Munich gets five new honorary citizens: co-founder of the Tafel is there - and a cult director

Created: 2022-11-29Updated: 2022-11-29 10:52 am

By: Sascha Karowski

Doris Dörrie becomes an honorary citizen in Munich.

© Tobias Hase

Munich appoints five more people as honorary citizens.

The Council of Elders has spoken out in favor of this.

The city council still has to approve it on Wednesday.

Munich – The list of Munich honorary citizens is now long.

Since 1818, this honor has been bestowed on 53 people, 13 of these deserving Munich residents are still alive.

Most recently, the former mayor Christine Strobl (SPD) was made an honorary citizen in February 2022.

In January 2019, football world champion Philipp Lahm, the actresses Jutta Speidel and Michaela May, the publisher Hubert Burda, the literary scholar Rachel Salamander, the long-standing Chamber of Crafts President and CSU politician Heinrich Traublinger and Franz Herzog von Bayern were all delighted to receive this award.

Munich gets five new honorary citizens: CSU veterans Walter Zöller and Hans Podiuk

So now another quintet is to be added.

Walter Zöller (82) sat on the Munich City Council for a record-breaking 48 years from 1972 to 2020 for the CSU.

Thanks to his talent for rhetoric, the notary usually carried out his political battles in the city council respectfully with the foil and rarely with the sabre.

He has a kind of harmonious love-hate relationship with another honorary citizen, former mayor Christian Ude (SPD).

In the course of his political career, Zöller not only acquired the aristocratic title of record city councillor, but also the attributes of "black giant" and "secret mayor".

At the end of the 1980s, under the then Mayor Georg Kronawitter, he built a majority outside the SPD.

Group leader Zöller was able to determine the day-to-day politics.

The passion of the shrewd strategist always belonged to urban planning politics.

Munich gets five new honorary citizens: cult director Doris Dörrie is honored

Hans Podiuk (76) is also a veteran of Munich local politics.

From 1978 to 2020 he was an uninterrupted member of the city council.

He was parliamentary group leader of the CSU for three periods.

In 2002, Podiuk lost to the incumbent Christian Ude in the election of the mayor.

He is a conservative politician of the old school - always loyal to his party friends, but never hurtful in his arguments with his political opponents.

Personal vanity was always alien to Hans Podiuk.

The cult director Doris Dörrie (67) has had her center of life in Munich for decades.

She became well known in Germany with her film comedies “Men” (1985) and “I and He” (1988).

She is considered Germany's most successful filmmaker.

Writing and filming is Dörrie's life.

In 1997 she was appointed professor for applied dramaturgy and story development at the University of Television and Film in Munich.

Although Dörrie flies through the glittering world of the film like a bird of paradise in flashy outfits, he is still a down-to-earth person.

Anyone who reads her book "Reading, Writing, Breathing" will learn a lot about the private side of the author, director and feminist.

Hannelore Kiethe is a co-founder of the Münchner Tafel.

The association has been providing food to the needy with incredible commitment since 1994.

There are now 28 distribution points in the city area, which 23,000 people come to regularly every week.

This requires 125 tons of food, which is collected from supermarkets or food manufacturers.

For Kiethe and her numerous helpers, work is a matter of honor.

Munich gets five new honorary citizens: Holocaust survivor Ernst Grube receives an award

The Holocaust survivor Ernst Grube (89) made a valuable contribution to the coming to terms with the Nazi era.

As a child, during the Nazi dictatorship, he experienced how exclusion turned into persecution and finally annihilation.

With one of the last transports, the son of an “Aryan” and a Jewess came from Munich to the Theresienstadt concentration camp at the beginning of 1945.

He survived.

The retired master painter and vocational school teacher has been speaking to school classes and youth groups as a witness of that time for many years.

Grube is President of the Dachau camp community, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bavarian Memorials Foundation and on the political advisory board of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism.