If we don't take it too seriously, a life can be divided into four phases: the cultivation, the sowing of the seeds, the cultivation of the fields and most importantly, the time of the harvest. The ideal: When old age is dawning, blood pressure rises, salt creeps into your beard and parting, you have enough to eat and drink, friends and family to share with, your mind free to try something new (only for yourself!) and time for an afternoon nap. The misfortune of our time: To many so-called and leading performers, this seems as sexy as long underpants with intervention. Sure, work also keeps you warm.
The journalist and news presenter Claus Kleber, who, after more than eighteen years, will hand over the management of the “heute-journal” to his colleague Christian Sievers on December 30th, seems to be doing the same. In an interview with the German Press Agency, he wants to look forward to "more than 160 evenings a year that are suddenly free", but thinks it is "a hefty number". That is why he now wants to "get to know the phenomenon that everyone talks about so much, social life, friendships" - he now wants to "try out" things like that. We take him at his word unironically when we find out: Kleber approaches these apparently little-tried "phenomena" as well as his better-tried messages: with a certain, never entirely unselfish distance, but hopefully a bit less energetically.
Perhaps Kleber is also a victim of his success: in addition to completing a law degree (doctorate on the “design options” of private broadcasting “within the constitutional framework”), he works as a journalist. After a short period as a lawyer, he finally switched to journalism at the age of thirty and became studio manager in Konstanz at what was then Südwestfunk. This is followed by posts as a radio correspondent in Washington, as editor-in-chief of the station "Rias" in Berlin and as head of the ARD studio in Washington. After a short guest appearance in London, Kleber met TV Germany from 2003 alongside Gundula Gause on ZDF “heute-journal”. In 2007 he almost became “Spiegel” boss and successor to Stefan Aust. But ZDF made him an offer that he couldn't refuse.
Both, he says, "ZDF and I" have not regretted it.
They all overlooked ambiguities and mishaps: in an interview with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in 2012, there was criticism because Kleber did not contradict him when he denied the Holocaust.
In other cases, his penchant for American anchormantism tended to come to the fore in interviews; on Twitter, his desire to provoke always carried him over the top.
But such a great and generally solid career rarely ends just like that.
There is still a little time left in which Kleber TV Germany and TV Germany can let go of Kleber.
Then it is important to turn to new "phenomena".
With that in mind, good evening, Claus Kleber.