Thomas Rogalla

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Thomas Rogalla (born 1953 in Witten ; died April 14, 2018 in Berlin ) was a German journalist and editor of the Berliner Zeitung .

Live and act

Thomas Rogalla grew up in the Ruhr area . He studied journalism and Scandinavian studies in Bochum, Berlin and Uppsala (Sweden). After a traineeship , he worked as an editor at taz and at Sender Freies Berlin . He wrote his first article on the international taz website in 1982 about the upcoming election in Sweden. For the local section of the newspaper, he spent several years managing editor .

In March 1989, when the red-green coalition in Berlin won the elections for the first time, he became the spokesman for the Senator for the Environment Michaele Schreyer . From 1992 to 1996 he headed the press office of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the GDR .

He returned to journalism in 1996 and has worked as an editor for the Berliner Zeitung ever since. There he headed the politics department, then switched to the science department. From 2003 his focus was the Berlin state politics.

He was spokesman, later chairman of the editorial committee of the Berliner Zeitung. In this function, he filed a lawsuit against the then editor-in-chief Josef Depenbrock , who in 2007 took over the management of the Berlin publishing house in addition to the editor-in-chief, which, according to Rogalla, violated the editorial statutes. He criticized the fact that an editor-in-chief made economic, but not journalistic, decisions depending on the share price due to this dual function. The lawsuit was dismissed by the Berlin labor court. After the Berliner Zeitung was sold to the DuMont media group in 2009, he spoke out in favor of its editorial independence. In 2010 he supported the elucidation of the Stasi past of editorial members.

In his obituary, Axel Klausmeier recalled that Rogalla campaigned “in numerous, always excellently researched articles and reports” to make the history of the Wall visible in the urban space and, in his texts, against possible undesirable developments in terms of content and design in the concept of the Berlin Wall Memorial of 2006 warned.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Federal President's Office and Federal Foundation for the Processing of the SED Dictatorship (ed.): The upright walk: Opposition and resistance in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR. Federal President Horst Köhler and Rainer Eppelmann in conversation with contemporary witnesses and students. Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-940938-33-6 , Appendix - The authors: Thomas Rogalla , p. 195
  2. ↑ Newspaper in court , Zeit Online, February 14, 2008
  3. ^ "Berliner Zeitung" editorial team loses trial against boss , Spiegel Online, July 2, 2008
  4. ↑ Klaus Beck et al .: Journalistic Quality in the Economic Crisis , UVK, Konstanz 2010, ISBN 978-3-86764-268-2 , p. 198
  5. ^ Constanze von Bullion, Viola Schenz: Stasi case at the "Berliner Zeitung". Exam hour , Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010
  6. ^ On the death of the journalist Thomas Rogalla , obituary of the Berlin Wall Foundation
personal data
SURNAME Rogalla, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and press officer
DATE OF BIRTH 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Witten
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 2018
Place of death Berlin