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    <em>Der Spiegel</em> Made Up Stories. How Can It Regain Readers’ Trust?

    Germany’s top news magazine reckons with a star reporter’s brazen lies in the age of fake news.
    by Emily Schultheis Jan 10, 2019 5 minutes
    Source: Morris MacMatzen / Getty

    BERLIN—On the Wednesday before Christmas, Christoph Scheuermann apprehensively called up a 99-year-old former member of the anti-Nazi resistance who had been imprisoned during World War II. The Washington bureau chief of Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, needed to ask her a question no journalist wants to reckon with: Did his colleague, a now-disgraced star reporter, invent an interview with her?

    “It was the most excruciating call,” Scheuermann told me. “I had to call this heroine in Germany after the war and ask her, you know, do you know this man, have you ever met him?”

    —and the German media world writ large—is still reeling from German journalism’s biggest scandal in its modern history: Claas Relotius, a 33-year-old writer who was long the envy of his peers, fabricated part or all of many of his biggest stories.

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