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East Side Gallery in Berlin: How can journalism do justice to the East?
Photo: Rainer Jensen / picture-alliance / dpa
I came back to Saxony in 2010 and was amazed: How they met you, the people here.
This mixture of shyness and severity.
Allotment garden maintenance with a seriousness I have never seen before.
Exercise rarely just for fun.
Dinner in the restaurant no later than 6 p.m.
Sausage Goulash.
Seasoning meat.
Soljanka.
It took a while before we got along.
Until I understood.
The peculiarities of the Saxons, indeed of the East Germans as a whole, had not just survived.
Had not become part of a larger whole, within which they found their place as a folkloric peculiarity, as in other regions.
The supposed remnants of the GDR were a defining part of the East’s identity.
Lived by many in a way as if one did not want to let the West into one's life.
As if there was a danger that one would otherwise dissolve as an Eastern citizen in the new possibilities.
This cautious, doubtful and largely lack of anything like Dolce Vita shape the basic Saxon mood more than a decade later, at least outside of Leipzig and Dresden.
I got used to it, slowly.
Qualified by birth in Karl-Marx-Stadt
In Baden-Wuerttemberg, where I had spent most of my life until I left for the East, I was the Ossi understanding.
Qualified by being born in Karl-Marx-Stadt and sporadic visits to Saxony before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I also had a touch of adventure - my parents had reached the west with an application to leave the country in the early 1980s, and we ended up stranded on Lake Constance.
From then on I spent most of my life in the flourishing south-west of the republic.
After my first days in Chemnitz, it became clear to me: I am clueless.
And if I had no idea, how did those who have never set foot in the so-called new federal states feel?
Or at most went to the Baltic Sea on vacation?
Just in 2010 researchers from Jena, Leipzig and Vienna published a study about the image that the supraregional, West German media painted of the East. Her findings, summarized by the historian Rainer Gries: "The East Germans are not perceived at eye level, but rather they remain the others two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall."
Sitting in the East, I soon noticed: This view of the West editorial offices is characterized by stereotypes and the same topics: Stasi, neo-Nazis, unequal living conditions.
The reason for reporting was almost exclusively statistics and anniversaries, the articles were often based on a kind of wheel of fortune journalism: Reporters hovered briefly in eastern climes, saw something, heard something and rushed off again.
If things went well, they had learned something illuminating; in the worst case, they returned to the western office with confirmed clichés.
Only marginal interest in SPIEGEL
In Baden-Württemberg, where I started journalism, an experienced colleague advised me in my first days as a volunteer at a local newspaper to read SPIEGEL on Mondays. There is always something in it that is new and important for your own work. Topics and news that can be picked up. Today, in our editorial office of the Free Press in Chemnitz, SPIEGEL is irrelevant to me in this regard. Sure, many colleagues read it, most of them for personal gain. But after more than ten years I can count the editorial conferences in which someone referred to a SPIEGEL article that we should definitely consider for our work on our own, the Eastern topics.
If you take the sold print run as a benchmark, normal readers in Saxony are only marginally interested in SPIEGEL. You can also count the percentage of SPIEGEL readers in all of Germany on one hand, and you don't even need all five fingers. With this measly share, SPIEGEL is in the best of Western society: if you add up the daily sold circulation of "Süddeutscher Zeitung", "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" and "Welt" in Saxony, you get a four-digit number. With four million people who live in Saxony. SPIEGEL sells nine percent of its domestic printed circulation in all of East Germany, with an East German population of 20 percent.
Of course, a regional newspaper always has a home advantage. Especially since in conversation with readers I quickly realized how much it means to them when the other person is one of them. But even that doesn't help with the toughest. Because part of the truth is that there are many people here whom we as the »Free Press« can hardly get any closer to than SPIEGEL. Established media are equated by them with the state and its institutions - in the interpretation of these people a single colossus, ticking in unison, pursuing questionable, opaque goals.
We meet these people every day on the Facebook pages of the »Free Press«.
They can be reliably recognized by the laughing emoji with which they react to corona contributions.
Behind almost every one of these emojis there is a more or less disturbing user profile, where you rarely have to search for a long time until everything is clear.
"I give a shit about solidarity, I am solidly Aryan" - such slogans can be seen there as a profile picture.
But by no means all Saxons are hopeless cases.
