She wasn’t actually allowed to become a journalist. The father had forbidden it because journalism comes “right after the circus,” he said, so it wasn’t for the daughter. Isabel Mühlfenzl told this story again and again in interviews. She was born in Frontenhausen in Lower Bavaria in 1927 and was intended to become a chartered accountant, studied business administration and received her doctorate. Until one day she accompanied an acquaintance from Bayerischer Rundfunk to an interview. He introduced her as a new colleague, and she was also allowed to edit the radio report. It was so well received that BR Mühlfenzl wanted to keep it. That was it with the career as an auditor.
The journalist has now died, the BR confirmed on Thursday, after an eventful professional life. As relatively easy as it was to start out in journalism, it was difficult afterwards: As a woman, she was told in the late 1950s, she would have no chance in the business editorial department. At “Frauenfunk” she was supposed to do household issues, which bored her. So Mühlfenzl annoyed her boss at the time and became an editor in the business department of the BR in 1961 – the first woman ever in this function.
Her boss was Rudolf Mühlfenzl, she married him in 1964 and had a daughter with him in 1966. This hardly slowed her down professionally, Mühlfenzl specialized in foreign issues, in business and politics. She met Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Arab sheiks and in 1964 became the first woman ever to interview Che Guevara.
She writes books and teaches at universities in the USA
In 1970 Mühlfenzl switched from radio to television, where she moderated programs such as the “Telekolleg Economics”, “Plusminus” and “Blickpunkt Wirtschaft” until the early 1990s. Mühlfenzl repeatedly had teaching assignments at universities in Great Britain and the USA, where, as she said, it was always much easier as a working woman than in Germany. She wrote books about the world economy and took over the management of the business department of BR television at the end of the 1980s.
Isabel Mühlfenzl’s life path shows the enormous resistance that women in journalism were exposed to for a long time. For example, at the beginning of her career she was not allowed to record her own contributions herself, “you can’t hear a female voice in business matters”, she told the SZ in 2018. Interviewees repeatedly mistook her for the assistant, and once a politician in pajamas opened the door for her. She remained undeterred.
Privately too: in 2015, Mühlfenzl and her daughter bought the old station building in Hechendorf near Lake Starnberg, where she lived with her family. She wanted to renovate it simply because she didn’t want to sit idly by and watch the old building deteriorate any longer. Isabel Mühlfenzl died on July 25, 2022 at the age of 94.