In the beginning there was Rudolf Herrnstadt: How the founder of the Berliner Zeitung made the GDR almost independent

"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 Maritta Tkalec, who recalls the newspaper's history.

Rudolf Herrnstadt was at the forefront of the Berliner Zeitung: an outstanding journalist from the finest German newspaper tradition of the 1920s, of upper-class origins, and convinced that a society without exploitation is possible. In other words, a communist.

After six years of exile in the Soviet Union , the then 42-year-old rolled into Berlin on May 8, 1945, on the back of a truck from Stettin. On the country roads, he encountered convoys of liberated Polish forced laborers on their way home. Three days earlier, Herrnstadt had been commissioned in Moscow as the only German to advise Red Army officers on the founding of the Tägliche Rundschau, a newspaper of the liberators for the people who had made the National Socialists great and accepted the extermination of the Jews. First published: May 15.

To the roots, to Theodor Wolff

Barely had he arrived when Herrnstadt received his second assignment: a newspaper produced by Germans for the city, the first under German ownership in all of Germany since the end of the war. Initial publication date: May 21. Captain Alexander Kirsanow was to support the launch as editor-in-chief; he hadn't yet arrived in Berlin, but he joined on May 18.

On his very first day in Berlin, Herrnstadt went to the Mosse House in the newspaper district on Jerusalemer Straße. There, the son of Jewish parents from Gleiwitz (Gliwice) had grown into a brilliant journalist: Under editor-in-chief Theodor Wolff, the national Berliner Tageblatt had become the most influential newspaper, a progressive-liberal leading publication of the Weimar Republic . This was to serve as a model for the newspaper he was now to build, which he wanted to call the Berliner Zeitung, which, even at first glance on its front page, embraced this great tradition.

But first, let's focus on the tangible. Irina Liebmann , who spent years researching her father's life in the book "Wäre es schön? Es würde schön!" (Would it be nice? It would be nice!), reconstructs this moment of re-entry into the Berlin press landscape from Herrnstadt's notes: "... the Mosse House stands in ruins up to the mezzanine floor. Silent and broken, everything broken. A man leads her over paving stones into the room with the printing presses; everything is unusable. A dead man lies in the courtyard."

One of the founding members, Fritz Erpenbeck, wrote in detail how they gathered the initial equipment for a newspaper. They needed untainted people, anti-fascists, typesetting and printing presses, premises, and paper. And they tracked down the first photographer, the Jewish woman Eva Kemlein. She had survived the Nazi years in Berlin underground.

They succeed. As ordered, the Berliner Zeitung appears on May 21, 1945, with a circulation of 100,000 copies, priced at 10 pfennigs. The hunger for information is immense; people snatch the paper from the vendors' hands. The first headline reads "Berlin revives!" Below it is a report on the establishment of the Greater Berlin Magistrate.

Herrnstadt, of all times, is sick with an acute attack of pulmonary tuberculosis. He has a fever of 40 degrees Celsius, but continues to edit his newspaper from his bed, serving as sole editor-in-chief from June 20th. On August 23rd, his paper appears for the first time with the face that makes it unmistakable to this day: the proud title "Berliner Zeitung" in striking Gothic typeface. Between the two words is the Berlin emblem: a bear with a mural crown, a symbol of urban bourgeois life. Readers still appreciate the handy Berlin format, 315 by 470 millimeters.

This is just the beginning. On October 11, 1945, Rudolf Herrnstadt founded the Berliner Verlag and became its publishing director. The first new product was called Neue Berliner Illustrierte (New Berliner Illustrated); the NBI became one of the most popular GDR magazines, just as the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung had been from 1891 to 1945, the largest-circulation magazine in Germany. Other publications followed in quick succession, with enormous circulations and low prices.

In Irina Liebmann's book, Herrnstadt can be read in the original: "Overall, as far as circulation is concerned, we are at least as big as Ullstein (the western competition, ed.) , of course not as far as profits are concerned," and they only want to earn as much "as is necessary to maintain and expand the operations."

