Claas Relotius

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Claas Relotius (2018)

Claas-Hendrik Relotius (born November 15, 1985 in Hamburg ) is a German journalist . He worked for well-known print media in German-speaking countries, mainly for Spiegel , and has received numerous awards for his reports . In December 2018 it was revealed that most of his reporting was partly or entirely made up. The scandal that followed made him known to a wide public.

Life

Relotius grew up in Tötensen with his father, an engineer for water management, and his mother, a teacher. He has an older brother.

Relotius studied political and cultural science in Bremen and graduated with a bachelor's degree . From August to September 2008 he worked as an intern at taz in Hamburg. From 2009 to 2011 he completed a master’s degree at the Hamburg Media School . This course has now been discontinued by the HMS.

He wrote freelance for Cicero , the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , the Financial Times Deutschland , the taz , Die Welt , the SZ-Magazin , Zeit Online as well as for the Swiss publications Weltwoche , NZZ am Sonntag and Reports . Since 2017 he has been a permanent editor of the news magazine Der Spiegel , for which he had previously freelanced for seven years on a large scale, including for the section Einebericht und Its Geschichte . A permanent position at Spiegel was offered to Relotius by Matthias Geyer and Ullrich Fichtner before 2017 . According to their statements, he turned down the job with the advice that he had to take care of his seriously ill sister, who, however, he had made up and who never existed. Relotius later admitted himself to have lied about the existence of a sick sister.

Affair about inventions in journalistic articles

Relotius enjoyed a high reputation among superiors and colleagues at Spiegel and was considered a meticulously researching journalist. After researching the time , however, there were first doubts about the journalistic correctness of one of his texts in 2017. Colleagues from Spiegel TV had come across contradictions when researching the article lion cubs (two alleged brothers weren't; wrong place and name information), but this did not lead to any consequences. In April 2017, two residents of Fergus Falls in the US state of Minnesota reported the discrepancies in the article In a small town to the Spiegel on Twitter , but received no response. They researched numerous details, but only published their results after the Relotius case had become public.

The forgeries were uncovered in late autumn 2018 when Spiegel reporter Juan Moreno , who had worked together with Relotius on the Jaeger's border report , noticed inconsistencies in the text in November, checked information and reported his suspicions to the head of the department. Those responsible in the corporate department reacted skeptically to the allegations and partly uncritically to Relotius' justifications. The management told Moreno, among other things, that either Relotius or he himself would have to go. It was only investigative research by Moreno and other affected persons who convinced the Spiegel to initiate a review of the reports and then a confrontation of Relotius with the evidence. Relotius thereupon admitted manipulation and submitted its termination on December 17, 2018.

On December 19, 2018, the Spiegel went public with the case. Claas Relotius "invented their own stories on a large scale", which the news magazine had printed. According to his own statements, Relotius' work ranged from correctly researched texts to the invention of figures, scenes, quotes and descriptive details to completely invented stories. He was quoted as saying: "I am sick and now I have to get help."

According to Journalist magazine , thirteen other editorial offices or editorial groups have published texts by Relotius in addition to Spiegel . Eight of them found evidence of errors in the texts published by them (as of March 2019).

Juan Moreno described his view of the case in the book A Thousand Lines of Lies , published in September 2019. In October 2019, Moreno was warned by Relotius' lawyer Christian Schertz . Relotius complains about 20 places in Moreno's book, including alleged false claims that Relotius continued to lie even after the scandal became known. Moreno contradicts the allegations. His publisher takes action against the warning.

