There were two certainties that haunted me as a teenager.
The first: when you have sex, you can become infected.
The second: if you have sex, then only with a condom.
SPIEGEL issue 23/1983: "Will AIDS come over humanity like an apocalyptic horseman?"
Photo:
THE MIRROR
When SPIEGEL wrote about AIDS in May 1982, it was just a "shock from over there" with a view to the USA and I was not yet in the world.
A year later, in June 1983, SPIEGEL printed its now infamous title: »Deadly AIDS epidemic.
The Enigmatic Disease «.
There are two men on the cover, naked.
The picture looks almost like a photo negative.
It suggests a sexual act, one man shows us his bum and reaches for the other man's penis, which is covered by a circular image of the virus.
The accompanying cover story begins with a quote from Albert Camus' »The Plague«, which immediately sets the tone for the rest of the article: Fear!
Panic!
Danger!
“Is there a plague? Will AIDS come over humanity like an apocalyptic horseman on a black horse? Is there a modern plague in sight that will join death, hunger and war, as it did in the Middle Ages? Or will only homosexual men have to believe in it? Perhaps (as the bacteriologist Fehrenbach puts it) because ›the Lord always has a whip ready for homosexuals‹? «
The illustrations that accompany the article are tough too: "Plague in Vienna (1348)", "Inder with smallpox (1974), Cholera depiction (1851)", "West Berlin gay scene: degree of infection increased", »Advertisement for gay meeting places: Monstrous market.« These are the captions from the time.
You will die alone
The tenor was mean: The gay man not only changes his partner like on an assembly line, but also lives a hedonistic lifestyle - and now he's bringing us the plague. Almost worse is the accompanying article, entitled "The sadness is increasing", for which the reporter looks around in the Berlin "homosexual scene":
“It's a world of its own, the subculture of Berlin's homosexual men, twenty, maybe thirty thousand members strong; tolerated by the population because homosexuals are polite and have money; also completely spared by the police, probably for the same reasons. Now, however, one is afraid of two kinds of evils: the disease AIDS, which will bring death to individual homosexuals, and - even worse - the heterosexual response to AIDS, which could ex officio revoke all homosexuals the great freedom to lust. "
At this point, at the latest, someone in the editorial team could have noticed something, someone could have been puzzled, could have asked themselves: Are we exactly fueling this feeling?
Instead, the reporter lets people have their say who warn against sleeping with black people or Americans who are angry about the unwillingness to monogamy.
In the end, a life is painted on the wall of the gay infected man who will die all alone.
Gauweiler's hard line of exclusion
The basics that will accompany me throughout my youth are already laid out here.
Therefore, this is not a text that SPIEGEL did not know any better at the time;
this text is not intended to attempt to cement something.
It should make it clear what mistakes and consequences SPIEGEL's reporting had (and continues to do today).
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SPIEGEL 22/1987: Bavaria's agitators on the cover
Photo: DER SPIEGEL
In his book "Die Kapsel", the author and journalist Martin Reichert describes how the reporting by SPIEGEL caused turmoil and fear in gay men, the consequences of the SPIEGEL title and the reporting that followed. In 1987 State Secretary in the Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior Peter Gauweiler (CSU) appeared on the SPIEGEL cover with a mouth and nose covering in the colors of the Free State. The headline reads: "One against AIDS".
Gauweiler stood for a tough law-and-order policy.
His catalog of measures provided for, among other things, to introduce mandatory screening for members of the risk groups, to which he also counted people who did not come from Europe.
If an infected person turned out to be unreasonable and did not renounce sexual contact, medical confidentiality should be lifted and a "segregation" ordered.
Sex = danger?
I grew up with these images, descriptions and ideas, fueled by media like SPIEGEL.
Always with the fear of potentially catching the virus.
More than 15 years after the SPIEGEL report, I still had to grapple with the consequences instead of experiencing first approaches like my heterosexual classmates in a much more carefree way.
Just thinking about sex meant for me to have to live with the possible consequences - and because I didn't know any better, that automatically meant for me: sex = danger. For the generations before me, however, it meant so much more. They fought the fights so that I would be more informed then and now, so that I could move more safely. Reichert writes in his book: »In 1996 I always had the feeling of lying in a made bed - the gay movement had fought its fight (...). It was the year of Vancouver that dying stopped. "
How could the reporting have been different?
Instead of painting a bogeyman on the wall instead of demonizing promiscuous gay men, it could have been a story about the cohesion of a community that helps itself because no one else does it.
It could also have been a story about the failure of the US administration, about the indifference of President Ronald Reagan.
That was often part of the picture, but on the sidelines.
An interview with Bernd Aretz was published on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of SPIEGEL, five years ago.
The HIV-positive activist and former lawyer got it right to the point: "This mood did not promote education, but fear," said Aretz, who died in 2018.
And further: "You had to educate, educate, educate - without pressure and threats."
What SPIEGEL did was, above all, the opposite.
Always in the belief then that this was the way to save human lives.
That sounds like a perfidious argument that doesn't want to deal with the real consequences.
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Issue 7/1987: The then Federal Minister of Health Rita Süssmuth on the cover
Conversely, this could mean that everyone who was not infected at that time owes it to media such as SPIEGEL, because they had given sufficient warnings about the infection at the time.
However, it seems to me that the survivors owe their salvation more to the solidarity in the community.
Part of the truth is that SPIEGEL not only reported in one way, but also published various positions, including the milder one of the then Federal Minister of Health Rita Süssmuth.
In 1987, DER SPIEGEL wrapped her in a condom and put her on the cover because she resisted compulsory HIV tests, mandatory reporting and isolation - in other words, defied Gauweiler's demands and stood for the awareness campaign with condoms.
In the nineties, for example, SPIEGEL printed an interview with the act-up activist Mark Harrington or a report by the director Rosa von Praunheim.
And the list continues to this day.
The problem with the price of the gay network
Because of such later texts, more level-headed and more diverse than the alarmist articles of the 1980s, the editorial offices of SPIEGEL and SPIEGEL ONLINE received the compass needle of the NRW gay network in 2013. Some queer associations and initiatives criticized this vehemently - not surprising in view of the history.
Deutsche Aidshilfe accused SPIEGEL of "having laid the foundation for stigmatizing people with HIV."
The journalist Stefan Niggemeier called the reporting "infamous" and "apocalyptic".
And the previous winner and sexologist Martin Dannecker refused, as is usually the case, to hand over the award directly.
In his book, Reichert describes how Dannecker wrote an open letter to the SPIEGEL editor Rudolf Augstein in 1986, which ends with the words: "SPIEGEL has been publishing an anti-homosexual and anti-minority serial novel for four years now."
When my colleague Markus Verbeet accepted the award on behalf of the editorial team in 2013, he used the acceptance speech to apologize:
“I can only guess what kind of injuries we caused. Without wanting to, without any intention. But we created these injuries. And I want to tell you: I deeply regret that. A number of conversations have shown me how big these injuries are. Conversations that I had in the last few days and also earlier, immediately before this event. I thank everyone who came to talk to me and did not refuse to accept it. "
Without question, this was an important moment, an apology that was more than overdue.
My young self would probably have needed more.
