Leopold Sonnemann

Leopold Sonnemann (29 October 1831 – 30 October 1909) was a journalist, newspaper publisher, and political party leader in Germany during the periods of the North German Confederation and the German Empire. Publisher and editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Sonnemann also served as a deputy to the Reichstag and was a founding member of the German People's Party.

Sonnemann was "a large, portly man, with whiskers like Lord Dundreary," wrote an English contemporary, but "he dresses with a neatness and elegance quite un-Teutonic."[1]

Career

Leopold Sonnemann was born to Jewish parents in Höchberg, Bavaria, in 1831.[2] Well-educated in his youth, he became an astute businessman and organizer. He built upon his family business and amassed enough wealth by 1856 to purchase a Bavarian market publication, the Neue Frankfurter Zeitung. Rechristening it to simply Frankfurter Zeitung, Sonnemann devoted himself wholeheartedly to the paper as owner, editor, and contributing writer.[2] The paper developed an influential position in the business community of southern Germany.[3]

Sonnemann was an active organizer and an effective orator. Though he could be clinically described as a social democrat, Sonnemann projected a highly individualized political presence which was regarded by contemporaries as somewhat esoteric.[4] He helped to found the German People's Party in 1868 and, from 1871, served as its first delegate to the Reichstag.[5]

Legacy

The Frankfurter Zeitung was kept running by Sonnemann's coterie, providing an alternative national media outlet for the German left. It survived precariously after the Nazi assumption of power, but was finally acquired by a subsidiary of the Nazi publishing organ, Eher Verlag, in 1938,[6] and ultimately closed by Adolf Hitler's orders in August, 1943.[7]

References
  1. Tuttle, Herbert (1876). German political leaders. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. p. 197. OCLC 1536166. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  2. Tuttle, p. 194.
  3. Singer, Isidore, ed. (1912). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 468. OCLC 269638. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  4. Tuttle, pp. 195–198.
  5. Gross, Michael B. (2004). The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-century Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 272. ISBN 9780472113835. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  6. Stanley, Adam C. (2008). Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. p. 182. ISBN 978-0807133620. Retrieved 7 May 2013.
  7. Noelle, E. (27 June 2002). "Die letzte Kerze. Das Verbot der Frankfurter Zeitung im August 1943". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German).

Further reading
  • Schnädelbach, Anna (German, 2009). Frankfurts demokratische Moderne und Leopold Sonnemann: Jude, Verleger, Politiker, Mäzen. Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag. ISBN 9783797311504.
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