Article overview

medium Number of articles written Period of the articles written affected by forgeries Remarks
Cicero / Cicero.de 18 (of which 9 in print) 2012 to 2016 at least 1 Cicero assumes that some of the articles contain forgeries and has therefore taken the texts offline
date 3 2013 to 2015 open The texts had previously appeared elsewhere
dpa 3 2010 still open The dpa has announced that it will review the texts
Financial Times Germany 10 2010 to 2012 10 All articles show deficiencies that violate good journalistic practice
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 3 2011, 2013 2 - He apparently copied parts of an interview allegedly held by Relotius from a book. According to the interviewee, parts of his answers are made up in another interview. The interviews were checked and the conversations confirmed by the interviewees, but not in full
NZZ Folio 2 2014 at least 1 The article about a Finnish hairdresser is said to contain several gross inconsistencies
NZZ on Sunday 6th 2012 to 2016 at least 2 Posts on Bastoy prison island and blood revenge in Albania
profile 5 2012 and 2013 still open The texts are interviews
Reports 5 2013 to 2016 at least 4 Inaccuracies, incorrect descriptions, factual errors and imaginations
The mirror 60 2011 to 2018 at least 14 I.a. Posts on the political mood in Fergus Falls
SZ magazine 2 2015 both Interview with Martin Greenfield , interview with two Woodstock contemporary witnesses
Daily mirror 2 2015 at least 1 The report contains fictional scenes, some passages are condensed in the interview
Day of the week 1 2012 1 Report from Sarajevo about the psychological consequences of the war
taz 11 2008 and 2011 not known Errors were found in the articles and some sources have to be questioned, which overall can be interpreted as a beginner's error
Die Welt / Die Welt am Sonntag 6th 2010 to 2014 at least 1 A funeral home described in the said article does not exist.
The world week 28 2012 to 2016 at least 5 A report from Bealsville, Ohio seems doubtful
TIME Online / TIME KNOWLEDGE 6th 2010 to 2012 at least 2 Parts of the Austin Lynch interview were made up

The mirror

Der Spiegel had around 60 texts "verified again" that Relotius had written for the magazine. Around half had been checked by January 2019. Most of them were falsified, contained exaggerations, misrepresentations and invented things or pretended to have conversations with people whom Relotius had never met. Relotius had his lawyer explain that he had "many times misrepresented, falsified and invented facts over the course of several years". In response to a catalog of questions sent in January 2019, he announced that he was unable to answer.

The results of the test so far:

