The story collector

Since October 2011, he has been editor-in-chief responsible for publishing the magazine "Reportagen. The magazine is positioned between a magazine and a book. It is intended to set itself apart from the other magazines on the newsstand: The text is in the foreground. No photos or picture spreads flood the texts; in the current issue, only a historical reportage by Maltese-American comic artist Joe Sacco interrupts the texts. "If I had to attribute one skill to myself, it would be that I believe I can tell a good reportage from an average one," says Daniel Puntas modestly. This does not mean that his assessment of the written story is the only correct one, but he feels competent in this area - and for the readership of the magazine "Reportagen" his assessment is apparently also correct. As a former real estate and foreign exchange trader, South America traveler and NZZ editor, Daniel Puntas has not only been around in many professions, but also in the world. Most recently, he was traveling in North Africa for a story of his own. There, he visited the Spanish town of Ceuta. African refugees wait outside the Moroccan-Spanish border for an opportunity to cross into Europe. It is not far, Puntas describes the situation, only a fence separates the many refugees in the Moroccan hinterland from the longed-for European soil of Ceuta. Because on February 6, 2014, Spanish border guards fired rubber shot at around 200 Africans who tried to swim around the border fence protruding into the water - and at least 15 refugees were killed in the process - the officers' guns were taken away. While one does not want a refugee invasion in Ceuta, more negative headlines weigh even worse for Spain.

A storyteller does not put himself in the foreground, is interested in the country and its people, their fears, their everyday life and their worries. Daniel Puntas has made these qualities his own, or precisely because of these personal qualities he has ultimately found his way to the journalistic-literary genre of reportage as a non-fictional narrative medium. Only slowly does he reveal his personality; even after hours of conversation, the focus of his narratives is the magazine and its reporters, the stories within it, and its positioning. His day-to-day work is not particularly exciting, he says. "Most of my time is spent in the office taking care of administrative tasks." In passing, he does mention that he often enjoys reading the reports together with his editorial team, evaluating them and, above all, in this way visiting places in his mind that he has never seen. Reading a report on St. Petersburg, for example, would have given him such powerful images and intense experiences that it would not have been a bad thing if he had never been able to visit this city. It is therefore not surprising that for Puntas, conveying experiences is the most important quality of a good reportage.

Passion reading

His life has come to him. Daniel Puntas only actively decided to do the CT. But that was only because he didn't know what he really wanted, as he says. After that, one thing led to another. After the military, he wanted to go to Spain. He found a job at a real estate company with Swiss clients. However, because this only marginally occupied his working time, he learned Spanish very quickly. "This job was a stroke of luck," he says looking back, "the best way to learn a language. " Eighteen months later, it was back to the military from Alicante. He was looking for a bank job, "because they pay the military," he says, explaining his decision at the time. At an audition at what was then Volksbank in Bern, he says, the human resources manager gave him a tour of the entire bank and then asked him where he would like to work. Puntas landed in foreign exchange trading in Basel. The ease of finding a job of his choice at a bank as a KVA graduate still amazes him today. "I had no idea about banking," he points out. His wish to work in foreign exchange trading was nevertheless fulfilled. "Foreign exchange trading, anyone can do it," he adds. He says it's simply a matter of the primal principle of the market, which is to buy lower than to sell, simply rephrased to currency pairs. At the time, Puntas was just 19 years old. Dealing millions at that age had been exciting. Still, soon after, he wanted to go to London for six months to improve his English. His supervisor gave him the opportunity to do his job in America instead. "A huge stroke of luck," he says in response. Looking back, he himself is sometimes amazed at how lucky he was. After his return, he met Roger Brennwald by chance, who was looking for a successor for his tennis tournament. That's how he got his start as marketing manager at the Swiss Indoors.

After five years of marketing tennis sponsorships, at the age of 27, he realized that his life had been exciting and educational, but also superficial and "did not offer any deeper satisfaction. After all, heart and soul flowed neither in finance nor in marketing. So his path led him to reading. One of the first books was Pablo Neruda's "Confieso que he vivido." In this book, Neruda describes the south of Chile. This impressive description magically attracted Puntas. After the desire to go to Spain had already brought him through the military, the desire to travel to Chile saved him through the last half year at the Swiss Indoors. Before leaving for Chile, he then stayed in Switzerland for one more winter season, on the Jakobshorn in Davos, helping out a friend "as a sausage and chicken griller," he says with a laugh. There, by chance, he met someone who asked him to help him with a house renovation in Hamburg. Finally, the opportunity arose for him to travel to Santiago de Chile by cargo ship. "To be so unattached and on the lookout, I liked that very much ", he summarizes. However, Puntas got off the cargo ship in San Juan de Puerto Rico. Another year would pass before he reached Santiago de Chile. Among other things, he worked as a translator for German tourists during a stopover on the Galapagos Islands. In Venezuela he worked on a coffee plantation and in Chile finally in the cellar of a winery. About 18 months later, after a detour as a tango cab dancer in Buenos Aires and to Calp (Spain), where his father had unceremoniously opened a restaurant, he traveled back to Switzerland to study and become a teacher in Fribourg. In 2004 he handed in his thesis. In between, he had started working at the "NZZ am Sonntag" to finance his studies. His boss offered him the you only after he had certified his licentiate thesis, he tells a little anecdote about the "old school NZZ". When he began to talk aloud to his employer about founding a reportage magazine at the same publishing house, he was simply told: "Dream on.

Daniel Puntas tells all this as if none of it were really worth mentioning. As if his life had merely happened - what is interesting is the other, the outside, the experience. So the story collector doesn't like to tell much about himself. It is not his way to put himself in the center or to cultivate his image. He prefers to stay in the background. This was also the case with his latest report from Ceuta, "Selection on the Fence." Even here he does not reveal his own emotions, tells little of the "culture shock" that probably everyone experiences who crosses the border between Morocco and the Spanish town of Ceuta on the Strait of Gibraltar. He doesn't talk much about the uncomfortable feeling of visiting a tapas bar and sipping wine in Ceuta - while next door thousands of refugees have been waiting for months in the rugged and mountainous hinterland to storm the border. "Many journalists have the concept of not paying money for information in such areas, so as not to encourage the business of information as well - I can't do that."

He almost always gives something, even if not much, to people living in precarious circumstances who have previously given him a lot of time and insight into their lives. His commitment, his tool in dealing with such inhumane situations is reportage. His magazine - with the telling claim "world events in miniature" - an attempt to generate attention for the people behind the headlines. Daniel Puntas is Bernese, even if he has not spent a large part of his life in this canton. Having grown up in Belp, he left his home canton at the age of 18. He only recently returned to Bern - to start a family. That's why the magazine "Reportagen" is now also based in Bern. His name has Grisons roots. Accordingly, on the phone usually only Graubünden people understand his name correctly. The origin of the name Puntas itself is Spanish, but etymologically it comes from the Grisons. And suddenly Daniel Puntas gushes out a personal story that he likes to tell. He begins to ramble: "In 1492, when the Spanish used foreign mercenaries to banish the Jews and Muslims from their own country, mercenaries from Switzerland served under the Spanish crown. This brought the Puntas family from the Grisons to the Cordoba area." In Switzerland, this then also developed further, the original form of Puntas became Püntener through sound shifting. This phenomenon of sound change fascinates him: "My children and grandchildren will still understand me, but after five or six generations this is no longer necessarily true. I have met Germans who came to Brazil in 1923, to a colony of Germans south of Rio de Janeiro. You almost don't understand their German anymore, because they speak the High German of 1923." Fascination with languages is part of Daniel Puntas Bernet, like reading, which since the age of 30, after initial interest, has developed into a passion with repercussions. The effects are the 20 issues of "Reportages" published so far. Puntas looks at it not only with pride, but above all with love for the narrated experience. In his opinion, a reportage should not only tell a non-fictional story, but should also take the reader with it, give the reader an experience as if he had been there himself. Or, as Puntas describes the goal of a good reportage: "To make a film with the typewriter, so as to set the cinema in motion in the mind."

Ursina mason