Tom Sorrow

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tom Kummer at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2019

Tom Kummer (born January 14, 1961 in Bern ) is a Swiss journalist and author . In 2000 he sparked a media scandal with fabricated interviews .

Life

Tom Kummer worked as a reporter for Tempo magazine for several years . From 1993 he worked as a Hollywood correspondent for SZ-Magazin and the Tages-Anzeiger-Magazin as well as a freelance journalist (e.g. for Die Zeit , Der Spiegel , NZZ , FAZ , Stern , Vogue ). In 1994 he was nominated for the Joseph Roth Prize for his story about Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford . He describes himself as a representative of " borderline journalism "; He openly admitted it in his 1996 book Good Morning, Los Angeles . In an essay updated in 2012, he presented his "journalistic basic idea" as an expression of our postmodern world.

In 2000, a press scandal developed when Focus magazine revealed that Kummer had not conducted several interviews with celebrities - including Hollywood stars such as Charles Bronson , Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone  - but instead reassembled or invented them from existing material. Both editors-in-chief of SZ-Magazin , Ulf Poschardt and Christian Kämmerling , were then dismissed. Roger Köppel , one of the injured recipients of such interviews, said in 2011 that he could not have imagined “that someone would act so boldly. [...] Afterwards, Kummer liked to tell you that with the knowledge of the editors-in-chief he was selling his pieces as an art form - that's a bold lie. In the end, he charged expenses for this - they were very real and not an artistic concept. "

After a break of several years, the Berliner Zeitung gave Kummer a new chance in the German-speaking print market in 2005 . A report he delivered turned out to be a bundle of two texts that he had already published in the NZZ and SZ-Magazin . Although it is not uncommon in the industry to recycle stories that have already been published, the Berliner Zeitung immediately terminated the collaboration because the editors were not informed that they were dealing with old, already published texts. Also in 2005 he was featured as a columnist for the Swiss magazine Faces .

In 2009 his report Nation Without a Bottom about the Super Bowl appeared in WOZ . This article was then criticized in Der Sonntag by the journalist Peter Hossli: facts are incorrect, passages are exaggerated and distorted. The WOZ editorial team justified itself in a separate article; Hossli, in turn, criticized the justification and provided further facts about inconsistencies in Kummer's article.

In July 2009 he wrote an article about the Facebook phenomenon for the German weekly newspaper Der Freitag . The text was voted one of the ten best feature articles of 2009 by the website Der Umblätterer (“Golden Mole 2009”). A remake was published in 2011 in the April issue of the Swiss cultural magazine Du under the title Facebook Revisited - the fiction of the real .

In 2010, the documentary Bad Boy Kummer was released , directed by Miklos Gimes , the 1997 deputy editor-in - chief at the Tages-Anzeiger-Magazin . The film opened in Swiss cinemas on October 21, 2010, and in Germany on May 5, 2011. According to Gimes, Kummer was paid for his work on the film - interviews, etc. - but did not participate in the filming.

In 2013, Kummer's story Borderline was published in the Swiss magazine Reportagen . The text was recognized as Kummer's comeback story. From 2013 to 2014 Kummer wrote regularly for the Swiss weekly newspaper Die Weltwoche . In 2016, Kummer was confronted with allegations of plagiarism. It turned out that several articles by Kummer in Weltwoche and in Reportagen magazine contained sentences and sections that he had copied from articles in Spiegel , in der Zeit , Süddeutsche Zeitung , Wikipedia and other places.

After the death of his wife Nina in 2016, Kummer moved from Los Angeles to Bern again. In benevolent reviews of his 2017 novel “Nina & Tom”, Kummer was described as a “brilliant stylist” and “strong narrator”. However, daily newspapers and the trade press reported renewed plagiarism. The Zurich-based plagiarism researcher and literary scholar Philipp Theisohn described Kummer's writing method as a "trick", again suspected "scenes that may never have played out" and concluded: "Here, an aging writing posture mourns the world it has lost."

At the invitation of Michael Wiederstein , Kummer was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2019 . He read the text "From Bad Parents" but was not shortlisted .

