At the end of 2020, we said goodbye to Joachim Trenkner - a German journalist, a long-time collaborator of German, American and Polish media, since 1997 associated with "Tygodnik Powszechny".
Joachim Trenkner was one of the people to whom we owe the "miracle of reconciliation" (W. Bartoszewski). As a journalist active in both German and Polish media, he largely contributed to overcoming resentments and bringing the two nations closer together. Especially now, in the year when we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the treaty of good neighborliness and friendly cooperation, it is important to recall the people who contributed to the peaceful coexistence of both nations.
We encourage you to read the memories about Joachim Trenkner, prepared for us by Dr. Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel, author of the interview with Joachim Trenkner "German mirror".
Joachim Trenkner - Farewell
He was born in 1935 in Göttingen, he spent his childhood in Thuringia, in the small town of Schlotheim. Although his childhood was during the Second World War, he did not have bad memories from that period. The areas where he grew up were not particularly affected by hostilities. His early youth was inscribed in the process of establishing the GDR and the political consequences connected with it. For participating in demonstrations in solidarity with the protesting workers, Joachim Trenkner was expelled from the school in Mühlhausen and forced to work in a tractor factory. Then, also from above, he was delegated to study mechanical engineering in Leipzig, a unique city on the map of the GDR. Thanks to the international fair held there twice a year, it completely changed its character. It was there that he experienced the process of gaining independence and awakening - political and intellectual. It was in Leipzig, a city with one of the oldest German universities, where you could listen to lectures by the philosopher Ernst Bloch and the Germanist Hans Meyer. Also in Leipzig, with the legendary Gewandhaus, Joachim Trenkner fell in love with classical music, to which he has remained faithful forever.
After another gesture of political commitment - wearing black ties with several colleagues after the suppression of the uprising in Hungary - he was reprimanded harshly, culminating in forced self-criticism. It was then that the thought of fleeing to the West appeared. On 7 October 1959, on the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the GDR, Joachim Trenkner fled to West Berlin. Despite the fact that it was forbidden to settle in the city at that time, he managed to stay there - paradoxically due to profession of a locksmith which was in great demand at the time and which was Joachim's learned but hated profession. Back then, nothing foreshadowed his future journalistic career. At the beginning of 1961, he applied for a scholarship from the Society of Carl Duisberg, which allowed him to go on a student trip to the USA. He went there shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall, which he still observed closely. First, he studied for two semesters at De Pauw University, where he prepared to change his profession by choosing history, sociology and text editing. At the same time, he got acquainted with the history of National Socialist Germany, based on the vast source literature collected in the library of his then mentor, prof. Grueniger. Then he moved to New York and it was the time he spent there that shaped him professionally. After a short period of activity in the German emigre newspaper "Staatszeitung und Herold", he got a job in the foreign editorial office of "Newsweek". There, he also learned the journalistic craft and assimilated the motto that journalism is a service based on facts and transparency. At the same time, he wrote his first texts for "Aufbau", a magazine for German-Jewish immigrants. It was from his meetings with them that he gained historical knowledge about interwar Berlin and the beginnings of Nazism. It was then that he realized the enormity of the guilt that lies on Germany and the Germans for the evil that happened during World War II. All these experiences became the driving force for his later professional and personal activities.
In 1967, he returned to Berlin, where he started working at the Free Berlin Broadcasting Station (Sender Freies Berlin). It was there that he soon joined the editorial staff of the newly created magazine "Kontraste", which focused its attention on the issues of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In this context, his first professional contacts with Poland were born. The treaty concluded between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Polish People's Republic in December 1970 created conditions that allowed for a relatively normal reporter's work. In 1972, Joachim Trenkner traveled to Poland for the first time. He brought it closer to the German audience through topics devoted to politics, economy and culture. This is how materials about coal mines in Silesia, the German past of Polish cities and cultural events, such as the Chopin Competition, were created. In this decade, relations with Poland expanded to include another, very personal dimension - a marriage with Iwonna Trenkner from Warsaw.
