The Reluctant Potentate

On the edge of the Iron Curtain, Europe's biggest press potentate last week occupied a strategic new foothold. Only nine years after buying his first newspaper, Hamburg-based Publisher Axel C. (for Caesar) Springer prepared to intensify his assault on the Berlin market by moving high-speed presses and an expanded staff into new quarters in the city's bustling Ullstein newspaper plant, home of prewar Germany's largest press empire. Newcomer Springer, who has already swallowed up almost half of the Ullstein papers, was also preparing for the hoped-for day when free newspapers will surge eastward in a reunified Germany.

Tall, elegantly tailored Axel Springer, 45, owns outright three thriving dailies and two Sunday papers with total circulation of more than five million. They reach their readers in editions published from teletype-linked plants in Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, Frankfurt and Munich. Springer also publishes five magazines (total circ. 4,680,000) that range from the weekly Das Neue Blatt, a sex-spiced gossip sheet, to Hoer zu! (Listen!), a TV-radio weekly whose 2,600,000 sales top all other German magazines.

The Other Germany. In contrast to the stodgy, opinion-packed journals that have traditionally formed Germany's newspaper diet, Springer's sprightly, independent papers concentrate on news and features. His morning Bild-Zeitung, a frothy, picture-filled tabloid that has the biggest circulation (3,000,000) of any newspaper on the Continent, pays little attention to politics and only skimpily covered Germany's election campaign. He launched it only five years ago after a London trip exposed him to the British popular press. To build readership, he borrowed a bag of tricks from U.S. and British newspapering, e.g., traffic-safety contests, horse-drawn coach rides for every couple married in Hamburg.

But Springer also puts out one of the country's most influential serious dailies, conservative Die Welt (245,000), which has on its staff some of Germany's ablest political analysts. Though Die Welt usually supports Konrad Adenauer's government, Editor in Chief Hans Zehrer often reflects the views of Hamburg's world traders that Bonn should establish closer trade and diplomatic ties with Russia and Red China (where Die Welt has its own correspondent).

Unlike German publishers of the '30s, who through ambition or complaisance became propaganda tools for Hitler, Axel Springer is an outspoken internationalist and firm friend of the West who believes that his mission, in his own words, is to "help the 'other' Germany, the nonmilitant, peaceful Germany of great scientists, great spirits, great minds." He is also untypical of European publishers in having no apparent political ties or ambition of his own.

Hateful Word. The son of an obscure Hamburg book publisher, Publisher Springer sat out World War II with a respiratory ailment and at war's end was among the first Germans to win an Allied license to start a magazine. With profits from Hoer zu! he launched Hamburger Abendblatt, his first daily, in 1948, and five years later won out over 16 other bidders when the British decided to sell their occupation paper Die Welt (for an estimated $1,000,000).

Springer keeps a close eye on his empire from a penthouse paneled in U.S. pine atop his handsome Hamburg headquarters. Even in bed at night, he fiercely snips his papers and scribbles notes to his editors that are carefully culled from the floor each morning by an aide. Businessman Springer seldom interferes in the policy decisions of his editors, who have greater independence than most editors in U.S. chains. Says he: "I hate the word 'power.' I once fired an editor who called attention to the 'power' I now had in my hands."

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