Kurt Ziesel

Kurt Ziesel (25 February 1911 – 10 May 2001) was an Austrian writer and political journalist. He co-founded the Germany Foundation and the Society for Free Journalism.

Biography

Kurt Ziesel was born in Innsbruck, the son of Tyrolean civil servant Eduard Ziesel. After attending the Realgymnasium for eight years and graduating from high school in Innsbruck in 1930, he studied as a working student at the College for Agriculture in Vienna. From 1929 Ziesel was active in politics; in 1930 he joined the party Students' League and on December 1, 1931 the NSDAP. At the same time, he worked for the National Socialist house organ Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung, after which he emigrated to Germany in 1933.

In Germany, Ziesel was first a volunteer at the Völkischer Beobachter, where he was summarily dismissed for "unreliability and various irregularities," then an editor at the Königsberg paper Preußische Zeitung. He lost this employment because of connections with a young woman of Jewish origin and written transmission of "atrocity news." For this reason, he was remanded in custody for several weeks in April 1934 and temporarily expelled from the NSDAP. Ziesel justified his contacts with the Jewish family with the not very credible admission that he, as an Austrian, had not known that "Cohen" was a Jewish name. The NS-District Court evaluated his written statements as an expression of "youthful pomposity." The Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP therefore rescinded Ziesel's expulsion from the party after several pleading letters and converted it into a "reprimand."

From September 1935, Ziesel held the position of editor at the NSDAP paper Westfälische Landeszeitung – Rote Erde in Dortmund, which he also soon had to leave due to disagreements. During this time, he also worked as a freelancer for the Völkischer Beobachter, the NSZ-Rheinfront, the Stuttgarter NS-Kurier and other papers. From 1936 to 1939, he was publisher and editor-in-chief of the Hanseaten-Dienst press office in Hamburg and wrote the book Voices of the Ostmark (1938). After the "Anschluss" of Austria, he returned to Vienna. There he became editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt in 1939 and worked as a Viennese correspondent for the NSDAP newspaper Westdeutscher Beobachter in Cologne and the Hakenkreuzbanner.

In 1940 Ziesel was drafted into a tank unit, but from 1941 he was a war correspondent with the rank of Sonderführer in a propaganda company and with the "Report Squadron" of the Upper Command of the Army. In addition, he was active as a poet and editor. Many of his books reached six-figure print runs. His anthology War and Poetry. Soldiers become Poets — Poets become Soldiers (1940) was particularly successful.

Ziesel dreamed of a future as an "Eastern colonialist". In 1943, he wrote from Minsk to the State Secretary in the Ministry of Propaganda, Kinkel, about his "longing ... to command the country here as a lord of the manor". Also in 1943, he arranged for his cook to be arrested by the Secret State Police for "anti-state activities." The designation of Ziesel as "former Gestapo denunciator" used by the SPD in this context in 1976 was prohibited at his request by the Munich Regional Court by means of a temporary injunction.

Ziesel was classified as scheming, quarrelsome, and vindictive both by his contemporaries and in later scholarly publications. Almost all of Ziesel's statements about political differences with the Third Reich are apologetic interpretations of these career-politically motivated private disputes or else freely invented. "As a characteristic, Ziesel's addiction to self-promotion and his tendency to belittle others should be pointed out, which often resulted in conflicts with politically like-minded people," according to political scientist Hans-Dieter Bamberg in his short biography of Ziesel.

After the end of the war, all of Ziesel's publications were briefly banned in Austria, and he himself was temporarily banned from speaking. In the Soviet Occupation Zone and in the German Democratic Republic, several of his writings were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated. In the Federal Republic, on the other hand, he was able to continue his "fight against the degenerate left that defiles our people" and against the "systematic destruction of faith, values, national feeling and clean state sentiment" unhindered. In the process, the ruling CDU also initially came into his sights. He criticized it for "lacking poise and steadfastness, and in need of internal renewal and purification." According to the Deutsche Zeitung of October 8, 1960, Ziesel demanded for the Federal Republic "a restriction of the fundamental right to free speech" and "the reintroduction of the labor service."

Surprisingly for the German literary scene, Ziesel went public with the novel Daniel in the Lion's Den (1952), which contemporary critics considered pro-Jewish.

