Editor’s note: This portrait first appeared in a similar form in 2018 on the occasion of Gerd Ruge’s 90th birthday.
When Gerd Ruge came to the radio, there were still foreign countries. Like Yugoslavia, where the 22-year-old Ruge took his first steps as a foreign reporter in 1950, 68 years ago, a year after he joined the relatively young Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) as a journalist. Yugoslavia was practically on the doorstep, but back then it was just as much a different world, one that required a visa. Ruge has always been interested in this stranger. Wherever it seemed strange, he was at home. He has now died at the age of 93.
Today, when you can reach almost any place in the world within a foreseeable number of flight hours and broadcast from there, much of Ruge’s early life as a reporter appears to be from a very distant past. Nothing about the stranger is like it was when he started.
Only Gerd Ruge was there for a long time, as a witness to German radio history. In a statement on his 90th birthday in 2018, he emphasized the role of independent journalistic reporting. “In the years of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1960s in the USA, which was marked by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, and even before that in Tito’s Yugoslavia and in view of the tensions of the Korean War – in all of these arenas I work for the public service Seeing radio as an opportunity to report in a complex and in-depth manner, “he wrote, linking this to the appeal, the World mirror to maintain.
Of the World mirror is the format that he helped push in in 1963, that was often the platform for his stories and that miraculously still exists today. “In addition to getting the news quickly, sensible background journalism must also be guaranteed today,” Ruge then wrote, and somehow it hurts a bit that he even had to warn about such a thing.
If the reporter Gerd Ruge – here in Moscow in 1992 – wanted to get people to talk anywhere in the world, then sometimes the rather open question was enough for him: “And?”
Image: imago / teutopress
Today, when you can reach almost any place in the world within a foreseeable number of flight hours and broadcast from there, much of Ruge’s early life as a reporter looks like something from a very distant past.
Image: imago / teutopress
For a long time it was said that when Ruge appears on the telly, it is important. He was a mediator between the big world out there and the comparatively small Germany.
Image: imago / teutopress
Ruge was always a man for the background. This was mainly due to the fact that there was a lot of background for a very long time. Because not every falling rice sack in Longsheng appeared as a push message on smartphones all over the world, someone had to get out and get things into the German world. There was still something unknown to discover and to convey to the television viewers at home, and one of the best mediators of those years was called Gerd Ruge.
You can count endlessly what he has done and achieved, that he was a correspondent in Moscow and in the USA, that he was for a few years monitor moderated that he is one of the founders of the German section of Amnesty International, that he briefly acted as television editor-in-chief at WDR and in between he was unfaithful to public broadcasters and reported for the world from Beijing for a while. Despite the abundance, none of this describes the true work of this journalist, who for a long time was part of the basic equipment of German television furniture.
For a long time it was said that when Ruge appears on the telly, it is important. He was a mediator between the big world out there and the comparatively small Germany. Ruge was close when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered; he was in Moscow in 1991 when a coup was launched there. When something important happened, he could always be trusted. What he reported was true.
Ruge has never shied away from taking the uncomfortable route. When it got rocky, it got up to operating temperature. It was only after he retired in 1993 that he took it easy and turned to reporting from countries that were just close to his heart. It went to Siberia, to China, but also to South Africa and Afghanistan. These films all had something in common: the man who got out of a minibus somewhere in the pampas and held his blue microphone under the nose of the nearest resident. He would then ask what life is like, and occasionally one could not shake the impression that his question consisted of just one word: “And?”
While Federal Chancellor Brandt was having hours of conversation with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko in his villa in Bonn in June 1972 and the press was waiting for news, Ruge – then ARD TV studio manager – improvised an “interview” with Chancellor dog Bastian on the doorstep.
(Photo: Fritz Fischer / picture alliance / dpa)
He has often been accused of being journalistic naivete, and in fact, such an approach would have knocked any volunteer out on the ears. But with someone like Ruge, such accusations didn’t catch on because he remained a great opener to people throughout his activities. It was easy to talk in his presence. His counterpart always felt that someone was really interested in the matter, in the people, and was not just picking up o-tones. “In his films he always spoke to people on an equal footing, with a lot of respect and without vanity,” emphasized WDR director Tom Buhrow in a tribute to Ruge a few years ago.
It was hardly noticed that Ruge himself was not a great speaker. Whenever you talked to him, you always had to listen very carefully, because his clever remarks often turned into a violent mumbling. His mumbling was less due to carelessness or arrogance than to his modesty. Ruge was never one to make a fuss about himself.
The question arises of how critical judgments can still be made on television today
The last major work came on the screen at the end of 2006. Fritz Pleitgen, Klaus Bednarz and Gerd Ruge chose the Rocky Mountains as the object of their television research. The Big Three of WDR journalism strolled ambitiously through the American mountains, but they didn’t really find anything to be amazed at. Accordingly, this trilogy also seemed a bit like a swan song for the great reports from unknown worlds.
Television has also changed. Gerd Ruge recognized this early on and often warned that with all the progress, please also take care of the inner values of the medium. When he received the German television award for his life’s work far too late in 2014, he spoke of the debate about how television should be made during this time and how far one could still accommodate critical judgments – and there was real concern in his voice.
A few years later it became apparent in many forms that television, as Gerd Ruge knew it, belonged on the list of threatened species. Even in old age he warned the striving for better films, for better television. That is what Ruge stands for and that is what his name stands for even after his death.
The long Gerd Ruge Night, WDR, Saturday, October 16, 2021, from 9.45 p.m.