Dart Centre Launches in Germany with Hamburg Workshop

“The only thing people wanted to know about Natasha Kampusch after I’d interviewed her in 2006,” said Austrian TV journalist Christoph Feurstein, “was whether she had been sexually abused.”

“And that,” said Feurstein, who famously spoke with the Austrian teenager in her first television appearance in September 2006 after her escape from eight years captivity, “is the one question I was never going to ask her, unless she had been willing to answer it. A good trauma interview is always led by the victim, not the journalist. It just won’t work otherwise.”

Feurstein was speaking at a ground-breaking Dart Centre discussion on journalism and trauma at a conference in Hamburg of the German Society for Pyschotrauma (DeGPT), a launch event for the Dart Centre in German that brought together several of the country’s most experienced war and trauma journalists with Germany’s leading association for psychologists and medical specialists in trauma.

Petra Tabeling, Dart Centre Coordinator in Germany, moderating the discussion with firm use of a red card to keep speakers to their allotted time, noted how journalists are traditionally trained to do the tough interviews with difficult politicians – but given no guidance in their training how to deal with people who’ve been through extreme and traumatic experiences.

“That,” said Tabeling, “is something that with the Dart Centre we want to change – and we’re making progress already, with training courses set up with WDR Television and Radio, and interest coming in from other German-language news and training organisations in Austria and Switzerland as well.”

The conference also coincided with publication on one of Germany's principal news websites, www.tagesschau.de, of a comprehensive report on the issues involved in the journalistic engagement with trauma.

Feurstein’s respectful, gentle yet informative interview with Kampusch just days after her escape was welcomed by an audience of some 60 therapists in Hamburg as a model of how journalists can get a first-class story, based on clarity, purpose and kindness rather than the emotional, sensation-seeking and even voyeuristic approach so often adopted by much of the media when dealing with trauma survivors.

“For years,” Feurstein told the Hamburg symposium, “I’ve been training Austrian investigators how effectively to interview paedophiles, murderers and the like. When you’re working with victims, if you ask the wrong question, they will either break off the interview or break down. And quite honestly, interviewing Natasha Kampusch wasn’t any different from interviews I’ve been doing for the past 14 years, and not even the hardest.”

A second burning theme raised by Feurstein and several other journalists in Hamburg, both at the public forum in Hamburg and at a half-day Dart Centre workshop the day before with 12 reporters from around Germany, was that of the media industry’s own culture around trauma, and the reluctance – even inability – to acknowledge and support journalists in their own reactions to what they witness.

“I was in Beslan in 2004,” said freelance reporter Andrea Jeska, author of Beslan, Requiem, “where all pretence at journalistic objectivity was for me blown away by what I saw, and by how children had been killed in the most terrible ways. But when I got home, there was absolutely no support from my newsroom. I’ve never been asked how I am. I just get paid, and that’s it”

Another journalist spoke of how she had lost her son in a sporting accident several years ago, and of how one of the most painful aspects of her loss was how completely her newsroom colleagues failed to acknowledge her grief – probably, she said, out of awkwardness and simple lack of understanding how to handle extreme distress.

In a discussion that ranged wide across the field of reporting trauma, former talkshow producer Suzanne Forsström (left) appealed for a greater acceptance and understanding for trauma survivors who chose to tell their stories on television and in public.

“If it’s done well, and with a good psychological understanding,” she said, “talkshows can help even severely traumatised individuals. But journalists have to be aware of the responsibility they carry.”

Ursula Meissner, freelance photographer of war and crisis, spoke of how the pictures of what she had seen over the years stayed in her head, and of the futility of publishing pictures that others would find unbearable.

The Hamburg conference also listened with gratifyingly close and enthusiastic attention (see right) to a report on Dart’s wider activities in Europe. And while there was no formal conclusion, the meeting identified much common ground between journalists and therapists in Germany on the need for more journalistic training and media understanding of the nature of trauma and its impact.

This, said Dart Centre Germany's Fee Rojas, a journalism trainer and therapist, had to come from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

If you’d like to know more about the Dart Centre’s developing work specifically in German-speaking Europe, please do get in touch.