Michael Naumann

Michael Naumann (born 8 December 1941, in Köthen, Anhalt) is a German politician, publisher and journalist. He was the German secretary of culture from 1998 until 2001. He is married to Marie Warburg, daughter of Eric Warburg and granddaughter of Max Warburg.

Naumann was born as the son of a lawyer in Köthen. His father was killed in 1942 in the Battle of Stalingrad. 1953 Naumann had to flee with his mother to Hamburg.

Naumann graduated with a Ph.D. (Dr.) in political science from Munich University in 1969 and continued his studies as a Florey scholar at Queen's College, Oxford. Naumann wrote his dissertation on Karl Kraus's Der Abbau der verkehrten Welt ("On overcoming a wrong world"), his habilitation on Structural Change of Heroism, from Sacred to Profane in 1978; he has also written a number of academic essays on theories of revolution.

Naumann worked for Der Spiegel and for Die Zeit, for the latter as a chief-editor and later as a publisher. In 1985 Naumann became Publisher of the publishing house Rowohlt Verlag. In 1995 he went to New York, first leading Metropolitan Books, then Henry Holt. He hosted a highbrow political talk show in German television, Talk im Palais from 2004 until becoming SPD candidate for mayor of Hamburg in 2007. From 2010 to 2012 he was chief-editor of Cicero.

Between 1998 and 2001, he served as the first Secretary of Culture (German title: Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien) for the federal government before returning to the publishing world. His most remembered act is declining the first design for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin on grounds of its monumental abstraction, and choosing the second proposed design by Peter Eisenman instead, including an underground "Ort der Information", a place of information, which provides the visitors with introductory informations on the history of the Holocaust.

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