In the early years of the Federal Republic, the main preoccupation of the argumentative and litigious Ziesel became revelations about the actual or alleged National Socialist past of former colleagues. In doing so, his persecutory instinct was primarily directed at journalists "who, in the Thousand-Year Reich, were militaristic, nationalistic, anti-Jewish to the point of vomiting — although, according to their own statements, they were always against it — and who today compensate for this willing sale of their journalistic dignity by waging pharisaic campaigns against those who, at the time, believed in what they did and wrote with a pure heart." In doing so, Ziesel used all legal means at his disposal. Criticism of his behavior came from colleagues such as Heinrich Böll. His countless counterstatements, criminal charges, injunctions and lawsuits eventually led to a change in German press law to prevent wanton interference with the functioning of the press.

The targets of Ziesel's wave of lawsuits included writers such as Günter Grass and politicians such as Carlo Schmid, then vice president of the Bundestag, and former German Chancellor Willy Brandt. In the "Grass case," Ziesel filed a complaint in 1962 after reading Grass's novella Cat and Mouse. The reason given was that he had discovered "filthy things" in it that "a normal person would not even dare to carve into the walls of an abortuary. The proceedings were dropped by the Koblenz public prosecutor's office in March 1963. In early 1967, by which time Grass was active in the SPD election campaign, Ziesel rehashed the case, whereupon Grass sued for injunctive relief. In a legal dispute that lasted several instances, Ziesel was forbidden to call Grass a "pornographer," but was allowed to continue calling him the "author of the vilest pornographic frills" and of "denigrations of the Catholic Church." In 1974, Ziesel filed criminal charges against the recently resigned German Chancellor Willy Brandt for negligent disclosure of state secrets. Although legally dismissed, he repeated the attack in 1976 and 1977.

Another subject of several legal disputes was Ziesel's intelligence connection, which for many years was only suspected by journalists and academics. Ziesel worked as an informant for the German foreign intelligence service BND. On a list submitted to the Federal Chancellery in 1970, he appears under the code name Zöllner as a "special press liaison" of Walter Wanke of the Munich office 923. The fact that Ziesel also had close ties to the German domestic intelligence service became known in 1973, when an internal agency dossier of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution on the journalist Kurt Hirsch was published in Ziesel's Deutschland-Magazin.

In addition to his journalistic activities, Ziesel was also active in organizational matters. He was a co-founder of Deutscher Kreis 58, a founding member in 1960 of the Society for Free Journalism, which according to the 2001 report on the protection of the constitution was the "cultural association with the largest number of right-wing extremists" in the Federal Republic, and in 1969 co-initiator of a "Committee for the Protection of Citizens against Defamation by the Left-Wing Press".

Above all, however, he was active from 1966 as an executive founding member (from 1977 chairman; later honorary chairman) of the Germany Foundation. Members of this organization were mainly the right wing of the Christian Democrats, but also German nationalists and individual representatives of the radical right. During the period of government of the social-liberal coalition, the foundation led by Ziesel saw itself as the "spearhead of the opposition".

Ziesel used his position as managing director of the foundation and publisher and main author of its magazine Deutschland-Magazin to expand his journalistic sphere of influence. Together with his supporters, he controlled the organization's external image and exerted considerable influence on the selection of the winners of the Konrad Adenauer Prize awarded by the Germany Foundation. The CDU initially took a wait-and-see approach to his activities, which was largely due to the "partly negative" assessment of Ziesel in government circles. This was to change in the 1970s.

After the social-liberal coalition took office in 1969, relations between the CDU/CSU and Ziesel and his Germany Foundation improved. Franz Josef Strauß, whom Ziesel had supported with criminal charges against Strauß critics during the Spiegel affair in 1962, honored him with a public tribute on his 60th birthday in 1971. Five years later, Helmut Kohl, Franz Josef Strauß, Karl Carstens and Axel Springer congratulated him on his sixty-fifth birthday. In 1986, Wolfgang Schäuble thanked the jubilarian for his "literary and journalistic work over five decades."

With Helmut Kohl's acceptance of the "Konrad Adenauer Freedom Prize" in 1994, Ziesel and the "Germany Foundation" finally became respectable. The Bundestag group of the PDS criticized the award, saying that it honored an organization that "propagates anti-liberal, anti-democratic, historical revisionist and xenophobic positions." The "Deutschland-Stiftung" then tried to force the PDS to refrain from this — according to the Bundestag printed paper — "justified assessment" by imposing an administrative fine of DM 500,000, but lost in two instances. In question time in the Bundestag on June 26, 1996, the then head of the Federal Chancellery, Minister Friedrich Bohl, nevertheless appeared unimpressed: "If there should be judgments by German courts that deem a different assessment permissible within the meaning of Article 5 of the Basic Law, this does not mean that the federal government must adopt these third-party assessments."

