The Press: Last Story

Faces set in determination, the three-member delegation from the directors of the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, West Germany's largest wire service, walked out of the board meeting in Cologne's posh Hotel Excelsior Ernst and up to the trim little man who had been waiting in the lobby. The man listened to only a few words before quietly interrupting: "I gather you want to get rid of me."

Fritz Sänger, 57, was absolutely right: after ten years, he was out as chief editor of D.P.-A.—and by last week the West German press bristled with charges that his firing was for reasons that were political, not professional.

Sänger's politics had long been common knowledge; since 1920 he had been a Socialist. But as editorial boss of the cooperative, Associated Press-like D.P.-A. since its founding in 1949, Sänger had not allowed his Socialist ideas to warp his handling of the news. Still, the very fact that he was a Socialist had constantly bothered the Christian Democratic publishers of the big papers that control the wire service. With key 1961 federal elections drawing on, they finally drummed up enough support on the agency's twelve-man board of directors to sack Sänger.

The purge of Sänger rankled West German papers of widely varying political persuasions. "Scandalous," cried the non-partisan Protestant weekly Christ und Welt. "Our newspaper publishers who sit on the D.P.-A. board should realize that they are doing exactly what Ulbricht and his henchmen are doing in the East Zone." Said Düsseldorf's Jewish Allgemeine Wochenzeitung last week: "We wonder how young German democracy will react to this attack against basic principles." Said Das Freie Wort, official organ of the generally conservative Free Democratic Party: "We are alarmed at this attempt to subjugate an independent news agency to party interests."

But Fritz Sänger, one of West Germany's ablest newsmen, was not fighting for reinstatement. In fact, he had already written his own professional epitaph. No sooner did he get the news of his dismissal from the directors than he walked to a nearby telephone booth, called D.P.-A.'s Hamburg office, and laconically dictated his bulletin: "Sänger leaves D.P.-A."