The renowned journalist and author Bettina Gaus has died. She was always looking for fixed points of view and was able to polarize – also at the Henri Nannen School of Journalism. An obituary from the former headmaster.
By Andreas Wolfers
A week before her death, Bettina Gaus was still teaching at the Henri Nannen School of Journalism. The 18 young women and men looked at the screens of their office computers in Hamburg, where Bettina could be seen. She sat on the sofa in her apartment in Berlin and explained the journalistic format that she loved most: the commentary.
In reality, that day was about something different, something much bigger: What does attitude mean in journalism? Bettina, however, did not use this worn, often misunderstood term, she would probably also have objected to exaggerating her teaching unit in such a way. Isn’t it possible a few grams less? In addition: You don’t talk about attitude, you exemplify it.
And so Bettina preferred to concentrate on the question of how pointed an opinion text can and should be, how explanatory, how balanced, how factual or hot-blooded. She quoted current texts from various media, she was audibly pleased with successful formulations, and she punished the unsuccessful ones with her way of emphasizing when reading aloud. If only nobody suspects that this illness would have managed to somehow soften it in the event that a sloppily worded comment got in the way, a confused argument, a feeling disguised as a train of thought. She hated that. Then she dismantled the sentences, let the hot air out and thus exposed them to ridicule. The video conference lasted three hours. Bettina talked as quickly as always, she debated, she praised and distributed, she asked and countered. And in between she smoked. Actually everything as always.
Conclusive, quick-witted, fearless
Bettina Gaus, born in 1956, was the only child of Erika Gaus and Günter Gaus, a well-known journalist and diplomat. “At dinner we always discussed politics, what else?” She once said. Günter Gaus was editor-in-chief of “Spiegel”, then he switched to politics and in 1974, as an eloquent advocate of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, became the first permanent representative of the Federal Republic of Germany to the GDR. In 1981 he returned to journalism as a TV presenter and author. His books on German-German subjects became standard works. The writer Christoph Hein characterized Günter Gaus as “uncomfortable, unwavering and with integrity”.
Hein could have said the same about his daughter Bettina. Her politicized parents had shaped her, she had learned from childhood not to make it easy for herself in search of a point of view – and she had learned to defend this point of view, coherently and quick-witted, even if it did not fit into political camp thinking and sparked applause on the wrong side. This independence in thinking, the pleasure in literally inconsiderate argumentation, only obliges the logic and factual loyalty: She wanted to inspire the young people at the Henri Nannen School for this journalistic virtue, that was important to her – and it also made her irrepressible Fun.
In her search for fixed positions, the journalist Bettina Gaus has come a long way. Six years editor of Deutsche Welle, seven years East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, from 1996 to 2021 with the “taz”, as head of the parliamentary office in Bonn, then as political correspondent in Berlin, since April 2021 columnist with “Spiegel”. In between she traveled through the United States for three months and wrote a book about it, the psychogram of a contradicting nation. Three years later she crossed 16 African countries with a backpack, buses and shared taxis, and she called her book “The Underestimated Continent”.
Bettina Gaus was a fearless journalist. In many countries it means the fearlessness journalists need when they speak to the powerful. Germany is one of those countries where it can be much more risky to snub your own people, those who are normally like-minded. Bettina Gaus didn’t care who she disliked if she was sure of her demeanor. In 2020, when a “taz” columnist compared police officers with rubbish that belongs in a landfill, Bettina sharply criticized her in the same paper: “Respect for human dignity is non-negotiable, no matter who violates it. That’s why I’m going to write the column about the It is possible here, not to defend well outwardly and only criticize internally. That would be misunderstood solidarity. “
When in Thuringia an official from the Ministry of the Environment was demoted because he went on a (legal) elephant hunt in Botswana, Bettina Gaus jumped to his side. “I can’t understand how anyone can have fun shooting an elephant,” she wrote in her “taz” column “Power”. The official from Thuringia does not arouse sympathy. But he correctly followed the law in both countries. His transfer is not in order, he also has basic rights. “The legal system wasn’t just invented for nice people,” she concluded.
Two weeks ago she wrote her last column for “Spiegel”. In it she criticized how the office affairs of the fired “Bild” editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt were reported. “If consensual sexual relationships are generally classified as ‘abuse of power’, then those who are at the bottom of the professional hierarchy are incapacitated.” Behind such a view lies “a worldview in which women are unable to make a self-determined decision about who they want to go to bed with”.
