Stefan Aust

German journalist

Stefan Aust (; born 1 July 1946) is a German journalist. He was the editor in chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008 and has been the publisher of the conservative leading Die Welt newspaper since 2014 and the paper's editor until December 2016.

Aust was born in Stade, Lower Saxony as son of the farmer Reinhard Aust and his wife Ilse, born Hartig. Together with four siblings he grew up on a small dairy farm which his family ran until the early 1960s. His father emigrated to America at the age of 18 and returned to Germany in the summer of 1939. His grandfather was a merchant and shipowner. Aust graduated from high school at the Athenaeum in Stade and gained his first journalistic experience working for the local school newspaper "Wir", through which he also got to know the journalist Henryk M. Broder. Aust dropped out of business studies after a few weeks.

Via Wolfgang Röhl, Klaus Rainer Röhl's younger brother, whom he met at the school newspaper, Aust came to the magazine konkret after graduating from high school, where he was initially in charge of the magazines layout. From 1966 to 1969 Aust then worked as an editor for konkret and later for the St. Pauli Nachrichten [de]. In 1969, Aust traveled to the United States for half a year. From 1970 he worked for the Norddeutscher Rundfunk. He was a television journalist at NDR and worked for the political television magazine “Panorama” from 1972 to 1987. Since 1987 Aust built the new “Spiegel TV” on behalf of Rudolf Augstein. Later, despite strong resistance from the Spiegel editorial team, he also took over the mother ship, the “Spiegel”. He was the editor in chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel from 1994 to February 2008.

Aust has repeatedly expressed scepticism about the causes and consequences of global warming and dismissal of measures against climate change and of proponents of such measures. Former Spiegel editor Oliver Gehrs wrote about Aust's influence on Spiegel in his 2005 book "The Spiegel Complex". In it he argues that Aust was never "left wing" he acted on the left for decades, but probably never thought so. Aust is an anti intellectual who is not attracted by the political debate, but by the noise. "It wasn't the political debate that appealed to him, but the action." In 2014, Aust became editor of the newspaper "Welt", which was published by Springer Verlag, which he fought against for decades. Aust longtime defended the former Spiegel editor Matthias Matusek, which also switched 2013 to Welt and in 2015 get fired there, because he was drifting to the New Right and its German movement Neue Rechte.

In 2010 Aust was awarded the Mercator Visiting Professorship for Political Management at the University of Duisburg Essen's NRW School of Governance. He gave seminars and lectures at the university.