Interview with former editor Göpfert | "Frankfurter Rundschau": "Independent and indispensable"

The "Frankfurter Rundschau" will reach its 80th anniversary next year, a proud milestone. Was or could this anniversary be duly celebrated? Or is your book the only reminiscence, a tribute to this historic date?

Yes, there was a celebration, all day long at the Haus am Dom in Frankfurt am Main, with numerous panel discussions and prominent guests. And I led two historical walks through the city center, following the trail of the "Frankfurter Rundschau," with many participants. The original building of the "Rundschau" no longer exists; the site is now occupied by faceless office buildings, unfortunately not uncommon in the banking metropolis. However, the building at Schillerstraße 19, where the first issue was published on August 1, 1945, still stands. At that time, it was the only building for miles around that had windows again. A great luxury.

In your book, you quote a US general who compared Frankfurt am Main in the year of its liberation from fascism with the destroyed city of Pompeii.

That's how it was. A landscape of rubble, lacking everything. Paper and furniture. The working conditions of the first editorial office, with its 24 employees, were correspondingly adventurous. Some of them sat on the stairs, with a typewriter on their knees, and one even sat on the toilet seat.

And for the most part they were not qualified journalists.

Yes, most were career changers or very young in their careers. Because at that time, there were hardly any untainted journalists who hadn't been involved with the Nazis, especially not in the bourgeois camp. Therefore, the first FR editors were three communists, three social democrats, and only one conservative, from the Center Party, albeit also a left-leaning Catholic.

You complain that the newspaper's founding phase was later denied. Because it was "too red"?

The most prominent among these seven was the communist Emil Carlebach, who had been in various Nazi prisons and camps since 1934 and was a long-time Buchenwald prisoner. With the onset of the Cold War, as the anti-Hitler coalition collapsed, the Americans wanted to get rid of him. He had already been assigned the supposedly most innocuous department, the local editorial office. But he was very adept at playing politics there, too. In 1946, the Americans brought in Karl Gerold from Switzerland, a Social Democrat and long-time journalist; he was 40 at the time. They wanted him to be the strong man in the "Rundschau." Gerold agreed, but set one condition: "First, you throw out the communists." Thus, Carlebach's license was revoked in 1947. And Gerold became both publisher and editor-in-chief, remaining so until his death in 1973. He rewrote the founding history of the "FR" and simply omitted the year and a half spent by Carlebach and the other six men, deleting them from the masthead. Arno Rudert, the last communist editor, was expelled from the KPD in 1947 for failing to represent the communist standpoint in the "FR." Rudert died in 1954.

The newspaper was originally supposed to be published on July 1, 1945, but it didn't come out until a month later.

Because even back then, there was a right-wing campaign against Carlebach. They spread rumors that, as a "Kapo" in Buchenwald, he had collaborated with the SS and betrayed prisoners. The US military intelligence service, the Counter Intelligence Corps, investigated this and could find no evidence. These were malicious allegations. Carlebach's granddaughter, Lena Sarah Carlebach, who is heavily involved in remembrance work and is president of the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee, kindly provided me with a great deal of material. This clearly shows that the American occupying forces wanted to get rid of Carlebach, among other things because he advocated for an indivisible Germany. And he was a very charismatic and influential figure. He contributed to the Hessian constitution of 1946, one of the most progressive in western Germany.

This reminds me of the campaign against the Red Kapos in the 1990s. But back to the "Frankfurter Rundschau": How would you describe its character? Does the label "left-liberal" fit?

Well, the term appeared in the editorial statutes of 1969. The fact is that the "Rundschau" has been committed to fighting right-wing extremism from the very beginning, reporting extensively on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945/46, for example, and then in the 1960s on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, which came about thanks to the Hessian Attorney General, Fritz Bauer. And even today, it takes a clear stance against the right. The "Frankfurter Rundschau" played a significant role in solving the Hanau massacre, in which nine people with a migrant background were murdered by a right-wing extremist on February 19, 2020. The "FR" uncovered police errors and exposed right-wing extremist attitudes among police officers. The 1st Police Station in Frankfurt am Main is notorious for this. Seventeen police officers there are under investigation on suspicion of bodily harm, obstruction of justice in office, and persecution of innocent people.

