Bringing the past into the present A conversation on the occasion of the publication of Schuld und Geheimnis. Bekenntnisse von Legenden der deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik [Guilt and secrecy. Confessions of legends of German-Jewish journalism]
Martina Thiele in coversation with Siegfried Weischenberg | Resistance, »internal emigration,« or flight? After the Nazis seized power, Jewish journalists mostly had no choice but to flee. How did they survive? How were they – and non-Jewish dissidents – able to oppose the dictatorship from exile through their journalism? And in contrast, how did others who stayed behind advance their careers or accommodate themselves to Nazi rule? In his new book, Schuld und Geheimnis. Bekenntnisse von Legenden der deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik [Guilt and secrecy: Confessions of legends of German-Jewish journalism], Siegfried Weischenberg, professor emeritus of journalism, focuses on well-known and lesser-known journalists. Whether Alfred Kerr or Hilde Spiel, Fritz Sänger or Elisabeth Noelle – a wide range of behaviors and accounts of their experiences are up for discussion. Author Siegfried Weischenberg and media scholar Martina Thiele (Tübingen) use the life stories and journalistic work of important 20th-century German journalists as a starting point to discuss autobiographies as sources, memory and forgetting, guilt and responsibility, as well as anti-Semitism and gender relations in journalism.