What other people notice about you is strangely unpredictable. Therefore, on this Thursday on the phone, Christian Sievers is initially perplexed about the question of why he wears the wedding ring on his middle finger. He says he has never thought about it, and the ring often wanders from finger to finger. “My mother always says I’m way too nervous.”
It is correct: when Christian Sievers appears on the screen in the “Today” news at 7pm on ZDF, then he brings across a very fine kind of dynamic. Regardless of what the world situation looks like, Sievers has something resolute in mind, sometimes paired with grimness, sometimes with a prancing restlessness, but often with a cheerful note. Even when he – a job he still has – presents the election projections on the Mainz broadcaster: With him you can withstand the global situation, that radiates his whole appearance.
Perhaps he can convey all of this because Sievers has dealt with crises and disasters up close: As a long-time Middle East correspondent for ZDF, but also as a reporter after the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. To get there at all from Lerchenberg in Mainz, Sievers tells on the phone that he and a colleague camped for two days at Frankfurt Airport in the departure hall until another plane left and took them with them. In the days that followed, he reported in reports about the city in a state of emergency – for the “Morgenmagazin”, where he worked at the time: “As a late riser, I had the early bird card for eleven years of my life.”
With “Today” at 7 pm it will stop next week
In the ARD, by the way, the Washington correspondent Claus Kleber moderated on September 11, 2001, who later switched to ZDF’s “Today Journal” – and which Sievers, now 51, will inherit at the end of the year if Kleber stops. So it happened that Sievers moderated his last “Today” program on Thursday next week. In the “Heute-Journal” he has always helped out, and in future he will take turns with Marietta Slomka every week.
Everything can change suddenly, as Sievers once summed up his experience as a journalist in the Middle East in an interview. Not suddenly, but gradually, his role on ZDF has changed. When he started as a representative at “Heute-Journal” in 2013, he was also head of the ZDF studio in Tel Aviv and commuted every few months. In 2014 he became the presenter of the “Heute” news and moved back to Germany entirely.
If you want, you can find interesting parallels with Sievers’ predecessor Kleber: Both studied law, both came to the radio via Südwestfunk – a predecessor of SWR – and both moved to the USA. At 27, Sievers had the prospect of a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Society if he could find a station that would take him. That was then done by local broadcaster WTNH-Channel 8 in New Haven, Connecticut. Sievers reported about old women with lots of animals or daily problems with garbage collection. He had “learned a lot” there, about American life, but above all going out and reporting, and speed – “US journalism is often ruthless in its competition.”
You can hear that he likes to remember this time, and it fits in with the fact that he wants to be “still enthusiastic about the topics of this world” in everyday studio life. He doesn’t want to hear about big announcements: “I’m not the new Claus Kleber. You can’t clone Claus, but you can learn a lot from him.” For his last “Today” broadcast next week, he already announces that there is “guaranteed no show”. But let’s see where the ring will be on that day.