Henryk M. Broder


Henryk Marcin Broder is a Polish-born German journalist, author, and TV personality.
Broder is known for polemics, columns, and comments in written and audiovisual media. He wrote for the magazine Der Spiegel, as well as its online version and the daily Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Since 2010, he has been writing for Die Welt. He is co-editor of Der Jüdische Kalender, a compilation of quotes and texts relating to German Jewish culture, published annually. Besides his numerous publications, he appears as a frequent guest on German TV talk shows. In 2010 and 2011, he produced and starred, alongside Egyptian-German writer and political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad, in the satirical TV series – Die Deutschland-Safari on ARD.
Broder is especially interested in Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Islam, Israel, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He sees a close relationship between German criticism of Israel's policies and Antisemitism, a view criticized by, among others, the French-German columnist Alfred Grosser.

Life

Born in Katowice, Silesia, Poland, Broder moved to Cologne with his family in 1958. Both of his parents were survivors of Nazi death camps. In Cologne, he studied economics, law and psychology but failed to graduate. Together with fellow student and nascent writer, whom he had known since high school times, he founded and edited two short-lived radically liberal quarterlies. In the late 1960s he took over the together with the journalist Michel Roger Lang, a then highly successful tabloid newspaper in Hamburg, along with Günter Wallraff, Stefan Aust and the photographer, in order to agitate the working class of the city with a combination of leftist articles, nude photography and lonely hearts ads.
In the 1970s, he wrote for the satirical magazine Pardon. From 1979 to 1981 he published, together with fellow journalist, the periodical "Freie Jüdische Stimme". In 1981, he left Germany to work in Israel for a while, but continued to write for high-level periodicals as Die Zeit, Profil, Die Weltwoche, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the 1980s he also hosted the television talk-show Leute, along with Elke Heidenreich, which ran on Sender Freies Berlin; one of their guests was African-American poet Rita Dove, who had just won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and is married to Fred Viebahn, Broder's old friend from Cologne.
Broder wrote a series of books which dealt with the relationship between Germans and Jews, respectively the growing German Jewish community. Together with Eike Geisel, Broder published essays, books and a documentary about the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a previously unknown chapter of Jewish German cultural life during the Third Reich. He wrote books about foreign policy with special regard to Israel, Islam and the growing German Jewish community.
Ever since Operation Entebbe, Broder grew more and more critical of the German approach towards Israel, and what Broder sees as appeasement towards Islamic threats. In Broder's opinion, Anti-Zionism is in essence anti-Semitic.
Broder's trademark is his polemical, blunt, and quick-witted style. He publishes hate mail and heated exchanges between him and critics on his website. The result of some of Broder's polemics were a series of lawsuits, some won and some lost by him. Many of Broder's writings for outlets such as spiegel.de and welt.de are archived at the Achse des Guten blog, which he, together with two other prominent German journalists, operates as a collaborative platform for the unfettered expression of about two dozen of his colleagues.
Broder is married to a publisher, and they have a grown-up daughter. He lives in Berlin.

Awards