Jasna Zajček

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Jasna Zajček (* 1973) is a German publicist, non-fiction author, journalist , Middle East and Bundeswehr expert , television producer and columnist.

Jasna Zajček was born in West Berlin (Charlottenburg) and, after graduating from high school at the humanistic Schiller-Gymnasium, initially trained as an advertising clerk and an IHK-certified trainer for advertising clerks. After participating in the “European Year for Young People”, during which she studied Portuguese in Lisbon and Madeira and completed a BSAC training as a diving instructor, she began her journalistic career on the TV program “ ARD Ratgeber Reise ”. As a result, in 2006, in addition to working as a television producer, she began studying journalism and communication studies and later also studying high-level Arabic and Islamic studies.

She then completed a traineeship at Marc Wohlrabes Zeitbank Verlag and initially headed the Berlin and later the nationwide editorial team of the youth and club culture magazine “Flyer”. a. also Negar Ghalamzan, who later became PR head of the European VICE magazine (magazine), became an advertising clerk and PR expert.

Until 1999, Zajček was print and online editorial management and relaunch coordination of the largest East German cultural magazine “Cab Nightflight” as well as coordinator of various East German culture and music festivals and then as head of service for Bernd Heusinger's online tabloid magazine “Thema 1”.

Since 2001 she has worked as a freelance writer for newspapers at home and abroad (taz, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Welt, Zenithonline, Kulturausch, the magazine of the Institute for Foreign Relations, Spiegel Online, FAZ, FAS, VICE, Der Standard, Die Woche and many more .) and as a TV producer and author in Arabic-speaking countries for the US TV stations Vice, arte and 3sat .

In 2005 she received the CNN Journalist Award in the field of print for a month-long undercover report from a training camp of the US Army (infantry and marines) in Afghanistan. In 2006 she reported undercover for taz and BZ on the working conditions of employees and hostesses during the soccer World Cup in Germany. For this research, she trained as a star waitress for weeks. 

Also in 2006, Zajček took part in the German-Israeli journalist exchange project, where she decided to study the Arabic language and specialize in the region during a visit to Gaza after the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces.

In her first book "Ramadan Blues", published in 2007 by Herder Verlag, she deals with the coexistence of cultures (Occident - Orient) and the confrontation of a young East German with life outside his village near Leipzig. She traveled with him and a German-Jordanian cameraman in the fasting month of Ramadan in an old Mercedes bus along the borders of the former Ottoman Empire and researched how communism contributed to the integration of the remaining Muslims. At the same time, in consultation with and under the control of the fasting German-Jordanian, she took on the role of a Muslim (wife) woman in Ramadan; She reported these experiences in a taz column and also wrote about this experience in "Ramadan Blues".

In 2007, at the invitation of the Goethe Institute and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, she went to Beirut, Lebanon, as an exchange culture journalist from Damascus, where she lived and worked at the time. In the course of this invitation, she integrated herself into the Beirut cultural scene, blogged about it and conceived and organized the first “Berlin - Beirut” cultural festival and later the first and second Berlin - Dubai cultural festivals with the Goethe Institutes Beirut / Dubai. She arranged and produced the VICE TV series "Back in Beirut - VICE returns to Lebanon."

Since then, Zajček has been participating in the "Living Globality" project, an international exchange project that brings together opinion leaders from the European and Arab regions and thus acts as a cultural mediator through publications in internationally relevant media.

In 2008 Jan Lerch brought her to the Berlin independent radio “ Motor FM” , for which she reported from the Middle East and also on intercultural Arab topics from Berlin.

In 2009 she organized the worldwide, interdisciplinary "Global Prayers" conference on behalf of the House of World Cultures, the European University Viadrina and the Goethe-Institut Beirut and was the press spokeswoman for the association "Transparency for Iran".

Her second book, "Among female soldiers - reports from the front" was published in 2010 by Piper Verlag. In order to do research, the author was trained as a soldier by the German Navy in officer training at the Mürwik naval school and traveled to German soldiers on her own initiative to dangerous countries such as Sudan or Djibouti. The book is present in the libraries of all universities, bases and barracks of the Bundeswehr and is considered a standard work for German women who are interested in a military career. Zajček was made an honorary reservist in the Air Force for her commitment to research.

Until the outbreak of war in 2011 she lived in Damascus and Beirut and regularly led the Syria cultural tours for the readers of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT.

In September 2011, when the catastrophe of the Syrian War was already looming in the Middle East, she and Friedrich Bokern founded the aid organization (NGO) "Relief and Reconciliation for Syria", an organization that provides donation-based interdenominational peacebuilding and educational work for hundreds of Syrians Operates refugee children in Lebanon.

Since 2012, Zajček has lived again as an author and journalist in her hometown of Berlin and advises a. a. Independent cultural projects, but also a state theater (until 2015) in her work as an intercultural (PR) culture and Middle East expert.

In 2014 she was appointed to the advisory board of Peter Scholl-Latour's German-Arab Society due to her expertise in contemporary Middle Eastern political and cultural matters .

In 2016 she went to Bautzen, Saxony, for five months as an undercover reporter, with the cover of the German teacher for Syrian refugees, and tried not only to integrate her Syrian students, but also herself into the Saxon society, which is considered to be closed. This resulted in the book “KALTLAND”, published in 2017, which was described by the taz as the “smartest book on the refugee crisis”.

On August 21, 2018, Zajček's first book was co-authored with award-winning Deutsche Welle presenter Jaafar Abdul Karim . The book with the title "Strangers or Friends - what the young Arab community thinks, feels and moves" was published by Rowohlt Verlag .

She is currently doing research as a fellow of the "Fleiss und Courage" cartographers' grant. a. the Mercator Foundation on the challenges of integrating immigrants of Arab origin in eastern Germany.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Global Prayers
  2. ^ Transparency for Iran
  3. ^ Relief and Reconciliation for Syria
  4. ↑ Empathy, moral filterless , taz, March 24, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Zajček, Jasna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Croatian-German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1973