Herrnstadt rescuer Sauerbruch

The great crisis came in 1947, when Herrnstadt's eroded lung brought him to the brink of death. Major operations (under only local anesthesia) failed, but he was finally saved by the world-famous Charité surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch . The ordeal by no means interrupted his work. In 1949, Herrnstadt took over as editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland, prompting the West German newspaper Der Spiegel to make venomous remarks on April 15: Herrnstadt was a "sophisticated journalist from the old Mosse school," and at the same time a "communist infant, until then editor-in-chief of the pseudo-neutral Berliner Zeitung."

In 1951, he also worked hard to build a proud street with attractive workers' housing, mobilizing support in the newspaper. An editorial was titled "Would it be beautiful? It would be beautiful!" He wanted to use the momentum and spirit of optimism of those years to create something exemplary for the new era: what would later become Stalinallee .

At his side throughout, he knew about the legendary cultural officers of the Red Army—more precisely, employees of the Propaganda and Information Department of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD). He was familiar with these circles, having worked in exile in the Red Army's intelligence service and, in 1943, after the turning point in Stalingrad, published a newspaper aimed at the number of German prisoners of war, which suddenly numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Now the cultural officers were tasked with organizing the spiritual and moral reconstruction of the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). First, however, they conveyed the message to the Germans, who had just fanatically supported Hitler in the final battle: No revenge, respect for Germany. A grand offer. The chief cultural officer, Sergei Tulpanov, became the most popular Russian of those years. The term ended in 1949; the German-understanding experts were withdrawn.

They had supported Herrnstadt's project for the non-partisan, popular Berliner Zeitung. Men like Tulpanov were "his ideal figures," as Herrnstadt's daughter Irina Liebmann writes. The cultural officers also experienced an exceptional time: "For a moment in their lives, they were able to build what was no longer possible in the Soviet Union; they hoped for an end to Soviet isolation." Then they were dismissed. A prelude to what would happen to Herrnstadt a few years later.

Tulpanov was initially placed under house arrest in Moscow, but was then allowed to work as a university professor in Leningrad. Travel to the GDR remained prohibited until 1965. A joint trip through the GDR by Alexander Kirsanov and Sergei Tulpanov also brought them to the Berliner Zeitung, where the editorial staff extended a warm welcome to them, full of gratitude.

Herrnstadt's texts from the first months after the liberation in 1945 stand like signposts in the spiritual and moral chaos. In the second issue of the "Berliner" newspaper, dated June 22, 1945, four years after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, he wrote: "We live amidst the rubble and epidemics that Hitler left us. We subsist on rations that we owe to the victor's insight. We struggle, amidst endless difficulties, from one day to the next. If all of this is to have meaning—and it is meant to have meaning—then it must lead forward. Then we must know what we want. Then we must have a goal, in every respect: physical, moral, and political."

“Innerly free and respected”

The physical goal, he said, must be to one day live a healthy, sufficient, and prosperous life again. As a moral goal, he stated, it was to live "innerly free and respected for one's useful contributions," and, politically, to "learn to think and act progressively, to eliminate the need for others to lead us by the hand, prevent us from robbing and murdering, and to painstakingly educate us, creating the conditions for a fatherland that is recognized as an equal, necessary member of the family of nations."

No other of the German comrades who had returned to Berlin from exile in Moscow, especially the newly powerful members of the "Ulbricht Group," was capable of writing such texts: clear, to the point, honest, empathetic, and motivating. They needed Rudolf Herrnstadt, his intellect, his professionalism, his immense experience, and his first-class contacts in those pro-German Russian circles with whom he had worked in the Soviet Union. They needed him for a certain period of time.

When they brought him, a man of upper-class Jewish origin, into the party organ Neues Deutschland in 1949, it was during a crisis. They allowed him, who had never been part of the inner party circle, without any power or familiarity with Stalinist intrigues, to rise to the position of candidate for the Politburo. They had him formulate a new party program that entailed a departure from Walter Ulbricht's accelerated construction of socialism and was in line with the course of those forces in Moscow that would presumably prevail after Stalin's death and envisioned a neutral, united Germany as a buffer between East and West.

On 16 June 1953, the Central Committee of the SED approved the so-called New Course, which Herrnstadt had helped to formulate, concentrated in the following quotation: “It is about creating a German Democratic Republic that will find the approval of all honest Germans for its prosperity, its social justice, its legal security , its deeply national characteristics and its liberal atmosphere.”

