Jürgen Elsässer was born in 1957 as son of a watchmaker and a secretary. His two sisters and he were "typically left-wing late 68s", said Elsässer about his youth. His father was a conservative CDU-voter. Elsässer became a teacher. Even if he was in communist groups, he swore on the Liberal democratic basic order of the German state to become a Beamter as teacher. He worked as a teacher in a vocational school in Baden-Württemberg, Germany for 14 years before starting his career as journalist for left-wing magazines in 1994. Elsässer published his first works in the newspaper Arbeiterkampf, a magazine which was tied to the Kommunistischer Bund, an organisation of which he was a member for years. In 1990 he was a sharp critic of the German reunification, because he was afraid of the possible dawn of a Viertes Reich. Elsässer was one of the political creators of the Anti-Germans movement. In 1994, he was editor of the leftist Junge Welt. He was also co-editor of the largest left-wing monthly magazine konkret until he was dismissed. Elsässer changed to the right. In 2010 he founded Compact magazine, of which he was also the editor. In 2011 Elsässer admires Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his mouthpiece in Germany. During the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine Elsässer was an outspoken supporter of Russian presidentVladimir Putin and received a lot of criticism from the German media for this position. Elsässer's current political position is commonly considered as right-wing populist and he is a sharp critic of the migration policy of the German chancellorAngela Merkel.
Reception
of Der Spiegel wrote about Elsässer, his appearances are "a mixture of evangelical preacher and teleshopping moderator" and this would "work independently of his message." Similar to this Dietmar Koschmieder, editor in chief of junge Welt said 2018 in Der Spiegel: "If you ask me, has no convictions at all... He is an expert in emotionalization who adapts his message to the respective target and audience."
