Richard Tüngel (1893 – 1970) was a German journalist and publisher, originally an architect and a longtime Director of Construction (Baudirektor) in Hamburg. He was a co-founder of Die Zeit.
Life
Removed from this position by the Nazis in 1933, he went to Berlin, where he lived until 1945 as a translator and writer. For example, one still finds his name on current German-language editions of Igor Stravinsky's memoirs. Immediately after the war, he was one of the co-founders of Die Zeit, initially as fiction editor (Feuilletonchef) and a bit later as editor-in-chief.
After that it is remarkably difficult to find biographical information about him, not least because he had a rather inglorious departure from Die Zeit: He had to leave, after Marion Dönhoff had provoked a scandal by enforcing a decision concerning the political line of the paper. Tüngel, who was described by his successor as editor-in-chief as "...helpful and inconvenient. Brilliant and the embodiment of antagonism and artistic temperament," stood politically on the right and was steering Die Zeit into a current "farther right than the CDU" (the German Christian Democratic Union). In 1955, the "difficult, but at the same time respected and feared" The book is sometimes referred to as his "memoirs". The book was reissued by Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlag.
References
Further reading
- – a balanced but critical view
- – A biography of Marion Dönhoff discussing Tüngel
- – Correspondence between Dönhoff and Gerd Bucerius