The former longtime editor-in-chief and publisher of the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, Theo Sommer, died in Hamburg at the age of 92. This was confirmed by a publisher’s spokeswoman on Monday. Theo Sommer was editor-in-chief from 1973 to 1992 and then until 2000 together with Marion Gräfin Dönhoff and Helmut Schmidt publisher of the “Zeit”. A few weeks ago, Sommer fell in his house. He never recovered from that.
“The colleagues of the publishing group are in deep mourning and bow to a great journalist who decisively shaped DIE ZEIT with his temperament, his energy, his clever judgment and his cheerfulness as a cosmopolitan, liberal, debate-loving newspaper,” said the publisher With.
Sommer, born in Constance, first came to Die Zeit as a local editor and then in 1958 as a political editor. As editor-in-chief from 1973, he shaped the orientation of the paper with his editorials, which was published by Marion Gräfin Dönhoff (1909-2002). From 1992 onwards he acted at her side – as did former Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (b. 1918) – as editor.
Sommer gave up this function in 2000, but continued to work as a publicist for the weekly newspaper. Foreign policy, defense and security policy as well as European issues were the topics of the former member of the Weizsäcker Commission on Bundeswehr reform (1969/70).
But the publicist also examined his surroundings with journalistic care: a work about his homeland, the “cosmopolitan city of Hamburg”, was published in 2007, and three years later one about his companion Schmidt. “It has to be well-founded in the facts,” Sommer made the yardstick. In old age, he wanted to do something to counteract the “journalism of the moment”.
