Flawless Democrats

Whoever declares someone else a democrat spares the public the trouble of checking. The question is who may award the seal, and how he came to hold it.

I. The label

In 2004 the presenter Reinhold Beckmann asked the German chancellor on ARD television whether Vladimir Putin was a “lupenreiner Demokrat”, a flawless democrat. Gerhard Schröder said he was convinced of it. Eight years later, in March 2012, he was asked about it on Deutschlandfunk and had nothing to take back.

The word comes from the diamond trade. “Lupenrein”, flawless under the loupe, is a stone in which the jeweller finds no inclusions under his magnifying glass. The buyer does not check for himself; he relies on the jeweller. That is the power of the word: whoever pronounces it relieves the public of the checking. And whoever pronounces it often enough decides who counts as a democrat and who does not.

Schröder is burned for that sentence. But he was only the loudest. In Germany the seal is awarded in several places, and in some of them sit people who were never elected.

II. The yardstick

Alfred Hugenberg chaired the board of directors of Krupp from 1909 to 1918. From 1916 he bought the Scherl publishing house and the news agency Telegraphen-Union, along with advertising firms and stakes in newspapers, and in 1927 the film company Ufa. This gave him one of the largest opinion machines of the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he became chairman of the German National People’s Party.

In 1929 he campaigned together with the NSDAP and the Stahlhelm in a referendum against the Young Plan. In 1931 he founded with them the Harzburg Front against the Brüning government. On 30 January 1933 he joined Hitler’s cabinet as minister of economics and food, hoping to limit Hitler’s power. In June 1933 he resigned and his party dissolved. In the years that followed he had to sell his newspapers and give up Ufa, against generous compensation.

Hugenberg did not want an NSDAP dictatorship. He wanted an authoritarian order under his own leadership, and he believed he could use the radicals for it. He gave them what a media lord can give: a stage and respectability. That is the yardstick by which we measure. Not the outcome of 1933, but the mechanism: a private lord of public opinion considers himself clever enough to tame the enemies of democracy by making them presentable.

III. The keeper of the seal

Mathias Döpfner began in 1982 as a music critic for the FAZ and took a doctorate in musicology in 1990. By way of Gruner + Jahr, the Wochenpost and the Hamburger Morgenpost he came to Die Welt as editor-in-chief in 1998, joined the board of Axel Springer in 2000 and became its chief executive in 2002. From 2016 to 2022 he was also president of the German newspaper publishers’ association. In “The Titanisation of the Confetti Cannon” we called him the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal: he gives or withholds approval, he certifies quality.

How he awards seals is documented. On 24 September 2026 the Springer group, of which Döpfner is chief executive and co-owner, gave the Axel Springer Award to Peter Thiel, and Döpfner delivered the laudation. Thiel had written in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy to be compatible. Beforehand Döpfner called Thiel “probably by far the most influential German of our time” and Thiel’s company Palantir “a protecting power of democracy, not a danger to democracy”. At the ceremony Thiel called parts of the media a “left-wing hate factory” and praised Döpfner as a dissenting voice. What lies behind this we described in “The Stone That Looks Back” and “The Katechon”.

How he withdraws seals is also documented, though only from messages he did not write for the public. In April 2023 Die Zeit published internal messages from Döpfner. According to that report, in connection with the election of the Thuringian minister-president in 2020, he wrote about Angela Merkel of a “nail in the coffin of democracy”. Shortly before the federal election of 2021 he wrote to the editor-in-chief of Bild: “Please Stärke die FDP”, please strengthen the FDP. Döpfner apologised for some of these messages and described others as ironic, provocative remarks. Fairness requires saying so. It also requires saying that they did not go to friends, but to the leadership of his newspapers.

The chancellor, then, is a nail in the coffin of democracy, the intelligence agencies’ data firm its protecting power, and the man who considers freedom and democracy incompatible a courageous dissenter. The seal is not awarded after an examination. It is awarded according to proximity.

IV. The hereditary estates

How does a man come to hold the seal? At Springer, through a succession in two stages.

Friede Riewerts, born in 1942 on the North Sea island of Föhr as the daughter of a master gardener, came into Axel Springer’s household as a nanny in 1965, at the age of 23. In 1978 she became his fifth wife, in 1985 his heir, together with children and grandchildren from earlier marriages. She bought back the shares of the Burda brothers and of Leo Kirch, as well as those of relatives, and became the majority owner. In 2002 she made Döpfner chief executive. In 2020 she gave him 15 per cent of the shares, worth around one billion euros by a calculation of the FAZ, and transferred to him the voting rights for her remaining stake. Since the split of 2025 the media business with Bild, Welt, Politico and Business Insider has belonged almost entirely to the two of them.

At Bertelsmann the story is similar. In 1958, at 17, Elisabeth Beckmann applied for a job as a telephonist at Bertelsmann in Gütersloh. She became the lover of the owner, Reinhard Mohn, had children with him and married him in 1982. In 1999 he brought her into the Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft, which holds all the voting rights in the group, and transferred to her his veto there and his rights as founder in the Bertelsmann Stiftung. In 2003, according to Cicero, she said: “Wo Bertelsmann herrscht, herrscht Familie”, where Bertelsmann rules, family rules. In 2006, at her urging, the group bought back shares worth 4.5 billion euros so that no outside investor would have a say. In 2021 she handed the chair to her son. The group includes RTL and Penguin Random House, and the foundation, which holds most of the capital, has advised politics and administration for decades. In 2004 Liz Mohn argued in Cicero for a Chancellor Merkel.

One must grant both women what they achieved. They held their houses together against powerful investors, and both spend a great deal on foundations. The problem is not the persons. The problem is that at no stage of these two successions did a voter, an open market or an outside shareholder have a say. There was an employment, a marriage, an inheritance, special rights and a gift. That is how succession is settled in every family business, and in a bread factory it is a private matter.

V. What follows

Bild and Welt, RTL and the Bertelsmann Stiftung are not bread factories. They are nodes of democracy: there it is decided what the public learns, how it learns it, and who counts as reasonable, courageous or democratic. At these nodes a feudal principle applies. Power comes through marriage, inheritance and the favour of the predecessor, and it is passed on in the same way. It owes account to no one except the next heir.

The press is supposed to examine who calls himself a democrat. When the heir to the seal himself decides who is a democrat, the examination falls away. It then makes no difference whether he judges wisely or foolishly, means well or ill. The public has no way of correcting him except by no longer buying the paper. We described the same form of power for the parties in “The New Nomenklatura and the Party Cartel”. Here it is even purer, because it does not even know elections.

VI. The thesis

A democracy need not forbid publishing houses to be inherited. But it must not mistake their heirs for neutral jewellers. Whoever received his seal through marriage, inheritance and gift and awards it according to proximity stands in Hugenberg’s tradition, whether he wants to or not. Not in what he wants, but in how his power arises and how he uses it: he considers himself clever enough to tame the enemies of freedom by giving them prizes.

They are all as flawless democrats as Hugenberg.

Further reading: The Stone That Looks Back · The Katechon · The Titanisation of the Confetti Cannon · The New Nomenklatura and the Party Cartel · How Do You Become a Billionaire? · Friendship among Brothers in Arms