The Israeli, Austrian, and German ambassadors sit with the New York mayor at the same table of honor and are also the keynote speakers.
5,000 people listen to them in the assembly hall of the college.
People who mostly come from the Alkondal region, from Germany and Austria, some from
Prague and Budapest.
Certainly, their old homeland and their old culture still cling to them.
But the sons and daughters they brought with them are already true New Yorkers and speak better
English than German.
With their national hymn, the Americans traditionally introduce every major event.
The older people among the 5,000 listening are still somewhat moved.
For these expatriates, it is symbolically linked to the experience of the safe haven of renewed freedom, a new homeland, and new citizenship. But the past, in Berlin, for example, in the 1920s, the romantic Café Max Reinhardt, the Kuestendamm, for the Viennese, the Opera, the Burg, again Max Reinhardt, and the cozy café atmosphere, remain and are forgotten.
They need a symbiosis of the guest and today, a bridge between spiritual values
that they left behind and that they rediscovered, both a swelling of memory
and an adaptation to this hectic America with its different lifestyle and work style.
This bridge was built 30 years ago.
It made it easier for 5,000 people, and many more who are not here today, to settle in
and gave them a common platform.
Aufbau is the pioneering name of the birthday boy.
Pim wrote in a long tribute.
The German weekly Aufbau is America's most important and influential newspaper
in a foreign language.
Aufbau was originally intended as a publication for immigrants, primarily Jewish immigrants.
Today, it plays a much larger, one might even say, world-changing role.
As the only foreign-language magazine in America, the paper has not only maintained its circulation, but increased it.
It averages 45,000.
20 percent of readers are not Jewish.
Among them are many citizens of the Federal Republic of Austria and Switzerland.
New American immigrants from Central Europe and young Germans studying in the United States.
The subscriber base covers 83 countries.
Israel, with its many German-speaking people, accounts for a lion's share.
But even New Zealand, Australia, the Dominican Republic, Patagonia, South Africa, and Iceland are not missing from the circle.
Subscribers include the American standing appointment and the Pentagon.
The Federal Minister, Israel's old and new ministers, Presidents Ben-Gurion and Levy Eschko,
Adenauer and Erhardt.
Albert Schweizer, Theodor Häus, and Adolf Schärf held the paper until their deaths.
Each paper has an owner, who was and is the founder of the New World Club, which runs it as a non-profit organization.
No member of the supervisory board is paid a salary, and the editorial and administrative staff of the magazine is surprisingly small, around 30 men and women.
Every last cent of the profits goes to charitable and scientific causes, such as the famous Weitsmann Institute in Israel.
Attorney Dr. Alfred Prager is a key figure.
In 1933, the Meissen native had already left Berlin and then completed the necessary English exams in America.
Prager was admitted to the bar by the highest court in the state of New York.
As chairman of the magazine's supervisory board and, much to the extent, president of the German Jewish Club, which later became the New World Club, he closely observed the entire development. First of all, it was necessary for us to support the new immigrants not only financially, but above all, educationally.
We had to offer English language courses.
We offered civics courses to prepare people so they could pass the citizenship exam.
And we also generally helped them socially so that they had a connection here and didn't get lost.
We even founded regional associations for the people who came from Presslau,
from Hamburg, from Saxony.
We founded Saxon Armed Forces and Hamburg Armed Forces, and in this way, we created a close
connection among the immigrants.
First, we established a job placement service, which was necessary because many of the immigrants didn't speak English.
But then, above all, through our newspaper, we created the opportunity to advertise, so that people who took up a larger apartment were able to rent out two or three rooms and thus create a free apartment for themselves.
The tasks of happiness today are still largely social.
We have different groups
which are very active.
And they also go to the youth groups.
We have a ski group, a soccer group.
German soccer is very popular here.
Recently, even soccer players from Germany were here who played against us.
But we also deal a lot with German literature.
We have the German theater, which we support.
We also ensure that the German language is kept alive here.
And at the same time, we inform our people about American culture and tradition, and combining the two,
which is part of the American spirit.
