At a time when it was not yet possible to follow Twitter accounts from all over the world and no cell phone videos from the last coup or the last major demonstration were promptly posted on the Internet and shared, one relied solely on television correspondents and the work of their camera team.

Hardly anyone knew what it looked like in areas like Siberia or Central Africa.

And if something was not happening there, one did not find out anything about it.

Andrea Diener

Editor in the features section.

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It was precisely these areas on the edge of the reporting area that particularly interested Gerd Ruge. The long-time correspondent of the ARD and inventor of the “Weltspiegel” not only concentrated on the latest political developments in the capitals, he always drove out, often to the very flat country and looked around.

That means: He asked those who live there how it is like living there and simply let them tell us about it.

Many did that willingly, because someone came along who never played himself in the foreground.

He mostly wore a blue shirt without a tie and beige trousers, and he mumbled a little - it couldn't be more unpretentious.

Especially with these programs, which ran under the succinct title “Gerd Ruge on the move”, many people remembered him as someone whose view of the world one likes to confide in oneself.

From these programs, which accompanied ordinary people in their everyday lives, one always learned astonishingly much about the world.

Fascination for Russia

It's easy to forget that Gerd Ruge was there as a journalist at not a few historical events. Born in Hamburg, he began his career at NWDR in 1949 with radio reports, many of them from abroad - in order to at least get out of the musty post-war Germany from time to time.

In the 1960s, domestic television prevailed, and images from all over the world reached the living room every evening. Including the reports of the young correspondent Ruge from Washington. He was the first German journalist to gain experience as a radio correspondent in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and then in Moscow - a pioneer there too. Russia will not let go of him until the end of his life. His reports from all remote corners shaped the West Germans' view of this country, which at that time was still sealed off behind the Iron Curtain and from which little leaked out.

The late sixties in the United States are particularly influential for Ruge personally. In 1968 he reports visibly shaken, but striving for clarity about the assassinations of the presidential candidate Robert Kennedy - he is at the scene himself - and of the civil rights activist Martin Luther King. A year later, he is there when the Apollo 11 space mission starts in Florida. Despite all the sympathy, Ruge never becomes sensitive and with all the analysis never becomes cold. He also implemented this as an activist when he co-founded the German section of Amnesty International in 1961.

But he also played a decisive role in shaping his home station. The "Weltspiegel", in which foreign correspondents have been reporting from their country since 1963, is still running successfully today. In the first show, which he helped develop and host, one already impresses with a special technical innovation: the first transatlantic satellite connection. He then headed the political magazine "Monitor". These were deserving desk jobs, as well as that of the head of the Bonn Capital Studio or the WDR editor-in-chief.

But despite all the management responsibility and all the merits, Ruge kept pulling it out.

Even after his retirement he still shot a lot of travel reports.

He had the two qualities he felt a good reporter should have: curiosity and good feet.

Gerd Ruge died on Friday at the age of ninety-three in Munich.