He observed the social and political breakthrough related to the rise of Solidarity up close. Together with representatives of other foreign editorial offices, he participated in a press conference organized in Lech Wałęsa's apartment and held talks with other opposition activists. After the declaration of martial law, he could no longer travel to Poland, but on a regular basis, thanks to the idea of brilliant SFB engineers - using an antenna focused on Szczecin - he obtained information about martial law from Polish television. These materials, translated from Polish into German by the increasing number of Polish emigrants in Berlin, reached the West. It was with them that he met on the spot in Berlin, he closely accompanied the Berlin "Solidarity" and its initiatives, including the aid campaign "Packages to Poland". It was it, in second place after Willy Brandt's famous Kniefall, that he described years later as events that contributed to the improvement of Polish-German relations after 1945.
In the summer of 1989, shortly after the political breakthrough in Poland, Joachim Trenkner prepared a report for the magazine "Kontraste", which changed the view of the first hours of World War II. Conversations with a regional historian and witnesses of the epoch, as well as the conducted inquiries, allowed him to show the general public that the first war crimes in 1939 happened to the inhabitants of the small town of Wieluń, bombed on the morning of September 1 by the German Luftwaffe. The response to this report was immediate in Poland. In 1990, Joachim Trenkner received the Wieluń City Culture Award for it.
1989 was full of other journalistic surprises. Together with the TV crew, he accompanied Helmut Kohl's visit to Poland with the first democratic prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. There, he also received information about the fall of the wall. Years later, he reported on his night taxi trip to Berlin, which allowed him to follow the political breakthrough in Germany. Helmut Kohl briefly interrupted his visit to Poland, but returned there on November 11. A day later, together with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, he participated in the Holy Mass in Krzyżowa, which went down in history as a famous gesture of Polish-German reconciliation.
He said goodbye to the editorial office of “Kontraste” in 1990. In the following years he dealt with the history of Berlin, his next great love. The 10-episode documentary series "Berliner Leben" was devoted to him, on the basis of which a book of the same title was later created.
He became known to a wider circle of Polish audiences in 1997, when his collaboration with “Tygodnik Powszechny” began. Over the following years, he regularly reported on current political and social issues in Germany for a Krakow magazine. Equally important, however, were his more extensive texts, tirelessly translated by Wojciech Pięciak and devoted to the history and culture of Germany. A little later, he started writing for the Polish-German Magazine "Dialog" and the Gdańsk "Przegląd Polityczny". Over the next years, in the pages of these magazines he shaped the image of Germany and Germans in many Polish readers.
I knew Joachim Trenkner's articles written for Tygodnik Powszechny for a long time before we met. It took place in 2009 on the occasion of the exhibition "We Berliners", one of the flagship projects of the Center for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin, initiated by its director at the time, Robert Traba. Joachim Trenkner supported the organizers not imposing himself, but consistently. From the second plan, he helped in establishing contacts with Berlin journalists and editorial offices, supported the flow of information, and advised. We talked a lot at the time, and soon the idea came to my mind to take a closer look at his biography. Fortunately, he was convinced, thanks to which I had the opportunity to listen to a fascinating story about his life lasting many hours. In 2011, it reached the hands of a Polish audience in the form of a book entitled The "German Mirror".
In the questionnaire that opened it, when asked about his state of mind at the time, he replied: "More and more composed, but still curious”. This curiosity was an integral part of his personality. In fact, each of the conversations, whether by phone or live, began with the sentence: "What's up, interesting?" This applied to both political issues - which kept his passion unchanged, especially in the US and Europe, but also to social and private issues.
We were divided by age, experience and, in a way, interests. Our conversations - first those preparing for the book, then the next ones, which took place over the years, but I will remember with great gratitude. I learned a lot from them. I will keep the picture in my eyes as it ends our occasional dinner together. Whenever we set up at the intersection of Pariser Str./Uhlandstr., I would turn around after crossing the street shortly towards it. Invariably he waited, smiling friendly and waving goodbye.
Goodbye, Mr. Joachim.Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel
Berlin, 05.01.2021
Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel, culture expert and researcher at Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies at the University of Martin Luther in Halle. He studies the recent history of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe with particular emphasis on the issue of the settlement of National Socialist and Communist crimes, as well as the processes of democratization after 1989. In 2010, she conducted an interview with Joachim Trenkner, which was published in 2011 by the PWN publishing house under the title "German mirror" (ISBN 978-83-01-1665808).
