Prof. Dr. sc. pol. Hans Poerschke

By Horst Pöttker

We are in mourning for an extraordinary academic whose career mirrored the upheaval of German contemporary history and, in particular, of journalism studies as a university subject.

Hans Poerschke was born in Berlin in humble circumstances. His father, who was taken prisoner in the war and never returned, was a janitor and later an unskilled worker in the Reichsdruckerei (imperial printing house); his mother was a seamstress who made ends meet after the war by taking in work at home, by helping with the harvest, and finally as a quality inspector. Scholarships received under the education policy of the DDR – which was initially friendly to the working class and was later replaced by self-recruitment of the privileged official class – enabled Poerschke to attend grammar school. After completing his schooling in 1955, and despite his gift for music, he studied in the faculty of Journalism Studies at Karl Marx University Leipzig. He graduated in 1959 with a thesis on analysis in journalistic pieces and, after a brief interlude as an official in the Free German Youth (FDJ) youth movement – returned to the Journalism Studies faculty. Students called the faculty the »red monastery« – a nickname that would later become the title of a book in which Brigitte Klump settled scores with the academic institution that trained the vast majority of journalists in the GDR. Under Dean (or Faculty Director) Emil Dusiška, Hans Poerschke gained his doctorate in 1969 with a dissertation on a topic of his own choosing: »the concept of societal information in journalism studies.« He then rose through the ranks to become a senior research associate, a lecturer, and, in 1983, having achieved his post-doctoral qualification, Professor and Head of the academic field of Theory and History of Journalism.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, students freely elected Hans Poerschke as the last Director of Leipzig’s Journalism Studies Faculty in the final months of the GDR. He then – despite being deemed »of limited educational potential« in evaluations by Kurt Koszyk – led the Communication Studies program in 1991 under founding Dean Karl Friedrich Reimers and served on the founding commission for the new Institute for Communication and Media Studies. Already knowing that there would be no place for him in the institute, Poerschke did not apply for a professorship and, when his last employment contract expired in 1992, entered transitional retirement. The financial security this provided enabled him even in retirement to remain active in academia and in politics, especially media policy, representing the political party PDS on the Bundestag’s »New Media« commission and spending six years on the MDR Broadcasting Council. He also helped to found the Saxony chapter of the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband and (together with other former members of the Journalism Studies faculty in Leipzig) the society »Diskurs«, which published a newspaper for the unemployed in Dresden as part of a job creation scheme. He sat on the district council for Anhalt-Bitterfeld and the town council of Bitterfeld-Wolfen. And, in the late 1990s, he accepted several invitations to teach at the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University.

Hans Poerschke was an exemplary academic above all because he maintained a self-critical distance from himself and the practical interests of his life. This distance enabled him to admit to errors and correct problematic positions. In doing so, he did not abandon the ideology-critical idea of the possibility of false consciousness that does not match the situation at hand. He would perhaps not have liked it, but Karl Popper’s favored method of laboriously making scientific progress through efforts at falsification is visible here.

For Hans Poerschke, an important object of his intellectual progress was the view that Lenin had held of party press and journalism. The fundamental work that shaped journalism studies in Leipzig was published in 1983, compiled by a collective of authors under his leadership. In it, he quotes and applauds Lenin:

»Only the creation of a shared party organ can fill every ›sub-worker‹ of the revolutionary cause with the consciousness that he marches ›in rank and file,‹ that his work for the party is directly necessary, that he is a link in the chain that will strangle the worst enemy of the Russian proletariat« (Poerschke 1983: 36f.).

The dictatorial character of Lenin’s views – expressed here and in many other places, such as the notorious, oft-quoted description of the role of journalists as collective propagandists, agitators, and organizers – was often explained by Poerschke and those around him at the time as temporary tactical necessities that arose in the early 20th Century from the development of the socialist party press in Tsarist Russia.

