Hermann Ludwig Gremliza, long-time publisher of the left-wing magazine "known" and its most famous author, is dead. He died on December 20 at the age of 79 in Hamburg, his partner Katrin Gremliza said on Monday.
"One of the few things that were undisputed with Hermann Gremliza was that he was a great journalist, perhaps, possibly even the greatest stylist that the Federal Republic had produced," said the "Jüdische Allgemeine".
Gremliza was born in Cologne on November 20, 1940, but grew up in Gerlingen near Stuttgart. After graduating from high school, he studied history and philosophy in Tübingen and political science in Berlin. In 1966 he graduated from the Otto Suhr Institute in Berlin with a degree in political science. He then switched to journalism and became an editor at SPIEGEL, from 1969 he was a senior editor for German politics.
After a discussion about questions of co-determination in the editorial office and publishing house, he left SPIEGEL at the end of 1971 and changed in 1972 as an editor to the left monthly magazine "concrete". According to earlier publishing information, the booklet was founded in 1955 by young West German communists with the support of the GDR as a "student courier" and in 1957 it was renamed "concrete".
"Grandchildren" by Karl Kraus
In the 1960s, the journal developed under the publicist Klaus Rainer Röhl and his wife, who later became terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, into a leading journal of the left-wing scene and the student movement. The circulation temporarily reached more than 130,000 copies.
After "concrete" went bankrupt in 1973, Gremliza bought the magazine title from the bankruptcy estate and founded the "Neue Konkret Verlag" in October 1974. Since then he has been the publisher, publisher and co-author of the magazine.
In 1987 Gremliza's engagement with the author Günter Wallraff caused a sensation. Gremliza claimed that he had written for Wallraff's book on the "Bild" newspaper ("Der Aufmacher"), which Wallraff did not essentially deny at the time, but called Gremliza envious.
Because of his sharp-tongued articles Gremliza was always hostile, he was attested "vulgar Marxist boom" ("NZZ") and a "fatal skill of simplification" ("SZ"). For others, Gremliza was one of the best authors in the country. "Like Karl Kraus before him, Hermann Gremliza was the only one in his time in this country who knew how to use language as an observation station for society," wrote the daily newspaper "Junge Welt", which Gremliza had advised journalistically in the mid-1990s, in her Obituary.
