Wolf Jobst settlers

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Wolf Jobst settlers

Wolf Jobst Siedler (born January 17, 1926 in Berlin ; † November 27, 2013 there ) was a German publisher and writer .

Life

Siedler was born in Berlin in 1926 as the son of the imperial diplomat of the same name and later lawyer and legal advisor of the Reich Association of Paper and Cardboard . His ancestors include a. the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow and the musician Carl Friedrich Zelter . His uncle was the well-known architect Eduard Jobst Siedler . His parents were friends with Otto Hahn .

Siedler attended the boarding school Hermann Lietz School at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar and from 1943 the Hermann Lietz School Spiekeroog . From there he was deployed together with numerous classmates as an anti-aircraft helper on the neighboring island of Wangerooge . As such, he was arrested together with Ernst Jünger Jr., the son of the author of the same name , for undermining military strength and sentenced by a court martial to nine months' imprisonment and then to "frontline probation". He experienced the end of the war at the front in Italy, where Ernst Jünger jr. Fell in 1944 and settlers became a British prisoner of war from which he was released in 1947. In 1948 he got engaged to Imke von Heede , the couple married in 1949 and the marriage had two children, including Wolf Jobst Siedler jun. who is also a publisher.

After studying sociology, philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin , he worked as a journalist for almost ten years, mainly for the Tagesspiegel , the Neue Zeitung and The Month . He experienced a high point of this career when he was appointed head of the feature pages at Tagesspiegel .

In 1963 Siedler joined the Ullstein publishing group and took over the management of the Propylaen publishing house . From 1967 to 1979 he worked as managing director of Ullstein GmbH for the publishers Propylaen , Quadriga and Ullstein .

Together with the film producer Jochen Severin , Siedler founded the Severin & Siedler publishing house in 1980 , which concentrated on political and historical literature. When Severin left in 1983, the publishing house was restructured, re-established as Siedler Verlag and continued in partnership with the Bertelsmann publishing group . In 1998, Siedler Verlag merged with Berlin Verlag under the direction of Arnulf Conradi and was then taken over by Bertelsmann . Bertelsmann kept Siedler in an advisory capacity in the publishing house.

Until February 2005, Siedler wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Die Zeit , Die Welt and the Berliner Morgenpost . He had lived in the same house in Berlin-Dahlem since childhood .

Wolf Jobst Siedler died in Berlin in 2013 at the age of 87. His burial in the Dahlem cemetery took place in close family circle. For the obituary notice, the family chose a quote from a tragedy by William Shakespeare .

criticism

In 1967, after reading Albert Speer's notes , Siedler wrote to him that he was enthusiastic about the “noble way” in which he dealt with the past, “both general and personal”. When Siedler had successfully brought Speer's “Memories” onto the market in 1969, he gave him an original sketch of Hitler as a gift. In 1975, Siedler Speer promised to make his “Spandau Diaries” “by all means one of the greatest book successes of the post-war period”. By 1982 at the latest it became known that many of the information in Speer's "Memories" and "Spandau Diaries", which had been published by Siedler as a lecturer and publisher, represented a corruption of history through glossing over, omissions and downright inventions . Siedler was criticized for tendentiously influencing Speer's autobiographical information. He had entered into an "unusual journalistic complicity" with Speer. In an exhibition opened on April 28, 2017 in the Documentation Center of the Reichsparteigelände of the city of Nuremberg, it is shown that “Speer with the journalist Joachim Fest and the publisher Wolf Jobst Siedler [...] had willing helpers who [had] the legend of the Nazi minister, who knew nothing, eagerly [promoted] ”. Both “didn't just rewrite things, they rewrote things”. Together with Fest, Siedler made a bestselling author out of Speer “without reflection and uncritically to the point of complete ignorance”. Four years after Siedler's death, his publisher corrected Speer's presentation at the time.

Appreciations

As early as 1964, Siedler took a clear stand against the demolition of Wilhelminian style houses and the felling of old trees in his book The Murdered City ; for this reason he was sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of the Greens". In its obituary, Spiegel online praised Siedler as “a great bourgeois and conservative of a kind that hardly existed even in the old Federal Republic”.

In Der Tagesspiegel , Hermann Rudolph pointed out the deep connection between Siedler's journalistic work and his hometown: "Since the early post-war years, Berlin has had a companion, interpreter and co-mover in him who is unequaled". With the death of Wolf Jobst Siedler, an era comes to an end.

Arnulf Baring regarded settlers in the world above all as a “great literary talent”, in whose work the “unique mixture of stylistic brilliance, wide-ranging knowledge and that elegiac tone of mourning over the sinking of old Europe, of former Germany, the former capital of the empire “Can be felt.

Siedler was a member of the PEN Center Germany .

