Henri Nannen was already a legend when, in 1989, he performed in a hour-long television interview should tell of his journalistic exploits. Some stories, he remarked patronizingly, he had told so often that he no longer remembered whether he had experienced them himself. At that time, Nannen hadn’t been active in the operative magazine business for a long time, but he looked back on his life’s work, the star, which he founded in 1948 and shaped to his will as editor-in-chief until 1980, an absolutist ruler in the golden age of print journalism. The interviewer Hans Herbert Westermann wanted to know whether he was considering writing his autobiography. Absolutely not, Nannen replied and took a stand on the sofa opposite: “There are no honest memoirs.”
Henri Nannen, who had made his publishers rich at Gruner + Jahr, preferred not to touch on the dark points of his own past. Instead, he talked about his childhood in Emden as the son of a social-democratic police officer, about his inexorable rise to being the king of circulation, and his art collection that was ready for a museum.
What he did during the Nazi era, Nannen never kept completely secret, but was happy to brush aside
25 years after his death, a discussion has broken out again about the Hamburg publisher and publicist, whom they reverently called “Sir Henry”. The young reporters Han Park and Gunnar Krupp have focused on Nannen’s role in World War II for the public service portal Funk – above all on his managerial position for the SS propaganda unit “Südstern” on the Italian front. Nannen himself did not completely conceal this part of his biography, but was happy to brush it aside nonchalantly, as in the 1989 interview: As a lieutenant in the Air Force, he was responsible for “psychological warfare”, period. To ask? nope
Even if the facts about Nannen’s time as a propagandist of the Nazi regime have been known for years are known: It’s worth taking a closer look – like the Funk reporters in their video. At the star they looked and suddenly shook discovered a new name.
A series of leaflets that were created in the “Südstern” department and then shot at the side of the Western Allies with grenades can be viewed in the Berlin State Library. The research confirms earlier findings: that the department was headed by SS Obersturmfuhrer Hans Weidemann, who was a friend of Henri Nannen and who later became star responsible for the campaign “Jugend forscht” – but that Nannen was actually responsible for the content design. Later, the publisher raved about the “Dolce Vita” in Castello Bevilacqua, where the “Südstern” management resided magnificently. He preferred not to tell anything about his actual work.
Henri Nannen, the defender of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, had courage, influence, journalistic gut feeling, a feeling for moods, the right connections and a yacht that was far too expensive. He knew what people wanted to read and what bored them, his merits are undisputed. But as the namesake of an important journalism award and a high-ranking Hamburg journalism school, he is now no longer acceptable to many. Those responsible would do well to avoid an agonizing debate and make sovereign decisions.
For a long time, Nannen could feel completely on the safe side
It is certainly no coincidence that the star is prescribed right now in matters of Nannen enlightenment. The traditional Hamburg publisher Gruner + Jahr has been sold to RTL, where you owe nothing to Nannen. And the star has a new editor-in-chief in Gregor Peter Schmitz, who must have an interest in the fact that his magazine is not overtaken by the past of the founder: Schmitz received his own Nannen Prize in the same year in which the US investigative journalist Jacob Appelbaum, who also received an award the role of Nannen in the Nazi era denounced and announcedtherefore having his trophy melted down.
What is particularly repulsive is the anti-Semitic message of the leaflets produced by Nannen: while the extermination machines in the concentration camps were running at full speed, the “Südstern” propagandists were still claiming in 1944 that rich Jews had instigated the world war and were profiting from the war. Other motifs showed American wives throwing themselves into the arms of the enemy on the home front in the absence of their husbands fighting the Nazis. Semi-pornographic Landser fantasies, not exactly on starlevel and provided with English texts.
In 1970, an entire “Stern” team of reporters refuted accusations against Nannen about shootings near Verona
Henri Nannen could feel on the safe side for a long time. In 1970 he took part in a television debate on ZDF with the staunchly conservative journalist Gerhard Löwenthal. Löwenthal confronted the star-founder with his Nazi past and also made some accusations that could not be proven. Immediately after the spectacular broadcast, the deeply affected Nannen sent a whole starteam of reporters to refute allegations that he was indirectly involved in shootings in a village near Verona.
Nannen, who had numerous defenders in the left-liberal camp, emerged from this discussion, which was extremely dangerous for him, almost unscathed. In a television interview in 1989, he skilfully withdrew from the affair when he spoke about the crimes of the Nazi era: “We were too cowardly, we were too opportunistic. That was us, my generation.”
Most journalists were satisfied with such well-tempered confessions at the time, there was so much else to talk about with the contemporary witness Nannen. The naked women on the cover of starthe political actions (“We’ve had an abortion!”), the debacle surrounding the forged Hitler diaries.
Times have changed, the star, which once had a circulation of two million, appeals to a rather woke target group. Today it would be unimaginable to imagine a capricious journalist running an editorial office like a squire, humiliating employees and throwing money out the window that was plentiful in the good times. “Insufferable and irresistible” he was, wrote the longtime star– Columnist and publisher Anneliese Friedman once about him. A big bully, kind of awesome. It still belongs to be taken off the pedestal.