80 years of Berliner Zeitung: Not all in one direction!

"Berlin is reviving!" This was the headline of the Berliner Zeitung on May 21, 1945. It was the first edition of the Berliner Zeitung to be published between the destruction and the awakening in East Berlin. Today, the Berliner Zeitung celebrates its 80th anniversary. To mark the occasion, there will be exclusive reports in the coming days, and on May 24, a special edition of the Berliner Zeitung dedicated to the awakening will be published. Here you can read the opening article by Birgit Walter, who recalls the newspaper's history.

At an awards ceremony, journalists were asked to recite a biography, but only the key milestones, no longer than one page. The task sent me into a bit of a panic, because my career didn't require a page; it fit on a single line: In 1978, I became an editor at the Berliner Zeitung. Period. No self-respecting journalist these days stays with the same paper their entire life. I admit, I don't have a biography, but I do have a newspaper.

This circumstance benefits me now. Because centuries seem to have passed at my workplace, despite my loyalty to the paper. Since the 1970s, I've experienced two social systems, six publishers, seven department heads, and eight editors-in-chief, all of whom wanted fundamentally different newspapers. I stayed. Since 2014, I've only been there as a writer, but even then, I've had a lot of experiences. So here are some personal impressions from the perspective of the rank and file, the editors.

The newspaper as party property

I loved that editorial office back in the 1970s. The atmosphere was almost liberating, especially after the torturous journalism department in Leipzig, which wanted to train its students to be collective propagandists. At the Berliner Zeitung, my colleagues were audibly ranting about everything—the party conference resolutions, the speeches, the babble about the "workplace as a battleground for peace," that is, about the state, the party, and themselves, with fluid transitions to cynicism.

In the editorial office, there was a taboo book listing prohibitions. Photos of ships and cars were strictly prohibited, so as not to remind readers of their wanderlust or car registration. The book was constantly updated, as the editor-in-chief received a weekly briefing from the party's agitation department. Thus, Morocco and Uruguay were included in the book: No negative mention, please, because the GDR sourced fertilizer from the kingdom and sold harbor cranes to the military dictatorship.

The party leadership, with its massive apparatus, attempted to paint a media image of the GDR as it theoretically should have. Many editors retreated into internal exile, especially during the last decade of the GDR, attempting to block out the political outrages. Most readers – 420,000 subscribers – had long since turned away, interested primarily in the classifieds, the local news, sports, and culture pages. A realistic view of the economy or the state of the environment was out of the question.

Journalists, however, developed a sense of what they could write despite this, exploited the scope, addressed grievances in business texts, and mastered the art of reading between the lines. When they succeeded, Dieter Kerschek, editor-in-chief from 1972 to 1989, regularly received a storm of criticism from the SED Central Committee. The newspaper's owner, in other words, was a fact many readers were unaware of, as the paper, founded by the Red Army in 1945 and transferred to the Berlin magistrate four weeks later, did not disclose that it had belonged to the party since 1953.

Kerschek didn't pass on the pressure, protected his staff, and behaved decently. At party conferences, he tried to at least save the local page from being printed with the flood of speeches. It didn't become a good daily newspaper, but it was arguably the best available in the East. The editor-in-chief left the editorial office without saying goodbye in the fall of 1989 and was immediately hospitalized.

Back then, the newspaper was 8 to 16 pages thin, the editorial team was large, the number of spelling mistakes was small, and the workload was relaxed. I was soon able to move into the culture section, a niche where there were no political texts to be written. Here, colleagues discussed the events in the country and the quality of the paper in a particularly open and disparaging manner—as if they sensed that nothing would last.

Gisela Herrmann, the head of culture, resided in Wandlitz with the other Politburo members as Joachim Herrmann's wife. But she was well-educated, loyal, and a guarantee that her department remained untouched by criticism. The reviews were of a classic quality, and colleagues gleefully exploited the fact that less strict taboos applied in the cultural sphere. In 1987, Junge Welt printed a grim scathing review of the Soviet film "Remorse," a reckoning with Stalinism. Such a piece would have been unthinkable in the Berliner Zeitung. This led to endless debates: What more could we possibly tolerate?

