From left to right | Ulf Poschardt and the worst of all worlds

Has anyone seen the glamor here? Ulf Poschardt, 2007 as editor-in-chief of “Vanity Fair” Photo: imago/Koall Paul is ambitious and wants to make a career. He is aware that he is smart. An intellectual who is currently writing his doctoral thesis. More importantly, he already knows at 26 that his career has its price: "He has to keep doors open so that he can find ways to move forward."

Paul succeeded. He rose to become editor-in-chief, managing director and publisher of the WeltN24 media group. Because Paul is Ulf Poschardt. And the author who wrote about Paul back in 1994 was Poschardt himself.

It's worth taking this article out from the special issue "Pop & Politics" from "Spiegel Spezial" again - Ulf Poschardt has never spoken so openly about himself again. But this was hardly noticed. Because he made a friend, a graffiti artist named Denis, the main character of this text “The Best of All Worlds”. He embodies the ideal that Poschardt already considered unattainable back then: Paul “is addicted to the good world and can never fully belong to it because he knows too much. He’s more intellectual than homeboy, more old leftist than young hipster.”

The “good world” is the antithesis to the “mutant world,” i.e. to the “world of alienated work, alienated pleasure and alienated truths.” And it wasn't Karl Marx who formulated this, but an “old leftist” named Ulf Poschardt: “The zombies of bourgeois society scare Denis. There is no right life in the wrong one.” With which Poschardt also quotes Adorno.

You rub your eyes in amazement when he writes: “In the past, someone like Denis would have been in the Communist Party. (…) A quarter of a century ago, communists were hip." But Poschardt also knows that we live in a society "that has largely suppressed the old contradictions between the oppressed and the oppressor. There is exploitation (…) and yet there are no longer any revolutionary classes.«

But what is left when “overthrow is unthinkable, despair is boring and reforms are – quite clearly – disgusting”? In 1994, Poschardt was editor of “Vogue,” not necessarily a communist struggle paper. Where there is no longer any chance of winning a pot of flowers with ethics (let alone a revolution), only aesthetics remains: »Whoever has seen the beauty of the good world will fight for it. Maybe beauty and morality are inevitable when you say no to the wrong thing and yes to the right thing. Beauty and morals are the products of labor. It is logical that artists and their relatives (graphic artists, journalists, stylists) built the good world. Karl Marx saw it that way: the artist is the ideal image of working and alienated people. He can realize himself, that is, shape the world according to his ideas.

Even then, Poschardt, the son of a teacher who worked as a lay preacher for the Methodists, did not see himself as a racing reporter on the hunt for exclusive stories. He was also not someone who tried to reveal a person's character and nature in his articles. That's why in "The Best of All Worlds" you learn little about the individual Denis, but a lot about Ulf Poschardt's world view and, yes, also his longing. He would love to fight for a great cause. Decades later, he wrote with admiration, even enthusiasm, about Karl Held, the founder and leader of the Marxist Group, in the “Welt”: “His Marxist acumen, his relentless rhetoric, delivered in a down-to-earth Franconian, tore apart every form of left-wing realpolitik when it tried to be arrogant, moralistic or even petty-bourgeois poetry. (…) For him, being a communist means questioning everyday bourgeois life down to the smallest aspects of everyday life.

And yet, even at the time of his “Best of All Worlds” text, Poschardt recognized that Held’s days were already over in the early 90s. At that time, even the PDS no longer believed in communism. In Marxist terms: Once the base is cast in reinforced concrete, all that remains is the superstructure. And Poschardt worked on it like no other. In his magnificent doctoral thesis “DJ Culture” (which was published as a book by Rogner & Bernhard in 1995) he spans the spectrum from the first US radio disc jockeys in the 1930s to the Love Parade in the 1990s. “Adapt” (1998) is a 500-page sociological examination of fashion. And in “Cool” (2000) he traces in 440 pages how people try to survive in “the icy winds of alienation”.

