How I visited Sahra Wagenknecht - and met a little girl

Moments of the year - How I visited Sahra Wagenknecht - and met a little girl

Making-of - that's the name of our new format on stern.de. We want to give you a personal look behind the scenes, tell you about our everyday journalistic life, what we experience during research and what moves us in the editorial office. We are starting with a short series in which we look back on our moments of 2023.

My personal moment of the year? Perhaps this one. It's a Friday afternoon in March 2023, I'm sitting with Sahra Wagenknecht in her Bundestag office, Jakob-Kaiser-Haus, room number 1.735. It's supposed to be a professional interview for a stern portrait I want to write. About this woman who has been causing a stir in Germany for months: With her criticism of arms deliveries for Ukraine, her demands for more toughness in migration policy, her nebulous hints about founding a new party of her own.

But it will be a very personal encounter. Wagenknecht talks about her childhood. Her father, who left the family when she was three years old. How it felt to sit on his strong shoulders as a little girl. How he once carried her up a steep flight of stairs. How much she liked him.

"And suddenly one is gone"

Then she says: "And suddenly one is gone."

Silence in the office.

It is very rare for politicians to reveal anything about themselves. And when they do, it is usually not without calculation. "I come from a poor background, often there wasn't enough money at the end of the month" - that's a very popular story, for example. It doesn't have to be false. And yet a certain manipulative intention shines through, the message that is supposed to be conveyed: Look, I know about the worries and hardships of "ordinary people", I was one of them myself.

But: being abandoned? To round off a story about your own life? Actually rather unsuitable.

Sahra Wagenknecht was beaten - and she hit back

Sahra Wagenknecht has so far spoken little about her childhood in the GDR. There is a very readable biography by social psychologist Christian Schneider in which she reveals a lot about herself. To be honest, I was more interested in this than chewing over her - in my opinion somewhat crude - theses on the Ukraine war, the alleged mistakes of coronavirus policy or the future of Europe for the umpteenth time. I let her talk.

And she told me how she wrote letters to her father, an Iranian exile who had returned to his home country to help overthrow the Shah dictatorship, for years - without ever sending them. How she got used to a strange handwriting, German, but stylized into Persian. Her father was never to appear again. She must have missed him very much for many years afterwards. She was often alone in her childhood. She was teased because of her somewhat foreign-looking face in the GDR at the time. Once a child asked: "Are you Chinese?" She was hit - and she hit back.

These were the topics on this Friday afternoon in room 1,735 in the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus.

This woman, of all people, who always keeps others at arm's length with noncommittal friendliness, buttoned up in a costume, coldly reasoning and lecturing, spoke about the first great pain in her life and about her early loneliness.

Perhaps she wanted to show that: I am not as unapproachable as everyone always thinks, I am also a human being. And therefore graspable, selectable. Perhaps she just wanted to talk about something that still moves and shapes her today. An early injury. An initial, shock-like feeling of insecurity, possibly: Rejection. How can you just leave a three-year-old girl behind like that? Can something really be more important? Was there no longing at all for the one who was suddenly "gone"?

With Wagenknecht, politics is 90 percent psychology

I have often heard that journalists should be careful with (lay) psychological interpretations. That is true. On the other hand, in the many years that I have accompanied and observed politicians for stern, I have learned one thing: politics is essentially psychology, which is the only way to understand and explain it. Of course, there is also the so-called "content". But I would estimate the explanatory part of psychology to be much higher. In Wagenknecht's case, to be honest: 90 percent.

In the meantime, she has long since left her old party, the Left Party, and founded a new one. The "Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance" has set out to plow up the German party landscape with a wild mixture of conservative-nationalist and old social democratic political set pieces. The first big test will be next year's European elections.

In theaters across the country, Wagenknecht regularly reads from her bestseller "Die Selbstgerechten", a furious reckoning with the German "lifestyle left" and its alleged green-woke dictatorship of opinion. Sometimes people stand up and applaud for minutes. She then bathes in the approval of all those who feel that this country is no longer their country, that they no longer have a home. Sahra Wagenknecht never had one either.

Is that why they get on so well?