Americans like to be seen as a melting pot,
we have many, many cultures that converge here and help, that actually help in the country.
An interesting observation that the New World Foundation made through surveys is:
The children of immigrants often don't like to speak German,
but interest is beginning to reappear among their grandchildren. They also want to know where the family comes from and what fate their history has had here.
From this interest stems the hope of the New World,
that it will not only have a past and present, but also a future.
The club's greatest achievement was undoubtedly the initiative to rebuild.
In the beginning, it had four hectographed pages.
Dr. Manfred George, a true Berliner from the Janowitz Bridge,
editor-in-chief and benevolent dictator of the rebuild, recounts how it all began.
Well, I came to rebuild in the strangest way in the world.
I can't even begin to describe it as a very small club magazine.
It was once distributed on four pages to the members of a small club, the John Jewish Club, which was concerned with collecting war relics, as much as possible, from the First World War.
But I earned money; my wife worked very hard here in New York, and I wanted to go to Hollywood,
because I thought, somehow, yes, my name would be known there.
I had a lot of friends there. I was also very well received in Hollywood,
but these honors weren't enough to get me a job.
It was all spent on Dinas and Lönschens and driving.
It was wonderful, but then one day I got a letter.
My wife had met our pediatrician from Lichterfelde here on the street.
And he said, "Tell me, where is your husband?"
Tell me, my husband is trying to get a job in Hollywood.
Has he already told you, my friend, "No, unfortunately not."
Then the doctor said, "You know, we have a small club pool,
if he wants to run it, he should come."
We know him as a journalist, $15 a month.
For me, that was the difference between zero and 15.
And after I made a few more attempts in Hollywood,
which also ended in failure, I came back.
And then I encountered one of the strangest and most interesting adventures of my journalistic life. The strangest and most interesting adventure of a journalist's life.
But certainly not the first adventure.
Dr. Manfred George, Georg became George,
so that Americans could even pronounce the name,
was already a well-known editor in the Weimar Republic.
The broad-shouldered, jovial man became a theater critic and, for Jeton, editor-in-chief
of the Mossische Berliner Volkszeitung.
He went to the 8 o'clock Abendblatt and, at Ulstein, took over the editorship of Tempo,
a daily newspaper with several issues,
something completely new for Berliners.
Manfred George also wrote novels.
The first biography of Marlene Dietrich,
a much-acclaimed and still frequently quoted biography
of the match king Iverkreuger,
shortly after his sensational suicide,
and one about the Zionist Herzel.
After the outbreak of the Third Reich, he had to flee very quickly across the Green Party with his wife, two children, and nothing else but a walking stick and a few sandwiches.
On the state parliament list, George had been the leading candidate
of the Republican Reich Party,
whose founders included Fritz von Unruh and Karl von Osjetski.
Certainly, the party was no longer gaining traction,
but even that didn't diminish the Nazis' hatred.
George became editor-in-chief of a Praga Monday newspaper,
a contributor to the Pariser-Tagetblatt published by George Bernard,
and the Basel correspondent for a Nationalzeitung.
For the Nationalzeitung,
Romanian, Dutch, and technical newspapers, he reported on the Spanish Civil War for several months.
In 1938, he went via Paris to New York.
Primarily in the cultural field and as a theater reporter, he now represents several newspapers of the Federal Republic of Germany, West Berlin, and the Basel Nationalzeitung in America. Well, George once had an amusing experience with the Nationalzeitung, which he considers his journalistic home in Europe.
When I broke the news of World War II, I phoned the Nationalzeitung
tion,
one could now report further,
here from New York, by a roundabout route, via Porto Galerwas.
There I received a classic telegram,
which read as follows.
It's too difficult for them to call after the war.
It reminded me of the good soldier Schweig,
who, as is well known, met up with his friends after the war,
simply after the war, at the Kälch Inn
in Prague.
The Aufbau publishing house is reminiscent of a Dittenstil house.
