MEDIA

...Journalists feared the decision could spell the doom of investi-gative reporting in West Germany: If the shady practices of the country's largest newspaper were not a matter of public con-cern, what was...

...u Serge d'Adesky is a free-lance writer who lives in Munich, West Germany...

...The exposes of Germany's maverick muckraker have not earned him an easy life...

...Two years earlier, Wallraff chained him-self to an Athens lamppost to protest the Greek military regime, and earned an authentic inside view: He was tortured and thrown into prison...

...In fact, Wallraff, a self-proclaimed "demoeratie socialist," remains an elusive figure in West German politics...

...MEDIA Serge d'Adesky MUCKRAKING MASTER Journalist Guenter Wallraff makes the mighty ofEurope tremble n 1976, West German Journalist Guenter Wallraff lured Portugal's former President to Duesseldorf by promising to ar-range a coup that would return him to power...

...Other muckraking adventures have earned him death threats from right-wing extremists and undue corporate interest in his State of mind: In 1973, the business-backed Institute of the German Economy distributed a study of Wallraff to personnel managers of thousands of companies...

...The grounds for the legal decision ap-palled non-Springer journalists throughout West Germany...

...In case that warning to readers did not take, Springer got a Hamburg court to block further publication of the book...

...Wallraffs muckraking masquerades, says the liberal magazine Zeit, have enabled him to expose "terrible realities, which almost without exception are cases for works Councils, industrial inspectors, and sometimes prosecuting attorneys...

...In East Germany, however, communist funetion-aries were incensed when he organized support for regime critic and folk singer Wolf Biermann...

...Of Bild publisher Axel Springer, Wallraff wrote, "Without Springer...

...In a five-part series, Bild called Wallraff "an Underground communist, exhibiting all the classical Symptoms of a stark psychopath...

...Finally, he was identified and thrown out, but not before he had gathered enough material for a book, Der Aufmacher (The Banner Headline), which accused Bild of fabri-cating interviews, Publishing sham photographs, cooperating with government intelligence agencies, and slandering public officials who do not share the paper's right-wing editorial policy...

...the study called him a communist and ques-tioned his sanity...

...The highly re-garded newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung noted, "If the German Press Council does not hold a special meeting on Bild to deal with Wallraffs material, then it would do HENRIK DRESCHER better to dissolve itself right away...

...Members of the ruling Social Demoeratie Party view him with suspicion because he turns to communist union leaders for help in investiga-tions and because his books have been re-printed in East Germany...

...Strauss was embarrassed—and Spinola was deported from Switzerland for engaging in forbidden political activity...

...There would be fewer spies and fewer lies...

...The court ruled that ob-taining information by deeeption and infiltration was illegal unless a matter of "truly predominant public interest" would ofherwise remain secret...

...Guenter Wallraff is, in short, his own man with his own missions...

...He produced a second expose of Bild—Zeugen der Anklage (Witnesses for the Prosecution), based entirely on outside research and informants...

...For three months at Bild, Wallraff wrote credibly trashy articles and pretended to share the views of his fellow reporters...

...He has had ample experience with this sort of harass-ment...

...Read by one out of every four German readers, Bild is owned by Axel C. Springer, who also owns eighteen other newspapers and magazines...

...there would be less nationalism and racism, less of a police State, and less prostitution, sexual as well as political...

...Without Wallraff, there would be more...

...But Wallraff did not toss in the towel...

...He spent almost three years in blue-collar jobs at such companies as Siemens, Melitta, and Ford, and produced a brilliant aecount of the squalor and drudgery of industrial life in affluent Germany...

...Wallraff, "the man of a thousand haircuts," has put in undercover time at a mental ward in Hessen and a shel-ter for homeless in Hamburg...

...Wallraff reports that while he was writing Witnesses for the Prosecution, he was followed, his house was bugged, and his telephone line was tapped, all in routine ways that suggest the touch of the BND, Germany's intelligence agency...

...With a new haircut, contact lenses to replace his glasses, and a darkly tanned, fresh-shaven face, Wallraff adopted the name Hans Esser, and passed a writing test at the Hannover bureau of West Germany's largest and most lurid newspaper: Bild...

...In March 1977, Wallraff undertook his most outrageous masquerade ever—as a reporter...

...Varying in style and content, the Springer publications all refiect the conservative, aggressively anti-communist beliefs of Axel Springer himself...

...Out of that meeting, in which Wallraff played a representative of rieh right-wing Germans, Wallraff wrote a care-fully documented article that divulged the details of high-level international intrigue, including secret contacts between the exiled former president, Antonio de Spinola, and German conservative politician Franz Josef Strauss...

...Bild's response was quick and vicious...