Joachim Jauer is one of the few journalists who have shaped historical sentences.

He said to his family on May 2, 1989 in the ZDF “heute” news: “Today, the forty-year division of Europe into East and West ends here.

This will have unforeseeable consequences – for Europe, for the Germans in the Federal Republic and especially in the GDR.” There was Jauer, the long-time GDR correspondent and presenter of the magazine “kennzeichen D”, at the Hungarian-Austrian border and reported on the Dismantling of the border fortifications by Hungarian troops.

Jauer died last Friday at the age of 82.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for feuilleton online and "media".

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"For many years, Joachim Jauer was the man who explained the East to ZDF viewers," said ZDF editor-in-chief Peter Frey.

For three decades, Jauer reported "authentically, knowledgeably and from his own perspective from the GDR and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - about big politics, but also about how the people on the other side of the Iron Curtain shaped their lives."

Jauer, born on July 26, 1940 in Berlin-Dahlem, did indeed do that.

He went to school at the Canisius College and studied philology, philosophy and history at the Freie Universität Berlin.

He started as an editor at RIAS Berlin in the early 1960s.

In 1965 he switched to ZDF.

From 1978 to 1982 he headed the station's office in East Germany and lived in East Berlin.

The Stasi had a whole phalanx of agents on him and kept his surveillance under the term "Fabulant".

In 1982, Jauer took over the editing of "kennzeichen D", the magazine that had taken up the cause of domestic issues and built a bridge between the Germans in East and West.

Jauer then went to the Bonn studio, then to Vienna, as a correspondent for Eastern Europe.

In 1990 he returned to "Mark D".

"As a bridge builder between East and West, Joachim Jauer was a clairvoyant, critical and often uncomfortable observer of his time," said ZDF editor-in-chief Frey.

"The description and overcoming of the division of Germany and Europe were the themes of his life, which he pursued with all passion and great vigor into old age."