Bascha Mika. A feminist pioneer in the field of journalism

Bascha Mika has been a well-known figure in the German media landscape for decades now – as a left-wing feminist who makes herself heard and who has taken on a pioneering role in many areas. In 1998, for example, she took on the management of the “Tageszeitung” newspaper from Berlin, better known as the “taz”. She remained in the role for eleven years, and became the first female editor-in-chief of a trans-regional newspaper in Germany. From 2014 to 2020, she held the same position at the “Frankfurter Rundschau” newspaper. Bascha Mika has never made any secret of her left-wing leanings. She herself traces this back to her childhood.

A feminist from a very early age
 

Barbara Anna Mika, the journalist and publicist, was born in 1954 in Komprachcice in Silesia, the child of German parents. At that time, the Upper Silesian region was just as devoutly Catholic as the rest of Poland “and as was expected, my grandparents took it upon themselves to give us a thorough religious education”[1]. She learned that Jesus was the embodiment of everything that was worth striving for: human charity, compassion and justice. There were even times during her childhood when she wanted to become a nun. She abandoned this idea after just a few years, but “the Christian influence remained and without doubt laid the foundation for my left-leaning sympathies.”[2]

When her brother, who suffered from heart disease, was unable to receive an operation that he needed in Poland, their parents packed two suitcases and emigrated to Germany. In Aachen, Bascha – the German spelling of Basia, the Polish pet name for Barbara – who was five years old at the time, had a new home. Despite being very young when she left Poland, she still had memories of her time there. As she recalls: “When I returned to Poland for the first time as an adult, I knew exactly where things were in our village: my grandfather’s house, the church, the village pond.”[3] She can also clearly remember their departure from Poland: “We were ethnic German resettlers who crossed the border without a hitch in the train with two suitcases. And although everything went smoothly, it left a very deep impression on me. We passed through all these reception centres, and when we arrived in Aachen, everything felt unfamiliar. I didn’t have any problems with the language, since I had been brought up bilingually, but the people and children felt strange to me.”[4] Remembering the period right after their arrival in Germany, she says that her parents still spoke a little Polish with each other, “but they stopped teaching it to us so that we didn’t get mixed up.”[5] She continues: “Who would have thought at that time that the language might one day come in handy?” Today, she still understands a certain amount of Polish, and has made several trips back to her home country, but no longer speaks the language herself.[6]

As she says herself, her conservative childhood exerted a strong influence over her. She realised that her brothers were given more freedoms and fewer household chores than she was. Her father also often made her angry with comments that he found funny about things that girls apparently weren’t able to do. She didn’t share his sense of humour at all. “But I should probably be grateful to him for spurring on my resistance and sense of justice at such an early age. I like to think that I was already a feminist by the time I was seven.”[7]

From banking to journalism
 

As a young woman Bascha Mika first trained as a banker, before taking a degree in German studies, philosophy and ethnology in Bonn and Marburg. While she was a student, she gained her first experience in journalism, and at the end of the 1980s, she went to work for the “taz” newspaper in Berlin before working her way up to one of the top positions at the “Frankfurter Rundschau”. Aside from her management roles, Mika also taught journalism. Since 2007, she has been an honorary professor at the University of the Arts (Universität der Künste) in Berlin, where she was head of the cultural journalism programme for five years. She also wrote books, such as a biography of the women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer, which was published in 1998 and which caused a large amount of controversy. The same was also true of the polemic “The cowardice of women” (“Die Feigheit der Frauen”, 2011) about women and ageing. In it, she illustrates how older women are rendered invisible in our society and are doubly disadvantaged.