That is why it is so fatal to repeatedly reduce the people in the East in reporting to their worst and most radical representatives - even if it is by largely ignoring the others.
Having to explain the East - sheer excessive demands
Anyone who thinks about SPIEGEL's image of the East cannot ignore Alexander Osang. As a SPIEGEL reporter, he explained the East to readers for years, as the saying goes. Perhaps one assumed in Hamburg that the construction site East was largely covered with this top author. In December 2017, Osang had a conversation with two colleagues from »Zeit«, which also discussed his role as an understanding of the East. "The other day at the SPIEGEL conference someone asked me: Mr. Osang, now tell us what is going on in the East?" Said Osang. "And I thought, how should I know." There is certainly a certain coquetry in this episode. But above all, the real core is that an Osang alone does not have comprehensive Eastern expertise. Having to explain the East - sheer excessive demands.
The year 2018 shows that a closer, open look at the East German problem areas can be successful. For weeks, editorial offices from all over Germany and beyond turned their attention to Chemnitz. The right-wing extremist and racist riots after a fatal attack by an asylum seeker raised questions that could not be answered without in-depth knowledge of the situation in Saxony. The protests were also of a magnitude that urgently required classification. What I experienced was genuine interest and, in some cases, a great deal of research. For a week or two, the "Free Press" was a kind of hub for colleagues from other editorial offices who wanted to get an exact picture. The drama of the situation had led tothat Saxony was looked at more intensively and with more interest than ever before.
The following year, a SPIEGEL title testified that everything did not suddenly become different and better.
"So eater, the Ossi." Was on the cover.
And for the informed audience, there was also a fishing hat in black, red and gold.
You have to know such a fishing hat was worn by a supposedly typical Saxon who aggressively attacked a television team on the sidelines of Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to Dresden at a Pegida demonstration.
The man who quickly became famous as a "hat citizen" turned out to be an employee of the State Criminal Police Office.
And the filming journalists were held by police for 45 minutes for no apparent reason.
The whole lousy picture of Saxony condensed into a single event.
Civil society shamefully abandoned
The cover picture was an impertinence.
"So esse, Ossi." A frown was still the friendliest reaction to this cover in those around me.
The bad thing about the Ossi title was that it contained an excellent text.
Author Steffen Winter delivered a clever and complex portrait of East Germany and its inhabitants.
SPIEGEL has rarely come closer to the answer to the question of why the East is the way it is.
Perhaps the cover was a final throwback to old, western chauvinist times.
Journalists are not politicians. You are not directly responsible if a federal state is hit against the wall, there have been serious failures for decades, especially in Saxony. The CDU played down right-wing extremism to a large extent, did not take skepticism towards democracy, political parties and state institutions seriously, and shamefully abandoned civil society. Even the best journalism cannot fix that.
But editorial offices like those of SPIEGEL can very well help to ensure that the sensible feel represented and noticed. Journalism influences the tone of debates and shapes the view of those who use it to get an idea of a region and its people. In this way, it also affects civil society, which in the long term decides where a country is going. SPIEGEL is ignored by those who undermine democracy. In the best case, however, from those who can save them.
How can journalism do justice to the East?
What can SPIEGEL do?
Good coverage of East Germany is not first and foremost a question of money.
Even if more reporters would be good on site - what matters is how the editors and their management view the East.
It doesn't work from above.
And if you only look over there cursory or at long intervals from the west, you will only find the eruptions to be newsworthy and relevant.
People have to be heard, their lives have to take place
Take the East seriously, that's the only way it can work. And not the screamers. But the people in the third or fourth row just trailing behind. And then above all those who want a different, better East Germany, but no longer dare to step out of cover. You have to be heard, your life has to take place when it comes to the East. SPIEGEL's claim should also be: Get out of the patterns of reporting and get away from the usual suspects. Real interest in everyday life in the east. The time of aggravation is over, the reality is stark enough.
After the new Chancellor Olaf Scholz was sworn in, I read a comment on SPIEGEL.de about his cabinet, in which there are hardly any East Germans.
It was written by Timo Lehmann, born in 1991, who studied in Saxony-Anhalt, a new generation of SPIEGEL.
Lehmann wrote: “As a West German you can simply accuse the Saxons of being stupid or lamely because too many don't get vaccinated or vote for the AfD.
But: it won't help at all. "
The man has a clue.
And one can say: That’s what SPIEGEL is now doing too.
