| 20.05.2012 |
|
||||||||
I was recently talking to a politician here in Germany who said that, in his opinion, the biggest challenge facing the country is to create an atmosphere of inclusivity. In specific terms, he was talking about the fact that many members of Germany’s immigrant communities say they still can’t and don’t entirely belong. And that’s pretty much how Tedros Teclebrhan, my latest guest on Talking Germany, feels. He was born in Eritrea – but Germany is where he grew up and Germany is home. Still, the ambivalence and absurdities surrounding the issues of immigration and integration were at the heart of his spoof video that went viral on YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcAN-Efb57I) Tedros is such a nice guy. He’s polite in an almost old-fashioned way, very smart, charming and warm. Full of enthusiasm for his blossoming career as an actor and comedian. And for life in general. “Peter, do you cook?” he wants to know. “Sure I do,” I reply. “Me too,” he says, “I love cooking.” So how come he got mixed up in a gang in his teenage years? Why was he was expelled from school? Why did he get so close to going right off the tracks? I don’t really know the answer to those questions. But you sense that ‘not belonging’ is part of the explanation. And there’s one important clue as to how he got out of the mess he was in: Canada.  When Tedros was at a really low point he spent a number of months visiting his aunt in Toronto. What he saw around him was a society that is in large measure based on inclusion. And it opened the way for him. Since then he’s been working very hard. Learning how to make the most of himself. He’s doing really well. But still, there’s that ambivalence: “Very German. And very un-German,” is how he currently describes himself.  “I love Germany,” he says. But: “I’m not a patriot.” And that’s the difference between Germany and Canada. In Canada, Tedros wouldn’t just be saying “I love Canada.” He’d be saying, “I love being a Canadian.” Which is the definition of inclusion. And ultimately of patriotism – a word with a troubled history in Germany. But any country needs people who feel they fully belong. Who want to fully belong.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 13.05.2012 |
|
||||||||
She’s brave and daring and charming. Very charming. And she tells me with a smile, a wonderful, winning smile about her last serious injury. Very serious. Not the one where she bit off her tongue. Not the one where she shattered her wrist. No – this was the one where she was lying there in the snow and ice, thinking that it was very likely that she was paralysed from the waist down: “Somebody had told me what it feels like – and that was precisely how it felt. So, of course, I was worried.” Luckily, it wasn’t quite that bad. This is Aline Bock, snowboard freerider, and my latest guest on Talking Germany.  Her mother’s a bit angry with her at the moment. Not because she shoots down mountain faces at an angle of up to 55 degrees. But because of the tattoo! The one on her forearm. Her mum doesn’t like tattoos and last time Aline was home she forgot to wear long sleeves. So mum spotted it. And she’s NOT happy. It’s been there since the accident, and it tells you a lot about the way Aline thinks: “Good things fall apart,” it reads, “so that better things can fall together.” But why, I ask myself, is Aline’s mum apparently more angry about her getting a tattoo than her risking her life in the mountains?  The answer’s obvious. It’s because Aline’s mum – and her dad, too – are winter sports people: both are part-time ski instructors. They live with risk. They know about it, they respect it, and they don’t run away from it. I was a bit reluctant to admit to Aline that I myself am a stranger to the slopes. But she listens hard when I tell her about how – many years ago now – I broke my leg high up in the mountains of Uzbekistan. And how I was brought down to safety on a stretcher – on the back of a donkey! She’s very interested in the details.  Because this is really her world: incredible landscapes, incredible footage (check it out on the Net), and incredible risks. And, while we’re chatting, she turns and says, entirely by the by: “A friend of mine phoned me (from somewhere in the Rockies) and told me about how she survived but the other six in her group were killed.” We are, apparently, talking avalanches. And she says it with a smile. With a wonderful, winning smile. As I said: she’s charming and daring and brave. Very brave.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 06.05.2012 |
|
||||||||