The wonderful time of anarchy

But theoretically babbled journalists weren't at the forefront of the upheaval in October 1989. It started on the streets. Editors followed at varying speeds. They elected one of their deputies, Hans Eggert, as the new editor-in-chief. A reform group quickly formed in the political department, which took to the demonstration on November 4 with a poster reading "Journalism away from the Geggel band." Heinz Geggel was responsible for media control on the Central Committee.

Then he was gone. What is often called the "wonderful time of anarchy" began: journalistic work without supervision. The paper became more interesting and contradictory than anyone had imagined. Sometimes I felt like a scissors in my head. Wolf Biermann came to East Berlin immediately after the fall of the Wall and, in his appearance, uttered foul-mouthed curses against the newly formed Krenz government. Heavens, was I supposed to write all that? Was it even my duty? Well, now I had to decide for myself.

Reporters who hadn't learned their "revealing" craft at school were already embarking on investigations: brilliant writers like Alexander Osang , André Mielke, and Andreas Förster, who wanted to know what the world looked like behind the walls of Wandlitz, the Stasi headquarters, the state's foreign currency procurers. Sure, they might have discovered staid little houses with Western fixtures rather than extravagant luxury hotels, and encountered ministers who were taken by surprise, but suddenly everything was in the newspapers—crass, new, surprising.

In the cultural world, my older colleagues waited and watched the rapid events unfold. They despised both the West and the East, refused to submit to a world ruled by money, and debated the viability of a third way. I was curious, responsible for entertainment, entered the international pop market unclouded by expertise, and learned. To order press tickets for the Rolling Stones in June 1990, I took the S-Bahn to Zoo and called the promoter from a payphone. The East-West lines were always busy.

Soon after, a producer contacted us, inviting journalists from three East Berlin newspapers to rehearsals of "West Side Story" in New York. He wanted to show the play later at the State Opera. What, the whole trip for nothing? The three of us boarded the plane with suspicion, stayed at the Sheraton, and feared we'd been scammed. We weren't familiar with the business model—trustworthy editorial copy saves expensive advertising for ticket sales.

Finally, in New York, my subconscious wouldn't let me sleep, chasing me day and night through the shimmering city. It was afraid I'd never get back there, as if the Wall might rise again at home. At night, looking out from the World Trade Center, I burst into tears: How the GDR wanted to keep all this from me! I must have suddenly believed in a human right to travel the world.

1991: Gruner+Jahr buys the Berliner Zeitung

We were astonished that British media mogul Robert Maxwell, as well as Stern publishers Gruner+Jahr, outbid each other for the newspaper with bids from the SED-PDS (Social Democratic Party of Germany). After Maxwell's death in 1991, G+J took over the newspaper entirely. Television presenter Erich Böhme came on as publisher. He had just declared, as editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, that he did not want to be reunited with the GDR; later, he suggested dumping the Stasi files into the Spree.

To welcome him in 1990, the editorial staff printed an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post. Throughout his life, Böhme was accused of wanting to turn the Berliner Zeitung into a German Washington Post—no: the editorial staff had expressed their desire for quality journalism.

Böhme was a familiar face, acted as a door-opener for conversation partners, and attracted attention. He treated his colleagues from the East with respect, and hired colleagues from the West to write a joint East-West newspaper. But he wanted to shake up the stodgy culture department, and in 1992 appointed a female editor who was averse to culture. She redesigned everything. The culture pages were now called "Berlin Berlin!" because the word "culture" was considered "off-putting" in the curator's office. The premiere review from the State Opera now appeared alongside articles about nude cleaners and eco-brothels—the main thing was color.

Objection didn't help. The renowned old theater critic heard the phrase: "The elites have changed!" We gossiped about the boss mistaking Raoul Wallenberg for a painter and wanting to greet Charles Gounod at the airport. Colleagues were retiring early, trying to refuse, or complaining.

In the 1990s, it was hopeless for an East German journalist to change papers. Three friends, like me, worked at the Berliner Verlag on Alexanderplatz. Their magazines, Freie Welt, Für Dich, and NBI, closed almost silently one after the other, laying off hundreds of colleagues. No West German publisher wanted to saddle themselves with competition from an East German magazine. At the Berliner Zeitung, too, dozens of colleagues had to leave over the years, and by no means only those with Stasi involvement.

