After his documentary on right-wing extremism in Germany, journalist Thilo Mischke is now devoting his series to the topic of poverty.
With his documentation "Rechts. Deutsch. Radikal." Journalist and author Thilo Mischke (39) caused a sensation last week about the self-confident right-wing extremist scene in Germany. In his new report "Special: Threatened by poverty" (Monday, October 5th, 8:15 pm on ProSieben), he now meets people on the poverty line. "Poverty doesn't look like what some media want us to convey," he explains in an interview with spot on news. "You can wear any face, there is no such thing as 'the face' of poverty – mothers, high school graduates, secondary school students, self-employed. That is probably the frightening thing."
Each facet moved him in a different way. "For example Monique, the single mother who cannot be called 'poor' under any circumstances. But: She has three jobs, one child, and at the end of the month things get tight." The documentary did not change his own image of poverty. He knows it from Berlin, it can be felt in this big city. "What I wanted, however, was to enable a real, real image."
Nowadays it seems to him that "there are potentially more people at risk of poverty, not least because of the condemned low-wage sector. It seems as if there was a visible limit earlier, in the past century. The working class family, the Day laborers, the unskilled workers and then the rest. " Although he grew up in the GDR and his parents earned little, they never let him feel it. What he is afraid of is poverty in old age – "Worked a lifetime to die in worry."
Research in the right-wing scene was an "intense and stressful time"
Most recently, with the report "Rechts. Deutsch. Radikal." celebrated a great success. "The research for this film was the most extensive I have ever done for a film or article. 18 months in right-wing circles. It was an intense and stressful time," he looks back in the interview. In the documentary, Mischke gets into conversation with protagonists with more or less openly right-wing extremist sentiments and lets experts assess this.
After a conversation with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, he feared about democracy. "The method used by right-wing extremists is the so-called mosaic. Anyone who looks at right-wing extremism up close does not see the overall picture. With this film, we wanted to take a step back and show the overall picture. What we saw was and is terrifying."