What all these rinds have in common: they look back with fascination. Not everything used to be better, but it was somehow more exciting. Poschardt, the man born too late, wants to save the wild subculture into the present. In the spring of 1996, the style-defining zeitgeist magazine “Tempo” was discontinued. Shortly afterwards, Poschardt, aged just 29, became editor-in-chief of the “SZ-Magazin”. He fills the gap left by “Tempo” and practices journalism that – as he himself admits – is “on the borderline”.

And sometimes beyond that. One of the authors he relies on in the “SZ Magazine” is the Hollywood reporter Tom Kummer. Kummer always surprises with interviews in which stars reveal their innermost being. There are rumors in the industry that things are not going well. Poschardt, however, ignores the warnings. When it emerged in 2000 that Kummer had invented complete interviews (he then described himself as a "non-journalist" and "conceptual artist"), the editor-in-chief also lost his position.

As a 26-year-old, he suffered from the fact that communists like Karl Held no longer had a chance. There were only hipsters left.

Soon afterwards, Axel Springer AG made him “Creative Director” of “Welt am Sonntag”. Poschardt gave the newspaper, which was quite staid and boring at the time, a makeover. At the same time, he is writing two books, one called “About Sports Cars,” the other called “Loneliness.”

In 2007 he wants to know it again. With "Vanity Fair" he tries to do something that is impossible in Germany: to bring glamor into a small-minded society with concerns. “The glamor lies in the self-confidence of saying: This is what you, your city, your country, your life could look like – totally different” (wrote Niklas Maak in the “FAS”). But the total otherness overwhelms readers who are happy to have their world view confirmed week after week by “Spiegel”, “Focus” or “Stern”. The magazine was discontinued in 2008.

Poschardt then made a career at Springer, first becoming deputy editor-in-chief of “Welt am Sonntag” and later editor-in-chief of WeltN24. At the same time, he writes a cultural history about the legendary Porsche "911" and a 120-page essay about the "taste bourgeoisie" that has replaced the educated bourgeoisie. Neither is particularly provocative.

Poschardt seems to have arrived at yesterday. His eulogy in 2014 to the outgoing Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit reads like an obituary for hipsterdom in general: »Wowereit's good mood, his bizarrely glamorous appearances on television shows, the ease with which he chats with Hollywood stars on red carpets is a one-man show. (…) In case of doubt, Wowereit doesn't care about the opinion of the majority or the other comrades. (…) The last photos of Wowereit at an SPD meeting show him shirtless in a wide sweater, an appearance like the Dude from 'The Big Lebowski' or caretaker Krause. But it also shows that he is a free person and despises convention.”

It's quite paradoxical. Once at the summit, Poschardt is overcome with melancholy. He is one of the most powerful journalists in Germany and yet conveys the image of a person who is powerless against the zeitgeist - the Neobiedermeier. Then Corona hits the world and suddenly everything is different. Poschardt smells morning air. The over-50s suddenly seem so excited, as if he had been infected by his former self. As a 26-year-old, he had suffered from missing the social battles of the 1960s. That communists like Karl Held no longer had a chance. There were only hipsters left. The beautiful, ideal world was only possible by retreating into a niche - a kind of voluntary lockdown to protect against the "mutant world".

But now is the time to come out of cover and declare war on the “zombies of bourgeois society,” as he called them in 1994. With his attacks against the “shit bourgeoisie” (2025) and “buckish bourgeoisie” (2026), Poschardt wants to make up for the Swinging Sixties revolt in which he was unable to take part - due to the disgrace of his late birth. In the process, his former political coordinate system is completely reversed - as if he were holding a magnet against his inner compass. The young Ulf Poschardt would have been passionate about Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. The older Ulf Poschardt, on the other hand, seeks salvation from billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (“Peter Thiel is my Taylor Swift”). The “disruption” (as the destruction of existing conditions is now called) no longer comes from the oppressed, but from the oppressors.

What would young Ulf Poschardt have thought of that? His article from 1994 also provides the appropriate answer: “Passion is the greatest enemy of liberality. If you feel passionate, you are attracted to things or repelled, and that only works if you don't live cynically, i.e. in a healthy environment. The good world is a refuge for everyone who feels sick when a clever cynic wins success, money and beautiful women. The young Ulf Poschardt would have thrown up at Elon Musk.

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