Strict editing, good style: “Never learned so much”

A defining era began in 1996. The Berliner Zeitung was solid and profitable when Gruner+Jahr decided to transform it into a capital city newspaper with national appeal. The publisher appointed Austrian Michael Maier as editor-in-chief – now publisher – and sent him on a shopping spree with a budget of millions. With a steady hand, he recruited respected colleagues for politics and layout, deployed correspondents around the world, and aimed to create Germany's best paper, a sparkling blend of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the FAZ in miniature.

The following year, he presented the newspaper so modern, chic, and boastful that it amazed the entire country. He staged his most extreme experiment in the culture section: With Jens Jessen as head of the department, he created a high-profile arts section, for which eight top journalists from across Germany, most of them from the FAZ , moved into specially created private rooms. The six of us remaining editors from the East were shocked – were our days numbered? No!

Jessen later wrote that he found the department in "memorable disrepair," but he was referring solely to the tabloidization of his predecessor. The new boss, with her thunderous educational background, took the old editors along with her, infected them with enthusiasm, treated them generously, indulgently, strictly, and lavishly praised. Never again did we learn so much about independent journalism, good style, and rigorous editing.

When things clashed, it was between the local news and the arts section: "Embarrassing crap!" raged our boss, who would have loved to impose his standards everywhere. But the local editor came from Bild, and the differences were calculated, meant to be mutually beneficial, haha. In the local section, they found us out of touch. But these weren't East-West conflicts. Those were played out over political issues, like the NATO mission in Kosovo.

Just three years later, Michael Maier became editor-in-chief of Stern, and Jens Jessen became arts editor of Die Zeit. Most of the other bigwigs slowly left the paper. Subsequent editors-in-chief, Martin E. Süskind (until 2002) and Uwe Vorkötter, were tasked with reining in the escalating costs. They found a proud, principled, and resilient editorial team with a very self-confident arts section, with a circulation of 200,000.

2002: Holtzbrinck and the takeover ban

This chapter is quickly told: Gruner+Jahr sold Berliner Verlag, which also owned Berliner Kurier and Tip, to the Holtzbrinck Group for 200 to 250 million euros. The Federal Cartel Office prohibited the takeover because Tagesspiegel also belongs to Holtzbrinck. During the legal dispute, the newspaper market shrank, and the sale price for Berliner Verlag fell to 150 to 180 million euros. Holtzbrinck did not sell to the interested party, DuMont, but to Mecom, British financial investors led by Irishman David Montgomery, known as a brutal saver.

2005: The Locust Comes

The editorial staff was in a state of shock. Never before had a new owner received such a cold welcome. "We are not amused!" read the banner welcoming the media manager. The staff waited in the large assembly hall with stony faces: They didn't want a publisher who would make a profit and then leave. Montgomery then, like all his predecessors, explained that he wanted to develop a high-quality newspaper. Phew!

What was it up to now? The newspaper made headlines, other papers reported sympathetically. Deutschlandfunk, of all broadcasters, pampered with license fees, forbade the whining that the highest priority was profit! Better to hear a foreign voice than Holtzbrinck's. Editor-in-chief Uwe Vorkötter had written fiery texts warning against the locust's return expectations and simultaneously begged readers not to cancel their subscriptions. Then, in 2006, he himself resigned, followed by 19 colleagues.

His successor, Josef Depenbrock, also took over management and was undeterred by the editorial committee's complaint against this dual role. However, he did not interfere in editorial matters. The editorial team protested by canceling a few early editions, but in reality remained powerless: A newspaper cannot go on strike like the BVG. In 2009, the locust-finance construct imploded due to plummeting stock prices.

2009: DuMont – much hope, maximum disappointment

Now DuMont -Schauberg took over the Berliner Zeitung, and Uwe Vorkötter returned as editor-in-chief. This was the fourth owner in 19 years. Each new owner took out loans for the purchase, which they paid off with the editorial staff's work. The staff's anticipation in 2009 projected the arrival of the large, traditional publishing family with its print empire was far from fulfilled. No one had anticipated the extent of the disappointment.

