“Descent is too deliberate. Sofie Häusler is not socially relegated, but made a shot drive through a targeted aisle, the markings of which could have been a saboteur. Someone who has a knack for dramaturgically accelerating the bad end.”
This is how Marie-Luise Scherer’s report “The state of being a helpless person” begins, which appeared in “Spiegel” in 1977 and for which she was awarded the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize. In it, Scherer describes the everyday life of an alcoholic in Hamburg. At the time, she could still write “drinker” without running the risk of linguistic stigmatization, and although she defied conventional ideas about the connection between gender and addictive behavior in depicting a woman’s alcoholism, she did not take her protagonist into political subversion exercises Service.
Contrary to what the first sentence suggests, her reprotage even turns out to be a story with an almost happy ending. With patient precision, Scherer traces how personal and social misery, family misery, private frustrations, and an inability to come to terms with the misery of everyday life can turn a hopeful and approachable person into a shadow of himself. But at the same time she shows how that shadow can turn into another person – not better, not purified, but someone who has learned something and changed as a result.
good style
The eulogies with which Marie-Luise Scherer’s work was repeatedly commended, and not only by colleagues, were always somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, they were a sincere appreciation of an author whose ability to combine graphic and thought, precise observation and imagination, was the result of hard work.
On the other hand, they have always been an expression of the need to rehabilitate a profession that has a reputation for being trivial, if not linguistically corrupt. Like few others, Scherer seemed to refute the widespread prejudice that those who write for money cannot write well and that good journalistic style is a contradiction in terms.
Therefore, in the course of her career, she was not only compared to Egon Erwin Kisch, but also to Walter Benjamin, for example, in whose tradition of literary physiognomy Friedmar Apel moved the author in an essay written in 2004 for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. Because the genre of reportage – not least promoted by the “Spiegel” itself – is suspected of mixing report and invention in an unfavorable way, journalists are particularly happy when, for once, a reporter receives literary consecration.
Without high school diploma and literary training
However, such exaggerations about the literary figure do not really fit in with Marie-Luise Scherer’s intellectual biography. Born on October 15, 1938 in Saarbrücken, without a high school diploma and no literary training, she gained her first professional experience in the still young Federal Republic at the Saarbrücker Zeitung, the Kölner Stadtanzeiger and the Berliner Morgenpost. The fact that the “Spiegel”, for which Scherer worked as a reporter from 1974 to 1998, gave her complete freedom in the content and form of her texts almost from the start was very unusual and was probably mainly due to a happy mood on the part of Rudolf Augstein.
Scherer’s legendary slowness – her sentence “Two good sentences in one day are a blessing” is often quoted – and her refusal to get involved in the rushed work rhythm of daily journalism were not due to literary-poetic ambitions associated with the genre of reportage would have been incompatible, but in this genre itself, which Scherer took more seriously than most.
If she often only provided the “Spiegel” with one or two reports a year, it was not due to a need to “decelerate”, but to a professional ethos that ruled out thoughtless improvisation as well as the linguistic feigning of authenticity. Scherer’s maxim that every sentence of a successful text must fit like a glove expressed the technical aspect of her self-image, which, however, was not limited to technical skills.
Scherer neither pursued a self-serving cult of facts, nor did she exploit the people she accompanied as a projection screen for her own views. Rather, their method was participation in reality, saturated with imagination, and the stranger this reality was, the higher the claim to do it justice.
A border crosser
The fact that Marie-Luise Scherer’s work belongs less to the tradition of the philosophical feuilleton in the style of Siegfried Kracauer or Walter Benjamin than to the genre of the imaginatively over-formed life report, to which particularly many female authors, such as Maxie Wander and Gabriele Goettle, made contributions, saw Hans Magnus Enzensberger most acutely, who since his 1972 historiographical prose text “The Short Summer of Anarchy” has repeatedly explored the border area between documentation and prose, between fiction and factuality. In 2004, Enzensberger Scherer made the volume “The Accordion Player. True Stories from Four Decades”, which brought together many of her important reports, known to a wider and demanding audience.
Since then, other reports have also been published in book form as a belated appreciation, including the text “Die Hundeborder” by Matthes & Seitz in 2013, which is based on a “Spiegel” report published in 1994 about the training and use of dogs to secure the GDR -Limit based. A special strength of Scherer’s texts lies in the fact that her reports are not exhausted in the reproduction of what is contemporary, but rather that what they record in the form of documentation is made accessible to those for whom it is already history. Although none of her works were originally written for book publication, their compilation into books is a necessary contradiction for today’s readers, which rather increases the attraction of the read.
Marie-Luise Scherer died on December 17 or 18 at the age of 84.