Gerd Ruge’s clear understanding of the world
The long-time ARD correspondent and reporter Gerd Ruge (1928 to 2021) is dead
Source: dpa
With Gerd Ruge, the Federal Republic got to know the world. Even in the iciest times of the Cold War, he did not give up the search for the realities behind the ideological and propagandistic facades. Now the ARD and WELT correspondent has died. He was 93 years old.
Sa death is a painful loss. Not only because Gerd Ruge was a legend of public television journalism, but because we journalists like him need more than ever today.
According to an illusion that is widespread among the public, the world is always just a click away and world knowledge can be called up as “information” at any time and any place. Gerd Ruge’s reports showed that the world is actually far and far undiscovered and that you have to move to get to know it.
Ruge was a traveler and one who preferred a more leisurely cruising speed. He spent a lot of his life getting to know life, politics, culture, everyday life in Russia, America and China and conveying deeply sharp images of it to his audience.
Rough’s reports were always a little bit educational. His mumbling manner of speaking, which belongs to him like the forehead fool, made him unmistakable. People liked to look at and listen to him.
Like many of his contemporaries who shaped the politics and culture of post-war Germany, Gerd Ruge used the opportunities that were offered to his generation, which was only scratched by the war. In 1948, at the age of barely 20, he completed a one-year journalism training course at Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk and was then taken over as editor by this broadcaster, which later became the NDR and WDR.
His talent for languages - Ruge spoke Russian, English and French – predestined him to work as a foreign reporter. Which in the Federal Republic of Germany, which had just emerged from the egg, inevitably meant confrontation with the war, which was not yet quite over.
Friendship with Boris Pasternak
In 1950 Ruge reported as the first German radio journalist from Yugoslavia. Five years later he accompanied Adenauer on his trip to Moscow and in 1956 became the first ARD correspondent in the Soviet capital. Even in the iciest times of the Cold War, he did not give up the search for the realities behind the ideological and propagandistic facades.
It was during these early Moscow years that he became friends with Boris Pasternak. From 1964 to 1969, as a correspondent in Washington, he reported on the opposite pole of the Cold War, from a country whose mass culture was beginning its global triumph and which was at the same time deeply divided politically.
Ruge witnessed the murder of Robert Kennedy. His report on that day, which shook the country, is one of the great testimonies of his journalistic art.
Ruge gave a guest appearance as a newspaper journalist when he reported from 1973 to 1976 for “WELT” from Beijing. With a certain inner necessity, he returned to Moscow at the end of his public service career in 1987.
Thirty years earlier he had seen the bipolar world order solidify up close. Now he could describe their dissolution. When he retired in 1993, the Soviet Union no longer existed. He never succumbed to the superstition that with it the dead weight and stubbornness of huge Russia as a factor in world politics disappeared.
Ruge also traveled to “His Siberia” as a pensioner to the furthest corners and presented the television audience with beautifully narrated travel pieces, especially but not only at Christmas time.
Clarified knowledge of the world
Yes, he understood Russia. The fact that this has become an insult today makes people uncomfortable because of the re-ideologization of politics and journalism that is expressed in it.
Even at an advanced age, Gerd Ruge could be heard on television with a clear understanding of the world and wrote an autobiography, a witness report actually from the second half of the 20th century.
At last it had become quiet around him. Now Gerd Ruge has died at the age of 93.
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