A Life Story

The story of a generation that saw the country and the world change
This authentic story of a happy life, which also and especially includes the account of a meaningful professional life, was not written out of vanity, nor from a need to prove one's own right in a kind of defense. Nor to admonish young people and refer them to earlier times that would have been so much better.
For half a century I was a privileged observer of people, tensions and conflicting events, a detached witness, but sometimes also, to a modest extent, a co-player. I was given the opportunity -- here too I may speak of a privilege -- to work in the editorial management of a leading and authoritative newspaper group. Anyone who was allowed to exert influence from such a position and build a relationship with hundreds of thousands of readers who placed their trust in him, feels obliged to take responsibility.
In order to explain why I took the sometimes controversial positions that were mine, I want to tell how the decisions came about, against what personal and social backgrounds, in what time climate. I have relied on a memory that has remained reliable, and on the archive that I have compiled all those years and have maintained to this day. In this way, this account also became the description of a society and of situations, the most remote of which already belong to history.