  • The article Jäger (published in issue 27/2018) about the case of an American who survived the attack of a rattlesnake, a bear and a shark within three years is in parts greatly exaggerated and does not agree with the statements of others Media reports on this.
  • The article Karteileiche (published in issue 16/2018) about a Romanian who was falsely declared dead after moving abroad and who then tried in vain to reverse this process contains numerous errors and alleged inventions. The name of the protagonist as well as his family members is wrong. The reasons for the separation from his wife and the presentation of the defeat in court are also incorrect.
  • The article last rest (published in 01/2018 issue) about an American who is looking for his missing son and his acquaintance in the Californian desert and who finds him dead after three months, is largely made up. Numerous details alleged by Relotius, which are said to come from an alleged conversation with the man, were rejected as false by the latter when asked
  • The article duds (published in issue 46/2015) about an English woman who for some time thought a grenade for a vase and used it as such is essentially correct. Relotius had contact with the woman. Factual errors such as the claim that the grenade was sharp were taken over by Relotius without being checked.
  • The article Loss (published in issue 41/2015) about a Syrian who fled to Germany, who found a 500 euro note and a savings account and handed it over to the police, is "correct in the matter, but in details," according to the Spiegel possibly smoothed out, shortened and perhaps also enhanced for dramaturgical reasons ”.
  • The cover story Nass (published in issue 49/2018) for the world climate summit in Katowice was written in parts by Relotius. He allegedly reports from Kiribati . However, the flight documents show that although he flew to Los Angeles , he did not continue his journey to Kiribati. The text on Kiribati contains facts that can be researched even without a local visit. The abandonment of three places on the island due to flooding was invented. So far only one of the places has been cleared. The portrayal of a man who tried to be recognized as a climate refugee is wrong or at least dubious on some points.
  • The report Jaegers Grenz (published in issue 47/2018) about a citizen militia on the border between the USA and Mexico, which ultimately led to the discovery of Relotius' forgeries, is largely invented or falsified. People are made up, of different ages or have different names. The vigilante denies claims that they would shoot too.
  • The Interview Doesn't evil also return one day, if you let it? (published in issue 39/2018) with Traute Lafrenz , the last survivor of the White Rose resistance group , contained inventions or falsifications, as was proven in December 2018. Lafrenz had not authorized the interview , which is also not common in the United States, where she lives, but which is one of the principles of the Spiegel . Lafrenz later stated that she had not seen current pictures of Germans during the riots in Chemnitz , as Relotius put into her mouth in the interview , that this was an invention.
  • Relotius delivered three interviews on the cover story German on Probation (published in issue 31/2018). All three were authorized and contained no adulteration.
  • In the article Sorry (published in issue 28/2018) Relotius has only summarized material from colleagues and is therefore named as a co-author. No falsifications could be found.
  • In the report A children's game (published in issue 26/2018) Relotius tells the story of a 13-year-old Syrian in the civil war there . Relotius says that he had contact with the boy via the cell phone. Although the boy exists, numerous details about the form of contact and the boy's biography are incorrect.
  • The article Angel of Death (published in issue 50/2017) about an American woman who allegedly drove an acquaintance to suicide via text messages contains forgeries. While the case itself is real and has been extensively described in other media, Relotius did not conduct an interview with the woman's parents, and a description about the woman's stay in a psychiatric clinic also contains errors.
  • The text Der Mann von Zimmer 402 (published in issue 49/2017) about the attack on the Borussia Dortmund team bus was written by Relotius and six other editors. Counterfeits were not found.
  • The article Touchdown (published in issue 44/2017) about Colin Kaepernick is mostly fake. He never interviewed his parents. There are also some other errors.
  • The story Home-Run (published in issue 34/2017) about a baseball fan who washed down the ashes of his deceased friend in stadium toilets is basically correct, but Relotius added inapplicable details. This includes a made up nickname and false information about the relatives of the deceased. The protagonist and his work are also misrepresented in some points, as he explained when asked.
  • In the article In a small town (published in issue 13/2017 at the end of March 2017), Relotius claims, among other things, that next to the town sign for the American town of Fergus Falls there is a sign saying “Mexicans Keep Out” - “Mexicans, stay away”, and School children would paint Donald Trump as a role model. Residents refuted this and a number of other inaccurate statements. The article was deleted by Spiegel Online on December 23, 2018 as the first of the invented texts, at the same time the article In a Fantastic City by Christoph Scheuermann appeared, who stated: “You meet people who resemble Relotius' characters, but keep moving away from them remove the longer you talk to them. "
  • Cover story Angry White Man (published in issue 46/2016) on reactions to Donald Trump's election victory gave Relotius an article on talking in a pub in Dortmund . The verifiable facts from the article are correct, but whether the conversations actually took place is incomprehensible.
  • The article Königskinder (published in issue 28/2016, July 9, 2016) about a Syrian sibling pair aged 12 and 13 contains fakes. The existence of one of the two children cannot be proven. The other child is described with incorrect biographical details. Relotius collected donations for the children (see section on dealing with donations).
  • The report number 440 (published in issue 15/2016) about a Yemeni prisoner in Guantanamo , who was held for years without charge but decided against being allowed into an Eastern European country for fear of foreigners, is largely made up, like Relotius admitted in December 2018.
  • For the title topic The Disturbed Nation (published in issue 51/2015) about the reactions of the Germans to the arrival of the refugees, various Spiegel authors wrote 19 short pieces, three of which Relotius wrote. Because the names have been changed, two of these items cannot be checked for counterfeiting. In the third, which reports from Sumte , some facts are true, but the protagonist rejects certain allegations in the text as false.
  • The article Weltklasse mit Herz (published in issue 40/2015) contains some passages supplied by Relotius. All but one could be verified. There was no evidence of falsifications.
  • The article Homestory: Jedi-Radler (published in issue 19/2015) tells about the author's experiences when buying a bicycle and researching the bicycle enthusiast scene. There are small factual errors that are more likely to be attributed to the author who is still learning in this area.
  • The article When murderers become carers (published on April 19, 2014 on Spiegel Online ) is a shortened version of a text published by the Swiss magazine Reportagen . Relotius was on site for the report on prisoners in a US prison who are caring for other prisoners and probably also interviewed prisoners. Only minor errors could be found, but certain information could not be checked because the prisoners' personal data are not accessible.
  • Spiegel Online offered Relotius an interview with the actress Julie Delpy on her film Before Midnight under the title The men are guilty , which was released on June 4, 2013. There are some contradictions to other interviews with Delpy from this period, but no noticeable implausibilities.
  • The interview published on November 29, 2011 on Spiegel Online with the American economic researcher Daniel Hamermesh under the title Beauty literally pays off was verified by the latter.
  • On November 14, 2011, Spiegel Online published the report Who blogs, threatens death about the Mexican drug war. The statements seem plausible, but only a few sources can be verified.
  • Regarding the article final cleaning (published in issue 18/2018) about a Canadian who apologized 17 years after his stay at a hotel because he had left a mess there, Relotius stated in December 2018 that he was not with the protagonist had spoken. When asked, he confirmed that he had not received a request from the mirror . He rejected all requests except one from CBC News . Since no sources were available apart from a Facebook entry by the protagonist and the radio interview with CBC, it can be understood that some passages were made up.
  • In the article Lion Cubs (published in Spiegel on February 18, 2017), he apparently invented conversations between a doctor and a boy in a Kurdish maximum security prison.
  • The report The Last Witness (published March 3, 2018) about a woman who travels through the United States and witnesses executions is completely fictional.

