Business & Industry > Working in Germany : Sound bites from Berlin

Information about Germany: A large number of international journalists live in Berlin and help shape Germany's image across the world

Sound bites from Berlin

January 05, 2010

Hundreds of international journalists report from Germany, helping to shape its image abroad. Two Asian foreign correspondents share their work and their lives.

Nazmun Nesa Piari, correspondent from Bangladesh, says her home is always where she happens to be living. At the moment it’s Berlin. She lives there in the heart of the city – right on Potsdamer Platz, a magical centre of attraction with shopping malls, flagship stores, major cinemas, cafés and restaurants. “I love being in a crowd. You know, right in the thick of it! I’m used to it from my home country. Apart from which, I can also get anywhere I want to from here very quickly,” she says, looking out of her apartment window. Take the Federal Press Office, for example. She has to be quick, because from there she sends news on German politics, economy, culture and sports to newspapers in Bangladesh, India and New York. Her motto: “I always describe what I see very vividly, so that people abroad understand what is happening here.”

The Reichstag in Berlin is reflected in a pool of rain water

The Reichstag in Berlin is reflected in a pool of rain water

News from Berlin is in demand worldwide. The national and international news business in the capital has been growing steadily since reunification and Berlin was chosen as Germany’s capital. Today, the city is one of the most important news hubs in Europe, if not the world. No other German town offers such diversity on the press market. Nine newspapers are published (almost) every day in Berlin, and over 50 German newspapers and magazines from other cities – for example, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Der Spiegel – have set up offices in the capital. Both the London Times and the New York Times are represented here. The Federal Press Conference has a membership of about 900 journalists. Then there are the members of the Association of the Foreign Press in Germany (VAP) – over 400 journalists, mostly from Europe, the USA and Asia.

Nazmun Nesa Piari is one of them. The daughter of a chemistry professor wanted to study art, wrote poems during her schooldays, but did her father the favour of studying chemistry. She taught at a college, but at¬tended art school and wrote poems for newspapers in her spare time. In the 1970s, she wanted to get away – to go abroad. She ended up at Deutsche Welle in Cologne, Germany’s global radio station, and got to know Germany in various jobs. Then she moved to Berlin, “to the city where the Wall had fallen”. She wanted to focus more on her creative work. Since 2002, she has been reporting for such newspapers as the Observer, Daily Star, Business India, Weekly 2000 and the Bengali Itte fak. She also writes and translates books, such as Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, and writes poems. She rarely has time to visit her home country and is only there for two or three weeks a year. “If I stay longer, I start missing Germany,” she says.

It was on a European tour in 1968 that Ramesh Jaura first came to Germany, where the now 67-year-old journalist sensed a mood of upheaval. So he soon decided to go to West Berlin. “I knew that Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik would be groundbreaking for the further development of the two major power blocs that history would be made here. And I wanted to report on this for India.” In 1977 he moved to Bonn and worked there for decades as a political and economics correspondent for Indian media such as All India Radio, Doordarshan, Economic & Political Weekly, Mainstream and India Today. In 1987 he became head of the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) for the German-speaking countries, and later Director of IPS Europe. He also founded the Global Cooperation Council (North-South Forum), an organisation that promotes relations between Germany and the countries of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.

His impulse when working as a journalist was “always to look at what really lies behind an eight-line news item”, he says as he sits at his desk at the IPS office in Berlin-Mitte within easy reach of the Federal Press Office and the Bundestag. He says a lot has changed since the government moved from Bonn to Berlin. Twenty years ago the main sources of information were still the government or ministry spokespersons; and back then you could still meet them for informal talks on the fringes of a press conference or in other places in the small city of Bonn. “Today, not everyone has a chance to really look behind the scenes of politics,” he says with regret.

By Katja Winckler