In late 1988, with Gorbachev’s Perestroika underway and the GDR having begun the socio-economic decline that would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall a year later, a manuscript by Hans Poerschke was reproduced and distributed in the Journalism Studies faculty. In it, unlike earlier in his career, he wrote of the role of journalism less as the production of public opinion, and more as the public sphere. He described journalistic work as a way to incite the processing and change of current problems in society – described somewhat generally and convolutedly as the »current societal situation« – by bringing them to people’s attention:

»Appropriation of the current societal situation [by socialist journalism] as a situation in which the people are to act, demands not only that possibilities and requirements resulting from this situation for further action [on the part of the people] are uncovered and assessed, but also that specific goals and means for using the possibilities and taking the requirements into account are presented and explored.« (Poerschke 1988: 158)

The source information of the chapters of the manuscript, bound separately, include more writings by Karl Marx, a champion of press freedom in Germany.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Poerschke more clearly reconstructed the change in views of the public sphere in the final years of the GDR from writings by Michael Brie, Wolfgang Luutz, and himself. In an essay from 2010, he writes:

»Whereas before, the guidance of society by the party, its leadership by the state, the introduction of the masses to socialist consciousness were the starting point for considering the public sphere, a new form of consideration now gained the upper hand. The public sphere was now consistently seen as a ›form of intercourse,‹ as ›a societal form of social communication,‹ as a ›societal way of communicating‹ that is a condition of the societal existence of people in modern society and whose functions dictate whether and how they can shape the way they live together.« (Poerschke 2010: 49)

Hans Poerschke also examined the views of party press and journalism that Lenin expressed in his many writings. In his 2020 book on the subject, Poerschke recognized Lenin’s concept of journalism as repressive and hostile to the public sphere from beginning to end, criticizing it sharply:

»The regime for the party’s dealings with the press, inspired by Lenin and implemented under his leadership, was thoroughly undemocratic. This was not a repairable deficit attributed to a lack of experience or adverse circumstances. On the contrary, only a comprehensive system of gagging and patronizing the people mentally and politically could secure the power exercised dictatorially by a party elite. The principle of party literature destroyed – like all other sides of the reign of the party of Lenin – the conditions for achieving the emancipatory objective under which the party had stood. […] The practice of regimentation was established under Lenin; Stalin was able to fall back on it as an indisputably self-evident.« (Poerschke 2020: 216)

Hans Poerschke reached this insight in a long and thorough process of research. He did not find it easy. In podium discussions, he spoke of his unease at his insight forcing him to betray the younger man he himself had been. In him, communication studies and journalism studies have lost a colleague who embodied the »profession of academia« like few others. The fact that there was no place for him at German universities following reunification speaks against the pluralistic diversity of those universities – as does the fact that his university became ashamed of and then jettisoned the name Karl Marx in the 1990s. It is another reason why we should keep the memory of the honest Marxist Hans Poerschke alive. He – and we – deserve that.

References

Poerschke, Hans et al. (1983): Theoretische Grundfragen des sozialistischen Journalismus. Leipzig: Karl-Marx-Universität, Sektion Journalistik.

Poerschke, Hans (1988): Sozialistischer Journalismus. Ein Abriß seiner theoretischen Grundlagen. Kapitel 3: Der journalistische Gegenstand im Prozeß seiner Aneignung. Abschnitt 3.1: Erschließung der aktuellen Situation. Leipzig: Karl-Marx-Universität, Sektion Journalistik (Manuskriptdruck).

Poerschke, Hans (2010): Öffentlichkeit als Gegenstand gesellschaftswissenschaftlicher Diskussion in der DDR. In: Eberwein, Tobias; Müller, Daniel (eds.): Journalismus und Öffentlichkeit. Eine Profession und ihr gesellschaftlicher Auftrag. Festschrift für Horst Pöttker. Wiesbaden: VS, p. 43-56.

Poerschke, Hans (2020): Das Prinzip der Parteiliteratur. Partei und Presse bei und unter Lenin 1899 – 1924. Cologne: Herbert von Halem.

Translation: Sophie Costella

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Citation

Horst Pöttker: Prof. Dr. sc. pol. Hans Poerschke. (March 5, 1937 – January 19, 2025). In: Journalism Research, Vol. 8 (1), 2025, pp. 3-6. DOI: 10.1453/2569-152X-12025-14992-en