NZZ Folio

The NZZ Folio , in which Relotius had published two interviews in the Bei Coiffeur series, said that the collaboration ended in 2014 after a reader pointed out inconsistencies in Relotius' second text. The first interview was offered to the newspaper by Relotius and was conducted with a Colombian hairdresser. After it was printed, Relotius said he could do another interview for the hairdressing series while on a trip to Finland.

World week

A report, two obituaries and 25 interviews from Relotius appeared in the Swiss World Week . The report was about a democratic village in the US state of Ohio that is turning away from Obama . It is doubted that Relotius ever visited Beallsville and that the main characters even exist. Weltwoche publisher Roger Köppel promised to examine the incidents, but stated that the interviews conducted by Relotius were "100 percent" authorized. The writer Leon de Winter remembered a "well-prepared interviewer" that Relotius had done "first-class work". The writer TC Boyle also remembered long conversations in his Santa Barbara home. The director Quentin Tarantino and the Syrian poet Adonis also confirmed the full text of the interviews.

SZ magazine

The Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin published two interviews by Relotius in 2015, which, after the scandal became known, it was found that they “contain errors and violate journalistic standards”. They have been removed from the magazine website.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

The FAS editors have checked three Relotius texts they have published: A report from 2011 about bloggers who are threatened by Mexican drug cartels could no longer be verified in quotations; However, the operators of the Borderland Beat blog assume that Relotius conducted an interview with one of the bloggers. An interview from 2013 with the former North Korean camp inmate and human rights activist Shin Dong-Hyuk could not be verified because he did not respond to a request from the FAS. According to the FAS, however, it is questionable whether Relotius met him, because essential parts of the conversation are literally or analogously in a book that was published in the USA in 2012 and tells the life story of the North Korean. The former Nelson Mandela prison guard , Christo Brand, who he allegedly interviewed in the same year, said when asked that he could not remember the conversation and that he had met a large number of journalists at the time. He also didn't recognize a photo of Relotius. The editors translated the interview into English and asked Brand to review it. This wrote to the FAS: "some parts of the interview are not my words". For example, he would never say there was a prisoner number on Mandela's shirt because he never saw it. “I wouldn't have said Mandela greeted me in Afrikaans either. The first prisoner who spoke Afrikaans to me when I started in Section B was Andrew Mlangeni. ”According to the FAS, Relotius may have used other interviews; if he had spoken to Brand, at least parts of the conversation would be falsified. There was one such case with the Spiegel.

Work for the Heinz Kühn Foundation

Relotius was in Cuba at the beginning of 2013 as a scholarship holder of the Heinz Kühn Foundation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia . Errors and contradictions were found in his final report published by the Foundation. The allegedly first tax advisor of communist Cuba appears there with changing names. A report about it, which he published in the magazine Cicero in September 2013 , was also noticed by his later Spiegel colleague Juan Moreno, who finally uncovered Relotius' wrongdoing at the Spiegel . Moreno was suspicious of the Relotius report from Cuba from the start - allegedly the shoe shiners were queuing up to use the services of this tax advisor. Later, to the amazement of his superiors at the Spiegel , he resisted a collaboration with Relotius.

Reactions to the manipulations

Spiegel front page of No. 52/2018 with the motto of the founder Rudolf Augstein

Der Spiegel publicly apologized for the fakes. The designated editor-in-chief Ullrich Fichtner announced that the affair would be cleared up by a commission made up of external members. Brigitte Fehrle , Clemens Höges (deputy editor-in-chief at Spiegel- Verlag) and Stefan Weigel (deputy editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Post ) were asked to investigate why the news magazine's inspection systems did not work and to document their results publicly.

