Obituary for the reporter Peter Wüst: No prototype – media

When the drama from the summer of 1988 was retold on Netflix last year, through the documentary Gladbeck by Volker Heise, there you saw him again: Peter Wüst, the blue light reporter. At some point in his early forties, Wüst sat in the back seat next to hostage-taker Hans-Jürgen Rösner during the kidnapper’s odyssey through Germany and Holland. Gun in hand, he gave him an interview. Wüst wasn’t the only journalist who got so close to the gangsters. That was collective crazy, said a colleague of Wüst 20 years later.

On the one hand, the hostage drama is seen today as a textbook example of the fatal amateurism of the police, who only ever followed the kidnappers to their national borders. And on the other hand, for a fatal crossing of boundaries by media representatives, who not only reported, but also intervened in what was happening, which satisfied Rösner and Degowski in their need to be two very important people. Two young people died.

Peter Wüst’s long career as a reporter meant much more than his interviews with the Gladbeck kidnappers. Discovered in an exhibition in Leipzig one of his reporter colleagues from Schleswig-Holstein nevertheless a photo of Wüst, signed with the words: “Prototype of the sensational journalist”. As is the case with alleged prototypes, they cannot do justice to a human life. Peter Wüst, born in 1946, was the chief photo editor of the early 1980s Picture in Hamburg, then freelance reporter and later head of news at Radio Schleswig-Holstein. In 1992 he became chief reporter at RTL, reported on the Yugoslav war and was driving the car in which the SZ editor Egon Scotland was sitting when he was shot by a sniper. Scotland and Wüst had been looking for another colleague in the Croatian village of Jukinac, who, contrary to an agreement, had not contacted her.

Wüst remained true to his life as a reporter in northern Germany. He died in Bad Oldesloe on February 18 after a serious illness.