Günter Wallraff | Brightening through dark contact lenses

"Right at the Bottom" is the title of the book. The cover depicts a black-haired, mustachioed man with a dirty face. Judging by his filthy clothes and hard hat, emblazoned with the logo of the steel company Thyssen, he is an industrial worker. In the background, a factory chimney billows smoke into the atmosphere.

The book, which is exactly 40 years old, remains one of the most commercially successful non-fiction books in Germany since 1945. It was published on October 21, 1985. Even before its release, there was enormous media hype: Der Spiegel ran a preview, and television also highlighted the book. Two weeks after its release, 650,000 copies had already been sold. In 1986, it was also published in the GDR, as a licensed edition by Aufbau-Verlag. To date, a total of over five million German-language copies have been sold. The book has been translated into 30 languages.

The book's official author is Günter Wallraff, then 43 years old and subsequently a popular figure. As a journalist, he had already gained public attention with his socially critical "industry reports" written in the 1960s. In 1977, the book "Der Aufmacher" (The Lead Story), published under his own name, which described and exposed the questionable practices in the "Bild" editorial office, became a bestseller. (Wallraff, using a false identity, managed to work for a time as a "reporter" for the Hanover local office of "Bild").

At Thyssen, he's treated like dirt. In restaurants, he's ignored, not served.

In his book "Ganz unten" (At the Bottom), which, like his first major bestseller, is conceived as a kind of large-scale report, Wallraff cultivates his method: slipping into a role in order to investigate social injustices without being recognized. He recounts his experiences as a penniless Turk living among Germans in Germany.

Wallraff was temporarily undercover in 1983/84, thus once again using a new identity. As "Ali Levent," with a "black hairpiece" on his head and "thin, very dark-colored contact lenses" in his eyes, he was recruited by various companies and corporations. Apparently, at the time, most people readily believed him that he was "the Turkish Ali." There, in the labor market, he briefly experienced firsthand, mostly as a day laborer or temporary worker without papers or rights, what many foreigners in this country have experienced for decades: everyday racism, exclusion, and exploitation.

During his odyssey through Germany, Wallraff, alias "Ali," is forced to perform underpaid slave labor: On a farm, he is "treated like a farm animal," and on the construction site and at Thyssen, he is treated like dirt. In restaurants, he is not served but ignored. He is constantly humiliated and subjected to racist insults by superiors, colleagues, and passersby, and in the end, he comes to a sobering realization "how far the contempt for humanity can go in this country."

The passages in the book in which "Ali" provides insights into the hectic daily work routine at McDonald's are also likely to remain unforgettable to this day: "Once, the manager sends a colleague directly from the Royal Grill to a clogged toilet. He uses the grill scraper he has in his hand to complete the task as quickly and conscientiously as possible."

Or the chapter that tells how "Ali" initially appeared as a spectator at the CSU's Political Ash Wednesday event in Passau's Nibelungenhalle, filled with 7,000 people, to listen to CSU chairman Franz-Josef Strauss speak, to test whether his idiosyncratic masquerade was credible enough. "I don't know if a gypsy attending a Nazi event in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller must have felt similarly," Wallraff comments.

In fact, he experienced the beer-fueled, large-scale event, where the atmosphere was, to put it mildly, heated, partly threatening ("Go on, sneak away, but quickly"), partly intoxicated and uninhibited: "Rivulets of urine formed in the corridors, and even in the hall, someone relieved themselves through their trouser leg." In the end, because "Ali" managed to pose as an emissary of the Turkish fascist leader, he was admitted to Strauss himself, who signed a Franz Josef Strauss illustrated book for him ("For Ali, with warm regards, F. J. Strauss").

Undoubtedly, Wallraff's bestseller "Ganz unten" (At the Bottom) achieved at least one thing when it was published – three years after the end of the social-liberal Brandt/Schmidt era: It drew a wider public's attention to the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany under then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) was anything but a perfect constitutional state. Behind the scenes of West Germany's model democracy, which strove to emphasize its pride in its Nazi "culture of remembrance," a closer look revealed precisely that post-National Socialist Germany that never disappeared. Many passages in the book demonstrate how unabated antisemitism and racist attitudes continued to exist among the so-called ordinary population of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The style in which the book is written may have contributed significantly to its success and mass reception. It is written in the lurid, sensationalist style of a tabloid reportage, catering to the reading preferences of a mass audience that, on the one hand, is meant to feel compassion for the exploited portrayed, while, on the other, is offered empathy and identification with the hero (Wallraff/Ali): The ordinary people are all "good" and have their hearts in the right place, whereas the bosses and members of the upper classes are all "evil" and heartless. Readers are meant, above all, to be moved or outraged. Hermann L. Gremliza, longtime editor of "Konkret," once called it a "literature of social varicose veins."

Former Wallraff employees have repeatedly reported that he had a collective of assistants and ghostwriters who "prepared" the text for the journalist. Wallraff's former colleague Uwe Herzog, who worked with him on "Ganz unten," told Welt am Sonntag: "Although Wallraff claimed to be the author, he ultimately couldn't testify in court about what others had actually researched on his behalf."

The first to dispute Wallraff's authorship of his books, or rather to point out his "method of having others write it for him," was Hermann L. Gremliza, who announced to the public as early as 1987 that he, Gremliza, had written the "lead story," and indeed "from the first line of the preface to the last of the epilogue... It is no different with the largest part of the second 'Bild' book and a smaller part of the third; the other parts and the other books, essays, reviews, and speeches were written by others . I am telling the truth, and Wallraff is not lying: he did not write any of his works, and they are all his. For the world-famous author, who cannot write, was able to attune the most diverse authors, whose help he enlisted, to that unified tone that guarantees the authentic Wallraff."

But there were debates not only about Wallraff's authorship, but also about the way he portrayed himself as a morally superior Robin Hood figure and heroic advocate of the exploited and disenfranchised, who suffers on their behalf and lets readers share in his supposedly authentic experiences.

Wallraff's method of disguising himself as a "Turk" with a black wig and contact lenses, and, while wearing this costume, speaking a distinctive "foreigner's German" of his own making, can be considered questionable today. What was perceived at the time as a clever tactic of dissimulation or a courageous method of undercover research now seems like a thoroughly botched racist circus act or a variant of blackface: The educated German presents others as the supposedly stupid and backward Turk, thereby reproducing precisely the stereotypes and racist clichés he claims to criticize.