It's not that most journalists tend to be cynical, by no means.

But there is a form of seriousness that has always been rare and now perhaps more than ever.

With this attitude Bettina Gaus, who worked for taz for three decades and most recently for Spiegel and often appeared on radio and television, was a solitaire in German journalism.

If someone on a talk show or a colleague in an editorial conference simply thoughtlessly said something, he always had to expect that she would take the argument at face value, deal with it passionately and reveal weaknesses.

Ralph Bollmann

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of economics and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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She did it with humor, you could laugh heartily with her, even about the weaknesses of politicians, without her despising the person because of it.

She loved to look at things from an unfamiliar side, even in her last column, in which she warned of a new prudish, which, despite all justified criticism of the editor-in-chief of the Bild newspaper, had crept into the debate about relationships in the workplace.

Bourgeois and left

The way in which Bettina Gaus combined a bourgeois habitus with a left political stance is rare in this country. Both were inherited from her father Günter Gaus, the former Spiegel editor-in-chief and permanent representative of the Federal Republic in East Berlin, whose television talks “Zur Person” set standards to this day. The daughter did not cling to formality, but she did not like formlessness, especially when it concealed indifference.

One of their big themes was the issues of war and peace.

She criticized the German military operations abroad early on - even at a time when it seemed to many as hopelessly old-fashioned after the red-green takeover of government in 1998 and the Kosovo war in 1999, even in her own newspaper.

In the end she was proved right: over time, the German Chancellor also developed a Merkel doctrine of non-intervention, and at the latest with the inglorious withdrawal of the Bundeswehr from Afghanistan, the gloomy prognoses were finally confirmed a few months ago.

She wrote about her own Africa

Bettina Gaus, who still headed the parliamentary office of the taz in Bonn and then worked as the newspaper's political correspondent in Berlin, was an excellent expert and keen analyst of German domestic politics, who differed fundamentally from many members of the company in her outward view. After starting out at Deutsche Welle, she received her journalistic character between 1989 and 1996 as the Africa correspondent for the taz, based in Nairobi. She remained closely connected to her Kenyan adopted home for family and friendship reasons. From a journalistic point of view, too, Africa remained one of her big topics, which was perhaps also about her most personal book, which appeared in 2011: She did not travel to the continent in search of exoticism or human misery,instead she wrote about her own Africa, about the everyday life of the growing middle class.

When her daughter was studying in Cairo, she and her bought a second home in the Egyptian capital, which she also kept, always with a keen interest in political events. Another passion was the United States of America, about whose election campaigns she reported regularly for the newspaper - and about which she also wrote a report book: In 2008, she followed John Steinbeck's route from the Kennedy election campaign in 1960 and vividly described the political division in the country , mind you eight years before the supposedly surprising election of Donald Trump caught the attention of the local public on the subject.

It is often said that the taz is something like the nation's journalism school.

If that's true, then the newspaper owes its reputation to one person above all: Bettina Gaus.

Hardly anyone let younger colleagues share in their own wealth of experience so selflessly, not because they wanted to promote some kind of career, but because they recognized the same seriousness in them that was their own.

She was capable of friendship, she challenged and encouraged, she praised and comforted, she selflessly helped with extensive book projects.

At the age of only 64, she died last Wednesday after a brief, serious illness.

Her voice, which she raised to the last, will be missing.