From Swabia to the red carpet

He bursts into the make-up suite waving Brezels. “I hope there will be enough to go round!” He’s been down to a Swabian bakery. “They told me they wouldn’t be opening until ten, but I was there at nine and they let me in.” A Swabian bakery in Berlin! The Swabians, I should add, come from Germany’s far away south-west, the area around Stuttgart. It’s the region where Dieter Kosslick spent his childhood (much of it, we discover, hanging around in a very atmospheric local bakery). Since then, he’s come far: these days he’s the director of the Berlin Film Festival. And he’s my latest guest on Talking Germany.

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78 going on 17

He disappeared from home when he was still a tiny boy. He survived the war. Then he got into snake charming. And that was all before the serious adventures began. So just how old was he when he departed on that first expedition? “I think I was three or four. People can’t quite agree. All I wanted to do was to visit my grandmother on the other side of town.” It’s Rüdiger Nehberg speaking: adventurer and activist – and my latest guest on Talking Germany.

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Or: living in two worlds

I like interfaces.” Well, that’s an understatement. It comes from Stefan Willich. He’s a remarkable man, who’s been very successful in two different fields: medicine and music. And he’s managed to draw his two passions together with the creation of the World Doctors Orchestra. “I find it productive to bring things together,” he says, with another display of understatement. Would he call himself an idealist? “No, no,” he protests, “I’m a hard-nosed realist, who likes developing things that are new.”

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Or: Mind the gap!
The main newsroom at DW TV is a pretty intense place. You see presenters talking on the phone to correspondents in the field, producers making last-minute decisions about how to deal with the latest item of breaking news, and, of course, many different languages being spoken. Foremost among them, our main broadcast languages: German, Spanish, Arabic and English. When I anchor our main news program, the Journal, I regularly find myself sitting across from the popular German presenter Dirk Jacobs – my latest guest on Talking Germany.

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The man they love to hate

It’s a long streak. Somewhere between red and orange. I was quite surprised that he let me touch it. It’s his mohawk haircut. And it’s been Sascha Lobo’s trademark for not far short of a decade. But apart from this stripe of colour, he’s looking a bit pale. “Not too bad though,” he says, “considering that I’ve been on the Internet all winter!” Sounds like a long session, I think. But it fits. Considering that he’s one of Germany’s best-known bloggers. An “Internet icon”. And my latest guest on Talking Germany.

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