Even Dr. George's small, stair-like office
has no trace of the splendor of the Handtakolleg,
where people celebrate.
The walls are decorated with interesting and varied motifs.
There are many original letters hanging there.
The names of Schweizer and Ben Goheon were included, who inquired whether so many Jews in America still speak and read only German.
The number of pictures with personal tributes to George is legion.
Malene Dietrich,
who wrote her first biography, is included.
An interview that Theodor Häusmann did for George,
had a certain amount of historical value.
It was also a milestone in the reconciliation between Jews and Germans.
I had the honor and the pleasure,
that Federal President Häus,
in an interview with me in Bonn,
gave Aufbau the opportunity,
as the first newspaper in the world,
to announce the German Federal Government's willingness to make reparations.
I consider this interview, in a sense, to be one of my
so-called historical scubes.
There aren't that many scubes of this kind,
and I must say, however, that I was particularly grateful to the late Federal President, whom I already knew quite well from earlier times,
for this.
When Aufbau was the leading militant newspaper against Nazism and fascism,
it had already propagated the idea of material reparations.
The paper was carried by waves of immigration,
which provided its most important contributors and core readers.
Driven by George, the monthly publications,
because club news then surprisingly quickly developed into a publication with half a million copies,
and finally into a weekly newspaper with an average of 40 pages.
When the lights went out in Europe,
there was hardly any other language for people with German speakers who had something to say.
Prominent Americans, Britons, French, and others soon joined the staff.
Anyone who leafs through Aufbau's 30 issues will come across successful series,
which certainly eclipse many of the world's largest and richest newspapers.
John F. Kennedy wrote an article about over-disarmament.
Franz Werff, Feuchtwanger, and Albrecht Goss, to name just three,
had their novels published in Aufbau.
They published entire series.
Miriam Berg's Diary from the Wachschau Ghetto and Frank's Diary were pre-printed in Aufbau.
However, Aufbau's editor-in-chief is too much of a journalist
not to be even more pleased by another phenomenon
than the lineup of prominent authors.
The editor of a newspaper saved the day.
That didn't, like other major papers,
have 10 or 20 foreign brochures,
but that had maybe 100 or 200 or 300 foreign brochures, or 400 or 1,000.
As it was, there were no brochures, of course.
These were Aufbau's readers, who were scattered across all five continents,
following their swarms to Patagonia, Haiti, Oslo, wherever they wanted.
And all these people, who gradually saw Aufbau as a central point in the fight against Nazism, had a sense of purpose, a sense of inner obligation, to write about everything they saw.
That is, I was as well informed about everything that was happening in various countries as hardly any foreign correspondent has a newspaper that only someone in Paris or someone in London has.
These weren't diplomatic secrets,
major political events received through the telegraph agencies, but rather clues, indirect information that turned Aufbau into a brilliant information sheet, which, for example, here in the United States at the time, was read with the greatest attention by the Pen, the Krippenton,
the then War Ministry, or other ministries.
A work gang, a roaring German refugee, who had been rescued by the Sahara Desert, once wrote to us. I don't know about Dakar,
that he escaped there and that the railway,
that he worked on railway construction, and so on.
And then we grabbed his head,
and said, what on earth is a railway builder doing in the Sahara?
We brought it up again,
then there was obviously an intention
to build a railway line to Dakar.
As far as we know, this route was then bombed,
by the Allies, or never, where it never ended.
But I can tell you hundreds of things like that.
If I could open the Aufbau archives, which I might have
after my nineteenth year, when I have time for it,
there is a wealth of anecdotes, of stories.
People, there is, I think, a novel or a book,
that is, bundles of people's fates.
That's exactly what the Aufbau archive presents.
They are the funniest, the tragic ones that become part of the things there.
The funniest ones, starting with the people who suddenly start
that they wanted a Aufbau in my Persia,
playing chess with someone in New York about a Aufbau.
But we didn't accept that.
Maybe someone wants to give some little piece of information
about this matter.
All the way to the most outrageous family fates,
where people found each other again, where people didn't even know,
after 20 or 25 years, that they had sisters or brothers.
