Hanns Joachim Friedrichs was a big name in the media industry. The fact that he is also considered a wise man was not only due to his goodness, position or the snow-white hair of the “Daily Topics” moderator, but also to his professional ethics. A good journalist, he said, doesn’t associate with anything, “not even a good one.” That was 1995, Bill Clinton President and Donald Trump bankrupt, climate change far away and Afghanistan a shattered country, but not under the Stone Age regime of the Taliban. Happy times for press principles. 27 years later, Donald Trump is about to start his second term in office, climate change is real and Afghanistan is so unchallenged in Taliban hands that Theresa Breuer can’t just get on with a good cause, she has to. “I’ve never committed myself to anything in my life,” says the journalist in an ARD documentary, “but maybe the moment will come for everyone: This thing is important to me, that’s what I’m committed to.”
[„Afghanistan – Ein Jahr später. Mission Kabul-Luftbrücke“, vierteilige dokumentarische Serie, ab Freitag in der ARD-Mediathek, lineare Ausstrahlung Montag, ARD, 22 Uhr 20]
Your moment came a year ago. So she stood up: for thousands of local workers and artists, media workers and human rights lawyers who have been in mortal danger since the panicked withdrawal of Western powers from Afghanistan. Journalists like Theresa Breuer founded “Kabul Airlift” for them – an NGO that does what the federal government failed to do after August 15, 2021: to create escape corridors for those who are considered traitors in the Taliban’s value system. “So everyone,” says the activist publicist, “who has cooperated with the West.”
For months, Breuer’s colleague Vanessa Schlesier accompanied the work of the aid organization on behalf of the RBB. She commutes four times 30 minutes between the Afghan and German capitals, Pakistani and Hessian provinces. The result is a testimony of private initiative in the name of humanitarian failure of the state, which goes to the heart, kidneys and brain. The four-parter is not limited to showing tearful individual fates. About the Walid family.
The Kabul Airlift has brought a good 1,000 people across the border
Sometimes with Breuer’s trembling smartphone, mostly with Schlesier’s calm hand-held camera, we accompany the Kabul Airlift as they evacuate the relatives of a local Bundeswehr employee. At the beginning of the second part they are all sitting on the plane to Islamabad. A huge success – with a symbolic effect. “Exercise what is possible,” Ruben Neugebauer describes the donation-financed rescue of a total of 148 refugees.
With its charter flight, the organization wanted to set an example of empathetic pragmatism for the populist part of the federal government that had been voted out of office at the time (Seehofer). Only then, as the next three episodes show, did Neugebauer’s work really begin. By the end of 2021, the Kabul Airlift had brought a good 1,000 people across the border in buses. Breuer and Schlesier film one of these odysseys over unpaved roads full of heavily armed checkpoints at close range.
It’s about real people
From Kabul to Torkham to Berlin in two gripping and enlightening hours of journalistic distancing – which sometimes gets a little out of hand. Theresa Breuer, whose telegenicity is surpassed by that of her collaborator Sami, is all too often in the picture. When she reaped the applause of the rescued after a speech of thanks, the report almost became ashamed of others. In the end, however, she follows modern docutainment rules and rarely forgets what it’s all about: real people.
Vanessa Schlesier leaves us alone with their fears and hopes, their pain and happiness for a few minutes. Whenever the objects of a murderous regime become subjects of their incipient future without comment, the silence is therefore deafening. The fact that journalists sometimes hug the subjects of their reports does not come across as distanceless, but human. Even Hanns Joachim Friedrichs would probably have understood that.