We’ve had quite a lot of top musicians on the show in the last couple of years: pop, rock, electronic, hip-hop. But they’ve all disappointed me. When, I wonder, are we going to get a really rude star? Who complains and insults. Who hates my questions and would rather be anywhere else that here. No, none of it. They’re all so darned nice. Take Stefanie Kloß – singer from the very popular German band Silbermond – and my latest guest on Talking Germany.  Very warm, very open. And what lovely eyes! What gorgeous eyes! Big, hazel eyes with a touch of green, too. But: Stefanie can get angry. About, for example, what she sees as a growing drift to the right among many young Germans. “There are so many kids who’ll say, ‘Why’s everybody moaning about the neo-Nazis? They’re not so bad.’ We’ve got some among of our fans too – making comments on the Web and that kind of thing. So, we try to talk about it. Try to combat it.”  It’s a problem that’s been compounded in a terrible way in recent months after it emerged that a neo-Nazi terrorist cell based in the eastern town of Zwickau had killed ten people between 2000 and 2007 – all but one of them members of Germany’s immigrant community. “Unbelievable,” says Stefanie, “I was so shocked.” It all explains why Silbermond have for quite a number of years now been actively committed to what they call Laut gegen Nazis – Loud against Nazis. It’s a group of independent musicians and bands who stage concerts and organise workshops against right-wing violence.  OK: it’s easy, you might be thinking, for bands to get involved in ‘good causes’. But there is a tendency among MOR (middle of the road) bands – which is what Silbermond essentially are – to keep their heads down and avoid getting involved in anything that sounds like politics, anything that could attract ‘negative publicity’. Silbermond, it seems to me, are just not like that. I think it’s fair to say that they really care about their music, about their fans, about the world they live in. So nice: yes. Not too nice, though.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 29.04.2012 |
|
||||||||
He’s big and boisterous. A real presence. Very sharp indeed. And worried about Germany. Yes, things are going pretty well for the time being. But what about the future? “Well, it’s like a house: it you don’t do any maintenance work for five years, things might still be OK. Wait for ten years, though, and you really have a problem.” So, an abject pessimist? “No, not a pessimist,” he insists, “just a realist.” So, where exactly do the problems lie? “Well, of course, we too have a huge debt crisis,” he says. “Education and training are a disaster. The tax system no better. The concerns of employers are falling on deaf ears. The politicians are in thrall to the parties and the parties are subject to the tyranny of the election schedule.” This big, boisterous and very engaging man is businessman and author Walter Kohl – my latest guest on Talking Germany. Yes: Walter, son of Helmut – the former German chancellor. The history man: the Chancellor of Reunification. Walter’s book “Live your life or be lived” was last year’s second biggest selling non-fiction work here in Germany. The number one, by the way, was “The woman at his side” – a biography of Walter’s mother and Helmut’s wife, Hannelore. So there’s clearly a great deal of interest in the family. Still, I was warned before the program NOT to ask Walter about his father – at least not directly. But, as it turned out, he was very open to talking about terrible and terribly moving chapters in his life, including his neglect as a boy and his mother’s suicide.  Growing up, Walter Kohl had an objective problem: his father was quite literally a man who cast a huge shadow. A man obsessed by his career. And Walter has a subjective problem: his own tendency to wallow in the indifference he experienced. But, as the show reveals, he has confronted and overcome his own trauma: “It’s like being on a roundabout. You think you have to drive round and round and round. But you have to see the signs. They’re pointing in other directions. You can leave the roundabout!” So will there be a reconciliation between the estranged father and son? It doesn’t, I’m afraid to say, look likely.  Most moving, though, was the passage in the conversation where he talks about his meeting with Hanns-Martin Schleyer. Back in the mid-1970s he was the head of Germany’s employers’ federation. Kohl junior – just 14 years old at the time – admitted to the avuncular Schleyer just how frightened he had become by the terror attacks unleashed by the Baader-Meinhof gang. The older man sought to reassure the boy: “Don’t worry,” he said, they won’t get us.” Only weeks later Schleyer was kidnapped. A short time after that he was found murdered in the boot of a car.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 22.04.2012 |
|
||||||||
