In the summer of 2000, Werner started working in an editorial office, which at that time still did not represent the leading and mass medium that SPIEGEL ONLINE is today, but was a bit like one of those start-up provisional institutions that entered the new Internet at the beginning of the Nineties. World broke up. Werner had a great desire to participate. He knew that network journalism would make dialogue with the reader fundamental, and he hired to develop this area, which today is a forum with several hundred thousand registered members. He already had a career as a communication professional at this time. From 1983 to the beginning of 2000 he was in charge of a large part of the press activities of Warner Music Germany in Hamburg, first at the WEA, then at EastWest Records, where he not only supervised stars like Simply Red, AC / DC or the Scorpions, but also from 1998 as one of the first in the music industry for the establishment and maintenance of Internet presence and online promotion provided.
At SPIEGEL ONLINE, during the moderation of the forum contributions, which he later mastered together with a small team of employees, this experience from the pop world, and above all the comfortable handling of more capricious characters on the artist and media side, benefited him. Werner quickly took on the role of an attentive observer in editorial affairs and at conferences, who knew how to settle or clarify things with clever, often humorous posts, if things got stuck somewhere or threatened to get in the way.
The shirt-sleeved and bad-tempered, which is shown far too often in our industry, remained alien to him. Even if things - whether human, aesthetic or political - terribly upset him, and that often did happen, Werner remained, at least to the outside, the mildly sensitive person whose patience and restraint we valued and respected. All the more so since we knew that as a forum manager, he had to deal with one of the hardest and most demanding jobs in the entire editorial department, faced in part with harsh comments and insults, radical accusations and insults that often enough were directed against him as a moderator. If a contribution in the forum was rated by him as unreasonable and therefore deleted, the angry researcher called him "censor".
He sought salvation in beauty and art
How Werner endured and moderated this unfiltered view of the readers' anger and thoughts with his own composure, we often asked ourselves. But the answer was obvious: Werner sought salvation in beauty and art. From the beginning of his time at SPIEGEL ONLINE he wrote theater reviews and music reviews for the cultural department, and for many years he wrote his own weekly column, in which he enthusiastically and passionately presented new CD releases with classical music. In it he honored and discovered again and again, especially young stars of the scene. Early on, he wrote about today celebrated as a master pianist Daniil Trifonov, praising the "gently paraphrasing phrasing" of the young Dutch cellist Harriet Krijgh or located in the Bach interpretations of the Viennese violinist Emmanuel Tjeknavorian a hunch of Heavy Metal.
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Concert hall, opera house and theater ranks were a second home for Werner, who often sat at his desk during the day in an elegant suit with a gleaming white or elegant black shirt, looking forward to a performance in the evening in Hamburg's Thalia Theater, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus or the Hamburg State Opera , Who accompanied him, I did that unfortunately too rarely, experienced one of drama, music and performance almost boyish enthusiastic fan, who in his criticisms the next day competent and - mostly - mildly argued, but of course stupidly stupid and stupid with sharp wit ,
That was also true when Werner denied a highlight of his cultural year every year: During a visit to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, about which he reported for SPIEGEL ONLINE for almost 20 years, the fan of fine tones could sometimes relish the musical bombast and megalomania - and made fun of the "picture amok" and the "threadbare punchlines" of the curly on the hill theatrical, as 2013 in the "Siegfried" by Frank Castorf.
The admirers of Van Morrison and Miles Davis discovered the good of the bad to distinguish the worthless from the scrap, the admirers of Van Morrison and Miles Davis already discovered in the mid-1970s during his studies of German and English in Brunswick, Göttingen and finally Hamburg, where the native Wolfenbütteler found a sophisticated, culturally rich environment that met its aesthetic requirements. In 1979, when the pop scene was rearranging itself after the punk explosion, Werner started as a dispatcher and salesman at the "Schallplatte am Mönckebrunen" in downtown Hamburg, at that time undisputedly Hamburg's best-sorted record shop. "I found it super cool to work there," he wrote in a reminder text in 2009: "Listening to the latest and greatest music all day, knowing everything and getting everything there was to get it, and then, too to bring to the fan, was a lot of fun. "
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However, it was not enough for him to recommend the customer new records only at the bar, Werner wanted to write about pop as well. In the "Musikexpress / Sounds" he reviewed blockbusters like Peter Gabriel's "So" as well as Yello or the then new "brisk fives" from Canada, The Tragically Hip. His acronym "wt" among the reviews was one of the first that I noticed in the early '80s as a teenager and "Musikexpress" reader. Years later, when I was writing as a pop critic and Werner was press officer at EastWest, we got to know and appreciate each other; When Werner came to SPIEGEL ONLINE in 2000, I had just started there as a cultural director.
"Accents instead of splurge"
His unconditional will to style, for him an existential matter of course, he also transported visually to the reader for a while. In a series of elegant and very instructive columns and video blogs, he gave tips on how man wears properly scarves and hats or which sunglasses are suitable for the elegant accessory. "Living, caring, books, music, anything that characterizes and expresses the personality can be an expression of your own style," wrote Werner in 2007 at the beginning of his column. Style, he knew, "enhances the quality of life," but he also commanded modest moderation: "Accents instead of splurge." Maybe his life motto.
In the former, rather less glamorous editorial office of SPIEGEL ONLINE on the Willy-Brandt-Straße in Hamburg, across from the SPIEGEL skyscraper, Werner and I sat side by side for a long time next to each other at a table cross in the metropolitan area. The unfinished and often hectic in the 70s bureaus left over from Bauer Verlag immediately countered Werner with a ritual that is one of the most beautiful memories of my working life: Hanseat, who was a British style of life, brewed the little feuilleton team around four o'clock each afternoon at half past four a fresh, very invigoratingly fragrant black tea. Anyone who still remembers the coffee broth curdled on the hotplate to tarry molasses from that early SPON period, suspects what lifesaving Labsal this not only collegial, but caring gift meant.
Werner has reminded us daily, not only with his texts, with his whole being, what culture means. He has, let us say, lived culture. That's how the whole editorial team has grown. He will miss us.