And that's what we discovered.
The International Red Cross confirmed that 75% of the people it sought through the publication of name lists in Aufbau have actually been found. A great human achievement. More significant, even, than all journalistic highlights. Wanted notices are still appearing in Aufbau. However, some of them have a different character. Witnesses are sought for reparations claims to bring Nazi criminals to justice. Lost books, paintings, and other valuables are sought.
As such notices changed, so did the paper's tasks.
The Third Reich was crushed in 1945, and with it, a period ended.
The fight against fascism and Nazism ended.
More precisely, today it is limited to the remnants.
George's Aufbau keeps an eye out.
Some time ago, it published a survey on whether anti-Semitism can be eradicated in Germany.
Willy Brandt and Eric Lüt participated, among many others. Willy Brandt didn't deny anything.
He didn't deny the occasional anti-Semitic graffiti either.
But he still believes, and denies it all,
that this is no longer a problem for Berlin
and that the traditionally good relationship
between non-Jewish and Jewish citizens is reviving.
Lüt was more skeptical.
What education had failed to achieve
must be made up for by human-to-human interaction,
between Jew and non-Jew.
Three decades later, a more established, globally spanning network of correspondents
replaced that of the countless occasional contributors from the pioneering days.
They have remained discerning
and maintain good Weimar press traditions.
Anyone who wants to read a light-hearted tabloid
certainly won't read Aufbau.
Almost all editorial staff and permanent contributors
also date back to the Weimar era.
If someone dies, the gap is difficult to fill. George needs people who, from decades of experience
and observation, have a very thorough understanding of European and American politics and economics,
European and American culture,
and, last but not least, theater.
Once, helping immigrants,
their economic and intellectual integration, were important areas.
Series about the most successful refugees from the Third Reich,
Jewish and non-Jewish, were intended to encourage others as well.
Now, the successes of the second generation are already being reported on,
familiar names.
However, these are the sons and daughters.
One, Dr. Otto Eckstein, who, like Johnston, is part of the closest economic advisory staff,
leaves the President's message in the Handtakolleg,
wishing them luck,
to join the staff and readers of Aufbau in these excellent newspapers.
Aufbau has emerged as a mouthpiece for liberal ideas.
I am sure that it will continue to justify this reputation in the coming years,
by providing readers with careful reporting, enlightenment, and responsible commentary
on the news.
Linden, Benes, Johnston.
The greatest incentive for Aufbau readers
were once three permanent editors.
One Polzer supervised,
what it's like here in England,
and what it's like here in England.
Ernst Wahlenberg, the 1000 Vorte American.
Now such lessons are no longer necessary.
Instead, Aufbau wants to introduce the next German section.
They are intended to benefit the children and angels of immigrants,
so that they do not forget the language of German and Austrian Jewry,
and the intellectual heritage is preserved.
Of course, Aufbau also organizes writing prizes,
and the lucky winners are rewarded with television presentations, European trips,
and other pleasant things.
One of Dr. Manfred George's favorites is the women's section.
He admires the achievements of her editors.
When Vera Kreiner writes retrospectively about the periods of initial difficulty in classifying,
those are truly times gone by.
Her readers hardly feel nostalgic.
smile,
but rather with the beautiful and proud feeling.
We did it after all.
A great stroke of luck.
You were given a housekeeping position with your own room and bathroom,
where your husband could also live.
All he had to do was do a little gardening, serving, and playing the role of butler.
Anyone who wasn't suited to being a butler,
and there were relatively few former lawyers, bank directors, and businessmen
who demonstrated a distinct talent for it,
had to look for work elsewhere.
But we gritted our teeth and acted as if we had never been anything other than housekeepers or cooks.
Because that was the only way to save the money needed to bring relatives over from Europe,
or to give your husband the opportunity
to get a real job again.
Sometimes someone would say, "Alright, give you a chance."
But they didn't always understand who was taking advantage of this opportunity. Because instead of rushing through production,
we did the finest handcraft, and to top it all, we were proud of it.