DuMont founded an external editorial partnership to supply its four daily newspapers in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt with articles on politics and business—the same texts for all papers. The Berlin newspapers again took to the barricades, citing their status as an author-run newspaper—all of which was useless.

In addition, Frankfurt's political and cultural editors had to move into the offices of the Berliner Zeitung. But we didn't belong together. The Frankfurter Rundschau was a left-wing paper, while in the Berliner, everyone wrote what they wanted—no single line, no unified direction. Those had existed here long enough. The Rundschau's cultural articles often didn't fit with the Berliner.

The Rundschau, on the other hand, didn't want any opinion that defended, for example, Hartz IV. However, their seasoned Frankfurt colleagues were hit much harder; they had to endure our grumbling and even leave their homes for years for this miserable experiment. In 2012, they returned home and, buoyed by their success, saved their Rundschau, which DuMont had just sent into insolvency.

Between all chairs

As editor-in-chief, Uwe Vorkötter found himself caught between two stools, managing the dramas with both dedication and courage. Then DuMont dumped him. His "crime": He had given a lengthy interview to Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner , which the former DuMont boss resented. Wow, blatant arbitrariness in the free West – no protest, much regret, the remaining Easterners registered it. The phrase "We would have tarred and feathered the locust for that" was often circulated at the time.

Vorkötter's successor, Brigitte Fehrle, proved assertive and unapproachable when the publishing house wanted to lay off staff. At the time, I conducted an interview with an industrial psychologist about the "culture of layoffs." He explained that an entrepreneur was doing everything wrong if he misinformed employees and didn't express a word of regret or gratitude. The publisher, who was doing everything wrong, could have probably recognized himself. Shortly before printing, the editor-in-chief tossed the interview off the page. She never said a word about it.

The next brutal violation of boundaries occurred in 2016: DuMont merged the editorial departments of the Berliner Zeitung and the tabloid Berliner Kurier. Then he founded a new newspaper company: Anyone who wanted to join had to move to the new headquarters in Kreuzberg and submit a fresh application. Please include a resume and work samples! Regardless of whether you'd been with the editorial team for three months or 35 years. Undisturbed by social criteria, the editors-in-chief then made their selections – for the Berliner Zeitung, this was Jochen Arntz (2016–2020). A third of the 160 colleagues fell by the wayside.

Eventually, DuMont tried to offload Berliner Verlag as a package with other newspapers. Berliner, too, had long been making losses due to the print media crisis, poor publishing policies, and a lack of digitalization. In 2019, DuMont booked IT expert Holger Friedrich to give a lecture on the digitalization of press companies. This gave Friedrich the idea of ​​taking over the Berliner Zeitung, the newspaper from his childhood. The entrepreneur, who has made a fortune in the digital economy, had sales and profit figures sent to him, called them a disaster, and bought Berliner Verlag with his wife, Silke.

2019: Holger Friedrich, the first East German publisher

To this day, he remains the only East German newspaper publisher, restoring the paper's independence. But even for outside observers, the media's hostility and malice toward this industry outsider upon his arrival was shocking. Especially when they delved into his Stasi story, although the reports weren't intended to be a fair assessment. The publisher, too, was astonished, but persevered. His publishing house has long been in the black. The new currency is clicks, online access to the texts, which generates advertising. Furthermore, unlike the mainstream media, the paper presents itself with radical geopolitical openness, finding influential interviewees, providing astonishing background information, and sharp, even irritating, opinions. At first, I felt uncomfortable. Today, I would accuse editor-in-chief Tomasz Kurianowicz of producing neither a pro-Putin nor a GDR-nostalgic newspaper, as is often assumed, but rather an exciting one. Often, the surprising reading material is barely manageable in a weekend. In my environment I experience boundless approval and criticism.

During the restructuring of the editorial team—the staff is now younger and more international—things got tough again, with colleagues coldly dismissed after decades of service. Today, I hear from the editorial team, alongside skepticism, but above all, incredible enthusiasm about their own product, their success, and the external support. However, colleagues rarely have time to chat: too much work, high intensity, endless days.