Henryk Modest Broder (born Henryk Marcin Broder on 20 August 1946) is a Polish born German journalist and author.
Broder is known for polemics, columns and comments in written and oral media. Broder wrote for the magazine Der Spiegel as well as its online version and the daily Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Since 2010 he writes for Die Welt. He is co-editor of Der Jüdische Kalender (The Jewish Calendar), a compilation of quotes and texts relating to German Jewish culture, published annually.
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 .[1]
Contents |
Born in Katowice, Silesia, Poland, Broder moved to Cologne with his family in 1958. Both of his parents were survivors of Nazi concentration camps. In Cologne, he studied economics and law but failed to graduate. In the end of the 1960s he took over the St. Pauli-Nachrichten (de) together with the journalist Michel Roger Lang, a then highly successful tabloid newspaper in Hamburg, along with Günter Wallraff, Stefan Aust and the photographer Günter Zint (de), 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(de). In 1981, he left Germany to work in Israel for a short time, 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, which ran on Sender Freies Berlin, along with Elke Heidenreich .
He 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 (Jewish Cultural Union), 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, Antizionism is in essence anti-Semitic.[2]
Broder's trademark is his polemical and blunt style. He publishes hate mail and heated exchanges between him and critics on his website at henryk-broder.com. Many of Broder's writings for outlets such as spiegel.de and welt.de are archived at the Achse des Guten (de) weblog which he operates. The result of some of Broder's polemics were a series of lawsuits, some won and some lost by him.