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Which Dictums for Action Emerge out of Disinformation? The transfer of foreign voices, which the local media tends to ignore or suppress, as well as the intelligent engagement with what is different – this is the basic concern of all cultural exchange. For "relations," Ines Kappert spoke with Roger Willemsen about current practices in the German media landscape, local perspectives on countries abroad, and attempts to form counter public spheres. With "Willemsens Woche" and the "Schweizer Literaturclub," Roger Willemsen became one of the most successful TV hosts of all the German-speaking countries. In the meantime, he has conducted over 2,000 interviews and published an astounding 27 books in the last 20 years. In 2006, two publications from Willemsen provoked heated discussion: Afghanische Reise, a travelogue about Afghanistan shortly after the country’s first democratic elections, and a collection of interviews entitled Hier spricht Guantánamo, the first interviews with released innocent prisoners to be published in Germany.
Ines Kappert (I.K.):You begin Afghanische Reise with a few preliminary considerations: one of the dictums being that each journey necessarily begins with oneself. Is there not a contradiction here between your plea that we should open up and expose ourselves to the unfamiliar, the strange, not the least so as to learn, and this concentration on oneself? How would you describe the relationship between this focus on the self, which perhaps even slips into vanity, and the commitment to provide a forum for voices which are largely ignored in Germany?
Roger Willemsen (R.W.):I could simply say that it’s a stopgap move by someone who, once faced with a country, finds that it is absolutely unthinkable to describe a country in a situation like the one I found myself in. Because I lack the necessary knowledge. I have no idea at all or it’s all too much to handle. Inasmuch, one has to say that I cut back on the objectivity of my report, and I do this from the outset as I did, for example, in my book Deutschlandreise, by prefacing my report with a Russian saying: "He lies like an eyewitness." But I decided to do things differently in Afghanische Reise and said to myself: no, there’s an eye of a needle through which I want to thread this journey, and, that is to say, something objective does actually crystallize in the subjective. There are certain things, even what’s sentimental, which belong to the objective reality of Afghanistan; for example, a kite seen from a refugee camp. Such an image has no claim to furnish an accurate picture, but it can claim to be true. As strange as it may seem, this is actually the greater hope. When couched in these terms, there was no other option but to write in a subjective poly-perspectivism, one which encompasses the Taliban and the General alike – the camel herdsman, the young boy playing football, the young girl playing football, or the woman working as human rights campaigner or constitutional lawyer.
I.K.:I had the impression that you wanted to give your interview partners as much freedomas possible and largely hold back your own interpretations.
R.W.:That’s true. For example, when I’m sitting opposite a village elder in Afghanistan and ask, "When will there be peace?" he makes it clear to me that my question is a little too meddlesome and that he’d rather talk about his cattle and how many calves he has first. And half an hour later I ask: "And peace? What do you think?" He says: "You ask questions a president has to answer, but I’m jobless." At that point, one realizes: oh, this will take awhile. Then you ask more questions about the cattle, and the orchard, and the almond crop, etc. And after another half an hour has passed, he may then answer the same question, and this is what actually happened: "You have the timepiece, we have time." And that’s the sentence we’ve been effectively working towards for an hour. The value of investigative questions in Afghanistan is completely different from those of the West. One has to acquire a feeling on the ground for what is defenseless or exposes your interview partner’s defenselessness.
I.K.:For your interviews with five of the some 200 prisoners released from Guantánamo, a number of critics have accused you of an inflated vanity that overshadows the political content…
R.W.:… yes, what’s being touted by the media is just a load of rubbish. In the case of the interviews, the only disgrace I’ve brought upon the media is simply the fact that I did the book and was the first person in Germany to talk with released prisoners, and this is noticeable everywhere. It’s embarrassing just how the media was able to ignore me and how they couldn‘t look at the book for what it is. Usually I always think, just get on with it and do it, it’s not that important [what others say], so fucking what, but when it concerns something like Guantánamo, I would have thought that…then they all say for once, we don’t need to praise it, just to present it at the beginning. If I wanted to be pretentious though, I could say that a couple of people have risked their lives for this book. Truly. And then you have to sit back and watch on as the Thüringer Allgemeine has the gall to ask: "How do you know that they are innocent?" Four years of torture, released by the Americans because they were found to be innocent, and then the Thüringer Allgemeine comes along and demands that we explain to them the innocence of these people. What one sees from this example is that a lack of passion is in fact an index of professionalism in journalism.
I.K.:What is striking in both the Guantánamo interviews and the Afghanistan travelogue is how you pose your interview partners very simple questions.
R.W.:Yes. The questions I ask are not brilliant. Anybody could have asked them.
I.K.:Is asking simple questions also a strategy for gaining a place for complex issues in a German media landscape so oriented towards simplicity?
