The journalist and author Peter Merseburger is dead. The German Press Agency learned this from family circles. Merseburger died on Tuesday at the age of 93 in Berlin. The former ARD correspondent and political publicist was one of the influential figures in the West German media landscape in the post-war period, for example in the 1960s and 1970s as moderator of the ARD magazine “Panorama”. His reports and comments triggered violent political reactions in the conservative camp.
In 1977, Merseburger went to Washington as an ARD correspondent. In 1982 he moved to East Berlin. In 1987 – almost two years before the fall of the Wall – he worked as an ARD correspondent in London. At the beginning of 1991, at the age of 63, Merseburger took early official retirement in order to continue working as a freelance journalist. He wrote highly acclaimed biographies about, among other things, the mirror-Founder Rudolf Augstein and SPD politician Willy Brandt.