He was a foreign correspondent, head of sports and the face of the daily topics:Hanns Joachim Friedrichs shaped the German TV landscape for 40 years. The journalist died in 1995 after a serious illness.
by Jonas Hirschfeld
Hanns Joachim Friedrichs is remembered for his reports, presentations and his characteristic voice. He goes on the air 101 times with the "Aktuelle Sportstudio" and 700 times with the daily topics. After graduating from high school, the young Friedrichs completed an editorial internship at the daily newspaper "Telegraf" in Berlin in 1949. Soon after, he is offered a job with the BBC in London. Friedrichs studied with the English for five years and became a speaker and news editor. His first work:a short self-spoken report about Berlin.
"Keeping cool without being cold"
He has seen and experienced a lot in his career as a journalist, but he has always remained true to his principles:"I didn't go through with all that crap, not infotainment, I didn't look through other people's keyholes under any pretext - I stayed clean." , he tells "Spiegel" editors in 1995 in the last interview before his death. "Keep your distance, don't get involved with something, not even a good one, don't sink into public concern, stay cool when dealing with disasters without being cold" - that's what he learned during his time in London. He defended these journalistic virtues to the last. He rejects modern forms such as sensational journalism. It is not a moderator's job to encourage people to be concerned.
Stations in Washington, Saigon and New York
After the instructive years at the BBC, Friedrichs, who came from Hamm, became an editor at what was then Northwest German Broadcasting in Cologne, from which NDR and WDR emerged shortly afterwards. At WDR he works as a reporter, moderator, commentator and author. In 1964 Friedrichs went to Washington and New York for ZDF. He reports from America for five years before traveling to Vietnam for several reports. After his first visit to Saigon, he would have preferred to stay forever, he says later. The reporter experiences the highlights of the Vietnam War up close - the traumatic images still haunt him years later. However, he did not go to Vietnam because of the war. War reporting never particularly appealed to him, but rather the special features of the country and its inhabitants. In 1981 the TV journalist returned to the ZDF studio in New York, where he developed the successful magazine "Bilder aus Amerika" together with Dieter Kronzucker.
Kohl's resistance to the "Sportstudio" management
The fact that Hanns Joachim Friedrichs, of all people, became head of the "Aktuelles Sportstudio" in 1973 did not suit Helmut Kohl, the then chairman of the ZDF board of directors. Grinding his teeth, he has to accept the personal details. Decades later, Friedrichs still remembers the moody Kohl:As a "little provincial reporter," he confronted the future chancellor after a state election with his miserable election results. Kohl never forgave him for that, says Friedrichs. The journalist also has difficulties with Helmut Schmidt's "annoying know-it-all attitude". "It's a funny bird. I must have interviewed Schmidt 20 times. It was always very brief and cool," he said in a 1995 interview with "Spiegel". "You have to ask that differently," Schmidt is said to have answered arrogantly over and over again.
Friedrichs as a trademark of the daily topics
In October 1985, Friedrichs switched to the newly conceived daily topics as "First Moderator". He quickly became a crowd favorite:within two and a half years, the number of viewers rose from two to four million. The jury of the Eduard-Rhein-Foundation praised him at an award ceremony in 1987 for his "confident form of moderation, averse to a style of proclamation, his critically distanced and to the point formulated view of current events and his unobtrusive professionalism" that made the main news program so popular /P>
"The gates in the wall stand wide open"
On November 9, 1989 at 10:42 p.m. Friedrichs spoke what was probably his most important moderation in the daily topics:"Caution is required when dealing with superlatives, they wear out easily, but tonight you can take a risk - this November 9th is a historic day:The GDR has announced that its borders are now open to everyone. The gates in the wall are wide open." During the live link to Berlin, there is still little to be seen of the open border, but after the historical report in the daily topics, a real mass rush to the border crossings begins.
"Outrageous ignorance" on private television
In his last interview, Friedrichs, who is now seriously ill, also criticized private television. "They think it's enough to put a beautiful woman or a young man in front of the microphone and have them say sentences full of outrageous ignorance." But Friedrichs is also harsh on the ARD:the participation of the parties in the founding of the public broadcasting corporations was a sin. You will never get this "incarnate proportional representation" out of the institutions again.
Moderation was his dream job until the end
The old one goes, the new one comes:In 1991 Ulrich Wickert succeeds Hanns Joachim Friedrichs as the first moderator of the daily topics.In November 1990, the full-blooded journalist renounced a further extension of his contract with ARD. On September 30, 1991, Friedrichs moderated the daily topics for the last time. Ulrich Wickert, until then a television correspondent in Paris, will be his successor. However, there was not a single day when he was reluctant to come to the editorial office, Friedrichs summarized in an interview with the "Spiegel" editors. "A lot of people have jobs that they only do to make money. Just look around the subway in the morning."
"I won't miss anything anymore"
On December 27, 1994, he received sad news:Hanns Joachim Friedrichs had cancer. There won't be much time left. However, Friedrichs takes the illness calmly:"I'm not missing anything that's really important." He was always a pragmatic person. On March 28, 1995, the 68-year-old died of cancer. His longtime friend and colleague Hermann Schreiber recalls that he was a "sought-after bachelor" for most of his life and only married into an intact family towards the end of his life. "Hajo, that Sunday boy, found the meaning of his death in his life. He had done everything he wanted to do, and so the end was not terrifying for him."