Ute Scheub

[3] Scheub was a musically gifted child, passing a Level C exam (‘C-Prüfung’) as a church organist, a qualification generally awarded only after two or three years of successful study.

Her doctoral dissertation, published (and widely discussed) under the one-word title "Heldendämmerung" in 2010,[a] concerned "Toxic Masculinity", a theme to which she regularly returns, in response to the unfolding news agenda, in her powerful newspaper commentaries.

[6][7] The circumstances under which Scheub learned of her father's past as a member of the government's elite paramititary "Schutzstaffel" (SS) organisation were exceptional.

Meanwhile, in Stuttgart participants at the 1969 German Evangelical Church Assembly had finished listening to a reading from an as yet unpublished new work by the author, the widely respected Günter Grass: a man in his mid-fifties stood up in front of one of the many microphones recently installed in the basement lecture theatre, and launched himself into a short speech reported at the time as "muddled and incomprehensible".

The unassuming and physically puny man had never been a leading figure in the elite SS, but he had been passionately committed to it, and to the wider Hitler project, with all its well reported horrors.

From his final words, and from the further researches which the event triggered, it became clear that the suicide of the man identified in reports of his death as "Manfred Augst" was driven not by any acknowledged sense of shame, but by bitter disappointment at the crushing of the National Socialist vision.

[8][9] Naturally Grass, who was already well known as a writer with an insatiable interest and in the long shadow cast by the Hitler years over the sociological and psychological development of post-war Germany, went on to write about the suicide.

It was Grass who invented and applied the pseudonym "Manfred Augst" when he referenced the incident in his 1972 political record "Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke" ("From the diary of a snail").

While her brothers joined in the discussion the daughter, according to her later recollection, had sat in silence, awed by the presence and intellect of one of West Germany's most iconic writers.

[11][12] Even before graduating from university, Ute Scheub was a co-founder in 1978 of the Tageszeitung ("taz"), a new daily newspaper published initially in Berlin, but which soon acquired a nationwide readership.

Having made her mark at „taz“ as West Germany's first “Environmental Editor” she moved on to the paper's news desk, and then to regional editorial responsibilities for Hamburg and Berlin.