Daniel Siemens (2022): Hinter der Weltbühne. Hermann Budzislawski und das 20. Jahrhundert. [Behind the World Stage. Hermann Budzislawski and the 20th century]

Reviewed and translated by Stine Eckert

He wasn’t a champion of women, says Daniel Siemens in an Online-Talk orga­nized by the Critical Communication Studies Network on March 15, 2022, about Hermann Budzislawski, whose biography he wrote. It is the first one about the man »behind the world stage« – a pun referring to Budzislawski’s years as editor-in-chief of the famous and influential German Weltbühne magazine, meaning literally World Stage, during the Weimar Republic. Again and again, Siemens addresses Budzislawski’s difficult interactions with women authors. For instance, when he shrugged off the article offered by 29-year old Hannah Arendt about the Jewish World Congress, perhaps because she signaled she also could take her work to the competition, the Tage-Buch magazine. Or when he denied that Dorothy Thompson, one of the most important American journalists at the time, had achieved her fame through her own work and charisma. But first things first.

As customary in biographies, Siemens walks the reader through Budzislawski’s life and works chronologically. The book is divided into ten chapters across 413 pages, complemented by 28 black and white images. Hermann Budzislawski was a journalist and editor, born on February 11, 1901, in Berlin, the capital of the German Empire, into a Jewish-Prussian family with Polish roots. He was the third child of a master butcher and businessman and his wife Jenny. He attended a Jewish boys’ school and finished his secondary education with the Abitur exams which enabled him to enroll in a university. After several location changes, he completed his doctoral degree in 1923 at the University of Tübingen with the highest honors for his dissertation on »Eugenics. A contribution on the economy of human hereditary dispositions« (p. 30-32).

Budzislawski cut his teeth in the journalism of the Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s by writing brief reports for newspapers in Berlin while also working as a tutor, which led him to meeting his later wife, Johanna, who was deemed »a good match coming from a Christian Jewish family« (p. 43). In 1929 their daughter Beate was born. Siemens highlights that Budzislawski’s estate only rarely contained documents about him as a private person or his family, leaving many aspects of his personal live in the dark. This also applied to their marriage, about which little is known.

It takes until December 6, 1932, until Budzislawski’s first article with his byline is published in the famous Weltbühne journal, the leading magazine read by the Weimar Republic’s leftist elites that fight against Hitler. More articles follow, mostly about the economy. Siemens contrasts his rather inconspicuous career beginnings with the spectacular and rapid demise of the young democracy of the Weimar Republic. Soon Budzislawski had to flee into political exile, first to Zurich, then to Prague, but also used the chaotic times and his cunning to make himself editor-in-chief of the Neue Weltbühne, the successor of the famous magazine now operating in exile. A nobody from nowhere taking over – that’s how many saw him then, according to Siemens. Budzislawski used his newly acquired platform to write against the Nazis and through diligent networking convinced the great German author Heinrich Mann to write for his publication, followed by other famous writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, and Lion Feuchtwanger.

In contrast, Budzislawski »didn’t have a good way to interact with women,» adds Siemens in the Online-Talk. For instance, Budzislawski sent a condescending letter to the very well-known woman journalist Gabriele Tergit, asking her to write »some feminine notes» for the Neue Weltbühne. She did not reply. He also rejected the suggestion of a French woman author who had sent him an article about the Nazi’s ideology on women, writing back that the manuscript would not be appropriate. Meanwhile, in his newsroom in Prague, his wife typed the texts, provided feedback on articles, and took care of practical matters. Siemens summarizes: »As with many living in exile, the woman’s contribution to the fight against fascism remained invisible to the public also in Budzilawski’s work. Despite rhetoric of social comradery, living in exile exacerbated gender inequalities.« (p. 78)

Siemens goes on to highlight Budzislawski’s biggest accomplishment – keeping the Neue Weltbühne financially afloat up until the summer of 1939 when he ceased to write op-eds from Paris because he got interned. After being released in June 1940, he escaped with his family to the United States, via Spain and Portugal, with the aid of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Remarkably, already in January 1941 he shined again in public as a guest speaker at Harvard University. His political analyses drew attention from US star reporter Dorothy Thompson who hired him as a ghostwriter for her articles on Nazi Germany and connected him to her influential set of acquaintances. In turn he provided insights into US lifestyles to listeners and readers in Europe. Siemens describes their professional and personal relationship as friends as mutually beneficial. Thompson ensured that Budzislawski was able to continue his astonishing publishing career without skipping a beat while also providing him a good income in exile. »Despite this opportunity, Budzislawski felt himself to be playing second fiddle, and on top of that to a woman.» (p. 142) As he also was not able to revive his beloved magazine Weltbühne in his new home country, Siemens writes, he rather felt to be in a bad position.

Relentlessly pursuing his goal to get back to publishing his own magazine, Budzislawski returned to Germany in 1948. Interestingly, as Siemens notes, his wife wrote about this time: »we« accepted a position as professor for international press at the University of Leipzig, still under Soviet occupation. Siemens concludes: »The Budzislawskis remained a husband-and-wife work team« (S. 175). With such brief interjections Siemens repeatedly recognizes the otherwise invisible and unpaid work of wives of authors. The biographer also renders visible the paradox that Budzislawski embodied, contrasting his bourgeois lifestyle with the mandate of his new position in academia. Despite living in a mansion with coveted imported items from the US that were in short supply after the war in Germany, such as a radio, electric hot plates, coffee, and soap, he was supposed to teach journalists the socialist way as the first dean of the newly founded College of Journalism at the newly named Karl-Marx-University in the young German Democratic Republic (GDR). To thread the needle, Budzislawski advocated the adoption of a pragmatic approach: more journalistic skills, less Marxism-Leninism, supplemented by foreign language classes and discussions of cultural and political issues of the day. He thus consistently tested the limits of the ruling socialist SED party, the guarantor of his privileges. Similarly, his wife ran into roadblocks. Despite her prominence, strong political interests, and long-time work for the Weltbühne, as Siemens describes it, her journalistic ambitions in the GDR were curtailed, leading to little more than publishing culturally framed cooking recipes.

Budzislawski himself toyed with gendered norms, too. In order to make his journalistic debut in the GDR, and to settle scores with his former supporter Thompson, he headlined in the daily SED-funded newspaper Neues Deutschland [New Germany] on November 24, 1948: »I was America’s most famous woman.» Siemens details Budzislawski’s dispute with Thompson and condenses through this incident, as in many other parts of the book, several narratives and themes still highly relevant today: the persecution of minorities, migration, (cold) war, ideology, gender, media structures and media ownership, world politics, and the role of the Soviet Union/Russia in Europe. Another example is the threefold danger Budzislawski faced in the young and still uncertain GDR of the 1950s. As a Jew, who had just returned from exile in the US, and as a socialist he had to defend himself against explicit and implicit accusations of having been a Zionist, spy for the US secret service, and/or Trotskyist. His allies in the SED party and university helped him regain his status. Many were jealous of the »American,« as he was nicknamed, and his relative wealth, while most students did not relate to the unusual C.V.s of the professors coming out of exile. Siemens here and elsewhere illuminates a multifaceted and interwoven US-German journalism history brilliantly.

The biographer uses the last third of his book to share the deeper context of Budzislawski’s rocky reboot in the GDR of the 1950s: personnel purges in the SED, public shaming, opponents at the university, a feeling of confinement despite immense privileges after having lived as a world citizen to survive abroad. Siemens summarizes Budzislawski ultimately decided that life in a golden cage suited him better than living out of his suitcase again. Given his special status as one of the best experts on US politics in the GDR, Budzislawski was able to treat himself perks by switching back and forth between working at the university and in journalism: writing articles for the newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung, giving regular commentary on air, and speaking at public events. He also travelled internationally to represent the GDR. At the College of Journalism, newly founded in 1954, he focused his scholarship and teaching on German and international press history. He authored – ironically based mostly on the work of unnamed co-authors considering the accusations he had raised against Thompson – the textbook Sozialistische Journalistik. Eine wissenschaftliche Einführung [Socialist journalism studies. A scientific primer]. While the book was sold in public bookstores starting in 1966, it was never used to teach in his own college due to Budzislawski’s academic enemies, according to Siemens’ remarks in the Online-Talk. The biographer based this fact on information provided by Budzislawski’s assistant Karl-Heinz Röhr. In contrast, many students idolized Budzislawski.

In 1967 Budzislawski was forced to retire from his university position, but in turn – with the blessing of the SED party – was allowed to return to his beloved Weltbühne magazine in Berlin once more. For four and a half years he reigned supreme as editor-in-chief in his own newsroom. He stood up for coverage that supported peace, recalled the resistance against the Nazis, and honored the memory of the Holocaust. Under his guidance, the Weltbühne was a journal for intellectuals that were loyal to the SED and GDR. He and his correspondents predominantly covered capitalist foreign countries, avoided critiquing their own government, and maneuvered around tricky events such as the brutal subjugation of the Prague Spring protests for liberal reforms in 1968 by printing milquetoast state-sanctioned press releases. Criticism, however cautious, of their own country was rare, as were articles by women authors, such as Elfriede Brüning or Greta Kuckhoff.

Budzislawski tested the limits of journalism in the GDR, but overall remained loyal to the SED party line and aloof as a person. He left the everyday business of running the newsroom to his deputy editor-in-chief Ursula Madrasch-Groschopp. Siemens here again offers insight into gender relations. Madrasch-Groschopp had to mediate a quarrel between her boss Budzislawski and the Austrian Communist writer Hugo Huppert to avoid an escalation between the two »old men« (p. 236) in order to refocus their efforts toward publishing the Weltbühne.

Hermann Budzislawski died on April 28, 1978, in his native city of Berlin and was celebrated for his service to the GDR and his efforts for the Weltbühne in exile. Almost a year later, on March 30, 1979, his wife Johanna Budzislawski passed away, too. Siemens dedicates several paragraphs to the context of her death and the resulting autopsy, again pointing to her important role in »Team Budzislawski.« In the last chapter, Siemens summarizes the rather ugly fights over Budzislawski’s estate, ending the biography with a reminder how difficult it can be for historians to gain access to personal materials in the possession of family members.

The biographer also recaps that Budzislawski’s first and foremost passion was journalism and that the Weltbühne was his »home.« The Weltbühne magazine bookended his journalistic career and he prioritized it above all else. Siemens adds in the Online-Talk that Budzislawski’s philosophy of journalism remained rooted in the values of the Weimar Republic, a journalism geared toward leftist readers of the bourgeoisie.

Alumni of the so-called »Red Cloister« – the journalism program at the University of Leipzig nicknamed for its closeness to the socialist SED party and, as Siemens floats, perhaps also due to the red hue of the porphyry stone building in which it was originally housed (p. 219) – and current students in the program, will find the last third of the book especially worthwhile reading. Siemens sheds light on the early history of the journalism program in the GDR in a nuanced way, including the ambivalences and disputes regarding how journalism in socialism should look like and be taught. Siemens shows through the lens of one frustrated journalist and journalism educator, who constantly had to adapt, how the college oscillated between highlighting practical skills and ideological teachings. Even without knowing much about the college or Budzislawski, it is easy to follow the narrative.

Siemens was born 1975 in the West German town of Bielefeld and – in his own words – was raised in the East Westphalian »boondocks.« He has been researching 19th and 20th century history as a professor of European history at Newcastle University in Great Britain since 2017. For writing the biography of Budzislawski, he conducted meticulous research in archives around the world and in materials in private possessions, and spoke with witnesses who knew Budzislawski or his contemporaries. In the book, he consistently cautions readers when sources were scarce or non-existent, but strives to provide ample details without losing sight of the broader narrative. His writing is a great joy to read and easy to get into for anyone interested in the many big topics that shaped the 20th century and everyday lives. Siemens manages to bring out the intersections of being a Jew, German, socialist, and a man skillfully. He fulfills the promise he gives readers in the preface, namely, to provide »an intervention in historiography« (p. 14), by writing a biography of an intellectual in the GDR with all its complexities that defy easy categorizations. He consequently makes good on his promise to contribute to productively disturbing an almost exclusively negative historiography of the GDR to the benefit of (younger) readers who can discover the history of the GDR with fresh eyes.

Siemens shines the spotlight on a man who had to transform himself over and over to play a role on the world stage, but who also stands for a men-dominated profession, socialist and antifascist movement, and journalism education in the 20th century. Siemens’ repeated brief but sharp insights into the gendered norms of the bourgeois journalism in differing German political contexts in the 20th century enrich and contextualize this biography greatly. They also point to lacunas that potential future research on East German journalism history could fill.

The books delivers a first biography of Hermann Budzislawski, who Siemens calls one of the most important leftist intellectuals in Europe and in the US in the 1930s and 1940s. He thus delivers an important and much better defined puzzle piece of the history of journalism in Germany before and after the Second World War.

About the reviewer

Prof. Dr. Stine Eckert, born in 1982, is Associate Professor of Journalism in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit und Editor of Journalistik/Journalism Research.

About the book

Daniel Siemens (2022): Hinter der Weltbühne. Hermann Budzislawski und das 20. Jahrhundert. [Behind the World Stage. Hermann Budzislawski and the 20th century] Berlin: aufbau, 413 pages, EUR 28.