Neustadt

In one way, my Slovenian exchange partner Marjeta Kralj is not a bit typical of her generation: the 30-year-old journalist likes a rustling sound when reading and turning actual pages. Paper can do that; a tablet can’t. Von Kathrin Keller-Guglielmi

The young woman has committed her professional future to a product that many consider halfway a museum object: the printed newspaper. Other than that, she is just like many other people her age: she is curious and loves new challenges. Therefore she was very excited when she was asked by her employer, Ljubljana’s daily newspaper Dnevnik, whether she would like to participate in a journalists’ exchange – despite the fact that the industry is going through difficult times on both sides of the Alps and is not exactly overstaffed.

“I wouldn’t have thought the editors would let me go for three weeks,” she says frankly. She however accepted and is now spending three weeks in Rhineland-Palatinate, three weeks in Neustadt. The first thing she naturally noticed was the dialect. Kralj speaks German, but not Palatinate. Her first impression of the city: “A bit like wonderland,” she said when she arrived at her holiday apartment in the old town centre. She mainly associated big cities with Germany so far; from 2007 to 2010 she lived in Berlin where among others she held a scholarship position at the office of Tabea Rößner, who is a member of the German parliament.

Two years ago, she returned to her home country and became a journalist, regardless of the future perspective of this job. She loves her job because “you learn something new every day.” It was good timing for her to go to Germany just now. Germany comes up frequently in the context of one of the topics the journalist deals with: labour market flexibilization. “Many people see Germany as setting a good example,” the Slovenian journalist says.

She knows that the labour market reform also has its downsides, she has heard of them. But now she has the opportunity to take a closer look at the situation first hand. This is precisely the idea of the journalist exchange Close-Up organized by the Goethe-Institut. Journalists from Germany and other countries swap their workplaces for three to four weeks and report their impressions from a foreign perspective. Therefore, there will be a number of articles portraying Neustadt and surroundings from a southeast European perspective in the next three weeks.