On the death of journalist Gerd Ruge.
Russia, USA, China – for a political journalist it is an important characteristic of his cosmopolitanism to have worked temporarily as a correspondent in at least one of these huge countries. Gerd Ruge, born in Hamburg in 1928, was in Washington, Moscow and Beijing when global political decisions were being prepared and made. More than on power and its surroundings, however, his journalistic gaze was always directed at the people who were directly affected by it.
After being the first German ARD journalist to be accredited in Moscow between 1956 and 1959, he shot a legendary report on the socially divided USA after the murder of the preacher and civil rights activist Martin Luther King in 1968. Ruges recorded haunting images cautiously curious gaze, not least of all, the shattered hopes of an entire country in the peaceful overcoming of racism.
For Gerd Ruge, the US capital was not just a place of work, it was also an important family station. His children Boris and Elisabeth Ruge, who later became the publisher of Berlin Verlag, grew up in Washington for the first decade of their lives before they returned to Germany at the beginning of the 1970s, where Ruge temporarily took over the management of the WDR’s capital studio in Bonn. But he soon moved away again, on behalf of the daily newspaper “Die Welt”, he relocated to Beijing, where between 1973 and 1976 he reported on the rising world power.
Initiated the “Weltspiegel”
Despite his professional excursion into newspaper journalism, Gerd Ruge was a television man – and stayed that way. Many political broadcast formats bear his stamp. Together with the later government spokesman Klaus Bölling, he initiated the “Weltspiegel” in 1963, which gave the ARD correspondents the opportunity to report on the country and its people beyond the daily news. At the beginning of the eighties, Ruge moderated the political magazine “Monitor” in a sympathetic nasal voice, which, due to its supposed left-wing bias, has repeatedly been the subject of party-political hostility.
Gerd Ruge was anything but a zealot. Often appearing in a denim shirt and sweater, he saw his job primarily in getting others to speak instead of trumpeting an opinion himself. Because of this, he was not unconcerned. Ruge founded the German section of Amnesty International together with the journalist Carola Stern as early as 1961, and he was also a member of the PEN Center Germany.
Gerd Ruge received the greatest recognition from the public for his reports abroad, which he had already produced as a retiree. With the loving gaze of an old friend, he traveled once more through those countries where his career had started and reported on people who tried to cope with social conditions beyond the general political weather conditions. Gerd Ruge died on Friday at the age of 93 in Munich.
