It shaped our view of Russia, China and the USA. For more than 60 years Gerd Ruge was on the road to explain the world. The ARD reporter worked under conditions that are hard to imagine today.
For decades he gave television viewers insights into foreign countries – when many countries were still really foreign because there was no mass tourism and no internet there.
To do this, he traveled tirelessly. “Gerd Ruge on the go” – that was the name of the ARD series for which he delivered international reports after his retirement. This title also describes his life.
Ruge, who died on Friday evening at the age of 93 in Munich, was not a mad reporter, but a calm one. The fact that he didn’t stay in the same place for long was – as he said – due to the interesting topics that attracted him: “I don’t think it was restlessness. It is curiosity, the interest to see what is going on in a country. “
Calm approach
His films don’t race either. “A real Ruge can be recognized by the calm and serene way of looking at things,” said the former ZDF correspondent Dirk Sager, who knew Ruge from Moscow. “You have to let the pictures stand long enough for the viewer to get a feel for what they see,” said Ruge, outlining his way of telling stories in pictures. In times of Twitter & Co. it has become more difficult for correspondents to «first clearly compare content with reality». Because: “Rumors are boiling up much faster these days.”
When Adenauer negotiated
If there had already been Twitter in 1955, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow would have been different. For the then Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano shot out of the negotiating room and called out to the correspondents: “Insolence, unbearable, the negotiations are over. We are leaving!” One of the journalists was Ruge.
In his “Politische Memories”, which appeared on his 85th birthday, Ruge wrote: “Only the poor telephone connections saved me from creating a false report, as it happens today within minutes, seconds, via radio or television and would circulate through the internet. ” The negotiations were not over: Moscow finally gave its word of honor for the return of thousands of prisoners of war to Germany as soon as diplomatic relations had been established.
He was interested in people
Ruge preferred to put people beyond celebrity and glamor at the center of his reports. As early as 1963, it was not archive images that shaped his film on the tenth anniversary of Stalin’s death, but the testimony of contemporary witnesses. He stayed true to this approach – as well as his mumbling speaking style. For example in the film he contributed to the ARD three-part series about the Rocky Mountains in 2006. Ruge only needed a weekly market and he found amazing life stories: “People who are very strange, but who consider themselves completely normal.”
It wasn’t easy for him to get so close to people. “I would never do it if I didn’t have a report to write about. Then you have a reason. And people are already noticing that you are interested in their life and not just want information from them. ” He made the major political developments clear through their individual stories and fates.
“When something important happened, you could always trust him,” wrote the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” about Ruge on his 90th birthday. In 1968, for example, he reported from the USA on the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. He experienced glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev and the 1991 coup that Boris Yeltsin opposed on the tank.
He moderated «Monitor»
However, he did not name these world events as the personal highlight of his professional life, “but that I had the chance very early in Moscow, namely in 1956, to get to know the writer Boris Pasternak and through him to get to a Russia that was completely different from that of the newspapers and the glossy brochures. “
Gerd Ruge was born in Hamburg in 1928. As a 16-year-old soldier, he was lucky enough to survive the final phase of World War II. At 20 he was an editor at Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR). In 1950 he reported on Yugoslavia, then from Korea and Indochina. In 1956 he went to Moscow as an ARD correspondent, and in 1964 to the USA. In 1970 he took over the management of the WDR studio in what was then the federal capital of Bonn, in 1972 he went to China for “Die Welt”, and in 1977 again to Moscow for ARD.
From 1981 onwards he moderated the political magazine “Monitor”, and in 1984/85 he was head of WDR television. “That had to be done, but I was always happiest as a foreign correspondent.” Which is why he returned to the Soviet Union in 1987. Ruge, who was married three times, spent his retirement in Munich, his adopted home.
He was critical of the “black and white thinking” of many German viewers – as he said – and blamed the media for complicity: Some reports on human rights demos in Russia or Egypt gave the impression that the majority of the population there were fighting against one government perceived as despotic. The reality is much more complicated.
Ruge has campaigned personally for human rights, was a founding member and first chairman of Amnesty International Germany, but: “I tried to avoid making reporting on a country’s politics dependent on one’s own ideas about human rights.”