The writer and journalist has died at age 91. Giordano was one of the most influential intellectuals in the former Federal Republic.
The Hamburg journalist Ralph Giordano | © Sebastian Widmann / dpa
He was an energetic warning voice against the right and his words carried weight: the writer and journalist Ralph Giordano was for decades a formative intellectuals in Germany. Now he has died at the age of 91 years in Cologne at the consequences of a femoral neck fracture he had suffered a few weeks ago in a fall at his home. A family member confirmed a report of Cologne newspaper Express
For his 90th birthday -. 20 March last year – he was honored in his hometown of Hamburg. It was one of the few public appointments, he was still able to perceive. “My energy levels, my force potential is reduced, which I clearly feel,” he said at the time. Behind him lies a “tremendous distance” and a “murderous century”.
Giordano was born on March 20, 1923 in Hamburg, 1972, he moved to Cologne. As the son of a Jewish woman he barely escaped the Holocaust at a young age. “It is a stage of life that has shaped everything I’ve done it,” he said. When his mother was to be deported in February 1945, the Giordano’s hidden in a cellar hole. On May 4, 1945, she was freed by the British army – almost starved and totally exhausted.
However, Giordano decided to stay after the war in Germany and to strive for reclamation and explanation of dehumanization
Minted has started his humiliation, persecution and ill-treatment by the Nazis. The fight against right-wing extremism was for Giordano life’s theme. For decades, he warned in books, articles and lectures to right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism.
He wrote 23 books, many of which were bestsellers, and abroad. His major works include the autobiographical family saga The Bertinis , The second fault or from the burden of being a German and If Hitler war would have won .
Much has been observed his autobiography Memories of survivors can . As a TV journalist, he worked from 1961, first at Norddeutscher Rundfunk, then turned from 1964 to 1988 for the WDR around 100 films from around the world, including numerous documentaries. For his television reports he received several Grimme Prize. He leaves
His work, German Literature Archive in Marbach. As will probably not be sufficient for the removal VW bus, Giordano had noted on his 90th.
Giordano was a mighty and also a controversial man. Much of the criticism he set off with his statements on Islam to a failed in his view, the integration of Muslims and the construction of the Cologne Central Mosque. Pointed comments on talk shows and the term “human penguins” for veiled Muslim women sparked outrage. That he was accused of common cause with the radical right, injuring him. It is simply to denounce such manifestations of Islam, which are incompatible with the Basic Law go to him, Giordano justified. known
Little was a private person Giordano. Three times he had married. In his last years, the lanky gentleman lived with the imposing white mane of hair quite withdrawn in his apartment in Cologne. His sharp intellect has been preserved to last him.
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