Media and reunification

The only freely elected government was temporarily set up in East Germany between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification in late 1990. Its primary task was to dismantle the former communist state and prepare for reunification. Now a journalism professor, Holger Doetsch worked as a spokesperson for one of the ministers in this government.

Deutsche Welle: Where were you on Nov. 9, 1989? And what did the fall of the Berlin Wall mean to you as a West German?

Holger Doetsch: I was in Koblenz on that day and was leading a meeting for the Curatorship for an Indivisible Germany. That was an organization from West Germany that advocated for the people of East Germany. For me, it was a wonderful message, which I received in the middle of the meeting, that the Wall had fallen.

What made you particularly interested in East Germany at that time?

I was the chairman of the German Abba fan club and had a lot of contact to young people in East Germany who were interested in posters and information about Abba. So I often traveled to East Germany before the Wall came down, and made many friends there.

It was a personal concern of mine not only to help the people - my friends - there, but also to do something that improved the situation. For example, after the Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, I volunteered to organize seminars on topics that the people in East Germany weren't able to have been exposed to - rhetoric, how to make a newspaper, how to make radio reports, etc.

How did you, as a West German, become one of the speakers in the last official East German government?

I became one of the government's speakers because, in the seminars I taught, there were participants who became ministers and secretaries in this new government. One of them - (Cordula) Schubert, East German minister for youth and sports - gave me a call and said, I was in your seminar and wanted to ask if you would be my spokesperson.

I said yes, and now I'm a little bit proud of the fact that I'm the first and last West German to have worked in the East German government, under East German conditions.

You've given seminars on journalistic skills in former East Germany. What were the biggest hurdles in the area of journalism at that time and have they been overcome?

The biggest hurdle was to communicate to the people who wanted to go into journalism, what responsible journalism actually was. It wasn't reprinting telegrams from East German politicians like (Erich) Honecker, but free reporting. It was important to prepare a report in such a way that people could appropriately absorb it and evaluate it.

The questions of free media were: How do you distinguish between news and commentary, what belongs in a news report, and what is a news report or a feature? How do you make an attractive newspaper layout? How do you construct a radio report so that people listen? Those were the main things that the people there couldn't be aware of because they'd never been taught them.

It was a problem connected to the democracy deficit in East Germany; the people there were never able to read a real newspaper, like we know in free democracies, and these principles needed to be passed on to them.

What role did the media play in the reunification process after 1990?

Today, as a professor of journalism, I say that the media is there to report what is. If they want to comment or judge, then they should do that in editorials.

But, in the first place, it's important for people to be informed and then form their own opinions from this information. It was extremely important during the reunification process to explain to the people - both in the West and the East - exactly what was happening. What did it mean that East Germany joined the Federal Republic of Germany on Oct. 3, 1990? Those are words that could create fear: East Germany joins.

It was the responsibility of the media to explain to people what that meant and what the advantages and even the disadvantages were - and it was also the media's responsibility to restore people's trust, so that they could believe what they read in the newspaper.

How would you assess the media currently in the eastern part of Germany? Has it become similar to the media in western Germany?

No, it hasn't. In eastern Germany, I've seen that there are many people working in journalism who have never been trained in it. It's not a profession that requires a certificate, like bakers or electricians. Anyone can become a journalist. Anyone who writers a letter to the editor can call himself a journalist, and that's how some of the newspaper articles look that I read. It upsets me when I'm in eastern Germany, in the year 2009, that journalists there still aren't able to separate commentary from news.

That would annoy me in western Germany, too, though. The standards have to be kept, but they aren't always fulfilled. And that's pretty scary.

Interview: Kate Bowen

Editor: Sean Sinico