INTRODUCTION

The story of Otto Klepper, former Prussian Minister of Finance and co-founder of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.), is emblematic both of the struggle to defend democracy before 1933 and of its reconstruction after the war. The political, economic, and social concepts developed by Otto Klepper for a post-World War II Germany were incorporated into the founding of the F.A.Z. in 1949 and remain as relevant today as ever.

THE STORY

Honesty, moral courage, and service to the community

Otto Klepper’s personality and life story: a politician of a kind rarely seen in Germany—a man of the middle class, independent, possessing moral courage and the ability to work with people of all stripes; a complex figure who divided opinion; a man of vision who clearly recognized the danger of National Socialism even before 1933 and tried to combat it, and who, after the war, was firmly convinced that liberal democracy would ultimately prevail as the more convincing concept against communism.

Born in 1888 in Thuringia to Huguenot ancestors and as the son of a judge on the Higher Regional Court, he studied political science and became involved in agriculture and finance: initially as chairman of the State Land Tenants’ Association and founder of the State Land Bank, and from 1928 as president of the Prussian Central Cooperative Bank, which he restructured both financially and in terms of personnel. Through the rationalization of the cooperative system and the reform of the agricultural credit system, he sought to implement a reform of land ownership east of the Elbe in order to strengthen the democratic forces of the Weimar Republic.

As the last Prussian finance minister in Otto Braun’s cabinet, he attempted to preserve Prussia’s independence and to oppose Papen’s coup d’état, but to no avail. Because he strictly refused to cooperate with the National Socialists, he was forced to emigrate and was hunted halfway around the world by the National Socialists: Starting in Finland, where in the spring of 1933 he wrote a first series of critical articles on the end of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialists’ seizure of power, he became an agricultural and financial advisor in China in November, fled via the U.S. and Mallorca to Paris, where he collaborated with the nascent Popular Front, founded a resistance party against the Nazis, the German Freedom Party, and wrote for the magazine Die Zukunft alongside Willi Münzenberg and others. Three months before the war began, they founded the German-French Union, which continued its work after the war.

His entire thinking was focused on a liberated Germany after the war, and so as early as 1935 he developed concepts for the political, economic, and cultural renewal of Germany. These concepts formed the basis for his articles in Die Zukunft and the two programmatic articles he wrote from Mexico for Die Deutschen Blätter.

Having returned to Germany in early summer 1947 as an unwanted emigrant amid great difficulties and long delays, he—an independent and unorthodox thinker—did not return to politics as the French had expected, but instead founded the Economic Policy Society in 1947 in Frankfurt together with Rudolf Mueller, a lawyer, and representatives from business, politics, commerce, and culture, the Economic Policy Society of 1947 (Wipog), which saw its mission in integrating the economy into a sense of responsibility for the common good, creating the conditions for a unified economic policy capable of coordinating the needs of agriculture, industry, and commerce with appropriate fiscal and tax policies, and promoting worker participation and co-determination in the spirit of a social market economy, moving away from national economic thinking toward integration into a global economy based on the division of labor.

In order to further spread Wipog’s liberal-democratic, non-partisan philosophy, it was decided to launch a daily newspaper in collaboration with the *Mainzer Allgemeine*, where Erich Welter served as editor. Thus, the founding of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—which saw itself not as a continuation of the old Frankfurter Zeitung but as a new venture—was initiated and carried out by the Wipog; that is, Klepper and Mueller brought together the key figures for the newspaper’s founding: the Mainz newspaper publisher Ferdinand Rothe, the first editors— Erich Dombrowski as primus inter pares, Hans Baumgarten, Erich Welter, Paul Sethe, and Karl Korn, and the financiers, all of whom were members of Wipog, together conducted negotiations on all three levels and concluded the contracts. Thus, Wipog became the “sole shareholder of the newly founded publishing company GmbH FAZ,” and Otto Klepper became its first managing director.

Although a rift occurred in 1950–51 for various reasons—primarily due to differing views on the newspaper’s political line—it can be demonstrated that the FAZ would not have come into being in this form without Wipog and, above all, without Otto Klepper, who helped the newspaper weather a critical financial crisis with American funds.

Another issue is why the FAZ conceals the actual circumstances of its founding and refers only to the “Friends of the Paper” from 1949 and the “FAZIT Foundation” from 1959, thereby provoking so-called “left-wing” critics into making the equally false claim that the FAZ is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank and thus of Joseph Hermann Abs. In contrast to these skewed and simplistic accounts, the true founding history of the FAZ is complex and serves as an interesting document for the early postwar history of the Federal Republic, for the debates over how to appropriately deal with the “brown” past, and for the struggle to find the right path forward amid all the associated economic, political, and cultural challenges.

Klepper’s view of politics was elitist, in the sense of an ethics of responsibility, yet at the same time democratic. Methodologically, it was demanding. Although he was well aware of the necessity of exploiting public sentiment for demagogic purposes, he held politicians to high standards of expertise, reason, and ethical integrity. In this way, the political demands of the French Revolution would finally be implemented socially, effectively for all, and indeed worldwide, for “the world has become so small that the art of statecraft requires a global outlook.” In this realization of a world that had grown small—a view he had arrived at long before the advent of mass media, the internet, and new transportation technologies—Klepper was ahead of his time.

