Manfred Piwinger (born 1936), long-time head of corporate communications at the Vorwerk Group (1978-1997) and co-editor of the "Handbuch Unternehmenskommunikation", was honoured as a key PR researcher with a two-part entry in the first Deutschen Online-Museum für Public Relations. In addition, Dr Horst Avenarius (born 1930), head of communications at BMW (1973-1989) and pioneer of PR ethics in Germany, received a two-part entry in the PR Museum.
Piwinger himself has his say several times in his contribution. Students of the Communication Management Master's programme in Leipzig had interviewed him in preparation for a seminar paper. Here he provides insights into topics such as corporate culture, laughter and humour in PR or PR as a contribution to corporate value creation. Piwinger, who can be well described with terms like "bridge builder" or "cross-linker", was one of the first in the profession to highlight the value contribution of public relations and published the first standard work on financial communication in communication science. Piwinger became known in the industry especially for his innovative annual reports for the Vorwerk Group. In addition to his academic achievements, Piwinger was a member of the German Council for Public Relations (DRPR) for many years, where he focused on financial communication.
Dr Horst Avenarius contributed significantly to the further development of PR ethics: As chairman of the DRPR for 16 years, he worked on many cases, prepared council decisions and developed the DRPR guidelines since 1997. In addition to his involvement in the DRPR, Avenarius discussed professional ethical standards in the PR field with students and colleagues in numerous guest lectures and lectures at the University of Leipzig. All in all, thanks to Horst Avenarius, PR and ethics are no longer considered something incompatible, but are perceived internationally in practice and academia as a central topic in terms of "PR ethics".
In addition to the portraits of these two outstanding professional practitioners, both of whom have also given important impulses to academia, there are contributions on English-language PR criticism from the 1950s to the 1970s and on PR dissertations from the same period by Tobias Liebert. Partly new are also summary contributions on PR history of the epochs of the Weimar Republic and the NS-period.