Staying professional during interviews, even when it’s tough

Emblem of the GDR’s Stasi secret service (photo: flickr/elmada)

Journalists talk to a wide range of people, sometimes even those whose actions we find morally reprehensible. But it’s crucial to stay professional during an interview—even with someone you might consider a monster. As part of our series on hardest interviews, onMedia’s Kyle James remembers his struggle to keep personal feelings from derailing a talk with a former official of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. 

Talking with people with unsavory pasts is never easy, but a part of a reporter’s job. Here in Cambodia, where I’m based, reporters researching the country’s traumatic past often find themselves face-to-face with former Khmer Rouge soldiers or officers. And given the scale of the 1975-1979 genocide, it’s very likely that these same reporters lost close family relatives to members of that regime. In many parts of the world—Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the Balkans, the list is long—journalists sit down with perpetrators of atrocities or their apologists. They are part of the story.

Such conversations are never easy, but it’s important to remain professional, stay neutral and not let your emotions get away with you. Our job as reporters is to get the story. Losing our temper in the middle of an interview could well prevent us from reaching that goal.

That doesn’t mean you don’t ask hard questions. As objective journalists, we let the story do the talking. Indeed, the cold facts can be more damning than our own heated reaction to them.

Stasi officer

Several years ago, while working on a story for DW about the notorious state security service of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), I scored a coup. I convinced a former high-ranking Stasi officer to meet for an interview.

His point of view would give the story another dimension, since I was also talking to people who had been persecuted by the once-sprawling surveillance agency. I had heard that the former officer, Wolfgang Schmidt, was unrepentant about the Stasi’s actions. I wanted to find out how someone whose employer – and by extension, himself – had intruded upon and ruined the personal and professional lives of so many, could justify his actions.

GDR memorabilia (photo: flickr/PercyGermany)

How do you live with yourself once the organization to which you’ve devoted your life has been so thoroughly discredited? Indeed, according to famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.”

While this incident might not be the equivalent of interviewing former Khmer Rouge executioners, I found myself getting fidgety in the elevator up to Schmidt’s apartment in eastern Berlin. My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that I had just taken a tour at the Hohenschönhausen prison, where the Stasi once locked up and interrogated people it saw as threats to its socialist system. Talking to former prisoners and hearing their stories, I had a distinctly bad taste in my mouth when it came to the Stasi. By the time I reached his floor, I was almost angry with the man, who I’d never met, but whom I suspected had a moral compass completely at odds with my own.

Once inside his flat, it was obvious that not only could Schmidt live easily with his past, he was quite proud of it. He worked for the secret service from 1957 until its dissolution in 1990 and his walls were crowded with paraphernalia from both the agency and the former German Democratic Republic.

Stay cool and collected

As we sat down to talk, it became apparent that he had no regrets, no remorse and little understanding of the disdain and hostility former GDR citizens felt toward him and his cohorts. Indeed, he felt he was a victim, not victimizer, and complained about how it had been so difficult for former Stasi employees to find good work after the Berlin Wall had fallen. (You can hear the full story below. The section with Wolfgang Schmidt starts at 7:24.)

I felt something close to disgust as he made these, to my mind, ridiculous logical contortions. And there were more than a few times where I was tempted to say something along the lines of: “You simply cannot be serious. The Stasi were the bad guys, not the citizens you spied on and locked up!”

Of course, I didn’t.

Had I succumbed to the temptation, sure, I might have felt a fleeting moment of satisfaction, but the interview would have probably stopped right there. He would have either asked me to leave or completely shut down.

Hohenschönhausen Prison (photo: flickr/le.poet)

What I was getting from him was, at least I think, his true feelings about the subject, however delusional they might have been. So I just let him talk. I didn’t exactly smile and nod my head in agreement, but I listened to what he had to say respectfully. I kept my tone level and my facial expression neutral, even when I was listening to a level of twisted rationalization that beggared belief.

I did put harder questions to him, but as neutrally as I could. I asked him if he could understand why so many people were so angry as him and his former colleagues. I asked him if he felt his agency had had the right to intrude in the most private aspects of citizens’ lives. Or locking them up in Hohenschönhausen jail simply for wanting to leave the country? I asked him if he would do anything differently if he could.

My job is to get his perspective, not to be ex post facto judge and jury.

In the end, I felt his own words were enough of an indictment. I just needed to get them on tape. Then I let the listeners decide what they thought of the man.

While it was a fascinating interview, and gave me (and hopefully listeners) insight into how some people can justify almost anything, it was tough going. I was relieved to say good-bye and leave this stuffy memorial to a discredited regime.

I hadn’t thought of Wolfgang Schmidt for years, but then in July 2013 he popped up in the news again. In an interview with the McClatchy news service, Schmidt told a reporter he was amazed at the breadth of the domestic spying service in the US under the NSA. “For us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said.

Author: Kyle James