Just a few remarks: While it is quite a interesting remark of the present problems of German conservatism, it is a PR piece for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well. Politically 'Die Welt' and 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung do not differ much. The FAZ is just a bit more liberal than the Welt. So both papers are competing more or less for the same customers. The Thomas Schmid mentioned below now works for the FAZ. Websites: FAZ: www.faz.de (German) www.faz.com (English) Welt www.welt.de
Johannes
Springer Flagship Maneuvers In Treacherous Waters By Konrad Schuller
BERLIN. Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. These words by the Duke of Wellington, the victor of the Battle of Waterloo, continue to resonate in the executive suites of a Berlin office block.
The Springer publishing house on Kochstrasse, bang on the former border between east and west, has continued to reap the fruits of that great victory of 1989, the collapse of the Eastern bloc.
The Berliner Morgenpost, the BZ, and above all the center-right leaning company's flagship paper, Die Welt , formed the vanguard of conservative politics during the Cold War. The golden facade of the Springer building glinted eastward, and the publishing power of the editorial offices mobilized the city's spirit of resistance.
After the fall of the Wall, '90s offices sprang up along the old death strip. The memorial cross for Peter Fechter, who was shot attempting to escape East Germany, had to give way to a new era. On the upper floors of the golden tower, the old war-horses became acquainted with the cost of peace as offices closed, and workers were made redundant. Die Welt, a feisty and principled publication, almost closed down. As the e-commerce generation came of age, it hobbled along with stagnating circulation figures and large financial losses.
The turnaround began in July 1998 when Mathias Döpfner became editor-in-chief. The youthful Mr. Döpfner, he is 37, cuts a glaringly elegant figure. He is charming but distant, a former music critic, an aficionado of the electronic media, and a conservative shocktroop journalist by nature. He was called in to square the circle. His task was to move an established but dusty looking 20th-century war-horse into the cyberworld with its myriad opinions and facets.
At first everything seemed to be going well. The Springer publishing house granted Mr. Döpfner millions of deutsch marks to get things going. The paper was given a visual makeover, Internet links positioned beneath all the key articles gave it a cutting-edge feel. He bought up anybody of note from the liberal and left-wing media, including Andrea Seibel, once caretaker of the opinion pages at the Tageszeitung, as well as Thomas Schmid, whom the Tagesspiegel once called the "chief ideologist of a political left in the process of freeing itself from ideology."
"Döpfner made us all believe that we could do it," says one insider today. "We will make Die Welt, the ugly duckling, the best liberal-conservative newspaper in the country."
And they got off to a promising start. In the third quarter of 1999, the company reported circulation figures of 257 000, the best result for 50 years. But last year a gentle shudder ran through the new slimmed-down Welt. Mr. Schmid, whom the newly acquired members of the department considered their "role-model," resigned.
Last week even saw a veritable civil war break out within the company. Wolf Biermann, a well-known singer-songwriter and left-wing eastern German dissident, who had been the paper's chief culture correspondent at the time of the relaunch, wrote a piece about the dispute over Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer's wild years that contained the following innocent sentence: "It warms my heart when a person has the strength and courage to change themselves." That was provocation enough for a newspaper whose deepest reflex is total dislike for anything from the environmentalist Greens or the center-left Social Democratic Party.
But Mr. Biermann went further, writing that Die Welt should stop throwing stones at Mr. Fischer "from the Springer glasshouse," and that this was after all the publishing house that with its "witch-hunt" once created an atmosphere in which student radical leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in an assassination attempt in 1968.
The empire struck back immediately. The day after Mr. Biermann's article, former editor-in-chief Herbert Kremp compared Mr. Biermann's criticism to utterances by Communist leader Walter Ulbricht in the 1960s. Two days later, Ernst Cramer, a columnist of sister paper Welt am Sonntag and formerly on the Springer board, continued the campaign, comparing the chief culture correspondent with "falsifiers of history and Nazi apologizers" of all kinds. Germany's biggest tabloid Bild, part of the Springer stable, talked of "character assassination." The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that "Die Welt buys up Biermann, and then is destroyed by him."
So what had happened? In the course of the year 2000, two developments coincided: first, the political climate in Germany changed; second, Mr. Döpfner rose to the top of the Springer publishing house.
Politically, the most crucial development of the year was the Christian Democratic Union's slush-fund scandal. This crisis in the "establishment camp" produced ever louder rumblings among the old war-horses at Die Welt and in the upper echelons of the Springer Group and undermined people's willingness to co-operate with the newly appointed modernizers at Springer.
At the same time, Mr. Döpfner's appointment to the Springer board of directors brought him closer to the Group's main shareholders, Friede Springer and Leo Kirch, whose world view dates from the Cold War era. This put the new editors on the defensive, for Mr. Döpfner's departure to join Mrs. Springer's entourage fueled the impression among them that their new boss had used the modernization of Die Welt merely as an "instrument for furthering his own career."
Under Mr. Döpfner's successor, Wolfram Weimer, the two editorial camps, who together should have produced Die Welt's own special recipe for the 21st century, began to distance themselves from one another. The abusive labels "hawks" and "wimps" quickly made the rounds. While the wimps succeeding initially in defending the two opinion pages at the back of the political comment section, the hawks occupied the news and reportage pages at the front of the newspaper.
But the newcomers soon began to weaken. Increasingly, their flagship figure Mr. Schmid failed to ward off attacks by the old guard on articles written by his proteges. Passages critical of the CDU were changed, whole editorials were shelved.
The liberal wing soon began to notice a new form of news reporting spreading through the paper, which the hawks liked to call "thesis journalism." The method for writing such a piece was described as follows: "First the journalist decides what conclusion he would like his investigation to produce -- this is the thesis. Then he goes out and collects all the evidence he can find to confirm his desired thesis." In the eyes of its critics at Die Welt, this kind of "thesis journalism" is tantamount to "journalists waging war." Similar methods were used to portray the Social Democrat-Alliance 90_The Greens government's tax reform as a failure.
That the old guard is making a come-back is particularly obvious from the newspaper's reporting on the CDU. Whereas at the beginning of the year it was calling for former Party Chairman Wolfgang Schäuble's resignation, not long afterwards it carried generous excerpts from Mr. Kohl's exculpatory "diary."
Disheartened editors are casting around for new jobs and financially the flagship is still not equipped to set sail on the open sea. The Springer Group refused to comment on Friday on the financial viability of Die Welt, but internal estimates put annual losses at between DM50 million and DM80 million ($23 million-$37 million).
The stiff financial constraints are beginning to make themselves felt at Die Welt. The Berlin office, whose staff has been pared down to a minimum, has been reduced to a dependency of its sister paper, the Berliner Morgenpost. Jan. 26, 2001