R.W.:That’s once again twofold. In the case of the Guantánamo book, what was required, besides the basic research that every interview demands, was something else: empathy. This means that I must be able to dissect a life and the path taken into the smallest possible tangible units. In this way, I am told things which the prisoner would otherwise never confide. This means: make it concrete. Translate the fate of a group into this distinctive individual fate. This is possible using the form of the simple question. In Afghanistan things are different. There the questions are determined initially by weighing up the ability of my interview partner to abstract. In some cultural contexts I can’t simply ask: what’s the point of your work? Because the concept of the point here won’t be understood. Or it won’t be understood how one could bring these two concepts together. I can’t ask a child, "what’s your favorite game?" if the child doesn’t know the difference between playing and field work or tending the flock. In this respect, I have to first extract myself out of my own nomenclature and the ways of thinking typical of my cultural group and ask myself: how can I liberate my outlook so that it is still cogent in transgressing this one cultural area and capable of communicating? That is the real challenge. But I wouldn’t rate either too highly. It is just a little technique; it isn’t something that I have appropriated for such a purpose, but it rather conforms to an interest in basic communication and the permanent search for what can be asked and what can be answered. How can I avoid embarrassing my interview partner?
I.K.:You’ve said that when you want to experience something abroad, then you have to liberate your own outlook from familiar cultural codes. But how does that transfer back function? Do you follow a catalogue of basic rules for the "home tie" when the unfamiliar is to be presented to the local public?
R.W.:As a rule, I have to abandon specific codifications for an answer which we have, for example those of psychology. For then I would interpret the statement of a camel herdsman in the Kunduz steppe, although this interpretation is ultimately opaque. I know nothing about the psychological makeup of a camel herdsman, and I should take care not to translate a flicker of emotion on his face into some form of social kitsch. To find access to the unfamiliar and the return to the familiar – this eventually works when following the principle of the analogical. For everyone understands dying, understands going on a journey, understands a country road. On the other hand, it is also a matter of reduction, reducing what then is imprecating, or archaic, or strange and withdrawn. At the same time though, I have to also cope with the reverse. I also have to be able to say that I have met people who live, if you want to put it this way, in a poem. They live from the ability to draw something from the purest spring water, which inspires them with a metaphoric that is completely strange to us. They can speak about almonds or the bend of a rice grain in such a way that we would say: in a soap opera, let’s say the "Lindenstraße," this would be the sign of a hysterical man. But in Afghanistan it is the unfolding of a deeply charitable manliness. However, if we look at the pictorial language generally used in the German media for Afghanistan, then it’s comprised of gutted rail compartments, burqas, and Old Testament-like patriarchs who play with a calf in their midst.
I.K.:They’re the rules of the game for evoking exoticism.
R.W.:Exactly. Exoticism in these different forms, reserved for Afghanistan. And the aim must be to fracture such forms. For clichés and prejudice are entwined with one another: one always emerges out of the other.
I.K.:When you look back on the last ten, fifteen years of your journalistic work and your television career, what has changed in the German media landscape?
R.W.:In the years covered by my career, or the path I have taken through the media, the parceling of the world has become increasingly pronounced. I could say, the television-shaped surfaces have gotten smaller, while the types of images situated there have become more uniform. Without thinking twice, RTL news – which one shouldn’t really call it, for that it is rather a news show – views a cow rescued from a river in America as a newsworthy topic. And even the serious news programs show only a limited interest in what’s going on overseas. As the Germans became involved in Somalia, Walter Michler published a study called Weißbuch Afrika, which examined how many minutes from the main news programs of ZDF and ARD were devoted to sub-Sahara Africa. The basis was 1,125 program minutes. The result: a whole 1.7 minutes dealt with sub-Sahara Africa, which today encompasses 46 states with 495 million inhabitants.
I.K.:Are there any movements countering this "conservative turn"? Can you discern any places in the media landscape from where a countermovement is beginning to emerge?
R.W.:Leftist and liberal journalism is largely dead. The form corporate concentration has taken has led to a situation in which all kinds of political opinions are fixed for a host of newspapers. The Springer corporation fixed in advance how its media group was to approach the Gulf War. And as long as Der Spiegel produces the television program of the Bild-Zeitung, and Herr Aust, who is not even allowed to write in his own news magazine, joins forces with Herr Diekmann to rail against the orthographic reform of the German language…one has to say that these kind of alliances clearly reveal that there is no spirit of contradiction, no critical distance, no analysis, nothing. Instead there are fixed agreements about, for example, the outcome of elections.
I.K.:Is that why you have left television?
R.W.:One reason. For 15 years, it was the principle of the program that each critic should present a new publication he or she was passionate about. One day, we were instructed to review a 700-page tome by a sitcom author for Swiss television. I thought, life is really too short and precious. But as far as the assault on journalistic independence is concerned, I couldn’t be more disillusioned. And the way people attach such importance to what the media does is quite bizarre.
