Germany's Press Lord

When the British decided to sell Die Welt, Hamburg's influential daily (present circ. 200,000) they had started at war's end, more than 16 German bidders tried to buy the paper, including one who was a close friend of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. But the British were choosy. Last week they found a buyer who suited them. For an estimated $1,000,000 the High Commissioner recommended sale of Die Welt to Axel C. (for Caesar) Springer, who would thereby become the biggest publisher on the continent with control of about 15% of the circulation of West Germany's press.

At 41, husky Axel Springer now owns a string of two newspapers and three magazines, which worries some Germans about his potential political power. This does not worry Springer. Christian Democrats have called him a "pink" Socialist, and the Socialists accuse him of having Christian Democratic tendencies. Grins Springer: "Doesn't that prove independence?"

"Listen." Springer has built his postwar empire on the small book publishing house owned by his father, which had also published a small Hamburg paper during the Nazi regime. The Nazis closed it down, but otherwise bothered the Springers so little that they went right on publishing technical and scientific books. Axel himself even wangled a medical exemption that kept him out of the army, continued working at book publishing and printing throughout the war.

At war's end, Springer started a weekly radio magazine, Hoer zu! (Listen), has pushed it to a circulation of 1,800,000, biggest in Germany. As Hoer zu! began paying off, he launched a woman's magazine, Constanze, which soon hit a circulation of 500,000, and Der Spiegel, a weekly news magazine. In 1948 Springer jumped into the daily newspaper field and made Hamburg's politically independent Abendblatt a leader in north Germany, thanks to his bag of circulation tricks (e.g., giving hundreds of flower bulbs to Hamburg children, organizing contests among radio hams and carrier-pigeon breeders, etc.).

On a visit to London, Springer noted that "Londoners were reading cheap, small, interesting and easy-to-digest papers." The result was his Bild-Zeitung (picture newspaper), filled with comics, pictures, sports, crime and women's features. Its circulation shot up to 700,000 daily.

Power. On foreign matters or the larger domestic issues, Springer's papers usually reflect the government line, though his policy is "not to print politics, but to print about politics." To charges that he has been lenient toward Germany's neo-Nazis, Springer answers: "The best policy toward those people is not to talk or write about them at all." To those worried about his power, Springer says: "I hate the word 'power.' I once fired an editor who called attention to the 'power' I now had in my hands." Nevertheless, he intends to increase his power by buying two other papers, and "then no more."

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