On the Boulevard

Chapter 14 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

7 min readJul 14, 2024

This fake photo — created with ChatGPT — shows Heinz Ullstein on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm boulevard in the early 1940s. He is on his way home from the forced labor he was compelled to do as a Jew: unloading coal at the Halensee railroad yard. In the Third Reich, he had to wear a yellow Star of David. However, ChatGPT’s content policy does not allow this reality to be depicted.

Toward West Berlin

WM and his MG are embarking on a detour to Tokyo in the Far East by way of the nearer East. West Berlin sits like an island in the middle of Soviet-occupied East Germany. The city’s inhabitants call themselves islanders.

“When I first visited Berlin, except for a short stay during my birth, I was over 20 years old and commissioned to write something about the Kurfürstendamm for the Hamburger Abendblatt,” says WM.

Editor-in-chief Wilhelm Schulze has dispatched him. WM delivers a literary report to his mentor. Back then, in December 1950, a streetcar is still running up and down the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s famous boulevard. WM boards the train at dawn and describes the scene in a style reminiscent of cinematic neorealism:

“The train acts as if it were the alarm clock for the boulevard. Gradually, it wakes up and comes alive. Cleaners arrive and switch off the advertising lights on the storefronts. Until daylight breaks, Kurfürstendamm looks hazy, tired, cold, like any other street. It is as if it takes off its obtrusive dress for a while, its make-up, which is meant to make it look different from what it truly is. But only for a few hours. The glistening façade returns with the salesmen hawking the morning newspaper. Then, for twenty hours, Kurfürstendamm acts like it’s still what it used to be.”

Efforts are underway to revitalize it:

“Over three hundred stores are back on Kurfürstendamm. They include seventeen jewelry stores, fifteen antique stores, six carpet dealers, and thirteen fashion salons. Forty-six stores went bankrupt after the currency reform.”

WM’s final verdict on the boulevard in the center of West Berlin is nevertheless harsh. Once the “epicenter of intellectual, fashionable and social extravagance,” Kurfürstendamm is now a “meeting place of intellectual impotence,” a “street of shattered illusions.”

The Rise and Fall of Cosmopolitanism and Modernity

The decline of the boulevard’s cosmopolitan vibrancy began with the Nazification of the press. In German, tabloids are called “Boulevard newspapers.” They got their name because their copies were not, or not primarily, distributed via newsstands or postal subscriptions but by newsboys. They shouted out the sensational headlines on the boulevards so that the newspapers were “torn from their hands.” The inaugural Berlin tabloid was the B.Z. am Mittag, “Berlin newspaper at noon,” created in 1904 by Louis Ullstein, one of the five sons of the publishing house’s founder, Leopold Ullstein. Its tremendous success contributed significantly to Ullstein becoming Europe’s largest book and newspaper group.

In the 1920s, Ullstein published a double-digit number of daily and weekly newspapers, monthly magazines, and trade journals, in addition to thousands of books in a dozen presses. The most widely circulated and influential publication was B.Z. am Mittag, which Wilhelm Schulze headed before leaving the country for Japan in 1933 for his own safety. Other highly regarded periodicals included the Berliner Morgenpost, Vossische Zeitung, and Berliner Illustrirte. Politically, they stood for cosmopolitan liberalism and modernity.

“The House of Ullstein,” wrote Arthur Koestler about the publishing company for which he worked for many years in the first post-war period, “was a political power and at the same time the embodiment of the progressive and cosmopolitan spirit of the Weimar Republic.”

Ullstein’s history ended with the first German democracy — only to be resurrected for a historic moment with the second German democracy. In 1934, threatened by a ruinous boycott, the Ullsteins were forced to sell far below value. The Nazis promptly ceased many publications, including the tradition-rich Vossische Zeitung. The rest of the group was absorbed into the central publishing house of the NSDAP. The family went into exile, primarily to the US. Heinz Ullstein, however, the only son of B.Z. founder Louis, who died in 1933, stayed until the end, not his end, but that of the Nazis.