And anti-capitalist?

Only a few colleagues fundamentally questioned capitalism, especially in its early stages and in the 1960s and 1970s. They welcomed the student movement but also viewed it critically, especially those from the older generation who had experienced the Nazi era and were repelled by the violence and militancy of the student revolts and later the Red Army Faction, or who were at least skeptical.

But antimilitarism.

Yes, the Frankfurter Rundschau already resolutely rejected rearmament and the founding of the Bundeswehr under the first German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, supported the Easter marches, and protested against the Vietnam War. In the 1960s and 1970s, the FR rose to become a leading national media outlet. The colleagues, many of whom were close to Willy Brandt's policy of détente, also did not support the NATO Double-Track Decision. I can still clearly remember how we made the pilgrimage from the editorial office together to the demonstrations against the deployment of Pershing IIs. In the book, I conducted an interview with a younger colleague, Hanning Voigts, who has worked at the Rundschau since 2012 and was previously active in social movements. One of his motivations for joining the FR was the disturbing rise of right-wing forces, the threat to democracy "as not since 1945," as he told me. A newspaper like the "Frankfurter Rundschau" is a good weapon in this regard. That's why I chose "Newspaper in Combat" as the title for the book.

And by that, you also mean economic struggles, from which the "Frankfurter Rundschau" was not spared, although you have described the working atmosphere there as quite harmonious for decades.

And that's exactly what it was. It began with the lockout in 1978. That was a "break with a taboo." For the first time, management, of all newspapers, the "Rundschau," resorted to this rigid means of discipline.

What was the trigger?

The introduction of new technology affected the entire newspaper landscape. And at the "Rundschau," some typesetters were also slated to be laid off. The union demanded a job guarantee. The employers refused to provide this, prompting the technical colleagues to protest. When they were coldly locked out, the editorial team showed solidarity.

No longer common practice today .

Unfortunately. In any case, the factory occupation took place. The "Frankfurter Rundschau" had a very militant works council chairman, Hans-Georg, or "HG" for short, Fritz. He's 92 now and was there at my book launch, which made me very happy. He was a trained typesetter himself. And 99 percent of the employees at the "Frankfurter Rundschau" were unionized.

This is no longer a given either.

Solidarity has always been a hallmark of the "FR." It appeared for a week as an eight-page "Emergency Review," distributed by the workers themselves, for just 20 pfennigs. The result was that the employees affected by rationalization were able to retrain for other jobs. "HG" Fritz became known nationwide. His successor, Viktor Kalla, was also a combative character. As a works council member, I tried to continue the tradition. But the conditions for union action became increasingly difficult.

And so began the gradual decline of the “Frankfurter Rundschau.”

The magnitude of the fall is best illustrated by the numbers: Of the nearly 1,800 employees in 1985, only 28 remained in 2012, the year of the bankruptcy. And while there were only three editors-in-chief until the turn of the millennium, there have been eleven since then. The owner has changed five times, and the editorial office has had to relocate five times since 2005.

Even as a highly sponsored "central newspaper," "nd" didn't have 1,800 employees. And there weren't that many relocations either. That's pure stress. How could this happen?

On the one hand, this was due to the technological upheaval, which cost many workers. All newspapers suffered the same fate. However, management errors at the FR made matters worse. This began in the 1980s, when the newspaper became dependent on printing orders from the Springer Group. With the new printing technology, printing companies offering dumping prices entered the market at the end of the 1990s. Springer finally withdrew in 2012, and the FR was left with expensively leased printing presses. This led to insolvency.

