Then my mother shouted over the phone: "My boy, you are alive!"
I thought:
"How so? Is everything OK?"
"My boy, we thought..."
"What's the matter, mother?"
"We saw on TV what happened around you..."
TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind from all the things that had happened in the war she saw it with her own eyes!
I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting.
That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional case.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.
I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that for many years.
Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper everything I say doesn't only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.
What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.
Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers Bild, die Welt get published articles extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.
There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't I don't mean this negatively want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.
That is, if one gets to follow a politician -- and this hasn't changed to this day -- I soon realized that when I followed the president or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.
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