One might accuse Klepper of hopeless idealism and a lack of realism, but that would be to misunderstand his view of politics. It was clear to him that we live on the “planet of interests” and that compromises must constantly be found anew, but there had to be at least a certain number of politicians and a large number of citizens who were shaped by a sense of social responsibility—that is, by the ethos he demanded— otherwise politics would degenerate into a pure power struggle over interests, and the common good would be crushed between corruption scandals, partisan interest politics, and resigned political disillusionment—precisely what he had witnessed in the final phase of the Weimar Republic and what he feared as a danger to any democracy, especially when it was not yet firmly rooted in broad segments of the population. “It requires,” he said in 1952, “education to determine the structure of communal life from one’s own understanding. It requires an ethos to translate the awareness of human freedom into the reality of concrete obligation.”

As Klepper increasingly came to realize that no one truly wanted this kind of commitment, and that his political goals did not align with the spirit of reconstruction that characterized the early postwar period, he became increasingly isolated. Lacking the counterbalance of a happy family life—which, on the one hand, was so dear to his heart, but which, on the other hand, he had jeopardized precisely because of his above-average political commitment and was ultimately unable to regain—he lost his inner balance, and politics came to occupy too much space in his thoughts.

In the spring of 1957, to his great joy, his daughter Renate visited him; by then he was already in the hospital. He died alone on May 11, 1957, in a Berlin clinic. One final wish was granted to him. He was buried at the Zehlendorf Forest Cemetery on Onkel-Tom-Straße, next to his first and much-loved daughter Gisela, who had died at the age of six and whom he had remembered throughout his life, and especially at the birth of his first granddaughter. The name “Onkel Tom” created a coincidental connection to the rest of the family in America. None of them were able to attend the funeral on May 15, 1957; instead, his old friends from the Preußenkasse and the new Wipog team had come.

To cite just one of the many tributes, Theodor W. Adorno wrote that he and his friend Horkheimer were deeply impressed “by that unity of the most concrete worldly experience and intellectual power” in Klepper, and that they were both “all too aware […] of how sorely we lack men of Otto Klepper’s caliber: here, truly, we must speak of an irreplaceable loss.”

Klepper belonged to a minority in German society: He represented what was ultimately a very small segment of a self-assured middle class that, on the one hand, affirmed democracy and thus cooperation with democratic politicians from the working class, but on the other hand was self-assured and politically experienced, without any inferiority complexes toward authority, and ready to defend the republic against state power if necessary. He tried to exemplify in his own life what he demanded of a politician: truthfulness, moral courage, and service to the common good.

Author: Astrid von Pufendorf

Contact: info@fritz-bauer-forum.de

Addendum by Pamela Taylor (Klepper) Marsh, granddaughter of Otto Klepper, March 2026:

“I am the daughter of Renate Klepper mentioned in Dr. von Pufendorf’s  article.  As the youngest grandchild of the late Otto Klepper, I first heard my grandfather’s voice a number of years ago, on a  historical German audio where he was discussing  the Prussian Emergency Act (1932), as finance minister to Prussia. As an American, I was amazed and tearful that somehow this relative had made enough of an international impact, that I  could listen to him, almost a hundred years later!

This led me on a historical hunt to learn more about my grandfather, whom I view as an unsung hero for Germany,  in his resistance to national socialism and his political ideology.  Although his views may have been “elitist,”   his belief in democracy was unwavering.  He was ahead of his time, in understanding the importance of a global economy and  a liberated Germany, along with demonstrated political characteristics including “truthfulness, civil courage, and service to the public,”  much of which is missing in our current day political systems.

A great deal has been written about my grandfather’s  apparent lack of commitment to his family and unending adherence to his political responsibilities. After the family fled Germany in 1933 and were stripped of their German citizenship, my grandmother Erna Trudi Eickhoff Klepper and her three children resided in Mallorca for seven years, on route to the United States.  During this time, they lived in poverty and the children were denied traditional education due to  the inability to register with the Nazi party on the island, due to safety concerns.   My mother, however, was a champion swimmer  on the island: (https://www.mallorcamagazin.com/nachrichten/gesellschaft/2015/12/02/43943/schwimmerin-gegen-den-strom.html), which allowed our family some semblance of safety, along with continued support from the George Bowden family in Mallorca. My mother’s compassion for her father was  endless, as was her commitment to her immediate family.  That being said, it was not without her own emotional suffering during her childhood and adolescence, as a result of  political persecution.

Otto Klepper’s descendants  have perhaps not experienced his adventurous and dangerous lifestyle.  We have, however,  been instilled with the importance of education,  inclusivity, democracy, and having a moral compass that guides our decisions.   In the past few years, I traveled to both Germany and Mallorca. I am indebted to Dr. von Pufendorf and Alex Sepas (Mallorca Magazine) for keeping my grandfather’s flame alive and assisting me in understanding my colorful history.  In 2021, I along with our daughters received dual citizenship with Germany through Article 116 involving our family’s political persecution  by the Nazi regime.  In some ways,  it is a reparation for a difficult back story, one which many Germans experienced.”

Pamela Taylor (Klepper) Marsh