Ulbricht lets Herrnstadt run into the knife

Herrnstadt called on Ulbricht to resign. The following day, the workers' uprising in the GDR reached its peak, and Herrnstadt's favorite project, Stalinallee, provided photos of rebellious workers. Initial strikes against de facto wage cuts resulting from increases in standards turned into political protests against the SED regime.

The official version, which the Berliner Zeitung also followed at the time, was: "A fascist putsch." The occupying forces saw reason to intervene, and tanks rolled out against the insurgents. In the end, 55 people were dead, 34 were shot by Soviet soldiers or People's Police. Seven death sentences were later carried out by Soviet military tribunals and East German courts.

On June 18, 1953, a front-page announcement by the GDR government stated: "These provocations are intended to make the establishment of German unity more difficult." Who had pursued the unification course in Moscow? Intelligence chief Lavrentiy Beria, the presumed new strong man after Stalin's death. He also worked to remove Ulbricht.

In Moscow, the other faction, which wanted to maintain direct control over the GDR, ultimately prevailed. Herrnstadt had found himself caught between the Soviet millstones. This was life-threatening. Beria was executed on December 23, 1953. He had opened the prisons after Stalin's death and wanted to continue Stalin's idea of ​​a neutral, united Germany as a buffer between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.

Irina Liebmann sees the following logic prevailing in those fateful days: If the result of Beria's new policy led to a fascist coup, then this policy was wrong. According to this logic, Ulbricht "let Herrnstadt do what he wanted," thus sending him into the knife.

Ulbricht triumphed. Herrnstadt was accused of "forming anti-party factions" and expelled from the party. Herrnstadt vehemently denied having been manipulated by Beria. At least he was not imprisoned for years in Bautzen prison, as happened to his fellow journalist Wolfgang Harich, who had also demanded Ulbricht's removal, but was allowed to eke out an existence in the German Central Archives in Merseburg from late summer 1953. In this special kind of solitary confinement, he was saved by his family: his wife Valentina, a German studies graduate from Chita, Siberia, and their daughters Irina and Nadja.

His comrades pushed Rudolf Herrnstadt into oblivion. In the GDR, people simply stopped talking about the man who, since the 1920s, had dedicated his life to the great idea of ​​a just society, accepted illegality and emigration, renounced personal happiness for years, and then threw himself body and soul into building a better Germany.

Failed by great powers and narrow-minded people

He envisioned this as united and democratic, combined with an "unreserved commitment to the Soviet Union." The conflict of the postwar years, in which he played a key role, revolved around nothing less than the questions: What should Germany do next? And how should his party, the SED, become a community of honest, open, and people-oriented comrades?

Herrnstadt's failure, his exile, and the silencing had consequences for 17 million GDR citizens. Thirty-five years after reunification, at a new turning point in world history, one reads the reports from the time of the new beginning in 1945 with surprising insights: The release of Europe from the US sphere of protection and influence, which we are currently witnessing – doesn't it bear a resemblance to the Stalin note of March 10, 1953?

It proposed the release of the Soviet occupation zone of the GDR from direct rule into a united, neutral Germany. Shouldn't this idea have been similarly frightening for the GDR leadership, which was just establishing itself in its own sphere of influence?

Herrnstadt advocated the German democratic venture and disappeared when the faction that preferred a quarter of Germany whole rather than half of the whole of Germany prevailed in Moscow.

Such a man worked for this Berlin newspaper, just like you did—a rather intimidating prospect. Could Rudolf Herrnstadt's standards have been met? Germany's most prestigious journalism award honors Theodor Wolff, Herrnstadt's mentor, who discovered the young man's talent, encouraged him, and continually protected him.

In turbulent times, Herrnstadt defended his convictions with the power of his words. He also repeatedly submitted to the party line – in the interest of the "greater cause." Many who worked in the GDR are familiar with this inner struggle. He was defeated by the great powers and the narrow-minded people around him. That's a grand framework, but one in which Rudolf Herrnstadt belongs. To stand in the footsteps of such a quintessential figure is both awe-inspiring and humble. The Berliner Zeitung has every reason to be proud of its founder.