Mathias Döpfner

Family

Mathias Döpfner grew up in Offenbach am Main. His mother was a housewife and his father Dieter C. Döpfner was a university professor of Architecture and Director of the Offenbach College of Applied Arts from 1966 to 1970.

Mathias Döpfner and his wife Ulrike, née Weiß – the daughter of Ulrich Weiß, a former management board member of Deutsche Bank AG – live at Heiligen See in Potsdam and have three sons.

Education and professional positions

Mathias Döpfner studied musicology, German literature and theater science in Frankfurt and Boston. He began his career in 1982 as the music critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung supplement. After working as the FAZ correspondent in Brussels and as manager of a subsidiary of the Winderstein concert agency, Döpfner moved to Gruner + Jahr in 1992 – initially employed by board member Axel Ganz in Paris, later as assistant to the CEO Gerd Schulte-Hillen.

In April 1994, Döpfner became editor-in-chief of the Berlin weekly newspaper Wochenpost. In 1996 he took over the post of editor-in-chief of the Hamburg tabloid Hamburger Morgenpost.

In March 1998 he became editor-in-chief of Axel Springer SE's national daily newspaper Die Welt. Under his leadership, the content and visual appearance of the paper was fundamentally revised. On February 26, 2008, Axel Springer announced that the Welt Group had generated a profit for the first time.

Döpfner has been a member of the management board of Axel Springer SE since July 2000. From October 2000 he has additionally been head of the newspapers division. Since Döpfner became CEO in 2002, revenues from digital activities increased from €117m to €2,0bn with EBITDA from digital increasing from €-12m to €429m. Worldwide digital audience expanded to more than 200 million users.

Mathias Döpfner took over the leadership of Axel Springer SE during an economically difficult time. After the company made 98 million Euros less profit in the boom year of 2000 than the previous year, it had to cope with a loss of 198 million Euros for the first time in its history in the 2001 financial year.

Journalistic and publishing activities

Mathias Döpfner regularly speaks out on media and socio-political, economic and cultural issues. Particular attention was given to his debate with Nobel laureate Günter Grass, documented by the SPIEGEL (19.6.2006). Döpfner surprised with the confession: "I am a non-Jewish Zionist". Alongside the topics of threats from Islamic fundamentalism and the image of the United States in Germany, the discussion also focused on the achievements and the failings of the 1968 movement. He was "ready to lead a self-critical review on behalf of the Axel Springer publishing house with regard to 1968". However, there also has to be an equally self-critical debate "on the substantive aberrations of the 1968 movement". In January 2010 Axel Springer SE put the Medienarchiv68 online, containing nearly 6000 articles, all comments, letters, cartoons, news reports, commentaries and interviews from the Springer titles between 1966 and 1968 regarding this topic. Döpfner published his opinion on the threat from Islamism in his WELT essay "The West and the mocking laughter of Islamism".

On 12.7.2009, ARD TV broadcast Döpfner's film "My friend George Weidenfeld". Döpfner sees the film portrait, in which he accompanies Lord Weidenfeld on his travels and at meetings and interviews prominent companions such as Daniel Barenboim, Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel or Shimon Peres, as "a very subjective approach to a great European".

He has repeatedly commented on the subjects of freedom and digitization, particularly in the fall of 2010 as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge. Under the title "Freedom and the Digital Revolution" Döpfner held three lectures in which he addressed the Germans' difficult relationship to freedom, the global erosion of freedom and its causes, and digitization as the fourth major cultural revolution and its impact on press freedom, privacy, and journalism as well as in his book "Die Freiheitsfalle - The freedom trap" published by Propyläen Verlag in 2011, in which he focuses on the forgetting of freedom by the West. Taking three watershed events as examples – the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nine Eleven and the financial crisis – Döpfner analyzes the triumphs, threats, and excesses of liberal societies and argues that freedom needs to be fought for, defended and answered for daily, but that democratic societies have not been sufficiently resolute in this. They risked falling into the freedom trap and either losing freedom through inaction or betraying it through the selection of illiberal methods of defense. Alongside the power of freedom in politics and business, Döpfner reflects upon the spirit of freedom in music, literature and painting on the basis of three central works by Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann and Gustave Courbet. The book closes with an analysis of the digital world, in which Döpfner emphasizes the ambivalence of the Internet as a platform critical of authority at the same time as being a monitoring tool controlled by authority.

Döpfner's contributions to media policy include keynotes, for example at the NOAH Conference Berlin 2015 or at the SPIEGEL Publishers Forum, the focus of which were the establishment of paid online content and the differentiation between private and public media in digital channels.

For the occasion of the centenary of Axel Springer's birth in 2012, Döpfner gave his personal view of the founder in his New Year's speech. The "Ceremony" in May 2012 was a surprise in itself, as Döpfner converted the entire event into a tongue-in-cheek and entertaining revue without a single speech. He made his own debut as an actor, reciting a fictitious letter to the publisher wearing a hoodie jacket and jeans. The F.A.Z described the revue as an event, in which "pathos, flippancy, understatement and exaggeration, self-righteousness and self-irony were mixed together in a wondrous, sometimes uplifting way, a milestone in the history of the Springer Group."

In an open letter to the Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, he criticized the search engine company, thus triggering a public debate.

On April 10, 2016, Döpfner showed solidarity with the German satirist Jan Böhmermann in an open letter. In his show "Neo Magazine Royale", Böhmermann had previously illustraed the difference between satire and insulting criticism based with a poem about the Turkish President Erdoğan, which lead to resentment in the Turkish government as well as public prosecution in Germany (→ Böhmermann affair). Erdogan subsequently applied for an injunction against Döpfner in May 2016 at a German Court. The request was rejected in the first and second instance.

Mandates

Döpfner has been the only European member of the Supervisory Board of Time Warner since July 2006, Member of the Board of Directors of Warner Music since May 2014, and Non-executive Director of Vodafone Group Public Limited Company since April 2015. Since October 2015, Döpfner is Chairman of the Board of Directors at Business Insider. He is member of the International Advisory Board at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Since July 2016, Döpfner is President of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV).

Private engagement

In 2007, Döpfner bought Villa Schöningen which is situated right beside Glienicke Bridge with Leonhard Fischer, CEO of RHJI. On the eve of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a German-German Museum was opened there on 8 November 2009 by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The privately funded project documents the events at the Bridge of Spies during the Cold War on the ground floor of the permanent exhibition. Temporary exhibitions of contemporary art are shown on the first floor. Among the artists were Andreas Slominski (Summer 2012), Georg Baselitz ("The Berlin Years", Spring 2012), Andy Warhol ("Early Works", Spring 2011), Anselm Kiefer ("Europe", Autumn 2010), and Martin Kippenberger (Summer 2010).

Döpfner said he wanted to use his philanthropic project to create a "peaceful place of freedom".

Awards

Works