At the 1996 award ceremony, Helmut Kohl praised Ziesel for his "commitment to the liberal democratic basic order," and in 1998 Wolfgang Schäuble himself was the Adenauer Prize winner. And in 2001, shortly before Ziesel's death, Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber certified that every historian of the Federal Republic would inevitably "also have to deal with you and your work. And you may consider this an honor."

Ziesel died in Prien am Chiemsee. He was married in second marriage to Hildegard Henckel and had six children.

Works

• Stimmen der Ostmark. Eine Feierabendfolge (1938)
• Verwandlung der Herzen (1938; novel)
• Der kleine Gott (1939; novel)
• Stunden der Wandlung (1940)
• Krieg und Dichtung. Soldaten werden Dichter, Dichter werden Soldaten. Ein Volksbuch (1940; editor)
• Unsere Kinder. Erlebtes am Rande des Krieges (1941)
• Der Vergessene. Eine Erzählung aus dem Jahre 1940 (1941)
• Der Gezeichnete. Erzählung (1942)
• Aphrodite lächelt … Erschautes, Erlebtes und Erträumtes von der Insel Rhodos (1950)
• Daniel in der Löwengrube (1952; novel)
• Das Leben verläßt uns nicht (1954)
• Und was bleibt ist der Mensch (1954; novel)
• Die goldenen Tage. Roman der Insel Rhodos (1954)
• Solange wir lieben (1957; novel)
• Das verlorene Gewissen. Hinter den Kulissen der Presse, Literatur und ihrer Machtträger von heute (1958)
• Der rote Rufmord. Eine Dokumentation zum kalten Krieg (1961)
• Die Pressefreiheit in der Demokratie (1962)
• Die Literaturfabrik: Eine polem. Auseinandersetzung mit d. Literaturbetrieb im heutigen Deutschland (1962)
• Dankt das Abendland ab? (1963)
• Der endlose Tag (1963)
• Der deutsche Selbstmord. Diktatur der Meinungsmacher (1963)
• Und was bleibt, ist der Mensch (1965)
• Freiheit und Verantwortung. Beiträge zur Zeit (1966)
• Die Sensation des Guten. Bericht über eine ungewöhnliche Weltreise (1969)
• Schwarz und Weiss in Afrika. Wirklichkeit und Legenden. Beobachtungen und Erfahrungen in Rhodesien, Südafrika und Südwestafrika (1973)
• Die Meinungsmacher. Spiegel, Zeit, Stern & Co. (1988)
• Der Preis des Ruhms. Roman einer Schauspielerin (1989; novel)
• Wider den Zeitgeist (1992)

References

• Bamberg, Hans-Dieter (1978). Die Deutschland-Stiftung e.V. Studien über Kräfte der „demokratischen Mitte“ und des Konservatismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain.
• Benz, Wolfgang (2009). Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2/2. Berlin: De Gruyter Saur, p. 901.
• Busch, Stefan (1998). „Und gestern, da hörte uns Deutschland“. NS-Autoren in der Bundesrepublik. Kontinuität und Diskontinuität bei Friedrich Griese, Werner Beumelburg, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller und Kurt Ziesel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
• Hillesheim, Jürgen; Elisabeth Michael (1993). Lexikon nationalsozialistischer Dichter: Biographien, Analysen, Bibliographien. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
• Sarkowicz, Hans; Alf Mentzer (2002). "Kurt Ziesel". In: Dies.: Literatur in Nazi-Deutschland. Ein biographisches Lexikon. Hamburg/Wien: Europa Verlag, pp. 415–17.
• Schildt, Axel (2016). "Im Visier: Die NS-Vergangenheit westdeutscher Intellektueller. Die Enthüllungskampagne von Kurt Ziesel in der Ära Adenauer". In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, No. 1, pp. 37–68.
• Sieverding, Daniel (2011). "Kurt Ziesel – der streitbare „Opportunist“." In: Rolf Düsterberg, ed., Dichter für das „Dritte Reich“, 2. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, pp. 269–300.

External links

• Works by Kurt Ziesel at German National Library
• Works by Kurt Ziesel at German Digital Library