Strolling Along the Ku’damm — With a Jewish Star on His Lapel

In the 1920s, Heinz Ullstein had tried his hand as an actor, film producer, film director, and, last but not least, bon vivant. Now he was fighting for survival, “only somewhat protected by his ‘Aryan’ wife Änne and his famous name,” as Will Tremper writes in his memoirs:

“With the yellow Jewish star on his lapel, he allowed himself to be coerced into forced labor with seeming indifference washing suburban train carriages at Lehrter station, unloading coal at Halensee railroad yard. Afterward, the once so elegant idler, dirty from top to bottom, strolled up Kurfürstendamm. When he saw acquaintances from the old days in the front garden cafés, he stopped ostentatiously and perused the posted price lists as if he could still enter if he wanted to. Even in the last year of the war, his pharmacist on Viktoria-Luise-Platz still had a bar of Yardley soap for the humiliated man, and the ‘Lingerie Else’ from the Lei-La-Li bar in Motzstraße would put her toothbrush glass with a thumb’s width of Scotch at the kitchen window for the down-on-his-luck suitor when she saw him sneaking across the courtyard.”

In his own family, Heinz Ullstein had been considered a “misfit” since the 1920s. The liberation of Berlin presented him, now in his late fifties, the long-awaited opportunity to prove himself. He applies to the Western Allies for a license to publish a new edition of B.Z. am Mittag, which his father founded. Given his lack of experience in journalism, he is only entrusted with a smaller project, a women’s magazine. Its title: sie, meaning “she.”

Heinz Ullstein recruits two intellectuals from the anti-Nazi resistance to work with him: writer Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and former Ullstein editor and later publisher Helmut Kindler. The new venture is a success. Heinz Ullstein has proven himself ready for higher challenges.

At around the same time, Rudolf Ullstein returns to Germany. He is Louis’ half-brother and Heinz’s uncle. He survived the war in Great Britain as a factory worker and now demands the restitution of the family property. His legal efforts are partially successful in 1952. The restitution includes properties such as the Tempelhof Ullsteinhaus and licenses for two Berlin daily newspapers.

Soviet Tanks and American Movie Stars

The former capital of the Third Reich, now divided into four occupation zones, exists on the brink — between cold and hot war, but also between legacies and new beginnings. An ideal time for daily newspapers. Rudolf Ullstein, who is almost 80, starts the new Berliner Morgenpost in September 1952. As editor-in-chief, he hires a man whom he appreciates from many years of collaboration and who has just resigned in a somewhat spectacular manner from Springer’s Hamburger Abendblatt: Wilhelm Schulze. There is plenty of news to report.

The Cold War threatens to heat up. At the turn of the year 1952/53, American and Chinese troops fight a war of position with heavy losses in Korea. In the Soviet occupation zone, the social crisis intensifies. The West Berlin reception camps are overcrowded with refugees from the eastern part of the city. Stalin dies on March 5. The power struggle for his successor rages in Moscow. Later that month, growing animosity between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union culminates in the downing of a British military plane that inadvertently strayed into restricted airspace. All seven crew members perish. At the beginning of June, the British garrison celebrates the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II with a large military parade in Charlottenburg.

The following two weeks bring the climax of the contrasts: In the eastern part of the city, workers rebel against the communist regime. They demand freedom, democracy, and reunification with West Germany. On June 17, Soviet tanks crush the uprising. Dozens die, hundreds are injured, over 10,000 arrested. The next day, June 18, the third Berlinale begins in the western part of the city, barely seven kilometers away. The glamorous international film festival, set up and financed by the American military government, is attended by Hollywood stars Ingrid Bergman, Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn. At the same time, Russian and East German troops hermetically seal off the border to West Berlin.

WM Joins Ullstein

Heinz Ullstein, now publishing director, feels the time is ripe to resurrect the legendary B.Z. under his leadership. He offers Wilhelm Schulze the position of editor-in-chief of ‘his’ former B.Z., in addition to the Morgenpost. “Tokio-Schulze,” now in his late fifties, has many new jobs to fill. He contacts the young author who talked him into serial factual reports and then resigned in protest against the employment of the Nazi Schenzinger.

“Schulze said,” recalls WM: “‘I need a young man. I don’t know what the youths want anymore.”

WM has achieved a certain degree of prominence with his satirical and critical current affairs radio show Adrian and Alexander. Now, just a few months after taking on the debt for his beloved MG TD, he receives a lucrative offer from Heinz Ullstein: heading the series department at B.Z. The first issue of the new venture is scheduled for publication in November 1953.