In an open letter in Spiegel Online on December 22, 2018, the designated Spiegel editor-in-chief Steffen Klusmann wrote of a considerable internal failure that would have consequences. Regarding Relotius' articles he said: “De facto today we have to assume that all Relotius stories are fakes, like those in the other media for which he has written. [...] The stories are worthless as a journalistic product. "The process is" so crazy, so brazen and so absurd that in retrospect the misconduct literally jump in the face ".

At the end of December 2018, the editor-in-chief of Spiegel took the first personnel decisions. Steffen Klusmann wrote: Ullrich Fichtner (editor-in-chief) and Matthias Geyer ( journalist , society department) will "suspend their new contracts for the time being" until an in-house commission has "finally investigated" the Relotius affair. Fichtner discovered Relotius for Spiegel and Geyer hired him on a permanent basis and headed the Society department.

Georg Altrogge criticized the magazine for being known for suggesting to readers that its reporters were direct witnesses to the events or that they could rely on first-hand information; for this, "the magazine has often come under criticism, mainly due to the tendentious nature of such passages, which are often not even capable of counter-representation."

Stefan Niggemeier , himself a former Spiegel author, attested that the magazine had a “dangerous culture of storytelling” in connection with the Relotius case. The documentation department, which is considered meticulous, was intoxicated by Relotius' "texts that were really written with great perfection". As a result, a myth collapsed. Niggemeier also pointed out that even in journalistic textbooks it is considered legitimate to "condense the speeches and actions of several people into a single figure" in reports.

The media scientist Bernhard Pörksen stated that the Relotius case forced a debate about the ethics of storytelling in journalism. Stylistic devices like those in literature are allowed, but the content has to be right.

Jörg Thadeusz , former moderator at the awarding of journalist prizes and juror at the German Reporter Prize, commented that when selecting journalist prizes, “a certain worldview was established”. A prize is awarded to those who “confirm this picture as magnificently as possible with a drinkable story”. He asked what kind of goodwill a forger would rely on when he invented stories about a small American town where “the dulls are among themselves”.

For the contemporary journalist, literary scholar and philosopher Thomas Assheuer , both the conservative and the postmodern theory school meet in Relotius' works: “The conservative school claims that one can only endure the self-development of modern society by compensating for its damage to modernization with comforting narratives . The postmodern school of thought claims that reality does not exist at all, it is a construct - and constructs shouldn't be touched, because in the end they'll be broken. "Assheuer continued to describe Relotius as a" genius of empathy ", he had editorial staff and readers made happy. “The superstar wasn't a reporter; he was a poet god who took his characters for a walk through his own creation [...] And because he knew his creation, the world architect was able to tell it beautifully. "

In Die Welt , Christian Meier wrote that Relotius was able to deal with language like hardly anyone else in his generation. His reports "were almost always spectacular, extremely well composed and written." He misused his talent. There would only be losers in history. Dagmar Rosenfeld speculates that Relotius got away with it for so long because the stories fit into the editorial team's view of the world. “Relotius wrote down what should be. (...) Seen in this way, Relotius' texts had something comforting about them. It's just not the job of journalism to comfort. "

Michael Angele wrote: “When I review the reactions to the Relotius case, it seems to me that everything that is difficult, demanding, and bumpy would be delegated to literature. And only want to sell pure 'news'. However, I can only imagine a report without literary means as a statistic, and even that would become literature in the context of a newspaper. ”So the awareness of form is addressed. “Anyone who reads a newspaper reads forms, types, genres. He doesn't just read the naked truth. "

In his essay In the Beginning was the Story , the sociologist Stefan Schulz argued that Relotius could write beautifully. "He created stories that corresponded to our wishes, and thus he sometimes got closer to reality than he would have succeeded in doing with a - namely one-sided - factual report (...) Awards for his work show that he does not inform his readers well, but has touched deeply. As an author, he has taken himself out of the picture and made his readers believe that they will experience first-hand what he allegedly experienced. This is art."

