Günter Wallraff worked on an assembly line, hauled parcels and was homeless, in order to experience what everyday life was like for those who were powerless and often also without rights. "Wallraffen", i.e. researching undercover, is not just an entry in German dictionaries. Now he's 80 and can't stop "Wallraffen".
The way to Germany's best-known investigative journalists leads down a narrow, quiet street, to an old gray house, through a narrow, cool corridor into a courtyard. There is a garden house and Günter Wallraff is sitting in it. He turns 80 on Saturday. But that's not a subject that suits him.
"There's no merit in getting that old," he says. "And I don't like to be celebrated." In his personal calendar, he entered an "80" for October 1st, but put a question mark after it. To the last he still had doubts whether he would ever get that old. "80 years - that's just beyond my imagination." RTL is showing "Günther Wallraff, the role player - the life of an enlightener" at 10:35 p.m. today. The documentation can also be seen on RTL.
Assembly line workers, guest workers, parcel haulers, homeless people, bread bakers and call center workers - when Günter Wallraff reports on the everyday life of the powerless, he has usually experienced it himself. With a false identity and an alienated appearance, he immerses himself in the milieu, experiences exploitation first-hand in order to then be able to describe and denounce it.
Since 2012 he has been revealing dubious conditions for RTL with “Team Wallraff”, research has been carried out in care, logistics and gastronomy, among other things. It's called "wallraffen" - also in Swedish and Norwegian dictionaries. On the shelves at the back of his study are countless editions of his hit "Ganz unten" (1985), which has been translated into 38 languages and has a total German-language circulation of over five million.
The house in Cologne-Ehrenfeld where he lives today was once his grandfather's shop. Pianos were built here. You can still see the rails that were needed to roll them onto the street. Wallraff himself did not grow up in Ehrenfeld, but in another district of Cologne, Mauenheim. He moved into the piano factory at the age of 25. At that time she was quite dilapidated.
He converted a neighboring former carriage house into a meeting center with exhibition rooms for a stone collection and stone sculptures designed by him. Apartments were built in the front building. Many of those who had stumbled and were persecuted found shelter there, such as the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann after his expatriation from the GDR and the homeless Richard Brox, whose autobiography later became a bestseller.
The most prominent roommate was the writer Salman Rushdie, who feared for his life after a death threat from Ayatollah Khomeini, known as a fatwa. That was in 1993. Wallraff was deeply shocked that now, so much later, an attack had been carried out on his friend. "The assassin saw himself as the executor of the fatwa," he says with certainty. Wallraff still vividly remembers the time with Rushdie. The author of "Satanic Verses" initially lived in an annex in the garden, but he couldn't sleep there because his bodyguards clamored on their walkie-talkies. "We put him upstairs there, so he had more peace."
You also played table tennis back then. In an interview, Rushdie later said that his only criticism of Günter Wallraff was that he could play table tennis better than him. This is the only sport in which he can achieve anything at all. The famous ping-pong table is in another garden shed, topped by a walnut tree. Wallraff only plays with a 40 or 50-year-old, worn-out racket that someone once left with him.
He recently had a nightmare, he says: the racket burst into 1,000 pieces. Such dreams had been plaguing him more often lately. He also sees his life passing by at night. "It's been going on with me for months that I can only sleep four hours at most. At night, when I lie awake, my whole life is unwound in fast forward. I go through all sorts of things that are unresolved, unresolved. Omissions, injuries, my own failure , at least sometimes positive."
He has a notebook next to the bed in which he writes everything down, including the nightmares, "maybe some things can be used for my autobiography". He suspects that the nocturnal brooding and lying awake also has something to do with the darkening of the world situation - keywords are the Ukraine war and the climate catastrophe. A few months ago he had a breakdown and thought that was it. However, anyone who sees him playing table tennis and watching him do pull-ups in his garden cannot really believe that the end is imminent.
And what about his birthday? He celebrated his 50th birthday in 1992 with the Vietnamese in Rostock, shortly after the pogroms a few weeks earlier, but without saying that it was his birthday. When he was 60, he went to Afghanistan to found a girls' school there. And now, for the 80th? "It will be something meaningful, unspectacular, with lovely people who are at the bottom of society." Typically Wallraff.
