Gisela Schmidt, long-time Volksblatt editor and reporter at Main-Post, died at the age of 62 after a long illness. An obituary from Holger Welsch.
Her trademark was the category “Gisela’s perfect world”. But the world is no longer so healthy. “May 2020 be a good year for all of us,” she posted on New Year’s Eve on Facebook. Now Gisela Schmidt, long-time Volksblatt editor and reporter at Main-Post, died at the age of 62.
Sad news for her husband Peter Kuhn, her mother, her friends, the many readers who valued her dedicated writing, her colleagues – including the author of these lines, who had shared the Main Post’s two-seater editorial office with her for many years. There was a lot of discussion about the texts – whether the accused was not rated too hard, whether the final punch line in the “perfect world” also ignited or whether one was wrong with a wording.
Persistent research and critical stance
“You can’t write it like that,” she could tear the text apart. She was critical, but always honest and helpful.
The journalistic world in which the colleague and friend was moving was mostly anything but healthy. The hustle and bustle of murderers, rapists, business criminals, and vicious shoplifters was the stuff she passionately worked up as a court reporter.
Just reporting the facts was often not enough for her to give the reader a sensitive perspective, to exacerbate the cases, her claim. To do this, she researched persistently and also spent more hours in the courtrooms on Ottostraße than in the editorial office. This resulted in a critical stance towards the accused, but also towards judges, prosecutors or lawyers, which earned her recognition, which made her not only friends.
Photo: Peter Kuhn
–
The negotiations accompanied by the court reporter are almost innumerable. The spectacular trial of a winemaker who killed his brother and disposed of in the wine barrel and the legal reappraisal of the Arnstein tragedy, in which six young people died from carbon monoxide poisoning, should be mentioned as representative.
The humor was in her cradle
As hard as everyday work with Justitia was, Gisela gallantly managed to balance the banal and less banal things of everyday life with humor. A gift that was born in Vallendar near Koblenz when she was born in the Rhineland.
The readers got to read this for years in the (self-) ironic section “Gisela’s perfect world”. Every week she was busy with things like child-safe eggnog, lying dogs or technically foolish husbands.
She vigorously touched clichés, which are all too often true, as Gisela proved to be punchy in the ideal world. The soap series “Lindleinstraße” was also characterized by wit and irony, in which she co-authored Würzburg’s city scene onto the stage of the Theater am Neunerplatz.
Writing was her passion
In addition to the “man at my side”, as Gisela liked to call her spouse in her rubric, dogs accompanied her on the way – often street dogs that she brought back from her beloved vacation in Greece, brokered or gave them a home, where now mixed breed dog Lotte without mistress has to get by. The love for the four-legged friends also brought the Würzburg animal table to life.
She had come up with the dog as a child, and she only discovered journalism after studying to become a teacher in English and French. She volunteered at the Kölner Stadtanzeiger, came to Würzburg in the early 1980s, where she worked as an editor at the Frankish Volksblatt and in 1996 she joined the Main-Post as a court reporter.
Writing was Gisela’s great passion. And she wanted nothing more than to research again after a long illness, to punch the keys, to write a “perfect world”. Unfortunately, the world is not always as healthy as we would like it to be.
–
