The party's leader and former chancellor , Willy Brandt , was a close political ally and a friend. Gaus was born and grew up in Braunschweig where his parents, Willi and Hedwig Gaus, owned and ran a successful fruit and vegetable retail business. Shortly before it ended he was sent for two weeks as part of a large schoolboy contingent to the Netherlands "to dig trenches" intended, it would appear, to serve as "tank traps". He nevertheless avoided any more personal "enemy encounters". May saw a return to peace and the start of a period of military occupation.
Gaus had already resolved to become a journalist, and before progressing to university he undertook what amounted to an informal internship with the Braunschweiger Zeitung. His first permanent appointment to an editorial office came just two years after his admission as a student to Munich University. In he joined the Freiburg -based Badische Zeitung. He moved on after four years to the Deutsche Zeitung und Wirtschaftszeitung.
In the words of one admirer he turned Spiegel into the "Strafbataillon des deutschen Journalismus" loosely, "punishment battalion of German journalism". A couple of years younger than her husband, Erika Gaus is a daughter of the former bank manager, Karl Butzengeiger [ de ].
She succeeded in keeping out of the limelight that frequently surrounded her husband. The couple's daughter, Bettina Gaus , was born towards the end of and has followed her father into a career as a high-profile political journalist. Each programme was devoted to a single individual. The interviewee of the launch episode was Ludwig Erhard , the minister for economic affairs, who later became chancellor , widely celebrated by his admirers as an author of West Germany's post-war "economic miracle".
By the time the series came to an end, Gaus had interviewed more than personalities, many from the world of politics, though representatives of the arts and philosophy were also enticed into the studios. Many of the interviews are remembered as classics of their kind, and repeats of them still run on German television more than fifty years later. The design of the television studios was deliberately minimalist, with nothing visible except a dark background, behind two armchairs containing two people.
