comment by
Detlef Esslinger
Reinhard Mohn was already in his seventies when he had a book written for him in 1997; “The big donors” it had to be called. It wasn’t so much about the content, it was about something else: putting it in line with historical figures; with Fugger, Rockefeller and Nobel. Joachim Fest made himself available as editor – the patriarch of Bertelsmann AG always placed great value on tasteful staging. Their companies should increase the knowledge of the Germans with all their business and feed the Bertelsmann Foundation with the proceeds so that it can work in gratitude on a better society. As far as the larger media companies in the Federal Republic are concerned, Burda was always a court and Springer a company; at Bertelsmann, on the other hand, nobody would have objected to being revered as the upper house of democracy. From one point of view, the decisions that Bertelsmann AG announced on Tuesday are to be welcomed: they are finally burying this fiction. Now everyone can see that there are no servants of the Republic at the headquarters in Gütersloh, but rather normal losers.