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The Story After the Story Tells the Story
The follow-up stories to the headline-grabbing viral ones never receive as much attention. This one, where Der Spiegel’s Christoph Scheuermann went to the town at the center of the Claas Relotius journalism scandal, should.
I arrived in Fergus Falls on Thursday, the day after DER SPIEGEL went public with internal revelations about Relotius’ journalistic fraud. I’m here to describe the city as it really is, to process what has happened, but also to better understand what Relotius did during the time he spent here.
The fairy tale begins right at the beginning when the author writes that the bus to Fergus Falls rolls toward a dark forest that looks like “dragons could be living in it.” I looked for that forest. It doesn’t exist, even though there are trees in and around Fergus Falls and small forests here and there.
You get overcome by strange feelings when you travel to hunt down the fabrications of an ex-colleague, but it’s even weirder when you try to compare reality with the fake images that his story ingrained in your head. You meet people who resemble Relotius’ figures, but the longer you talk to them, the greater the distance grows between those depictions and the reality.
In some cases, the names that were used in the fabricated story are the same as a…