The management had also missed the boat on digitalization, reacting far too late. This was also due to the fact that the management was too old. Horst Engel, the chairman of the management board, was already 78 years old when he finally had to leave in the spring of 2003. Moreover, in the early 2000s, he had burned through twelve million euros on the nonsensical project of a midday newspaper called "City." Those responsible for this received severance payments, the amount of which was not disclosed, but which must have been substantial, given that one of the ousted bosses was able to buy a vineyard in Rhineland-Palatinate. This naturally caused outrage in the editorial department, where the newspaper was fighting daily for its survival. Furthermore, an opportunity was missed when, against the wishes of many editors, the decision was made in 1989/90 not to build a network of correspondents in eastern Germany and to establish offices in the so-called new federal states.

How was the insolvency overcome in 2012?

By the Sozietät-Verlag and the Fazit-Stiftung, the financial parent of the "FAZ," taking us over.

The competition? That can't end well.

The Fazit Foundation has not compromised our editorial independence. However, in 2018, it sold the FR again to Ippen-Verlag.

By the way: How independent has the "Frankfurter Rundschau" been able to remain despite the many changes of ownership? Were there any interventions regarding content by the respective owners or managing directors?

The editors have always defended their independence and responsibility for content. And I can only recall one attempted intervention by the current owner, Dirk Ippen. That involved an article on allegations of abuse of power against Bild editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt, who ultimately had to be dismissed at the end of 2021 as the evidence against him became increasingly overwhelming. Ippen stopped the article and boycotted its publication. The editorial team made this public, which caused outrage. And then the article was published after all.

I read the chapter "The Arts Section Shines" with great interest. Some newspaper editors view this section as more of a "playground," dispensable in times of need. Just as politicians always cut back on culture first.

The arts section truly shone back then, and it still shines today. It was not for nothing that Thomas Mann visited the "Rundschau" editorial office in 1949, the Goethe Year. In the 1960s and 1970s, we also had Günter Grass, Theodor W. Adorno, and Joseph Beuys as guests and authors, to name just a few. And we had great arts editors, such as theater critic Peter Iden, film critic Wolfram Schütte, and opera specialist Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich. They all revolutionized their respective fields.

The FR also had a women's editorial department, the »nd« never did, although women's emancipation was more advanced in the GDR than in the Federal Republic.

The women's editorial department was an achievement or expression of the West German women's movement in the 1970s. And, of course, the newspaper was also at the forefront of the fight against Paragraph 218 of the German Criminal Code. However, the FR only had its first female editor-in-chief in 2014, with Bascha Mika, who came from the "Taz." Initially, the "Rundschau," like all German newspapers, was male-dominated. The first staff in 1945 consisted of 102 men and 19 women, of whom eight were employed as cleaners, four as secretaries, three as cooks, two as publishing employees, one as a laborer, and another as a photography assistant. This ratio only gradually changed. Jutta Roitsch, an editor at the "Rundschau" newspaper during the Golden Seventies, also recalled in an interview with me how, as a political science graduate, she was sent out by men every day to fetch beer, and how she was not taken seriously in the newsroom and mistrusted as an educated woman. She was then taken on by the arts section, where she was responsible for the women's and children's section.

Nice from the arts section, but also a gender-specific allocation of tasks that women would no longer accept today. What do you wish for your current colleagues, your former newspaper?

I hope that the "Frankfurter Rundschau" will remain and defend its recognized place in the German newspaper landscape. It is needed and indispensable in the fight against the far-right, against rearmament and militarization, against the growing gap between rich and poor, against social cuts, and against climate change. I wish my younger colleagues self-confidence and strength. Given the precarious state of the print media, the profession of journalism is now more than ever a job for idealists. And I wish the "Frankfurter Rundschau" many loyal readers.

On October 23, at 6 p.m., Claus-Jürgen Göpfert will present his book in the salon of the »nd« editorial building at Franz-Mehring-Platz 1, 10243 Berlin, in a conversation with Karlen Vesper.