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In 1948 he went to the institute of what was then the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) and completed training as a journalist. He then got a job here as an editor. It was not least thanks to Ruge's excellent language skills in Russian, English and French that he was soon employed for reports abroad. He was the first German journalist to travel to Yugoslavia after Tito's break with the Soviet Union. Gerd Ruge's work subsequently took him to America, Southeastern Europe, Korea and Indochina, from where he reported on the ongoing war. He always made sure to reflect not only the political situation of the country, but also the daily lives of the people. From 1956 to 1959, Gerd Ruge, the first German journalist in post-war Germany, went to Moscow as a permanent ARD radio correspondent. Here, too, he not only left the Kremlin to describe the country's situation, but also deliberately questioned scientists and artists as well as people on the street.
During this time, Ruge became friends with Boris Pasternak. From May 1959 he took over the editorial management of the ARD television team at international conferences, including the summit conference in Paris in 1960. At the time of the Vietnam War and the associated protest movements, Gerd Ruge was America and Washington correspondent for ARD. In his typical manner and his special human style, he reported on the political and social conditions that prevailed in the USA at the end of the 1960s. Many people remembered his deeply moving reporting on the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Gerd Ruge witnessed the murder live on June 6, 1968. From 1970 to 1972 he worked as ARD's chief correspondent and head of the WDR studio in Bonn. He then went to Beijing for the daily newspaper "Die Welt" until he took over the correspondence for ARD in Moscow again in 1974. From 1976 to 1977 Ruge was a fellow at the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University/USA. In 1977 he became an ARD radio correspondent in Moscow.
In 1981 he was appointed WDR television special correspondent. In the same year he was added the management of the television magazine "Monitor". From 1987, Gerd Ruge was head of the Moscow ARD studio and he reported on Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts at reform as well as the coup attempt by reform opponents in 1991. Ruge has also repeatedly worked as an author and published his experiences, including in 1997 with the volume "Weites Country - Russian Experiences. Russian Perspectives". Although he had been officially retired since 1993, Ruge regularly took part in TV productions, including appearing as co-moderator of the talk show "nienieZehn" on 3Sat. His report series "Gerd Ruge on the go", which was broadcast by ARD every Christmas time, was also very popular. In this series he reported on the social and cultural developments in the USA, China, the Balkan countries, Georgia, Siberia and of course Russia. From 1997 to 2001 he taught as a professor of television journalism at the Munich University of Television and Film.
For his work, Gerd Ruge was awarded the most important prizes in his industry, including the "Adolf Grimme Prize" (1964), the "Bambi" (1970 and 1971), the "Golden Camera" (1991), the "Federal Cross of Merit" ( 1992), the "Bavarian Television Prize" (1994) and the "Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Prize" (2001). In 1999, Ruge was president of the jury of the "Prix International des Correspondants de Guerre". From October 1997 to 2001 he was head of the television journalism department at the University of Television and Film in Munich. Together with the Filmstiftung NRW, Ruge awarded the "Gerd Ruge Scholarship" worth 100,000 euros annually from 2002 onwards. In 2014 he was honored with the German Television Award and the Federal Cross of Merit.
Gerd Ruge died on October 15, 2021 in Munich.
