These days before Christmas, it's very cold and windy in Fergus Falls, a town of around 14,000 inhabitants in the state of Minnesota. There's a bit of snow on the ground. Claas Relotius published in DER SPIEGEL in March 2017. When I read it at the time, I thought to myself: It seems really, really long.

Trump voters: The story carried the headline, "In a Small Town," and what it meant to attempt to describe and better grasp. As we now know, the writer's story and characters are portrayed in the story.

I arrived in Fergus Falls on Thursday, the day after DER SPIEGEL went public with internal revelations about Relotius' journalistic fraud. Relotius did during the time he spent here. I'm here to describe the city as it really is, to process what has happened.

The fairy tale begins to appear at the beginning of the Fergus Falls falls to a dark forest that looks like "dragons could be living in it." I looked for that forest. It does not exist, even though there are trees in and around Fergus Falls and small forests here and there.

You get overcome by the feelings when you go to the fabric of an ex-colleague, but it's even weirder when you try to compare it with the fake images. You meet people who resemble Relotius' figures, but the longer you talk to them, the greater the distance grows between those depictions and the reality.

Maria Rodriguez ("a mother and restaurant owner from Mexico") and the city administrator. Some of the cases are in person. But in others, they are fake, as with "Neil Becker" or "Israel Rodriguez" (the alleged son of Maria). Ultimately, you come to the conclusion that there is no actual connection between the real people and the characters described in the article.

A Figment of His Imagination

The Fergus Falls in Relotius' article is a figment of his imagination. He admitted as much in the confession he made to his bosses at DER SPIEGEL. But the scale of the fabrications in this article became quickly clear - due in large part to the work of two people who have been pursuing and reviewing the article for the past year and a half. Last Wednesday, they posted their own devastating fact check on the web. The two are Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn. They wrote to the @DerSPIEGEL Twitter account after the article's publication to the mistakes, but nobody noticed in the editorial office in Hamburg. The two did not answer at the time. (You can read about the problems with the story here.)

Anderson works for a nonprofit organization that supports local artists at Fergus Falls; and Krohn, an IT consultant, collaborates with her occasionally. So they happen to be friends. After Relotius 'article appeared, they' ve gone to the beginning of the story. At the end of the story, that's the problem, they started preparing their reply. They wanted to expose the lies.

It's Thursday afternoon, the two are sitting in the office of the artist's nonprofit Springboard for the Arts, where Anderson works. They're still surprised by the number of people in the village now thanking them for their work. They've become heroes here in Fergus Falls. Two days later, Anderson, a woman at the table next to us. The question sounded only helped in jest.

Blind Faith

Krohn and Anderson played a role in making Fergus Falls one of the most central places in the affair surrounding formerly THE SPIEGEL reporter Claas Relotius, who has admitted to falsifying and fabricating numerous articles that ran in the magazine. Relotius went into distorting and twisting reality. The town also presents the degree to which it appears to be skeptical, suspicious and sharp-toothed. The editorial team I work for. It's painful for me to even have that write. On Thursday, the editors wrote: "THE SPIEGEL did not check the facts as thoroughly as its own statute." The editorial staff and research and fact-checking department relied too heavily on the reporter's presumed credibility. " Michele Anderson says Relotius orchestrated "the easy narrative of decline" here.

According to Relotius' portrayal, "Neil Becker," a Trump voter, what a hard-working coal shoveler at the local power plant who has spent his working life attending to a conveyor belt and what reluctant to travel. Douglas Becker, on the other hand, on the real Becker, who is in Lincoln Avenue for 34 years and is familiar with almost every airport in the United States. He ships packages for UPS. Hey, sells used records on the side.

He laughs when I ask him if he's angry. This is to the mayor. "I first thought the article was a piece of satire," says Becker. "I do not feel offended at all." He says he thought the writer was friendly - and he still does today. A nice guy. Becker says he's worried about him.

Then he talks about the marathon's he ran - Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago - through half of America. He said he did not vote for trump because he wanted a man in Washington who "shakes things up a bit."

