One-woman radio? Roma Stacherska-Jung and her Polish programme at Radio Duisburg

The person responsible for the Polish language show at Radio Duisburg is Roma Stacherska-Jung. This is not only because she’s the head of the Polish editorial board and the voice of the show, or that she prepares the broadcasts herself and provides the music for them. To a certain extent, Roma Stacherska-Jung has created the format from scratch. She is the undisputed mother (and often a very lonely one) of the only live show in the Polish language to be broadcast on a privately owned German radio station in the Ruhr Region, which is directed mainly at the Poles living there and for people interested in the Polish language.

The show does not cover politics; nor does it repeat news items. There is no advertising and no campaigning. It is a show about us (the immigrants) and for us (the arrivals from Poland), which is broadcast nearly every Tuesday at 9:04 pm. One curious fact is that right from the start, the shows have been produced by Germans who don’t understand a single word of what is being said. According to Isabell Steinwerth, the best of all studio engineers, who has worked with the editor Roma Stacherska-Jung since 2008, there is even a third kind of communication at work during the show. It is one in which words and gestures are superfluous and in which even the most refined montages and sounds go on the airwaves without a hitch... It’s the magical language used by people who work in radio.

Thanks to her training, but above all thanks to her many years of experience and her passion for her profession, Roma Stacherska-Jung is a journalist through and through. Her adventures in radio began during the 1980s, when she began working for the “Iglica” student radio station while taking a course in Polish studies at the University of Wrocław. She was fascinated by the secretive world of radio, by the art of putting programmes together, and by all the things that could be done with an item of recorded speech. Although she didn’t like being live on air, in the end, she made her début with a piece about her favourite singer, Stevie Wonder. Music had always been important to her. To this day she regrets having given up first piano lessons, then learning to play guitar... Even so, her work for the third channel of the Polish state radio broadcaster, her involvement in the TV light entertainment programme “Jarmark” and any involvement in music were a good supplement to her “literary” calling.

Roma Stacherska-Jung achieved her career breakthrough after a work placement at the cult show “Lato z Radiem” (“Summer with the Radio”), which had been broadcast from Warsaw since 1971, and where she contributed material. The editorial board for the show included the most well-known figures in journalism of the time, masters of radio reporting such as Tadeusz Sznuk, Andrzej Matul, Wiktor Nidzicki and many others. While untold quantities of coffee were being consumed, Roma Stacherska gained first-hand experience of the creation of live shows, and became familiar with the atmosphere in the editorial offices. Most importantly of all, however, this was where she met her mentor, Małgorzata Kamykowa. Roma Stacherska-Jung still stresses today that it’s thanks to her “radio mother” that she developed her attitude towards her profession, her courage, honesty and her wariness of making judgements too quickly... There, she came into contact with the unforgettable third channel on Polish radio and its legendary presenters, Piotr Kaczkowski, Marek Niedźwiecki and Wojciech Mann.

Despite all this, it is paradoxical that what is now her trademark – her deep, extremely radio-friendly voice, which is also described as a “ladies’ baritone” – remained entirely unappreciated by the chief editors at “Lato z Radiem”, and that despite having passed the difficult exam to obtain her “microphone license”, she was asked to learn to speak with a higher voice in order to be allowed to go on air...

On TV, Roma Stacherska worked on “Jarmark”, a highly popular music show on Polish TV at the time, which was compiled by the outstanding journalists Krzysztof Szewczyk, Wojciech Pijanowski and Włodzimierz Zientarski. She then moved on to another legendary show, “Teleexpress”, where she met one of the best-known figures in Polish TV, the then head of the Warsaw TV broadcaster Józef Węgrzyn, who created perennial favourites such as “Teleexpress”, “Kurier Warszawski”, “Panorama”, “Nagroda Viktora” and many others; a man who thought in moving images, who lived in a world of film and who was not bothered in the slightest by Roma’s deep timbre. From then on, nothing more could stand in the way of Roma Stacherska’s highly promising career...

When asked why she decided to move to Germany despite all this, Roma Stacherska-Jung replies with a smile and says she only intended to pay a short “working visit”, which was then unexpectedly extended for a while longer. There were no rational reasons for this. However, there were some that were irrational; in other words, emotional...