The “Zeit” editor Josef Joffe has to let his office rest. He had warned a banker friend about ongoing research into the Cum-Ex scandal. Has he become estranged from his newspaper?
Josef Joffe in conversation, February 2018.
His entry on Wikipedia has already been changed. Josef Joffe, it is now said, “has been the editor of the German weekly newspaper ‘Die Zeit’ since April 2000.” The emphasis is on the word “was”, because Joffe is leaving his post until 2023. Since his contract then expires anyway, his time off is tantamount to a resignation in installments. Joffe and the “Zeit” publishing house were reacting to German media reports in which the 78-year-old was accused of cronyism and betrayal of journalistic principles.
Specifically, it is about a letter that Joffe sent to his friend Max Warburg in January 2017. His Warburg bank was involved in so-called cum-ex transactions, which the German Federal Court of Justice classified as illegal in a verdict that was not yet final in 2021. According to his letter, Joffe informed Max Warburg about his own newspaper’s research and assured him of his support.
“Not worthy of our friendship”
Among other things, Joffe writes: “I warned you about what was in the pipeline, and it is thanks to my intervention that the piece was pushed and the bank was given the opportunity to object.” In fact, at the end of 2016, “Zeit” published an article entitled “Now Warburg too?” published, which Max Warburg obviously did not like at all. In his letter, Joffe refers to a “not very affectionate letter” that “is not worthy of our long friendship”. He, Joffe, did everything to limit the damage.
How Joffe’s letter got to the media remains open. The ARD journalist Oliver Schröm, who was involved in the “Zeit” research on Warburg and Cum-Ex, recently published it in its entirety on Twitter. Schröm denies that Warburg Bank was not given an opportunity to comment, as Joffe suggested in his letter. Rather, there were several offers of talks.
target of friends of Russia
When asked by the NZZ, Josef Joffe wrote that in retrospect his behavior was not wise, “but not reprehensible either”: he merely suggested to the editors that they get an original sound from the bank that was missing in the first version. If he had exerted influence as claimed, the “Zeit” article about Warburg would hardly have been as scathing. Joffe wants to have the question of whether government agencies were involved in the publication of the letter legally clarified.
What is certain is that the ominous letter damaged one of the great journalistic careers of the Federal Republic. Born in 1944 to Jewish parents in Nazi-occupied Lodz, Josef Joffe made a career for himself in the 1970s and 1980s at the “Zeit” and the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. With his opinion, Joffe attracted attention again and again. Among other things, he defended the USA and NATO, which made him the enemy of the satirists of the ZDF “Anstalt”, who until recently were very Russophile. And while many German media were intoxicated by their noble sentiments, Joffe mocked political correctness or “climate religion” in his articles.
From the outside, it often seemed as if the “Zeit” publisher wanted to annoy his own colleagues. Despite all the diversity of opinion, Die Zeit likes to maintain a moralistic, sometimes activist tone. The deputy editor-in-chief Bernd Ulrich, for example, published a book with the climate activist Luisa Neubauer. Joffe, on the other hand, has recently published many of his articles in other newspapers, including the NZZ. Has the “Zeit” editor alienated himself from his paper before the current quarrels? Joffe’s answer: “Die ‘Zeit’ enjoys the largest circulation of all time. You don’t become alienated from them.”