Mathias Döpfner


Mathias Döpfner is a German business executive and journalist who is the current CEO of media group Axel Springer SE and President of the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers.

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, 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 became a member of the management board of Axel Springer SE and head of the newspaper division in 2000. He became CEO in 2002. A defining characteristic of his leadership continues to be a rigorous focus on digital transformation. Since the start of his tenure as CEO, revenues from digital activities increased from €117m to €2.5bn. EBITDA from digital went up from €-12 to €582m, accounting for 80 percent of the company's EBITDA. Worldwide digital audience expanded to more than 200 million users.

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. 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. 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, which addressed 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 the freedom of press, 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 West's growing tiredness of defending freedom. 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, and that democratic societies have not been sufficiently resolute in this regard. They risked falling into the freedom trap and either losing freedom through inaction or betraying it by defending with the wrong means. 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 illustrated 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. 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.
In November 2017 Döpfner publicly condemned Kuwait Airlines for barring an Israeli passenger from a flight.

Other activities

In 2010, Döpfner was visiting professor in media at the University of Cambridge and became a member of St John's College. In addition, he holds a variety of paid and unpaid positions.

Corporate boards

In 2007, Döpfner bought Villa Schöningen which is situated right beside Glienicke Bridge with Leonhard Fischer. 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, Georg Baselitz, Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger and :de:Olaf Metzel|Olaf Metzel.
Döpfner said he wanted to use his philanthropic project to create a "peaceful place of freedom".

Recognition