The Augstein family

When the publisher Rudolf Augstein published the first issue of ‘Der SPIEGEL’ in 1947, he laid the foundation for the future SPIEGEL Group. At the time of his death in November 2002, Rudolf Augstein held a quarter of the shares in SPIEGEL-Verlag. He had already transferred half of his company to his employees in the 1970s and sold a quarter to the publishing house Gruner + Jahr. Rudolf Augstein's shares were transferred undivided to his children's community of heirs upon his death. However, the other two shareholders of SPIEGEL-Verlag, Mitarbeiter KG and Gruner + Jahr, which is now part of Bertelsmann, have a pre-emptive right to purchase one per cent of these shares, as stipulated in the articles of association.

Both shareholders are exercising their pre-emptive rights, which means that the Augstein heirs now only have 24 per cent of the shares in the SPIEGEL Group. This has a significant impact on the balance of power at the news magazine ‘Der SPIEGEL’. The staff now have the majority of the say. The Augstein family now only plays a supporting role, albeit an influential one.

Rudolf Augstein was married five times in his lifetime, had three biological children and one legally recognised child: the lawyer Maria Sabine Augstein (born 1949), the journalist Franziska Augstein (born 1964), the painter and economist Julian Robert Augstein (born 1973) and his legally recognised child, the journalist, writer and publisher Thomas Jakob Augstein (born 1967). His biological father is the writer Martin Walser. Thomas Jakob Augstein is the owner and publisher of the weekly newspaper ‘Der Freitag’, which he bought in 2008, and has been its editor-in-chief since 2013. From 2011 to 2018, he was a columnist for Spiegel Online.