Michael Naumann

Michael Naumann (born 8 December 1941) is a German politician, publisher and journalist. He was the German secretary of culture from 1998 until 2001. He is married to Marie Warburg, daughter of Eric Warburg and granddaughter of Max Warburg.

Since 2012, Naumann is director of the Barenboim–Said Academy in Berlin.

Early life and education

Naumann was born as the son of a lawyer in Köthen, Anhalt. His father was killed in 1942 in the Battle of Stalingrad. At the age of eleven, Naumann had to flee to Hamburg with his mother in 1953. Because of contacts with her Jewish relatives who had emigrated to the USA, she had been targeted by the Ministry of State Security of the GDR.

Naumann graduated with a Ph.D. (Dr.) in political science from Munich University in 1969 and continued his studies as a Florey scholar at Queen's College, Oxford. Naumann wrote his dissertation on Karl Kraus's ''Der Abbau der verkehrten Welt'' ("On overcoming a wrong world"), his habilitation on ''Structural Change of Heroism, from Sacred to Profane'' in 1978; he has also written a number of academic essays on theories of revolution.

Career

In publishing and the media

Naumann worked for ''Der Spiegel'' and for ''Die Zeit'', for the latter as a chief-editor and later as a publisher. In 1985, Naumann became publisher of the publishing house Rowohlt Verlag. In 1995, he went to New York, first leading Metropolitan Books, then Henry Holt. He hosted a highbrow political talk show in German television, ''Talk im Palais'' from 2004 until becoming SPD candidate for mayor of Hamburg in 2007. From 2010 to 2012, he was chief-editor and publisher of ''Cicero''.

Political career

Secretary of Culture

Between 1998 and 2001, Naumann served as the first Secretary of Culture (German title: ''Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien'') for the federal government before returning to the publishing world. His most remembered act is declining the first design for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin on grounds of its monumental abstraction, and choosing the second proposed design by Peter Eisenman instead, including an underground "Ort der Information", a place of information, which provides the visitors with introductory information on the history of the Holocaust.

Mayor candidate in Hamburg

In late 2007 Naumann became the official Social Democratic Party of Germany candidate for the mayor election in Hamburg 2008 on 24 February that year.

The 2008 election in Hamburg caused setbacks for the Social Democrats in advance. After a recent election in Hesse just a few weeks before, which failed to bring a majority to the Social Democrats, party head Kurt Beck left it open to local Social Democrats in West Germany to form local Minority government coalitions with the Greens and/or the FDP that would be tolerated by the emerging, controversial Left Party (in eastern parts of Germany, full-blown coalitions with the Left Party's predecessor PDS had been commonplace for years since German reunification in 1990 but always taboo in the West). The election in Hamburg was not far off when Beck made these ambiguous statements in favor of such minority coalitions tolerated by the Left Party, whereas before, he had utterly denied it.

This caused a huge controversy in the media in the final crucial week of the Hamburg election, overshadowing the issues of Naumann's campaign themes – social welfare, better education, and improvement of Hamburg's infrastructure. A specially pronounced issue Naumann dwelled on during his campaign was acceptance of referendums and honesty on behalf of the city's government, as incumbent conservative mayor Ole von Beust was known for having had ignored a number of referendums and lying about the issues they were involved with, especially selling off of community property to private investors, such as the city's public state hospitals and parts of the Hamburg harbor.

Beck's ambiguous statements about local co-operations with the Left Party forced Naumann to repeatedly and adamantly deny any co-operation with the Left Party after the elections no matter what election results would follow, even going so far as stigmatizing them as Soviet Communists several times during his campaign, repeating the line, ''"I will say it in a way even ''they'' will understand: ''Nyet