Thomas Borchert monitors the Nordic countries for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), the largest news agency in Germany with around 1,000 employees.
Among its customers DPA has virtually every German newspaper and electronic media outlet.
Since 1986 I have reported on more than 223 Nobel laureates for the German news agency DPA.
During all this time I have made only one mistake, but it was huge: In 1999 I was far too shy to ask Günter Grass's enchanting daughter to dance at the Nobel banquet in the City Hall. I felt in some way that I looked ridiculous in tails.
Every year, the Nobel Prize is an incredibly important theme for our newsletter -- with the exception of Queen Silvia perhaps the most important phenomenon in Sweden. Newspapers, radio and television report in great detail, regardless of the complexity of the citation for the Chemistry Prize.
Our science desk in Hamburg always prepares itself with a colossal investment of time and labour for all conceivable decisions, so it will be able to dispatch comprehensible explanations to all media offices as quickly as possible after the announcement -- within five minutes if possible.
To facilitate this work, I'm a member of various highly secretive detective societies in Stockholm. They have only one objective: working out the names of the Nobel laureates in advance. During the preparatory work for awarding a prize, the name is of considerable help. If you can't discover the name, which is unfortunately almost always the case, you have to guess. For this reason I also belong to various guessing clubs.
Guessing, as everyone knows, is fun. The most fun of all is the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most exciting of the Nobel Prizes. On the other hand, everyone finds the Economics prize epically boring. After every year of yet another two or three elderly men selected completely at random, all of them with some remarkable theory to justify capitalism, I ask myself: Why isn't this prize abolished ASAP? And this opinion is shared by almost everyone I come into contact with where the Nobel Prize is concerned.
And I have one more wish. For the German media it would be really so very nice if just for once the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy or the Nobel committee in Oslo could give the distinction to Queen Silvia. If the worst came to the worst, even the Economics Prize... And then our headline would be: "Germany wins the Nobel Prize."