“I don’t care about your attitude, I won’t judge you”
Bettina Gaus was able to polarize, even at the Henri Nannen School. Since 2009 she has trained all courses in the journalism school in comment writing. After the introduction, the students were given three hours to write a catchy opinion text on a given topic. “I don’t care about your attitude, I won’t judge it – but the way you justify it,” she said.
A few days later she returned with the edited texts. She discussed every comment with the course and examined every word for accuracy. One should comment on whether and when the media are allowed to out the sexual orientation of politicians. One student wrote that journalists had to weigh up whether the public interest in it was really big enough. Bettina Gaus noted next to the sentence: “Don’t write ‘big’ if you mean ‘justified’. And then please tell us what criteria we should use to judge it.”
Bettina enjoyed the feedback sessions. Then she sat at the front of the lecturer’s table, mostly propped up her right arm, her head tilted in the palm of her hand, and listened to a debate that she happily fueled herself, with pointed questions and precise, unadorned criticism. She did not hide how she despised laziness, clumsy parroting and resentment. She valued original theses – if you could justify them. And she liked quick-wittedness, the clever reply; I giggled happily at that.
She didn’t need to explain that even her harshest criticism shouldn’t be taken personally. You could tell the warm affection for her anyway. Bettina found every young woman and every young man who had decided on journalism to be really great. If at the end of a seminar the class rated all lecturers with points, Bettina always ended up in the top group.
Bettina Gaus has also invented a new teaching format for the Nannenschule: the obituary for a living person. Anyone who wants to portray a prominent person can do so by getting information from the Internet and combining it more or less intelligently. But if we imagine that the person has just died, a lot more intellectual effort is required for the text. Because there is no template on the Internet for assessing what this person has meant for his country, his generation or his industry. The challenge of summarizing this assessment on two sheets must be overcome alone.
For each obituary exercise, we let four celebrities die, men and women, good and bad people, and when preparing the course, Bettina always made the selection in an exuberant mood. It was just not allowed to be Germans, she found that disrespectful. You or a student could have met the person. We called Madonna, Elizabeth II and Pope Francis out of life, Silvio Berlusconi, Salman Rushdie, Marie Le Pen, Jane Fonda, Julian Assange and many others.
If she had the obituaries, there was no more arrogance. If someone hadn’t really done everything to try to think through a person’s life and understand his work, then Bettina saw herself downright personally hurt. Then she could dish out. Her damning conclusion under a text about Michelle Obama is here because Bettina is quoted in full as an example: “Do you find it really acceptable to write an obituary for Michelle Obama in which none of the following questions even arise: Who does she have provoked and with what? Did she embody a modern or a conventional role model? What is the meaning of the fact that she was black? Did she tend to split or reconcile the nation – and what did she actually want to achieve? Is she more in the tradition of Angela Davis or Susan Sonntag’s or Jaqueline Kennedy’s? Or are we assuming that our readers don’t know any of the three women? Sorry if the questions sound aggressive. But I’m reading the fourth obituary now. And someday a political classification would be quite nice … “
You could rely on Bettina Gaus. Also that she took a ten-minute break after every hour. Then she had to go to the balcony of the Nannen School to smoke. She mostly used the time out there to catch up on the latest gossip. Bettina Gaus loved gossip: from the course, the publishing house, our industry. She kept to the motto “Keep your ears open, shut your mouth”, and because she knew so many people and everyone knew about their secrecy, she must have learned an incredible amount of private stuff.
Bettina Gaus sat on the preliminary jury of the Henri Nannen Prize for seven years, two of which she was the spokesperson for the main jury. In the preliminary jury “Reportage and Documentation”, the final round of judging could take five hours. Bettina’s enthusiasm would have lasted longer. She loved to fillet texts, reveal subliminal intentions, identify research gaps and open questions. She found the award ceremony itself amusing. As long as she sat near a door to slip out to smoke in between.
The comment texts for the current course are now in her apartment in Berlin. The students will not get them back edited. You will also not see Bettina sitting on her sofa in a good mood, letting the air out of fluffy sentences, how she throws her hair back resolutely when she detects a carelessness or the judgment falls on a train of thought. But the attitude, what counts in journalism, was something that Bettina Gaus was able to convey to her last course.
The journalist and author Andreas Wolfers headed the Henri Nannen School of Journalism from 2007 to 2019.