Magnus, Kurt

Lawyer, politician, co-founder of German broadcasting

Born: 28.03.1887 in Kassel

Died: 20.06.1962 in Wiesbaden

Magnus studied law in Oxford, Göttingen and Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1910. He then worked as a lawyer and in-house counsel for the Vox record company in Berlin. Initially a member of the supervisory board, he was elected to the group's management board in 1923. He was one of the initiators of the first German broadcasting company, Berliner Funk-Stunde AG. In 1925, together with Hans Bredow, he founded the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, an umbrella organization representing nine independent radio broadcasting companies. Bredow became chairman of the administrative board and Magnus its director; from 1930 he was chairman of the board. He was removed from office by the National Socialists, arrested in August 1933 and imprisoned in Oranienburg concentration camp and Moabit remand prison for a total of 19 months. The proceedings against him and other employees in the so-called radio trial were dropped in 1935.

In the following years, he worked for various companies, including in Berlin and from 1940-45 at Schleussner Foto Werke in Frankfurt am Main. In 1945, he moved to Wiesbaden and was appointed to the Hessian state government. From 1947 onwards, he worked as a ministerial director in the Hessian Ministry of Economics and Transport. Together with Bredow, he developed the basic concept for a reorganization of broadcasting in the Federal Republic. As a representative of the state government, Magnus was elected to the broadcasting council of the newly founded Hessischer Rundfunk (hr) in 1948 and was its chairman until 1951. In the same year, he succeeded Bredow as Chairman of the hr Board of Directors. He was also President of the Administrative Board of Deutsche Welle and the Sound Archive of German Broadcasting, a member of the Supervisory Board of Degeto-Film and Werbung im Rundfunk as well as long-time President of the Goethe Institute (1951-62), of which he was a co-founder in August 1951.

For his services, he was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Goethe Plaque of the Hessian Ministry of Culture and was made an Honorary Senator of the TU Berlin. In 1962, ARD established the Kurt Magnus Foundation, which has since awarded the Kurt Magnus Prize to up-and-coming radio talents every year.