The View from West Berlin

Abstract

Thomas Eckert, born in 1953 in East Berlin, is a third-generation socialist Jewish journalist. His maternal grandfather Hermann Budzislawski (1901–78) was the founder and, after 1934, Editor-in-Chief of Die neue Weltbühne, a well-known left liberal journal in pre-war Germany. In exile in the United States during the 1940s, he worked as a ghostwriter for Dorothy Thompson. After the war he returned to the German Democratic Republic and was appointed Director of the Institute of Journalism at the University of Leipzig. Budzislawski’s daughter, Beate Eckert, worked for many years with the East German television, radio and news agency. Thomas Eckert, her son, was a journalist in East Berlin. He is currently writing a PhD dissertation in Political Science at the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German Jewish History.

This interview was originally published in New German Critique, Spring–Summer 1986.