The media scientist Joan Kristin Bleicher warned against the "naive view that reality can be represented in the media and media content is a pure image of reality." Reportage is traditionally a genre that prepares facts with narrative elements, Relotius used this form of representation. “I assign Relotius to the traditional line of New Journalism . Its founder Tom Wolfe emphasized the possibility of conveying reality as a narrative. ”Several media drew the same comparison. In the DIE ZEIT the author Konstantin Richter pointed out reporters like Gay Talese or Hunter S. Thompson , who celebrated their subjectivity as poetic truth. They wrote “detailed reconstructions of scenes that they had not experienced themselves. They reproduced the dreams and most intimate memories of their protagonists. They made one out of three people because they believed that the shortage was more expressive in the end than the disdainful reality (...) Relotius always had protagonists in his great stories who looked like characters in a novel, there were great scenes and a very unique tone. It was no coincidence that the protagonists always listened to music, the sound was more important than the truthfulness. "

In the debate about fake and fiction, numerous media compared the Relotius case with the case of the writer Robert Menasse , who in several political essays Walter Hallstein had composed a speech on the grounds of the Auschwitz extermination camp in order to advocate the idea of ​​a "European Republic". In Focus designated Ulrich Reitz both cases as "politically motivated". He compared Relotius and Menasse with Jurek Becker's “ Jakob the Liar ”, who kept his concentration camp inmates alive for as long as possible with the lie that liberation from National Socialism was imminent. "Lies are not only lied out of fear, malice, ridicule, pursuit of advantage or moral neglect, but not infrequently out of friendship, decency or love." Give motive for misleading. ”In his text“ May poets lie? ”The philosopher Konrad Paul Ließmann also took up this comparison and assumed both Relotius and Menasse“ theses and texts from a spirit of honest conviction ”. In the right-wing magazine Tichy insight took Klaus-Rüdiger in May this view. However, he also accused Relotius and Menasse of “attempting to abolish reality”.

Because US citizens were affected by counterfeits, Richard Grenell , US ambassador to Germany, requested an independent investigation by Spiegel . He also criticized anti-US reporting. Dirk Kurbjuweit apologized to the US citizens, who had been insulted and vilified by the reports; He rejected the charge of anti-Americanism . In the United States, the media took up the Relotius case. It was used as an opportunity for media criticism and analyzes of transatlantic relations. In the opinion of the American journalist James Kirchick , Der Spiegel "has long been spreading a crude and sensational anti-Americanism".

Investigation Commission report

On May 24, 2019, Der Spiegel published the 17-page final report of the intelligence commission convened in December 2018 around Brigitte Fehrle, Clemens Höges and Stefan Weigel. The commission reported a number of indications (from outside and from colleagues) that some Spiegel colleagues did not always work correctly journalistically in their texts.

These are falsifications where facts are incorrectly or incompletely presented, “either for dramaturgical reasons, because a story can be told more smoothly if one is not exclusively bound to facts when describing it, or for ideological reasons, because Let a story be told more stringently if you omit contradicting facts. In its many conversations with editors, documentaries and judicial officers, the Commission has gained the impression that these are not just occasional outliers, but in some cases differing views of what is still permissible in a journalistic text and what is not. "

Together with its final report, the Commission presents a number of proposed changes. This means that not only the facts are correct in stories, but also that the dramaturgy and processes must reflect reality. There should also be new rules for the Spiegel documentation department . Among other things, a story is to be selected at random every week, which is then "further verified". In addition, every reporter must "document his research completely" and his documents must be "kept for at least two years" by the documentation department.

The media journalist Stefan Niggemeier praised the relentless criticism and at the same time described the report as “devastating” for Der Spiegel. Most terrible is the description of the editorial culture in the company, "which could hardly be further removed from the outward-looking claim".

The former Spiegel editors Horand Knaup and Hartmut Palmer criticized the report in the Taz: “Even the title, 'Der Fall Relotius', is wrong. ' Der Spiegel Fall ' would have been more accurate. The new report refutes the version that had been widespread up to then that the magazine was a victim of the clever trickster Relotius. The report is rather a shocking document about the understanding of journalism in one of the leading German media houses, but also in the training centers of the branch. It says there: 'The report has been declared the “supreme discipline”. Journalism students learned to… leave out contradicting and bulky things, tell black and white stories, avoid shades of gray, subordinate reality to the dramaturgy. ' Or also: 'The narrative style that has been and is taught in reportage seminars, for example that of the “Reporter Forum”, draws on the toolbox of film, comics and literature, i.e. fiction.' And finally it still says: 'They [the reporters] then also told examples from their reports that then more and less falsified the true story. But there was always agreement that that was allowed. '"

Attempts to manipulate this Wikipedia article

In 2019, several attempts were made to manipulate and colorize Relotius' article in the German-language Wikipedia , which was only created after the manipulation allegations in December 2018, in his favor. The manipulation attempts were carried out by several newly created sock puppets .

