Stephan Schäfer, who brought Gruner + Jahr under the control of RTL, writes a story and finds his late happiness. The book is insane.
When Stephan Schäfer stopped being a manager in August 2022, things looked bleak for many people at Gruner + Jahr, where he had been boss in one way or another for most of his professional life. Schäfer was co-CEO of RTL Deutschland and a declared friend of the merger of Gruner + Jahr and RTL, which the parent company Bertelsmann had already initiated. A few months after Schäfer’s departure, an unprecedented clear-cutting began at the traditional Hamburg publishing house – magazines were discontinued or sold en masse, and another 500 jobs were cut from the rest that remained.