Biography
The father immigrated from Sicily. Immediately after Adolf Hitler's Nazi takeover at the beginning of 1933, Giordano moved from elementary school to a respected Hamburg high school. Since his mother was Jewish, the child was exposed to anti-Semitic reprisals from teachers and classmates at high school as a result of the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. Giordano was arrested several times by the Gestapo and badly beaten during interrogations. In 1940 he had to leave high school early. At that time, Giordano began writing a story about his family, which was to be published in novel form in 1982. After the family lost their home in Hamburg as a result of a bomb attack in the summer of 1943, they temporarily moved to Bösdorf in the Altmark. A year later he returned to Hamburg.
Shortly before the collapse of National Socialist rule, Giordano's mother was threatened with deportation. A friend from Hamburg then hid the family in a cellar, which saved them from the worst. After the end of the war, the 22-year-old decided to investigate the National Socialist crimes in Hitler's Germany. He joined the newly formed Jewish community in Hamburg. At the same time, he initially became politically active on the far left by joining the Hamburg Communist Party in 1946 and also writing for communist newspapers in the following 10 years. Giordano even took part in a writers' school in the GDR. However, Giordano's Stalinism met with increasing criticism until he finally left the Communist Party in 1957. In 1961 he published the book "The Party is Always Right," in which he recapitulated his involvement in the Communist Party with unusual self-criticism. The literary reckoning brought Giordano his first attention in the German media.
In April 1961 he was initially appointed to the East-West editorial team of NDR television in Hamburg. Giordano then went to WDR in Cologne in 1964, where he worked until his retirement in 1988. During these more than two decades he made television documentaries about National Socialism and Fascism, but also about Stalinism. In his 100 television films, he also addressed the problems of the Third World as a further focus, being one of the first to address German involvement in colonialism ("Heia Safari - The Legend of the German Colonial Idyll in Africa"). The television documentarian's special style included making general social grievances visible through the depiction of individual fates. With his book "The Trace" in 1984, Giordano presented a summary of his television work. Giordano published the novel "The Bertinis" in 1982, which describes the persecution of a family under National Socialism and depicts the author's 40-year literary examination of his own family history.
The German and international success of the book (translations into Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, French and Hebrew) led to a film adaptation as a five-part ZDF series, which also found a wide television audience in Israel. As a more political preoccupation with his and German history, Giordano published the book "The Second Guilt or the Burden of Being German" in 1987, which deals with the repression of National Socialism in post-war Germany. However, the journalist and writer was not only concerned with the recent German past, but was also interested in current political events. In the wake of the emergence of a new right-wing extremist youth movement in unified Germany in the 1990s, Giordano repeatedly addressed the public with warnings. His political commitment made Giordano himself a target of right-wing extremist violence: he received more than 200 death threats within a year. However, when he called for more effective state countermeasures in an open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1992, he was met with nothing but rejection.
Due to the East German PEN members' failure to come to terms with the Stasi past in the wake of the merger of West and East German PEN, Giordano resigned from the writers' association in the spring of 1997. Even after the red-green government change in September 1998, Giordano had reason to speak out critically. In the spring of 2002, he protested in an open letter to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the writer Martin Walser against the history-falsifying statements made by Walser, who had been admitted as an official speaker on the anniversary of the end of the war at the SPD headquarters in Berlin. Giordano was honored with numerous media awards such as the Grimme Television Prize (1968/69). In 1990 he received the Heinz Galinski Prize and the Federal Association First Class Service Cross. Since the same year he has been an honorary doctorate from the University of Kassel and has been a recipient of the North Rhine-Westphalian Order of Merit since 1992. In 2001 the journalist was awarded the Hermann Sinsheimer Prize for literature and journalism. In September 2003 he received the Leo Baeck Prize.
As a literary product of a trip to his father's homeland, on which he got to know the roots of his own origins, Giordano published the book "Sicily, Sicily! A Homecoming" in 2002. In October 2004, the journalist was awarded the Surp Sahak-Surp Mesrop Order by the Armenian Apostolic Church for an ARD documentary in which Giordano reported in 1986 about the Armenian genocide in 1915 in the former Ottoman Empire. Giordano was married to Helga in his first marriage from 1913 to 1984, his second marriage to Tanja from 1987 to 1988 and his third marriage from 1994 to Roswitha Everhan, who died in 2002.
Ralph Giordano died on December 10, 2014 in Cologne.
