Moving speech: Marcel Reif in the Bundestag on Wednesday
Photo: dpa/Michael Kappeler
When Marcel Reif finished his speech at the Bundestag’s Holocaust memorial hour on Wednesday, the professional moderator’s voice sounded fragile: “Be a human being!” He passed on this formative sentence from his Jewish father to the members of the Bundestag and their guests . Shoah survivor Leon Reif’s simple yet profound maxim applies to many situations in life – as a reminder, as a warning, as advice or even as a reprimand: “Be a human being!”
In his speech, Marcel Reif, who was born in Wałbrzych (Poland) in 1949, also thanked his father for his wise silence: Grandparents, uncles and aunts had been murdered by their fellow human beings, but Leon Reif didn’t say a word about it to Marcel and his siblings. Not in Wałbrzych, not in Israel, where the family emigrated in 1956, and not in Kaiserslautern, where the family finally settled in 1957. The Reif children grew up in happiness. Without the burden of suspecting a perpetrator in every neighbor.
Marcel Reif became a political journalist at ZDF. When he didn’t get the position of London correspondent he was hoping for in 1984, he went to ZDF Sport in a huff and became the country’s most popular sports reporter. Because of his cleverness, the features section was at his feet, sometimes “uncritically,” like he was once revealed to the “Spiegel”: “When I shouted ‘Ui, ui, ui!’ after a nice attack, everyone patted me on the shoulder the next day.”
In 1994 he went to RTL, from 1999 to 2016 he worked for Sky. Today the 74-year-old can be seen regularly on Bild-TV. Although he has been a Swiss citizen since 2013, he is still one of the most famous television faces in Germany. Since Wednesday, people think they know him even better: the man Marcel Reif.
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