In the Junge Freiheit, Egon Bahr praised Siedler's modesty: “He did not want to be restricted by political bodies, the authority of a superior or the pressure of elections. He knew the source of his strength: the independence of his thinking. It also required the self-recognized renunciation of action, a respectful modesty. "

Awards

Works

  • The murdered city: swan song on putti and street, square and tree. Siedler, Berlin 1993 [first edition 1964], ISBN 3-88680-513-1 .
  • Prescribed cosiness: swan song on the play street, traffic calming and cityscape maintenance. Severin, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-88679-125-4 .
  • On the Pfaueninsel: walks in Prussia's Arcadia. Siedler, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-88680-236-1 .
  • Hikes between the Oder and nowhere: searching for the land of the ancestors with the soul. Siedler, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-88680-303-1 .
  • City thoughts . Goldmann, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-442-12801-3 .
  • Farewell to Prussia . Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1991, most recently Orbis Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-572-01174-4 .
  • The Loss of Old Europe: Views on the Past and Present. DVA, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-421-05047-3 .
  • A life is visited: In the world of the parents. Siedler, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-704-5 .
  • Phoenix in the sand: splendor and misery of the capital. Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-442-75590-5 .
  • Neither Maas nor Memel: Views of Damaged Germany. Goldmann, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-442-72827-4 .
  • We got away with it again: memories. Siedler, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-88680-790-8 , reading sample , ( PDF file, 23 pages; 173 kB)
  • The long farewell to the bourgeoisie: Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler. wjs-verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-937989-10-2 .
  • Thought against the grain . Siedler, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88680-844-0 (collection of essays from five decades of JW Siedler's journalistic work).

literature

  • Carsten Heinze: Identity and History in Autobiographical Constructions of Life. Jewish and non-Jewish dealing with the past in East and West Germany . VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-531-15841-9 (see also Inner Emigration ).
  • Achim Engelberg : "I'm sorry: I totally agree with you again" - Wolf Jobst Siedler and Ernst Engelberg: An unlikely friendship. Siedler, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-8275-0049-6 .

Web links

Commons : Wolf Jobst Siedler  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Geert Mak : In Europe. Pantheon, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-570-55018-2 , p. 417.
  2. ↑ Nothing read. The Frankfurt noise about the Goethe Prize candidate Ernst Jünger. In: Der Spiegel , August 16, 1982, accessed December 3, 2013.
  3. ↑ Publishing history | Siedler Verlag. In: www.randomhouse.de. Retrieved October 12, 2016 .
  4. ↑ "The combination was an irresistible offer." In: Tagesspiegel , June 28, 1998, interview with Arnulf Conradi .
  5. ↑ Geert Mak: In Europe. Pantheon, Munich 2004, ISBN 978-3-570-55018-2 , p. 407.
  6. ^ Obituary notice from relatives of the settlers pdf (15 kB) [1] . Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 573.
  7. ↑ Volker Ullrich: Albert Speer: For thanks a picture from the Führer , in: Zeit Online from June 3, 2016
  8. ↑ Matthias Schmidt : Albert Speer: The end of a myth - Speer's true role in the Third Reich. Scherz, Bern and Munich 1982, ISBN 3-50216668-4 . New edition: Netzeitung, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-938941-00-6
  9. ↑ Matthias Schmidt: The end of a myth. Revealing a falsification of history. Goldmann, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-44211354-7
  10. ↑ Volker Ullrich: Speer's Invention - How the legend about Hitler's darling came about and what role Wolf Jobst Siedler and Joachim Fest played in: Zeit Online, May 4, 2005
  11. ↑ Must of the city of Nuremberg: Albert Speer in the Federal Republic - On Dealing with the German Past , exhibition from April 28 to November 26, 2017
  12. ^ Christian Gampert: Albert Speer and his helpers. History falsification for the fairy tale of the apolitical technocrat in: Deutschlandfunk , broadcast April 30, 2017
  13. ^ Rudolf Neumaier: The fairy tale of the "good Nazi" Albert Speer in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , online May 7, 2017
  14. ↑ Magnus Brechtken: Albert Speer A German Career , Siedler, 2017, ISBN 978-3-8275-0040-3
  15. ↑ Sebastian Hammelehle: To the death of Wolf Jobst Siedler: A wistful conservative. In: Spiegel online , November 28, 2013.
  16. ↑ Hermann Rudolph : publisher and publicist Wolf Jobst Siedler dies: The untimely. In: Der Tagesspiegel , November 28, 2013.
  17. ↑ Arnulf Baring : Wolf Jobst Siedler conceived Europe from Prussia. In: Die Welt , November 28, 2013.
  18. ↑ Egon Bahr: Solitaire of Independence , JF, December 5, 2013
  19. ↑ Review by Hermann Rudolph : Defense of contradiction. Stations of a journalistic life. In: Tagesspiegel , January 17, 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Settler, Wolf Jobst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 17, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 2013
Place of death Berlin