Henryk Marcin Broder: German thinking with Jewish rationality and a Polish heart

Henryk Marcin Broder, polarising author, provocative journalist and feared talk show guest because of his unconventional directness, was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Katowice, Poland on 20 August 1946. In 1957, his family left Poland and travelled via Vienna to the Federal Republic of Germany in the following year. During his first stays in Cologne (school-leaving exam and uncompleted degree) and Hamburg (where he met Günter Wallraff and Stefan Aust), Broder began working as a journalist and quickly became an author.

In 1981, he left Germany following various confrontations with the left-wing press and lived in Israel for ten years. His subjects are anti-Semitism, exposure and combating the world’s atrocities and political power fantasies. One thing that motivated him was the search for a new Jewish rationality which, following the Holocaust and in the face of Israel’s current situation, was supposed to create a foundation of security for the Jews and help to establish their state. His literary stock-in-trade is biting polemic with a Polish heart.