Paul Sahner: obituary for the Bunte reporters – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Paul Sahner always approached on velvet paws. He already familiar terms getting to know. After only two sentences he had one thing in common found. For example: “You, your boss is a good one I’ve time to ‘Penthouse’ fetched.” At the latest with the third set he gave one the feeling that one is friends for ages. Let someone close is not equal to, Sahner put an extra helping of melting in his latte macchiato voice, and his soft eyes looked a trace gentle.

So let well empathize with what it had to celebrities who sat opposite him at the interview. The gentle way he made them clear: pack again right, then it’s out, it’s better for you. Of course, it was better for the rest of the “Bunte”, whose chief interviewer was Sahner. Or, as the “taz” called him, the “godfather of intimate confession”.

The maintenance of professional friendships was the main occupation of the gossip reporter Paul Sahner. Stars like Thomas Gottschalk or Udo Jürgens, he already knew, as the young men were. The natural wonder Johannes Heesters he made for “Bunte” for life to pay his respects to the birthday. Had than the mirror overwritten a story about the aged Heesters with “Assisted singing” Sahner complained eloquently in a letter.

Sahner and “Colorful” – a symbiosis

Because Sahner occurred as a friend, celebrities felt safe with him. And talked around his neck. Marcel Reich-Ranicki lederte talking to Sahner to literary critic Sigrid Löffler, they have no understanding of eroticism. Franz Beckenbauer known, he could imagine a rebirth as a plant.

Once Sahner also wrote political history, the holiday interview with a lively Rudolf Scharping. The defense minister was not going to be photographed with his noble companion of a photographer in the pool. Sahner sat on the terrace and wrote gleefully with. In “Colorful” was later to read of “skip fountains” and a Scharping, the braces his Countess at the “slender waist” from the pool. The response to Scharping public Planscherei was devastating.

Paul Sahner was “Bunte”, and for many years, he coined Burda People magazine perhaps more than some editor in chief. He and the blade went into a symbiosis, it seemed as if he had always been there. But that corresponded neither to the truth as the impression of the dandy with the chic scarves must have been born into the Munich Dietl Eichinger Schumann’s glitterati.

In fact Sahner came in Hamm to the world, he volunteered at the “Westfalen Blatt” and was a 22 year old local chief in Hoexter. After that he worked as a police reporter for “image”. Since the seventies he wrote for “Bunte”, but also operated the “star”, “Quick”, “Hörzu” and the Munich “Abendzeitung” until he editor of men’s magazine “Penthouse” in 1992. After two years he returned to the “Bunte” back, he became a member of the Editorial Board in 2001. Only last year he retired on an author posts.

“What’s left of him, the legendary?” was entitled to the Playboy Gunter Sachs Sahners obituary. What remains of Sahner? The certainty that an era is irretrievably past. Stars go today not as clueless journalists how to Sahners great time. A gossip reporter like him there will be no more. For this alone provide armies of flack.