Detlef Kühn

Detlef Kühn (born 16 November 1936) is a German commentator. A qualified jurist, he is a former politician and broadcasting director. He is also noted as a genealogist.

Between 1972 and 1991 Kühn served as Chair of the Whole German Institute ("Bundesanstalt für gesamtdeutsche Aufgaben" / BfgA), an organisation sponsored by the West German government which promoted awareness of the shared cultural and linguistic roots of East and West Germany, and in retrospect can be seen to have kept alive the idea that German division, viewed almost universally as a permanent fixture through the 1970s and nearly all of the 1980s, might not be permanent after all. In practice the BfgA was a highly politicised institution: the choice of Kühn to lead it was endorsed by the duration of his incumbency. When the organisation was hit by a media storm in 1981 one caption writer described him in 1981 as "a lawyer with a heart" ("Jurist mit Herz").

Life Provenance and early years Detlef Kühn was born in Potsdam not quite four years after the Nazis took power. His father was a private sector clerical worker who had moved to Potsdam from Riga after the First World War. His mother's family roots lay in East Prussia and Brandenburg, which has subsequently underpinned both his interest in the history of those regions and his increasingly public genealogical research. His early life and schooling took place in Potsdam, which after 1945 found itself administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic). As a child he reported to his parents that someone had asked him whether his family was protestant or catholic. "Just tell them we're believers in God" was the parental advice. In fact he had been baptised a protestant, but just a few months later, in 1937, his parents "left the church", taking their infant son with them. In 1952 the family relocated to West Berlin. A few years later it would have become difficult or impossible to move from East Germany to West Berlin in this way, but in the early 1950s the so-called Inner German border was still relatively porous, and many families made the move, exacerbating East Germany's desperate shortage of working-age population in the process. Kühn passed his school final exams (Abitur) in West Berlin in 1956 which opened the way to a university level education. He then moved on to the recently founded Free University of Berlin where he studied Jurisprudence.

After 1990 With the BfgA now surplus to requirements, Kühn's career took a new direction. He identified a desperate lack of experience and expertise in running free media operations in the "new federal states" (former East Germany) and moved to Leipzig, the largest city and a cultural capital of Saxony where he took on the Administration and Broadcasting directorship[ at Saxony Radio which had taken over the bandwidths formerly occupied by Radio DDR 2. In 1992, when Saxony Radio was subsumed into Central Germany Broadcasting ("Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk" / MDR), Kühn responded the call from the CDU politician (and former civil rights activist) :de:Arnold VaatzArnold Vaatz to create, in Dresden, a statewide broadcasting facility to support private broadcasters. It quickly became apparent that this arrangement was opposed by Saxony's western born Minister-president Kurt Biedenkopf, who had very clear ideas of his own about an alternative broadcasting hub for Dresden. After seven years Kühn was obliged to abandon the project, but not before he had been able to have a significant influence on the "broadcasting landscape" in Saxony.

Beyond politics In 1974 he was one of the eight co-founders of the German Cancer Aid ("Stiftung Deutsche Krebshilfe") foundation.

In recent years he has contributed extensively on political topics in the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit.

For decades Detlef Kühn has also pursued genealogical research, principally on Baltic region genealogy.