Theodor Wolff

Theodor Wolff (2 August 1868 – 23 September 1943) was a German writer who was influential as a journalist, critic and newspaper editor. He was born and died in Berlin. Between 1906 and 1933 he was the chief editor of the politically liberal newspaper Berliner Tageblatt.

His talent as a writer won praise from an unlikely quarter: In 1939 Joseph Goebbels recommended his Propaganda Ministry staff to study Wolff's contributions in back numbers of the newspaper that he had edited. According to Goebbels, despite him being Jewish, the quality of Wolff's writing was matched by only very few in Germany. What Goebbels did not mention was that as a younger man he had himself on at least one occasion applied to work for the newspaper in question.

Life Early years Theodor Wolff was born in Berlin, second of the four recorded children of a fabric wholesaler from Silesia called Adam Wolff by his marriage to Recha, née Davidsohn. Recha was a doctor's daughter from Danzig. Wolff grew up in a prosperous Jewish family. He rapidly achieved good results at the prestigious King William I Grammar school in Berlin.

He married in 1902, in Paris, the actress Marie Louise Charlotte Anna Hickethier (known as Änne), coming from a Protestant Prussian family. The couple had three children: Richard Wolff (born in Paris, 14 June 1906), Rudolf Wolff (born in Berlin, 9 July 1907) and Lilly Wolff (born in Berlin, 7 August 1909). The children were baptised as Protestants.

Journalism mostly In 1887 Wolff's cousin Rudolf Mosse recruited him to his successful publishing conglomerate. Mosse was 25 years older than Wolff, to whom he provided a thorough commercial and journalistic training across all the departments of his publishing business, the "Mosse-Verlag". During these years Wolff also found time to write some early novels, inspired by Theodor Fontane whom he greatly admired, and several plays which were staged in Berlin, advocating a "parliamentarisation" ("Parlamentarisierung") of the constitution and vigorously opposing the "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" Meanwhile, Germany's traditionalist Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, refused any interviews or statements to the Tageblatt while his successor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, instructed all government departments to steer well clear of the newspaper's reports and opinions.

1918–1933 In November 1918 Theodor Wolff was one of the founders of the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP), In 1920 Hermann Müller, who in the early summer was briefly the German Chancellor, invited Wolff to take on the position of German Ambassador to Paris but, again, Wolff opted to remain a Berlin-based journalist. (Kurt Tucholsky, one of the Tageblatt s most high-profile contributors, had also, on the world stage, sharply condemned DDP support for these measures.) Wolff nevertheless remained powerfully influential, a leading advocate for democracy and moderation, welcomed as a dinner guest by various government ministers. to move his base from Vienna to Berlin.

Germany's military defeat and the catastrophic economic aftermath did much to discredit democratic politics during the 1920s, which saw a corresponding growth in support for right wing politics, which in their turn favoured somewhat 'tribal' definitions of the political sphere. Theodor Wolff and his Berliner Tageblatt (the "Jewish news-sheet", das Judenblatt) were increasingly targeted by nationalists and during the 1920s nationalists were increasingly setting the country's political agenda. His name started to appear on the death lists of various radical-right and populist groups, causing Wolff to become anxious that he might share the fate of Walther Rathenau, the generally popular Jewish Foreign Minister and fellow DDP member who had been shot dead by a gang of three extremists in June 1922. Anxiety that he might be murdered by racist extremists remained with him for the rest of his life. His counterpart at the right wing Hugenberg media group, editor in chief Friedrich Hussong, stirred up popular hatred of Wolff, whom he identified as a representing the liberal metropolitan press. His opinions nevertheless remained clear enough, and on 26 October 1937 he was deprived of his German citizenship.

In exile Wolff reverted to writing books, while still contributing occasional pieces of journalism to (non-German) newspapers.

Wolff continued to distance himself from Zionist separatism, believing throughout his life in a "German-Jewish symbiosis" ("deutsch-jüdische Symbiose").

Arrest and death

After the Fall of France on 22 June 1940 Theodor Wolff applied, unsuccessfully, for permission to emigrate to United States: he remained in Nice. The coastal strip along the south-eastern part of France including, from late 1942, Nice was in the process of being annexed by Italy, and on 23 May 1943 Theodor Wolff was arrested by the Italian civil authorities. He was handed over to the Gestapo and interned in a Marseille jail before being transferred to the Drancy detention centre near Paris. Drancy was used as a collection point for Jewish internees scheduled for deportation to internment camps and death camps in Germany, and Wolff now found himself transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the east of Berlin. Now aged 75, and ill with phlegmon, his fellow internees pleaded successfully for him to be sent to the Jewish Hospital in Berlin. Here he was admitted on 20 September 1943: he died three days later.

Theodor Wolff's body is buried in the "row of honour" at Berlin's Weißensee Cemetery.

Posthumous honour In 1961 the Theodor Wolff Prize for newspaper journalism was founded, and it has since 1962 been awarded annually. Since 1973 the prize has been awarded by the German Newspaper Publishers' Association (BDZV / Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger).

Published output (not a complete list) Der Heide ("The heathland"). Novel, Berlin 1891. Der Untergang ("The downfall"). Novel, Berlin 1892. Die stille Insel ("The quiet island"). Play in four acts, Berlin 1894. Die Sünder. Eine Liebesgeschichte ("The sinner. A love story"). Berlin 1894. Niemand weiß es ("Nobody knows"). Play in three acts, Munich 1895. Geistige und künstlerische Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich. In: Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Deutscher Zeitgeschichte – 1872–1897. Jubiläums-Schrift. Ed. by the editorial office of the Berliner Tageblatt, Rudolf Mosse, Berlin 1897, S. 139–148. Die Königin ("The queen"). Play in three acts, Cologne 1898 (second, strongly revised edition as play in four acts, Cologne 1904). Pariser Tagebuch ("Paris diary"). Munich 1908; new edition: Berlin 1927 (selection from the Parisian reports, released from 1894 to 1906). Spaziergänge ("Walks"). Cologne 1909. Vollendete Tatsachen, 1914–1917 ("Fait accompli, 1914–1917"). Berlin 1918. Das Vorspiel ("The prelude"). Munich 1924; Paris 1926. Anatole France. Berlin 1924 (self-published) Der Wettlauf mit der Schildkröte. Gelöste und ungelöste Probleme ("The footrace with the tortoise. Solved and unsolved problems"). Berlin 1929. Der Krieg des Pontius Pilatus ("The war of Pontius Pilate"). Zürich 1934; London 1935; Paris and New York 1936; Prague 1937. Der Marsch durch zwei Jahrzehnte ("March through two decades"). Amsterdam 1936; London 1936, Paris 1937; as a strongly augmented new edition under the title Die Wilhelminische Epoche ("The Wilhelminian epoch", 1989). Die Schwimmerin. Ein Roman aus der Gegenwart ("The swimmer. A novel from the present"). Zürich 1937.