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“I want to let go” – Ranga Yogeshwar turns 65
Ranga Yogeshwar turns 65 years old. photo
© Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa
Ranga Yogeshwar was one of the first science journalists on German television – and one of the first non-white presenters. He is now actively working on his own loss of importance.
In the summer of 2021, the house was also destroyed Ranga Yogeshwar in Hennef near Bonn flooded. The trained experimental physicist first sat down and calculated the amount of water that had plagued his valley. “That was probably my way of processing the trauma,” says the science journalist for the German Press Agency. Processing through penetration based on numbers and facts – that suits him.
Ranga Yogeshwar, who died on May 18th. Turning 65, he hosted the WDR science magazine “Quarks” for more than 25 years. In the meantime, he is “working on his own loss of meaning,” as he puts it. He still gives lectures, but you only see him on television when he is invited to a talk show. He seems very satisfied. “I want to let go. If I can sometimes be a mentor to younger people, I think that’s really cool. I’m happy.”
Childhood in India
Yogeshwar was not only one of the first science journalists to become really well known, he was also one of the first non-white presenters on German television. His father was an Indian engineer married to a Luxembourger. He himself has Luxembourg citizenship, but spent a large part of his childhood in India. “We lived in southern India, near Bangalore, a city with 400,000 inhabitants at the time. It is now a megacity with eleven million inhabitants.”
The color of his skin is the reason he has lived with threats for more than 30 years. Sometimes more sometimes less. “But I never felt like a victim. My attitude was always: Just do it, normality will come by itself at some point. When I started, I was pretty much alone. When I look at the program now, I think: It’s possible!”
Yogeshwar has repeatedly positioned himself politically; a few weeks after the start of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine, he was one of the authors of an open letter in which celebrities appealed to Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz not to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons. The first signatories also included the women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer, the writer Martin Walser, who has since died, the cabaret artist Gerhard Polt and the singer Reinhard Mey.
Yogeshwar began his journalistic career in the early 1980s, at the time of the NATO double decision and the Bonn Hofgarten demonstration. It was the great time of the German peace movement, and he was part of it. His first book was called “Responsibility for Peace.” Many of those who demonstrated back then now support military and financial aid for Ukraine and see this as a service to peace because they say that Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to do so in the event of a victory over Ukraine. Yogeshwar sees it differently.
Appeal for a different conflict grammar
“I definitely don’t understand Putin,” he assures. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. But I know something else: In the world of tomorrow we will have to come to terms with much larger countries such as China, which are not Western-style democracies. In this multipolar world, we will We can’t solve problems by going all-out on conflict. We’ve seen what happens in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. I’m convinced that it’s time to develop a different conflict grammar “That neither side – neither Russia nor Ukraine with Western support – can win the war. It just goes on like it did in the First World War. And that’s absurd, that’s terrible.”
The issue that concerns Yogeshwar the most is climate change. He is self-sufficient for eight months of the year when it comes to mobility, heating and electricity. “For me, this is also an experiment: What can be done, what is possible? The idea behind it is to keep pushing it forward. But I don’t want to point the finger at anyone. Everyone has to decide for themselves what is possible.”
Yogeshwar and his wife have four children and four grandchildren. One of his lectures is entitled “Emil’s World”, named after his eldest grandson. “The perspective behind it is – firstly: This generation will experience the next century. And secondly: We like to talk about the future – ‘in the year so and so we will be CO₂-free’ – for this generation that will be the present. It’s one thing , thinking about the future as an intellectual game, and being emotionally involved about children and grandchildren is another thing that brings with it a special truth and urgency.”