Those Who Have Learned Nothing Become Journalists

Chapter 6 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

7 min readMay 19, 2024

This fake photo—created with ChatGPT—shows WM in early 1947, trying his hand at photojournalism in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn entertainment district.

Longing for Objectivity

WM is 22 years old and has his whole life ahead of him. Having survived the Nazi dictatorship and the world war, he is now on parole from a post-war prison sentence. However, he is under pressure to earn money so he can pay his fine and avoid returning to prison. Early in 1947, he decides to pursue a seemingly straightforward and tempting path: training as a photojournalist.

Photography is surrounded by an aura of objectivity ascribed to the objective lens. Photographers are seen as agents of authenticity, their snapshots as a corrective to the propaganda lies that the Nazis spread throughout the war in written and shouted words. Photojournalism is also a modern medium. Cameras with short shutter speeds and rapid mass printing of photographic images are early 20th-century inventions. The first illustrated monthlies and weekly news magazines using photographs appeared in Germany in the 1920s and in Anglo-Saxon countries from the 1930s onwards, bolstered by the expertise of German journalists who had fled the country.

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his mid-1930s novel Goodbye to Berlin. This statement is programmatic. The nascent medium of photojournalism, scarcely older than WM, offers a model for strictly factual reporting—an objective recording of reality countering the subjective bias and opinion-making in the press and radio. Photojournalists and, above all, war reporters become stars in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the best-known is Robert Capa. Amidst violence and chaos, he captures unique and existential moments. Photos such as “The Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War and the series “The Magnificent Eleven” from the Allied landing in Normandy shape the collective perception. Other photojournalists who achieve worldwide fame for recording perilous and harrowing moments include W. Eugene Smith, Margaret Bourke-White, and Lee Miller. Miller’s photographs, for example, show the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the unimaginable horrors of the concentration camps in Buchenwald and Dachau.

However, photojournalists do not only supply the media with images; they are also featured in newspapers and magazines and later glorified in feature films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) or Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966). Many young people, therefore, regard photojournalism as a dream job. WM can have no idea what the future holds for him. To a certain extent, however, he co-creates his fate, following his inclinations and fascinations. His closest friend in the 1950s will be a man who trained as a photo war reporter in 1944 while still being a member of the Hitler Youth. And in the mid-1950s, he will live through an intense affair with a young woman who is one of the most famous photojournalists in the world. To break free from the folie à deux, WM will leave Europe for Asia.

Now, however, in the spring of 1947, he begins procuring some of the necessary expensive equipment and practicing. His friend Bernd Hering, who is studying at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, arranges an appointment with a professor of photography. However, the meeting with the former Nazi Party member is so unpleasant that WM abandons his plans immediately.

Dreaming of the Cabaret

As a voracious reader, he has other dreams anyway. “I wanted to pursue something involving writing. My inclination was more towards the cabaret.”

He regularly attends live performances in a movie theater in Eppendorf. Two artists particularly inspire him: Werner Finck and Heinz Erhardt. The Nazi had imprisoned Finck in the Esterwegen concentration camp and then banned him from his profession. Now, he publishes the first post-war satirical magazine. Heinz Erhardt works at NWDR public broadcasting radio and will become quickly the most popular film and television comedian of the young Federal Republic of Germany.

However, WM is not confident writing texts of this type and quality. Not yet. “That was out of my reach for the time being, so I looked around to see what else was out there in this field.”

The Journalistic Compromise: Between Information and Opinion

As a bread-and-butter profession, variants of journalism based on writing look like a good choice—newspapers, magazines, and radio. The traditional press is 100 years older than photojournalism. Its rise is driven by the need for information among the masses in the rapidly growing industrial metropolises whose populations soon number in the hundreds of thousands and millions. Since the 1830s, automated printing presses have been able to produce copies in five-, six-, and ultimately seven-digit numbers within a few hours. Newspapers become mass publications, reporting the latest news, often with multiple daily editions.

However, in the class struggles and cultural conflicts of industrialization, opinions providing orientation become as critical as information. From the German Empire’s founding to the Weimar Republic’s final days, newspapers and magazines flourished in numbers nearly unimaginable today. In Berlin alone, there were, at times, around 150 daily newspapers. With deliberate partisanship, they served confessional and political ideologies: Catholic and Protestant, social democratic, socialist and communist, conservative, nationalist, and finally, National Socialist. This diversity of the press mirrored the fragmentation of society. Until 1933, when the so-called “Gleichschaltung”—the forcible adaptation of social, political, and cultural life to National Socialist ideology—ended all diversity.

Radio, just a decade old when the Nazis assumed power, was treated no differently. Many intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, believed in the democratizing effect of the new medium. But equipment and the required reception license were expensive. In 1932, only four million radios were in operation. The National Socialists recognized the enormous potential for propaganda. They subjected the existing stations to their control and ensured that all programs supported the ideology and goals of their regime. Large-scale campaigns spread anti-Semitism and warmongering. In parallel, the production of inexpensive people’s receivers tripled the number of installed sets to twelve million by 1938. The majority of Germans sat in front of them listening as the Nazis propagated their wars of aggression and the Holocaust. Lawful alternatives to the conformist Nazi media were non-existent. At most, you could secretly listen to banned “enemy stations.”

From Nazi Propaganda to a Democratic Press

The victorious Allies are aware of the fatal role German journalism played in the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. Immediately after the end of the war, the British begin to (re)establish democratic media in their occupation zone, centered around Hamburg and Hanover. The physical scarcity of frequencies prevents a larger number of radio and later television stations as long as terrestrial transmission is required. To nonetheless ensure political diversirty, the military government sets up a public broadcasting system modeled on the BBC. The basic rule — which will remain in place for a few decades — is independence from the state. It is intended to promote politically neutral, diverse, balanced reporting and thus democratic opinion-forming. NWDR, the largest broadcaster in the western zones, is established in Hamburg. WM will work for this station and its two successors, NDR and WDR, for many years.

On the other hand, the printed press is not subject to natural or technological limitations. Licenses can be issued in any number. The British military government allocates them to people purportedly or genuinely not tainted by National Socialism, mainly relatively young men. Between 1946 and 1948, the journalistic careers that will shape West Germany begin, such as those of Rudolf Augstein, Henri Nannen, and Axel Caesar Springer, as well as Rudolf Gruner, John Jahr, and Gerd Bucerius. One of the most essential criteria for obtaining allied licenses is objectivity and fidelity to the facts. Augstein’s Spiegel is modeled on the American news magazine Time. In the first decades, Spiegel’s articles do not even give the author’s names to eliminate the appearance of subjectivity. On the other hand, Nannen’s stern begins as an illustrated magazine modeled on Life and Look, whose central attraction is their photojournalism, the authenticity of the images produced by a camera’s objective.

How to Become a Journalist? And Precisely Why?

WM finds himself at the center of this journalistic start-up scene in 1947. He is in the right place at the right time. Since school, he has been friends with Richard Gruner and soon gets to know the other key players. Eventually, he will work for all of them: for Springer’s Hamburger Abendblatt and Die Welt, Nannen’s stern, Bucerius’ Zeit, and — despite all his opposition to Augstein, who is nearly the same age — for Der Spiegel. The first steps, however, are difficult.

“It’s hard to imagine today, but people knew next to nothing about this profession.”

Journalism schools do not exist in Germany, and certainly, no university or college education. The industry recruits its personnel from ‘natural talents,’ who have at most — like Augstein, Nannen, Springer, or Richard Gruner — completed traineeships in print shops or editorial offices. The first German school of journalism opens in Munich in 1949. Until the 1980s, it remains the exception that journalists are trained in their craft. At best, they have qualifications in other fields. Cultural journalists, for example, often have degrees in the humanities. In my case, it was literary studies. Only in 1979 the Hamburg School of Journalism, which today bears Henri Nannen’s name, is founded; the Axel Springer Academy in Berlin follows in 1986.

WM is a bit perplexed for good reason. Besides shooting and driving, all he has learned is reading and writing. Even though he possesses a unique talent for the latter—as a journalist, he has to invent himself from scratch.

The ranking of his professional interests, however, points towards his future. Editor or reporter are only second, if not third, choices for him. His strong affinity for photography and cabaret—the visual representation of reality on the one hand and satirical criticism on the other—points to a rare combination of talents. It will characterize his later work for theater, film, and television, as well as his public talk show host persona: a fusion of social or historical realism or factual fidelity with satirical humor and quick-witted performance.