Handling of donations

On December 22, 2018, Der Spiegel reported that Claas Relotius may have misappropriated donations. Relotius is said to have offered to readers of the magazine who contacted him with the intention to donate to donate for orphans in Turkey and to have sent his private account details for this purpose. The occasion was his article Königskinder , which appeared in the Spiegel , which deals with two alleged Syrian orphans who are said to be living on the streets in Turkey. This article is also affected by inventions. Der Spiegel announced a criminal complaint for allegedly misappropriated donations. On December 27, 2018, a law firm in Relotius' name stated that its head of department had been informed about the entire process and that Relotius in October 2016 gave up the donations of more than 7,000 euros from private funds that had been received on its account 9,000 euros and then forwarded it to Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe for a project to support war refugee children in Iraq . The organization confirmed that it had received an amount of 9,000 euros from Relotius in 2016. In addition, the law firm wrote in the press release that Relotius would refund all donors their money in full.

Awards

Relotius received 19 awards and two other awards in the field of journalism.

In 2012 Relotius was awarded the Swiss Media Prize for Young Journalists for an interview with the controversial French criminal defense lawyer Jacques Vergès (the greatest criminals are often the most cultured personalities) and the Austrian Magazine Prize in 2013 . In 2012 he also received a second prize in the young journalist competition "dpa news talent" for his report Tödliche Tradition in the magazine Cicero and the Coburg media prize for a story about a residential complex for people with dementia in the Netherlands.

In 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2018 he received the German Reporter Award , including three times for the best reportage and once as the best freelance journalist. In 2014, CNN named him Journalist of the Year . In the laudation it was said that he was telling about social problems in a “poetic way”, that he was able to “create images in the reader's head that run like a film”. In 2017 he was awarded the Liberty Award and the European Press Prize for his Spiegel reports on a Yemeni in Guantanamo Prison in the US and on two Syrian refugee children . For the, as it later turned out, manipulated Spiegel report about Königskinder , he also received the Catholic Media Prize in the print category in the same year . Relotius received the German Reporter Prize 2018 in December 2018 for a text also based on inventions, which, according to the reasoning before the manipulations became known, was "of unprecedented lightness, density and relevance" and "never leaves open the sources on which it is based". Also in 2018 he received the Peter Scholl Latour Prize from the Ulrich Wickert Foundation .

After the affair became known, Relotius announced, as his lawyer declared, "regardless of the authenticity of the reports on which they are based," that they wanted to return all journalist awards. According to his own statements, he also wanted to reimburse the donors for the associated prize money in some cases. After the manipulation became known, Relotius had previously been denied the Peter Scholl Latour Prize . Even CNN International recognized him from all the awards. In addition, the German Bishops' Conference Relotius recognized the Catholic Media Prize on December 28, 2018, and asked for the prize money of 5,000 euros back.

literature

Web links

Commons : Claas Relotius  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Double name as the author of a Zeit online review
  2. ↑ Information on a scholarship (PDF) from the Heinz Kühn Foundation ; accessed on December 19, 2018.
  3. ↑ Juan Moreno: A thousand lines of lies . Rowohlt, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-7371-0086-1 , pp. 128, 29-31 .
  4. ↑ Juan Moreno: A thousand lines of lies. Rowohlt, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-7371-0086-1 , pp. 132, 4-18
  5. ↑ Georg Löwisch: taz checks Relotius texts . In: The daily newspaper . December 20, 2018, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 2 ( taz.de [accessed December 23, 2018]).
  6. ↑ Juan Moreno: A thousand lines of lies. Rowohlt, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-7371-0086-1 , pp. 128, 24-26
  7. ↑ a b CNN Journalist Awards 2014 . In: CNN . March 28, 2014.
  8. ↑ The Relotius case: The answers to the most important questions. In: Spiegel Online. December 19, 2018, accessed December 23, 2018 .
  9. ↑ The SPIEGEL articles by Claas Relotius (2011 to 2016) , Spiegel Online , December 20, 2018.
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personal data
SURNAME Relotius, Claas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Relotius, Claas-Hendrik (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1985
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg