Theo Sommer was an institution.

Not only in the weekly newspaper "Die Zeit", whose editorial office he joined in 1958 (on the recommendation of Theodor Eschenburg) and which he later headed for decades, but throughout Germany.

This was of course due to the importance of “Zeit” as the leading left-liberal medium, at least from the 1960s onwards when the social-liberal coalition was established.

Sommer was an Atlanticist who had completed part of his studies in the United States, but that fitted in well with the paper's foreign policy line, which was shaped by Marion Countess Dönhoff and was anything but left-wing.

Sommer was considered the Countess' journalistic foster son, whom she brought back to make him editor-in-chief of "Zeit" in 1973, after he had previously, under the Brandt government,

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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In 1973, Sommer was 43 years old and he would hold the position of editor-in-chief for almost twenty years.

There has never been less change.

Countess Dönhoff, his predecessor, had held the office for only four years, but had then been appointed to an editor's chair and, as I have said, she herself chose Sommer as her successor.

Twenty years his junior, he had the advantage of having grown up in the “Third Reich” – Sommer was born in Constance in 1930 – but no longer guilty.

From one of the elite Nazi schools, the Ordensburg Sonthofen in the Allgäu, he returned to a normal grammar school at the age of fourteen and did his Abitur there just as the Federal Republic of Germany gained independence in 1949.

The discipline learned at the Napolas was combined by these personalities with an unconditional desire for democracy, because only this could entitle Germany to continue to exist as a state.

Their skepticism about the GDR was correspondingly high, and Sommer fitted perfectly into the still clearly western-oriented climate of the political editorial department of "Zeit" at the end of the 1950s.

At the same time, he served as a young fig leaf for various journalists who were already active in the “Third Reich” – as was common in most German newspapers at the time.

Countess Dönhoff, in turn, acted as a representative of the Hitler-sceptical part of the German nobility, and she made Sommer "her young man".

Still the young man of the Countess at over sixty

And he stayed that way until he was over sixty and even longer, when he finally rose to become the editor of Die Zeit, then alongside Dönhoff and the SPD politician Helmut Schmidt, who was also appointed editor immediately after he was voted out of office.

This triumvirate officiated together for eight years, from 1992 to 2000, but it was also a trio of publicists, now graying of honor, who had little to offer journalistically as a surprise.

But even those who became regular "Zeit" readers in the mid-1980s will remember the slightly mockingly stated foreseeability of Sommer's editorials in particular.

And back then, in the eighties, it was Sommer who, as head of a trip to the GDR, agreed to

The fact that Sommer was able to write numerous books in addition to his leading position in "Zeit" is a testament to his work organization.

The last in his long series of publications appeared in 2019, when Sommer was almost ninety years old, and in the wake of the interest of Helmut Schmidt, to whom Sommer was just as loyal an adept as Countess Dönhoff, it again launched into a major global political hit: "China First - The world on the way to the Chinese century".

In doing so, however, Sommer also continued his own curiosity about the Far East, which unfortunately was neglected early on, especially with regard to Japan.

He was always more a foreign than a domestic politician, a tendency that also found expression in his commitment as a board member of Welthungerhilfe from 1992 to 2004.

After retiring as editor of "Zeit" in 2000, Sommer remained active in a wide variety of journalistic functions: writing, editing, representing.

He even became the subject of reporting in 2014 when he was convicted of tax evasion, which earned him a nineteen-month suspended sentence.

It was the last time that Sommer found the national attention in Germany that he had directed for three decades with his responsible work in the "Zeit".

He has now died at the age of ninety-two in his adopted hometown of Hamburg.