He relocated to the outskirts of the town for 38 days from mid-January to the end of February 2017. He had five weeks to report his feature. That's an eternity in journalism, and most reporters can only dream of spending that much time on a story. At one point, I wonder why he invented "Neil Becker" when Douglas Becker Trump supporter is more interesting than the cliché of a coal-shoveling.

Maria Rodriguez, the second purported trump voter in Relotius' supposed "feature," can be seen on a 45-minute drive outside of Fergus Falls, where she can see waiting tables. According to Relotius' account, she suffers from a kidney disease, she's out of the money and dreams of returning to her home country of Mexico.

The truth is that Rodriguez is totally healthy and feels very much at home in Minnesota. She just opened a restaurant with her husband. She could not have been Trump, anyway, even though she has a residency permit, she does not have a passport. "I'm always trying to see the best in people," Rodriguez says. "I trusted this reporter and what's disappointed, but that does not mean that I'm not open to other people in the future anymore."

A Most Forgiving City

Fergus Falls appears to be the most forgiving city in the Western Hemisphere. People here to outdo each other with their affability. The first sentence Mayor Ben Schierer throws at me is: "Apology accepted! What do you want to drink?"

Schierer stands in the front of the brick oven at his pizzeria. He's a man with a small and wiry frame and the laughter of an Olympic champion. "Maybe something good will come out of this eventually," he says. "We now have the opportunity to tell the true story."

The true story, the mayor says, is that Fergus Falls is a beautiful, lovable little town. Yes, he says, there are different political opinions and so problems. The city's only shopping mall has moved away, some shops on Lincoln Avenue have shuttered, the train station has been out of commission for quite some time. "We're proud to live in this little town." "The people, who live here, want to live here."

Later, in his office, Sheer shows me plans for a new playground and a small amphitheater, with market stalls around it. It makes me think that the article is probably more than just local pride here. It's probably that people have been left feeling unrecognized in their drive to push the town forward. Relotius had described the place as a backwater. In his fabricated article, "X-Files" or game shows in the evening rather than read the opinion pages of The New York Times . In his article, he wrote that they are not racists, but then someone, in Relotius' imagination, put up a sign with the inscription at the entrance to the village: "Mexican's Keep Out." That sign, everbody tells me, never existed.

The longer I stay here, the more I get the impression I'm conducting an investigation at the scene of a crime. "Fox & Friends," the president's favorite show, interviews the mayor, the local TV station has sent a camera team, the German tabloid newspaper image was set to send a reporter and the US Embassy in Germany is so getting involved.

Not everyone is willing to move on so quickly. There are people in Fergus Falls who are still upset, including the city administrator. He is pictured in Relotius' article as a gun lover who carries his Beretta pistol around the Town Hall, seems rather childish and naïve, has never been to the sea before and is rebuffed as a Trump voter when he awkwardly tries to chat up a woman on the bus.

The truth is he's been in a relationship for three years, he has not been able to take the bus. Nothing about the depiction of him is true. He does not have a TV in his office that he tunes in to CNN, as Relotius wrote, there's no stuffed wild boar anywhere. Nothing is true.

'A Gem of a Town'

We sit opposite each other for an hour at a Town Hall meeting room and talk. I apologize on behalf of DER SPIEGEL, which has become part of my job. And yet the city administrator is not concerned about all the false details that have been written about him. Nor does he want to set the record straight about anything. He says he does not care about the wild boar. What upsets him is this entire messed-up story about his town. He does not want to be quoted again and he does not want to have his photo taken.

He has only one sentence he'd like to say for the record: "This is a wonderful, loving community - it's a gem of a town."

Of course, this story does not have a happy ending.

Fergus Falls, and not in the imaginary one, provides a lesson in humility. Of course, this town has its problems, but people are doing their best - they're friendly and hard-working. Yes, it may well be true that the people of Fergus Falls are dreaming of Claas Relotius.