I.K.:Not only "people" take the media to be massively important. In the field of culture as well, the success of projects or initiatives is measured ultimately by their reception in the media. And practically no attention is paid to how a live audience or a readership, etc., responds.
R.W.:Of course. The all-domineering question is always: can I turn this into a news item? The media is drunk on its own self-importance! There is not one single media-critical magazine on German television that merits the name. It beggars belief that such a form of self-reflection is not possible. Accordingly, the alternative public sphere has retreated to the Internet. And there the conspiracist’s imagination flourishes, and that’s enjoyable in its own way. I enjoy reading BILDblog. But I no longer believe that the media can change, I no longer believe that one can achieve change through the media. Let’s take a look back: who was on the just side before wars broke out, or who was ever on the just side in times of tense social conflict? The happy few. Not the corporations, not the whole ex cathedra hacks, and not the editorial writers, who in their opinionated obstinacy hold onto their prejudices and, above all, their views.
I.K.:Would you go along with drawing a distinction between the public and the market-dominating media?
R.W.:That’s how it is. The Iraq war was supported by the majority of newspapers, but not by the public.
I.K.:Which doesn’t ennoble the public per se.
R.W.:No, that’s right. It’s important that you mention that. At best it makes the public independent of the publicized opinion. Another indication of this would be the massive debacle suffered by just about the whole spectrum of the German media during the last federal election. When practically every journalist in Germany, with only a few exceptions, agrees that Angela Merkel has to become chancellor, and the outcome is a stalemate, and this after dramatic opinion polls and articles which were nothing other than demolition jobs on the Red-Green coalition, and the conservatives manage nothing more than a stalemate – then one has to say, hats off to the German people, who all stayed calm amidst the agitation. But conversely, one may not of course believe that… I could now take a detour more out of the way than I actually need to and say, "Take a look at the German attempts to come to terms with the past, its boundless lack of commitment and obligation, as well as its repeated rearrangement of well-known material." And what does one see? How noncommittal this coming to terms with the past is when we are not even able to identify existing camps for what they are, namely, as acts of transgression. Spaces initially developed in terms of the rule of law are rendered into something that is no longer legal and where the rule of law no longer holds, and about which it is possible to lie. And that this process doesn’t end with Guantánamo is clear when we know about Bagram and Kandahar, about the CIA interrogations in Bulgaria and Romania.
I.K.:Does this mean: stop paying attention to the media? Because it makes no sense? Form your own partial counter or alternative publicspheres?
R.W.:I wouldn’t be as sweeping as that. Of course, there are some good journalists, and, of course, there are good foreign correspondents. Of course, one can read the taz in terms of its good correspondent network and in this point it is entirely credible. Nonetheless, the effort needed to decontaminate newspapers, and this begins with the themes they prescribe, is greater than ever before. Let’s take a simple example. Somewhere I read a single column piece entitled "The FDP presents Afghanistan reconstruction plan." You read it and browse further through the paper. And then you think: wait a minute, is every splinter party in Burkina Faso going to Afghanistan and presenting a reconstruction plan? And how are we to envisage how this plan came about? Something like this: FDP experts convene and say, ok, now it’s time to tackle the problems of roads in Afghanistan…. What do they think they’re doing?
I.K.:I think it’s better if we don’t…
R.W.:But that’s depraved Dadaism, that’s gaga. And we read such a piece, and it is sent to and spread by the news agencies, and the most sensible thing to do with this item would be: to pass over it. I have to ceaselessly empty out the newspaper, and I am forced to say, "That’s not important and this as well, and why are they saying this, and why are they saying that. Don’t rely on this comment, don’t go down the road this comment is taking; it’s based on false premises." In the moment when one is informed or competent in even only one area, for me that would perhaps be Afghanistan, then you suddenly ask yourself: what are the Afghanis actually doing to convey an image of their country in the newspapers? Where are the local experts and what are are their opinions about their country? The really important question is: which dictums for action emerge out of disinformation? And, above all, is information there to produce more than orientation? That’s when the issue of relevance comes into play, an issue typical for the generation of 1968, but for me it’s becoming ever more decisive. I simply have to ask myself: what do I have to know? What actually serves to substantiate my standpoints or guiding my actions? Or what has value as orientation and what can I pass on? But all this is becoming increasingly selective, increasingly difficult, and I’m increasingly drawn to reading newspapers from abroad. For example, I’m an avid reader of The Guardian. There, freedom of opinion is interpreted differently than here in Germany. That’s simply how it is.
I.K.:Herr Willemsen, thank you very much for your time.
R.W.:A pleasure.
Roger Willemsen |
relations e.V. / Blücherstraße 37 A / D-10961 Berlin / Telefon: +49 (0)30-61 65 72-40 / Fax: +49 (0)30-61 65 72-50 / 