Fonts (selection)

  • Good morning, Los Angeles . The daily hunt for reality. With an afterword by Claudius Seidl . dtv, Munich 1996
  • Is there anything stronger than seduction, Miss Stone? Star interviews by Tom Kummer. With a foreword by Ulf Poschardt . dtv, Munich 1997
  • Sharon Stone (illustrated book with foreword by Tom Kummer). Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1998
  • Jackie! A body education novel . Ullstein, Berlin 1999
  • We love you (Com & Com art catalog with a text by Tom Kummer). Niggli, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-7212-0459-X
  • Blow up. The story of my life . Blumenbar, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-936738-26-1
  • Little Knut really big. The world's most famous polar bear in conversation with Tom Kummer . Heyne, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-453-14658-7
  • Nina & Tom. Novel. Blumenbar, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-351-05035-1
  • Five fictional interviews, in Christian Werner: Los Angeles. Korbinian Verlag, Berlin 2019
  • From bad parents . Klett-Cotta-Verlag, Stuttgart 2020, ISBN 978-3-608-50428-6
  • Reports & portraits 1987–2016. Work edition Part One . Ed. V. Tom Kummer and Florian Waldvogel. Edition Metzel, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-948395-00-1

documentary

  • Miklos Gimes : Bad Boy Sorrow . T&C Film, Columbus Film. 92 minutes, CH 2010.

literature

Web links

To the author

On the counterfeit scandal

Interviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ aufbau-verlag.de: Tom Kummer , online , accessed on September 4, 2017
  2. ↑ Press reports with a reprint of the article. (PDF; 5.99 MB)
  3. ↑ First sensation then scandal: what journalistic sloppiness can lead to . In: Focus magazine. April 24, 2008
  4. ↑ On the Myth of the Real
  5. ↑ When Tom Kummer fooled the world . In: Focus magazine. October 25, 2010
  6. ↑ "I distrust the crowd" . Medienwoche.ch, November 25, 2011; Retrieved June 1, 2013
  7. ↑ The Forger of Truth . RP Online , May 3, 2011
  8. ↑ FACES: New columnists with Maxim Biller, Tom Kummer and Uwe Kopf . persoenlich.com, March 16, 2005, accessed May 31, 2014.
  9. ↑ Nation without a soil . In: WOZ Die Wochenzeitung , February 5, 2009
  10. ↑ Peter Hossli: Sorrow is worrying again . hossli.com, The Sunday of February 8th, 2009
  11. ↑ Sorrow with Tom . In: WOZ Die Wochenzeitung , February 12, 2009
  12. ↑ Peter Hossli: Take care of Spielberg . hossli.com from February 12, 2009
  13. ↑ Moritz is still drinking , the Friday of July 7th, 2009
  14. ↑ Best of Feuilleton 2009
  15. ^ To the content of Du, issue 815, April 2011
  16. ^ Bad boy and me - Director's Notes . (PDF; 127 kB) kummer-film.ch, accessed on October 21, 2010
  17. ↑ The forger . In: Tages-Anzeiger , October 20, 2010
  18. ↑ The dazzling promise of pop . Spiegel Online , May 5, 2011
  19. ↑ Journalist who faked celebrity scoops stars in film about his life and lies . In: The Guardian , May 10, 2011
  20. ↑ borderline .
    Jan Wehn: Tom Kummer: Borderliner on the Borderline
    Alexander Krex: Banal Reality: Meeting Tom Kummer . Berliner Gazette, June 5, 2013
  21. ↑ Comeback of Tom Kummer . persoenlich.com, July 18, 2013; accessed on December 1, 2013
  22. ↑ Boas Ruh: Tom Kummer's unfair text collages. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . July 9, 2016. Retrieved July 9, 2016 . - Rainer Stadler : Plagiarism. The (in) culture of copying. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 9, 2016, accessed on July 9, 2016. - Daniel Puntas Bernet: Statement on the NZZ report on Tom Kummer. In: Reports . July 9, 2016. Retrieved July 9, 2016 .
  23. ↑ Stefan von Bergen: Tom Kummer: «'Bad Boy', that comes close to my being» . In: Berner Zeitung , August 28, 2016.
  24. ↑ Nina & Tom. Retrieved September 11, 2017 .
  25. ↑ Jochen Schmid: Tom Kummer reloaded. (PDF) Basler Zeitung, accessed on September 11, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Jens Jessen: "Nina & Tom": A tolerator, not a macho . In: The time . March 30, 2017, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed September 11, 2017]).
  27. ↑ Tobias Sedlmaier: Tom Kummer: Everything just stolen 2.0 . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . April 19, 2017, ISSN  0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed September 11, 2017]). - Tobias Kniebe: "She will kill me if she ever finds out about it". Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 20, 2017, accessed on September 11, 2017 . - Plagiarism allegations against Tom Kummer - He did it again , boersenblatt.net, April 19, 2017, accessed on April 21, 2017
  28. ↑ Philipp Theisohn: Tom Kummer: Gonzo no longer lives here . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . April 28, 2017, ISSN  0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed on September 11, 2017]).
  29. ↑ Tom Kummer: From Bad Parents. In: Bachmann Prize 2019. ORF, June 28, 2019, accessed on July 5, 2019 .
  30. ↑ The shortlist for the award. In: Bachmann Prize 2019. ORF, June 30, 2019, accessed on July 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Grief, tom
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss journalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern