World Trip to the Local Section

Chapter 9 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

6 min readJun 9, 2024

This fake photo — created with ChatGPT — shows 24-year-old WM in early 1949, dressed in a British outfit, entering the offices of the evening newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, where he works as a local reporter.

Africa Must Wait

WM arrives in Hamburg in early 1949. He plans only a brief visit to his family and friends, particularly his former colleagues from the German News Service. However, most of them no longer work there. They have moved on to a new start-up, a daily newspaper published six times a week since October 14, 1948, with a circulation of 60,000 copies. In its early days, the Hamburger Abendblatt is eight pages thin and costs 20 pfennigs. The editorial team is still small and has found accommodation on the fourth floor of a backyard building owned by the public welfare organization “Volksfuersorge.” WM likes the atmosphere, and he likes the concept.

The five other newspapers in the Hanseatic city are aligned with specific parties and agendas — social democratic, Christian democratic, conservative, liberal, and communist. In London, WM has learned to disdain partisan reporting and opinion journalism. The Hamburger Abendblatt, however, wants to be non-partisan.

“We are looking for sensible voices, whether they come from the left, the right, or the center,” announces the 36-year-old publisher Axel Caesar Springer in an interview with public broadcaster NWDR.

The newspaper is also different in other respects — for example, the publication time. The few printing plants in Hamburg that survived the war operate at nearly total capacity. Springer could only secure printing in the afternoon. Delivery has to be in the evening. The publishing company, or rather, its young owner, is also particular. Strange stories about him are circulating in the editorial office. WM’s curiosity is aroused.

“I said: ‘I’ll start here too’. And they said: ‘Sorry, we’ve filled all the departments’.”

After some back-and-forth, WM discovers that the only available position is that of a local reporter. He shrugs the offer off. He wants to go to Africa anyway.

But before he can continue his journey, he falls in love.

“I met a girl at a carnival party.”

Africa must wait.

“I went back to the editorial office and said: ‘OK, I’ll do the local reporter.’”

WM Learns Literary Reporting

WM begins to hone the skills he acquired in Wilton Park and London, skills that will define his artistic work: a simultaneously authentic and narrative presentation of facts established through thorough, independent research. He writes “factual reports,” as they are called at the time, to distinguish such texts from most other forms of journalism based on official announcements, agency reports, and preconceived opinions. Three decades later, when I landed in journalism around 1980, only a few months older than WM is in 1949, people were referring to them as “reportages.” They can be more or less literary, but preferably less.

Many of the smaller articles and reports WM writes for the Hamburger Abendblatt are not credited with the author’s name and are, therefore, almost impossible to identify. However, even the few verified texts demonstrate the variety of topics and forms.

For example, WM describes Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary Kon-Tiki expedition in April 1950 as if we were in the Pacific, eye-witnessing the events—only to learn that the account is based on a conversation with one of Heyerdahl’s companions, whom the local reporter met in Hamburg.

Likewise, in October of the same year, we experience the search for a partner by a lonely man and a no less lonely woman from a novelistic perspective—starting with the contact ad he placed after much hesitation, her reply, their meeting at the movies and first kiss, through to the engagement, pregnancy, and wedding. The punch line of this touching story comes, as it should, at the end, as a postscript: The couple sent in an album with tickets, invoices, and photos documenting their relationship up until their marriage. They won the competition of the Hamburger Abendblatt’s advertising department.

Another research leads into the past: In April 1951, WM investigates the few men still alive who were involved in the construction of the Elbe Tunnel, which began precisely forty years earlier. The result is aptly summarized by the title: “Monkey is Dead—But Tunnel is Alive.”

The Kracht Cloning

Four decades after this report was published, on a winter day in 1992, Wolfgang and I are sitting at his desk in Klopstockstrasse in Berlin-Zehlendorf. Side by side, as we always do when he presents me with computer problems in the hope that I will solve them. Or that they, at least, show up. Because he keeps accusing me that my presence alone is driving away the malfunctions that have reliably plagued him for days on end — which undermines his credibility. I then usually say:

“You’re just looking for excuses to lure me here. So, you don’t have to work!”

At the time, I am the head reporter for the Hamburg Zeitgeist magazine Tempo. The phone rings, and Wolfgang picks up. I get up, stretch my legs, and discover an open box of photographs on the shelf. On top is a black-and-white picture showing four men with sunglasses sitting in a kind of stadium. The print seems decades old. But I recognize one of the four immediately. I only saw him the day before yesterday. Not a day older than in the picture.

Wolfgang ends the call.

“That’s Christian Kracht!” I say, irritated, and point to the box.

Wolfgang gives me a surprised look. “How do you know him?”

“He’s one of our editors.”

“Very funny!” Wolfgang takes the photo out of the box. “Christian is older than me. He must be over seventy today. He lives in Switzerland. Filthy rich.” He points to the others with his index finger. “That’s me. When I was at the Abendblatt. Next to me is Wilhelm Schulze, our editor-in-chief. And that’s Springer on the left. We were at the soapbox race, the first one in Hamburg after the war.”

“The two Krachts aren’t father and son,” I say, “they’re clones.”

“Make a story out of it,” grins Wolfgang. “But first,” he points to the Macintosh computer before us, “fix this thing here.”

Writers Remain Poor — Poorer At Least

WM got to know Christian Kracht, the senior, as a journalistic colleague at the Hamburger Abendblatt. They struck up a friendship. When the photo was taken around 1950, Kracht was 29 years old, the same age as his son at Tempo in 1992, three years before the novel Faserland, which will establish him as a writer.

His father, Christian Kracht senior, decides to pursue a different future in the early 1950s. While WM’s goal in life is to become an author — he wants to tell stories, to create something significant — his friend Christian strives for a career in publishing.

“You think I have a lot of money,” says Wolfgang, placing the photograph back in the box. “That’s true, actually. For someone who writes. But you can’t imagine how much less I have than most of the people I started out with back in Hamburg. I’m actually the poor friend.”

Like Richard Gruner, Christian Kracht is one of WM’s early friends, who will earn millions in double and triple digits. From assistant to the publisher, Kracht ascends to General Representative and Vice-Chairman of the Springer Supervisory Board. In the 1960s, he is Germany’s best-paid manager, with an annual salary of well over a million marks. He lives next door to the publisher, covers his romantic affairs, and handles a necessary divorce.

Kracht has his rapidly growing wealth in common with others who sacrifice their lives, or at least crucial decades, to Axel Caesar Springer and his arbitrary whims, such as Peter Boenisch, another friend of WM. At Springer-Verlag, “top managers can earn sums that support entire companies elsewhere,” and when it comes to an end, the separation, then “royal severance payments” are the rule.

This is how Michael Juergs — my editor-in-chief at both stern and Tempo, and himself paid off with large sums both times, just not so generously, as these magazines had other publishers— describes the usances in his Springer biography. The book contains revealing details about the publishing house and its owner. Springer’s politically problematic rise to becoming the most powerful publisher in Germany—for which Christian Kracht’s work was instrumental — will ensure that WM eventually drops his ambitions in print journalism to find his fame and fortune in other media.