BOOKS & MORE: Ulrich Wegener in conversation

History is always told by someone. Mostly by historians, sometimes by people who were there themselves. Often stories are simply told by people - this is where authors come into play again, ultimately turning them into history. Ulrich Wegener was a man who had a lot to tell. Ulrike Zander and Harald Biedermann had the opportunity to conduct long interviews with him before the death of the founder of the GSG 9 - HERE on SPARTANAT the obituary for Ulrich Wegener - from which this book emerged. Oral history can have its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is the uninterrupted speech, the direct narration.

Ulrich Wegener speaks - shortly before his death he talks about his life, his youth in the Third Reich and early adulthood in the East, about his experience in the prisons of East Germany, his path to service in the Federal Border Guard. It is fascinating how strongly a traditional German officer ethos shaped this independently thinking man, equally interesting to see how a lively and spirited soldier stands in the right place and the GSG9 is founded in response to the Munich terror, which ultimately proves to be the right instrument in Mogadishu. The outstanding thing about Wegener's character is that he founded and shaped a unit until the end, as can also be seen in interviews with the succeeding commanders. By the way, if you want to see the current GSG 9 in action - HERE is our recommendation.

The passages about Mogadishu are the strongest in the book, also because the stories surrounding them are likely the most canonized due to frequent telling. The authors then made the effort to interview people from Wegener's environment. The interviews with politicians (including Genscher, Schmidt) are fundamentally uninformative. Those with GSG 9 comrades provide an interesting insight into the establishment of the unit. Extremely exciting are the interviews with Israeli counterterrorism experts, who actually had a direct influence on the formation of the German counterterrorism unit, a fact that we were not aware of beforehand.

The interview book with Ulrich Wegener is a mixed bag of goods. The disadvantage is that the authors let the interviewees tell the story. And that they themselves refrain from taking over the narration of the history, asking critical questions, providing additional information, presenting facts, evaluating (they show with the pointed chapter introductions that they can do it well) and also a somewhat lacking tactical and technical approach, which is not everyone's forte. Nevertheless, an exciting book has been created, but it also leaves many questions unanswered for the critical reader. One reads "GSG 9 - Stronger than Terror" with profit, but the real biography of the founding father of the German counterterrorism unit has unfortunately not yet been written.

“GSG 9 - Stronger than Terror“ an interview book with Ulrich Wegener, compiled by Ulrike Zander and Harald Biedermann, LIT Verlag 2017, 308 pages, Euro 34.80