What every little girl here knows from an early age,
we learned from everyday American life.
You won't get a job here if you look unkempt.
Gray hair isn't necessarily a recommendation.
And when money is so tight
that it's either enough for lunch or for the hairdresser,
you can't hesitate to make a decision.
Least of all when you're looking for a job.
Only rarely did we hear our American sisters complain about the double burden of family and work.
However, their husbands were generally younger and better educated than ours.
When the women, who had sat at the power tools all day
and earned what we considered fantastic sums of money,
came home in the evening,
the potatoes had already been peeled
and there were no arguments about washing the dishes. The master of our house, on the other hand, would have preferred to learn the Declaration of Independence by heart,
or even dry a single plate.
Probably no other place reports on German events so well and objectively.
His editor-in-chief had been offered the most prominent positions in the press, newspapers, and television,
from his old homeland.
Of course, he valued the honors and would certainly have accepted them 30 years ago.
Now, however, George feels too closely connected to the great country,
which is also the country of his children and grandchildren.
Which doesn't emanate a great love for Berlin.
If you ask him if he has seen the old capital since the end of the film,
this feeling resonates in his answer.
First, he was often invited.
Second, you see a bear standing up there, which Mayor Brand sent me as a token of thanks from the city of Berlin for my campaigns around Berlin.
We had a huge special issue on Berlin once a year, and of course I've been to Berlin 5, 6, or 7 times.
I'm invited to the Theater des Spiels, the film screening, and I walk through Berlin,
as one walks through the city of one's youth.
I was born on the Janowitz Bridge, yes, from the Janowitz Bridge, cherry pits onto the Spree steamer,
which sailed to a little house, and one remains connected to such a city.
I grew up in Berlin.
It's natural when the American says,
you and the last Kiddauers themselves, let's not fool us.
I walk through Berlin, all the Schersteller, Schönesperdül, and see the city and think, it's still the same.
And then I suddenly realize that I personally have treated all the street fronts with my own memories and that there's actually something completely different behind them.
But I love being there.
I must say, though, that I consider the United States my home today. While Aufbau had strongly condemned the guilt of the many during the Hitler regime,
it simultaneously denied the collective guilt of the German people.
Now it wants to build a bridge between four countries: the United States, Israel, Germany, and Austria.
The cultural life and the already allistic life of Aufbau takes place within these four countries, with the focus in the United States.
We try, and the first generation, to which I also belong, is always a bridge generation everywhere, to be a bridge.
That means that Aufbau is trying today to explain American to the Americans in Europe and in Europe, where we also have many readers in Germany.
After the Mayor of New York and the representatives of Israel and Austria, Dr. Heinrich Knabstein took the floor at the 30th anniversary of Aufbau at the hands of the College of German Embassies.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the editors and Dr. George for the support they gave me in the matter of the statute of limitations by printing my
An article on mass murder must not and will not be allowed to expire.
The article was reprinted three times in the Congressional Records, the minutes of the American Congress, and was widely distributed.
Every now and then in diplomatic life, one has to put one's neck on the line for a good cause, and Aufbau helped and supported me.
Knabstein's courageous article was published by Aufbau in the summer of 1964, a long time before the Bundestag had even decided on the statute of limitations.
At the end of his long and very humane birthday speech, he described reconciliation between Jews and Germans as the most desirable goal.
It may be that for us, the older generation, this goal is not yet fully achievable.
But the younger generation must achieve it in the years to come.
We have to do everything in our power to prepare the way for them.
I am happy that Aufbau has been working toward this goal for many years and congratulate the staff on their great success.
For my part, I promise to work with anyone of good will who pursues this goal.
If I'm for us, then for the next generation.
Finally, I say Admultos Anos to Aufbau, to many more happy years.
Thirteenths is a long time.
Most of the five thousand in the Handekollegsch, the readers and subscribers of Aufbau, consciously joined in.
They have become good Americans who continue to cultivate the culture of old Europe.
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