Quiet hymn to life in original sound
Noisy editorials are far less effective at describing—let alone influencing—people’s everyday lives than intimate interviews. A plea for bringing more emotion into journalistic interviews.
Thanks to the summer slump. Even the experimental Zeit magazine probably only makes room for twelve pages for such a cover story in mid-August. Three uncelebrated but all the more interesting gentlemen in their prime talk about their image and their farewell to their own father. "When I walk in my father's footsteps, it scares me to death", sings Bob Dylan. The three conversations vary this eternal male theme in a touching, at times depressing manner. You witness an intimate atmosphere full of existential honesty that resonates far beyond the reading.
The intensity of these soft tones almost made me write my first letter to the editor out of gratitude. Okay, I'm probably biographically mature and therefore particularly receptive to the father-son motif. As we all know, washing machine advertising is of particular interest to those contemporaries who are currently considering buying one. However, the way interviewer Herlinde Koelbl dresses human trials and tribulations in subtle question-and-answer texts has already moved and convinced many people. Her high number of book editions and the many awards won by the well-known author and documentary filmmaker testify to this.
Koelbl is a grand master of empathy and intuition. Anyone who thinks these qualities are specifically female - even in journalism - has been proven wrong by André Müller for more than 30 years. The Austrian, not unjustly praised by his clients (Weltwoche, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel) as the "most important interviewer in the German language", dissects his prominent counterparts with a rhetorical scalpel. His horrendous claim that not only the reader but also the interviewee should learn something new in the process is often fulfilled. He elicited from Elfriede Jelinek, for example, that she, like one of her novel characters, cut her own vagina with a razor blade. The Nobel Prize winner would never have dared to have so much courage to expose herself, as she later admitted.
But it doesn't have to be such emotional extremism. Genuine curiosity about the other person, more courage to take risks and knowledge of human nature would alleviate the yawning boredom that 90 percent of all interview texts spread, especially those with tie or functionaries. The argument that political and economic discussions serve to convey factual information is a purely protective claim by uninspired journalists. After all, party manifestos and corporate figures would be far more precise and reliable sources than ministers and CEOs. There is often a lack of empathy and preparation behind the mindless chatter that fills more and more columns, but even more often a simple lack of awareness of the potential of this genre. Interviews are not treated as an art form, but all too often merely as an editorial stopgap: if you can't think of anything else, you just do a quick "Inti".
Good conversations are always a stroke of luck - both privately and in the media. Which is why they cannot be (re)produced on an assembly line. Müller, for example, never organizes more than two or three of his meticulously prepared soul stripteases every year. Galore, which was launched in 2003 as a pure interview magazine, has also realized that quantity is detrimental to quality. Since this year, the pioneering title has also been publishing reports, features and columns. The official reason: in order to be even more effective in the future, the interviews as the "journalistic supreme discipline" are now surrounded by a court of other genres. I have never regretted renewing my subscription immediately after this announcement.
The intensity of these soft tones almost made me write my first letter to the editor out of gratitude. Okay, I'm probably biographically mature and therefore particularly receptive to the father-son motif. As we all know, washing machine advertising is of particular interest to those contemporaries who are currently considering buying one. However, the way interviewer Herlinde Koelbl dresses human trials and tribulations in subtle question-and-answer texts has already moved and convinced many people. Her high number of book editions and the many awards won by the well-known author and documentary filmmaker testify to this.
Koelbl is a grand master of empathy and intuition. Anyone who thinks these qualities are specifically female - even in journalism - has been proven wrong by André Müller for more than 30 years. The Austrian, not unjustly praised by his clients (Weltwoche, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel) as the "most important interviewer in the German language", dissects his prominent counterparts with a rhetorical scalpel. His horrendous claim that not only the reader but also the interviewee should learn something new in the process is often fulfilled. He elicited from Elfriede Jelinek, for example, that she, like one of her novel characters, cut her own vagina with a razor blade. The Nobel Prize winner would never have dared to have so much courage to expose herself, as she later admitted.
But it doesn't have to be such emotional extremism. Genuine curiosity about the other person, more courage to take risks and knowledge of human nature would alleviate the yawning boredom that 90 percent of all interview texts spread, especially those with tie or functionaries. The argument that political and economic discussions serve to convey factual information is a purely protective claim by uninspired journalists. After all, party manifestos and corporate figures would be far more precise and reliable sources than ministers and CEOs. There is often a lack of empathy and preparation behind the mindless chatter that fills more and more columns, but even more often a simple lack of awareness of the potential of this genre. Interviews are not treated as an art form, but all too often merely as an editorial stopgap: if you can't think of anything else, you just do a quick "Inti".
Good conversations are always a stroke of luck - both privately and in the media. Which is why they cannot be (re)produced on an assembly line. Müller, for example, never organizes more than two or three of his meticulously prepared soul stripteases every year. Galore, which was launched in 2003 as a pure interview magazine, has also realized that quantity is detrimental to quality. Since this year, the pioneering title has also been publishing reports, features and columns. The official reason: in order to be even more effective in the future, the interviews as the "journalistic supreme discipline" are now surrounded by a court of other genres. I have never regretted renewing my subscription immediately after this announcement.
Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration and was previously media editor.
