“Time of my life”: The memoirs of Theo Sommer – media

For years he had sweaty hands while writing, Theo Sommer claims in his memoirs, although his boss Marion Gräfin Dönhoff sent him an enthusiastic telegram from Sylt on his first editorial: “Bravo, brilliantly done!” The publisher could have wrapped the praise as a lower third around Sommer’s posthumously published memoir “Zeit meines Lebens”, because if there ever was a brilliant journalist’s life, then it was Theo Sommer’s.

In 1958, at the age of 27, he became editor of the Time, one of the so-called “boys” of the childless countess. “She offered me the chance of a lifetime. That chance became my life.” For almost thirty years he was not only editor-in-chief and then co-editor of the Time, but the one next to that Mirror-Founder Rudolf Augstein most influential political commentator with enormous reach. Sommer was the author of foreign affairs, columned in the American magazine Newsweek and in the Japanese daily newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun, sat on countless commissions and bi- and multinational associations and lectured, guest lectured and precepted from Seoul to St. Louis.

Hundreds of editorials followed the first, mostly on the East-West conflict. Not a trace of weakness in writing, not a trace of sweat. So in the end he only has comforting things to say about his job: “Sometime there comes a time when the terror of writing loses its terror and you can be sure that the white sheet in front of you will not remain empty, but that something It says on it. From then on, journalism is pure pleasure.”

Of course, like every great journalist, Sommer made a big mistake

Sommer’s memories are a document from the heyday of Sylt-Hamburg journalism: a gentlemen’s club in English blazers, busy all day with at least world politics, always working a seven-day week, because of course you got the English Sunday newspapers and the world situation in the morning pint in Kampen or immediately discussed further with Werner Höfer on television. Sommer was the youngest in the group, probably also the smartest, and he knew them all, the heroes of post-war German journalism. He does not shy away from praising his colleagues from the “Hamburg cronies” scented by political opponents, praising their services to the democratization of post-war Germany. For him, Rudolf Augstein is “more influential than any other journalist” in 20th-century Germany, one of the “great cleansers in the country.” The press capital Hamburg was clear. Sommer recalls that the ad fat star the loss-making one for two decades time fed through, and quotes the editor-in-chief Henri Nannen: “My star was for the fine time like the hooker from the Reeperbahn who pays for her daughter’s convent school.”

Gentlemen’s club of German journalism: Johannes Gross (Capital), Rudolf Augstein (Der Spiegel) and Theo Sommer (Die Zeit) in January 1987 in Gütersloh on the sidelines of the Bertelsmann Forum.

(Photo: imago stock&people via www.imago-images.de/imago images/teutopress)

Hamburg’s camaraderie reached into politics. The Countess gave him a book by Henry Kissinger to review in 1957, and he was already won: “Defense in the nuclear age has become one of my favorite subjects.” He met Helmut Schmidt in 1961 on the night train from Geneva. It was brothers in arms love at first sight. “We spent half the night talking about security policy and nuclear strategy over Fürstenberg Pils.” In 1969, Sommer moved to Schmidt’s Ministry of Defense for two years and headed the planning department. In 1983 the former Federal Chancellor switched to time and became co-editor.

The son of a professional soldier, born in 1930, had it with the military; At his funeral last September in Hamburg’s main church of St. Jacobi, two soldiers from the Bundeswehr stood guard over Sommer’s larger-than-life portrait. In the photo section of the memoir, summer 2008 is standing in front of a helicopter in Kunduz, young and radiant in a bulletproof vest and steel helmet. He was already a passionate war reporter in Vietnam, wrote after the Americans had heard (“The red tide is rising in Vietnam”), but later regretted having pushed them far too long to continue. But he was oriented towards the West: the famous summer seminar to which Henry Kissinger invited him and many young intellectuals from all over the world was, as Sommer later realized, indirectly paid for by the CIA. “It was about nothing more than psychological warfare, let’s not beat around the bush.”

Sommer came out of the war himself, or at least had been prepared for it in a smooth course of education from the Horst Wessel School to the Hindenburg High School and the Adolf Hitler School. He was to play the werewolf in the Volkssturm and, together with a hundred other fourteen and fifteen-year-olds, prevent the Americans from taking Ulm in April 1945. “For a year I kept waking up in a sweat, waking up from the dream that the Third Reich had won the war after all, and that I should now be available to help shape the victory, as the Führer ordered .”

The collapse brought liberation from obedience to the leader. Sommer wants to understand what happened not only to him, and he wants to write. A letter to the editor becomes his first publication in 1948, the following year he begins articles for the Rems newspaper to write, line fee 20 pfennigs. That’s between us, measured in terms of purchasing power, more than even the major newspapers pay their freelancers today. Young Sommer was enormously ambitious and hardworking. He therefore recommends starting out in local journalism, following his example. However, an American pacifist brotherhood quickly helped him out of his native Schwäbisch Gmünd into the world, first to Sweden and then to the USA. He acquired a cosmopolitanism early on that perhaps only Hans Magnus Enzensberger of his generation could boast of.

The memoirs with fundamentals: “Print is under pressure today” or also: “Only the opinion is free, the facts are not.”

Together with the principal, Sommer accompanied the détente policy of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr; Whether it would have succeeded at all without the support of the people of Hamburg is something for historians to judge. Of course, like every great journalist, Sommer made a big mistake. Accompanied by the count, he visited the GDR in 1964. He had the trip Concrete-Publisher and secret KPD comrade Klaus Rainer Röhl was so well prepared in the best Potemkin tradition that Sommer stated that “Things are progressing in Ulbricht’s state”. In the case of a repeat incident, in 1986, the travelers who were being cared for had the GDR’s apparent economic prosperity demonstrated to them. At the beginning of 1989, just like Helmut Kohl, who was the same age, Sommer thought little of taking the “skeleton of German unity” out of the closet. In his memoirs, he feels compelled to write a thirty-page dossier to prove that he wasn’t the “unpatriotic oddball” when even Axel Springer, who hated communists, could temporarily imagine a two-state solution.

All the travel, conferences and editorial triumphs, the writing of memoranda until four in the morning and the certainty that one will be read carefully by the powerful pale in comparison to the description of one’s youth. Sommer sings the praises of tradition like in the classic Bildungsroman of the 19th century. When his parents met at the end of 1928 at Hohenzollern Castle, where his great-grandfather was castellan, the world was even closer to Biedermeier than to any modern era. Despite having a service apartment and a maid, life in the 1930s and 40s was also summer for the family and especially hard work for the women. There was constant knitting, sewing and washing, wood had to be sawn and split for heating, coal had to be fetched from the cellar. Herbs were gathered, jams and jellies were made, herbs were pounded for the winter. “Dried apple peels made a tasty drink, we picked sacks of linden blossoms from the trees on the edge of the barracks courtyard. But we children also had to pick raspberry and blackberry leaves, camomile, peppermint and yarrow.” With an amazing memory, Sommer tastes the food from back then.

The memoirs end with the basics of journalism: “Print is under pressure today” or: “Only the opinion is free, the facts are not.” That’s what you expect from a senior, but with reference to his publisher Gerd Bucerius, he proves that he was still the “free liberal” he once described himself as: “We’re all a bit crazy. We stand up for some unreasonable things and we despise much that is sensible.”

This is the secret message of these memories, beyond the world-historical turning points and course setting: that journalism does not always have to be sensible, but can be fun. In the case of the newspaper editor Theo Sommer, it was a lifelong plea.

Theo Sommer: Time of my life. Memoirs of a journalist. With a foreword by Haug von Kuenheim. Berlin: Propyläen 2022. 504 pages, 32 euros.

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