Günter Wallraff (born 1 October 1942) is a German writer and undercover journalist.
Günther Wallraff was born in Burscheid, the son of a Ford worker and a factory owner's daughter. After attending high school, he trained as a bookseller until 1962. He began writing poetry as early as the 1950s.
Wallraff invoked his constitutional right of conscientious objection against conscription into armed military service, thus leading to being required to carry out alternative civilian service. Having missed the deadline for filing his refusal, he was nevertheless drafted into the Bundeswehr.
Wallraff refused to use weapons in the Bundeswehr. During his time in the Bundeswehr in 1963, he kept a diary about his service. When he announced the publication of the diary, the military leadership offered to release him from his service if he refrained from publishing it. Wallraff rejected this, and was admitted to the psychiatric ward of the Bundeswehr hospital in Koblenz (Bundeswehrzentralkrankenhaus Koblenz). In 1964 he was diagnosed by a military doctor with an "abnormal personality" and "unfit for war and peace" ("untauglich für Krieg und Frieden") and was released from service. In the 1960s, the Bundeswehr was a place where many former Nazi officers served, Wallraff later said.
His experiences from this time were published in 1970 in the anthology "From one who moved out and learned to fear". In this book he processed his time in the psychiatric ward of the Bundeswehr hospital in Koblenz. The involuntary role as a psychiatric patient became a key experience and starting point for his later literary work.
Wallraff described himself as a person with a weak ego. However, this weak ego also accounts for his ability to empathise with others.
From 1966 Walraff was editor of the magazine Pardon, from 1968 on for magazine konkret and from 1973 a freelance author.
Throughout his life, Wallraff repeatedly hosted prominent persecuted artists in his house for a period of time. For example, he hosted Wolf Biermann after his expatriation from the GDR, and Salman Rushdie after he was given a fatwa.
Wallraff came to prominence thanks to his striking journalistic research methods and several major books on lower-class working conditions and tabloid journalism. This style of research is based on what the reporter experiences personally after covertly becoming part of the subgroup under investigation. Wallraff would construct a fictitious identity so that he was not recognisable as a journalist.
In the German newspaper Die Zeit in 1977, Walraff formulates a sentence that is central to his work: “If I want to make myself the mouthpiece of the voiceless who have little to say even though they have a lot to say, that means to me that I am one of them, at least temporarily."
Wallraff first took up undercover investigative journalism in 1969 when he published 13 unerwünschte Reportagen ("13 undesirable reports") in which he described what he experienced when acting the parts of an alcoholic, a homeless person, and a worker in a chemicals factory.
He travelled to Greece in May 1974 at the time of the Ioannides military dictatorship. While in Syntagma Square, he protested against human rights violations. He was arrested and tortured by the police as he purposely did not carry on him any papers that could identify him as a foreigner. After his identity was revealed, Wallraff was convicted and sentenced to 14 months in jail. He was released in August, after the end of the dictatorship.
In 1977 Wallraff worked for four months as an editor for the tabloid Bild-Zeitung newspaper in Hanover, calling himself "Hans Esser". In his books Der Aufmacher (a pun meaning both "Lead Story" and "the one who opens") and Zeugen der Anklage ("Witnesses for the Prosecution") he portrays his experiences on the editorial staff of the paper and the journalism which he encountered there, which at times displayed contempt for humanity. In 1987 the journalist Hermann L. Gremliza claimed that he, rather than Wallraff, had written parts of Der Aufmacher. The book also formed the basis for the 1990 English-language film The Man Inside, starring Jürgen Prochnow as Wallraff.
Ganz unten ("Lowest of the Low") (1985) documented Wallraff's posing as a Turkish Gastarbeiter, and the mistreatment he received in that role at the hands of employers, landlords and the German government.
In 1986 he was honoured as a Laureate of the International Botev Prize.
In December 1996, Wallraff met with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan at a Syrian training camp to discuss The Surahs by Kurdish dissident Selim Çürükkaya, who was threatened with death because of this book. Wallraff was warmly received by Öcalan thanks to his role as the Turkish worker "Ali", but failed in getting the murder order overturned. The conversation was printed by Die Zeit.
In January 2003, Russia turned away Wallraff and two other Germans, the former labour minister for the CDU Norbert Blüm and Rupert Neudeck, head of the relief organisation Cap Anamur, as they tried to enter the country to work on a human rights article about Chechnya.
In May 2007, Wallraff announced that he had started yet another undercover journalist work, this time at a German call centre.