Anyone who understands at a very young age that humanity is putting on a comedy on earth will find it difficult to institutionalize later in their professional life. They will question every corporation they belong to from within and model the processes in such a way that they can lead as self-determined a life as possible. Lutz Hachmeister was one of these people. He studied communication sciences because he realized that the real power structures are not revealed in offices, but in the communication surrounding these offices.
The discrepancy between what people claim to do and the actual goal of their actions became the theme of his life. The friction he created in the process was part of the program, because there was nothing he could stand less than stagnation. He wanted to be a thorn in the side of the world and he undoubtedly succeeded. The chutzpah that is needed for this was already evident in his doctoral thesis, which did not even bother with partial aspects. He presented his faculty with the “History of Communication Sciences” and explained to his astonished examiners how deeply the subject and not a few of its protagonists were rooted in National Socialism.
From that moment on, it was clear that Hachmeister did not want to waste his life swimming in the mainstream or making a career in the system. Rather, he felt it was necessary to examine the system as a whole for its weak points in order to make it more truthful and more suitable. Criticism for its own sake, the continuous provocation that is ultimately silenced by a welfare office, was not his thing. He did not consider political actors who have no real concern other than to get one of the far too highly paid director positions at a state media authority to be traitors, but rather satirists who were not aware of the satirical nature of their actions. The only attempt to force Hachmeister into this system could therefore only last for a limited time.
When, after a brief stint at the Berlin Tagesspiegel, he was offered the opportunity to take over the Grimme Institute, he invented modern media policy. The institute, which at the time had little other task than to award the highest prize for German television productions, experienced a fireworks display of intellectual activity during his term in office, confronting producers, actors, publishers, journalists and politicians with completely new questions. When it dawned on him that a small town like Marl could not be turned into the new Paris, he went to Cologne and adopted the strategy of self-institutionalization. He founded the Cologne Conference.
It was the time of Wolfgang Clement, whose rapid political rise was due to technological issues and who wanted to transform North Rhine-Westphalia from an industrial center into a media and service center. The Bertelsmann Group from Gütersloh was at one point the largest media group in the world; Cologne was, alongside Munich, the most modern city in Germany at the beginning of the 1990s. Lutz Hachmeister, a gifted networker and pacesetter, was also at the center of events. The international orientation of this policy with its vanishing point in North America coincided with his conviction that the technical and financial possibilities of US companies would have a direct impact on the German communications system.
Voices from the desert
Media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and Robert Maxwell, who had no interest in the goals of German media regulation, were the villains of the hour. At the beginning of the new millennium, however, Hachmeister saw a completely different challenge looming. He believed it was inevitable that companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon would enter the media production sector and that the national media policy in Germany, which was dwindling, was unable to react to this. The laws prohibited a company such as Axel Springer (Editor’s note: which also includes WELT), for example, to buy the television station Sat.1. An American tech company or hedge fund, on the other hand, was able to take control of the same television station without any difficulty.
In order to bring the fragmented and divided German media landscape together and prepare it for the new situation, Hachmeister founded the Institute for Media and Communication Policy. He was able to take on this new role as a “trustee of the public” because he was not only an author, journalist and media politician, but also entered the film business himself with a documentary about Hans-Martin Schleyer. With the “Goebbels Experiment”, “I, Reich-Ranicki” and “Friendship – The Free German Youth”, he played in the top league of documentary filmmakers. He won the Adolf Grimme Prize in 2004 and the German Television Prize in 2009. But his multiple activities also had their downsides, because if you get involved everywhere, you end up not belonging anywhere.
Every discipline in which he was involved felt the distance from the voice of the voice in the wilderness, which Hachmeister also carefully cultivated. He ripped the mask off the face of Der Spiegel, the “assault gun of democracy”, by making public Rudolf Augstein’s preference for former SS soldiers as authors. In his post-doctoral thesis on the “enemy researcher” Alfred Sixt, he criticized the historical sciences for knowing next to nothing about the men in the Reich Security Main Office fifty years after Hitler’s death, even though it was they who had planned and carried out the industrial mass murder. Unlike Hitler, they had not only survived, but they continued to build their networks in the Federal Republic. He predicted that the German media system would lose all relevance if it did not focus on its core tasks and reinvent itself.
Hachmeister was the actor Habermas had in mind for his “ideal speaking situation”. His arguments always applied to the matter itself. He was completely ruthless against any power group that stood in the way of the ideal situation. But his biography is also proof of the utopian nature of Habermas’s thinking. Anyone who wants the freedom to saw off every branch they could potentially sit on must seek their fortune in the branches. The communicative, intellectual and social skills that an intellectual needs in the Federal Republic when there is no political camp, publisher or journalist to reinforce their own position are very rare, if not unique.
His love for France was obvious, because the French did not just invent the human comedy, it is a consciously lived culture there. No one plays more skilfully with the fragility and ambiguity of existence than our western neighbors. After his documentary about the “Bay of Billionaires” at Cap d’Antibes in 2006, Hachmeister has repeatedly found topics and reasons to delve deeper into the country. There, on the Côte d’Azur, he completed his last book: “Hitler’s Interviews,” published by Kiepenheuer and Witsch. It is his final interjection, with which he once again writes in the journalism record book that life is a battle against vanity. Hachmeister died last week at the age of 64.
Kai Burkhardt, university lecturer and publicist, worked for Lutz Hachmeister at the “Institute for Media and Communication Policy” between 2005 and 2011.
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