She really means it. That’s the thing: she really means it. I ask her how she views Angela Merkel. And how encouraged she feels in her own ambitions by the fact that the German chancellor is a woman. “Well,” she replies, “I know that I could also be chancellor.” And then: “But I don’t know if I want to.” It’s an extraordinary statement for a 24-year-old. She’s Marina Weisband – my latest guest on Talking Germany.  Two years ago, she was a nobody: a psychology student in the central German city of Münster. Since then she’s exploded onto the scene as the figurehead of the Pirate Party. That’s right: the Pirates!!! Who, you might not have noticed, have within a matter of just months emerged as possibly the third force in German politics, overtaking the Greens, and usurping their “protest party” credentials. The “grassroots party of the Facebook generation” is what they’re being called.  So, what is it about the Pirate Party? How and why have they gone from two percent, to nine, to thirteen in practically no time? “We don’t have all the answers,” says Marina, “but we’re clearly asking the right questions. And we speak a language that a lot of people understand.” It’s about transparency, participation, Internet freedom, and how the “old parties” just don’t get it. But it’s also about how “society is becoming much more individualised – something that we really need to address.” And, the “big challenge” that lies ahead: “The fact that people have such short attention spans – a real danger.”  Marina is, according to Germany’s main tabloid Bild newspaper, “the pretty pirate”. Which she doesn’t like. Although she’s certainly great TV. Which is why the last year or so has been one long merry-go-round of interviews, appearances and talk shows. The result: Marina is washed out and set to take a break from front line politics (almost certainly only temporary – as she reveals in the show). So, I ask, what has she learnt about the media? “They suck!” She really means it!  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 13.04.2012 |
|
||||||||
OK, I’ve got a bit a problem with Regietheater. And there’s a lot of it here in Berlin: director’s theatre, where the director can cut and paste away at the original text to create something very different from what the author originally intended. I call it ‘big brain’ theatre and often wish for something closer to the original. I got thinking about all this because one of the leading proponents of Regietheater – both here in Germany and internationally is Thomas Ostermeier – Artistic Director of Berlin’s Schaubühne Theater – and my latest guest on talking Germany.  And I was a bit nervous before the show, imagining myself challenging the one-time enfant terrible of German theatre on the rights and wrongs of Regietheater and getting my head bitten off, with him decrying me as a stuck-in-the-mud conservative! Fortunately, I must add, I did have the intense pleasure a few years ago of seeing one of Thomas Ostermeier’s most celebrated productions: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It’s true: it transpose the psycho-drama into the present day, with sleek people living in sleek homes. And it ends NOT with the most famous slamming of a door in the history of theatre (as Ibsen wanted it) but with a gunshot! But it was brilliant.  To have something more to offer, I found myself making a list of the other productions I’ve particularly enjoyed in recent years here in Berlin: A Doll’s House, of course. Emilia Galloti, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya at the Deutsches Theater, and Don Carlos in Dresden. But top of my list in the last decade is still the work of English director Simon McBurney. Could I admit this to Thomas Ostermeier? An Englishman, with his nose ahead of the best Germans?  So it was funny when, just before we got going, we were talking about English theatre in recent years – about which Thomas Ostermeier is a great enthusiast (Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill among his favourites) – and I ventured to say that my big favourite is Simon McBurney. “Oh yes,” says Thomas, “Simon, I was talking to him only last week. He’s the best!” So: no fierce Thomas Ostermeier: just a very thoughtful, very intriguing, very warm guest.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 08.04.2012 |
|
||||||||
It came out in 1979. The Marriage of Maria Braun. Surely the stand-out movie among the three dozen plus made by the brilliant but doomed German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His muse in most of those films was Hanna Schygulla. Now, amazingly, and several decades on, she’s my latest guest on Talking Germany. I can remember precisely where, when and with whom I saw the film. And my rapture at this striding, cruel, unknowable, hurt and hurting woman. She was a diva, a sex symbol -- and about a million miles from where I was.  Which, strangely, is where she still is today. Unnahbar, as the Germans say: remote, unapproachable. As if she’s hiding her true self – the one the movies saw, but never knew – at the heart of a complex web. So when I asked her to sign my DVD copy of Maria Braun, which she did, her signature was precisely that: a complex web; a map, almost, of an unknowable person.  The meaning cannot be spoken, she appears to be saying. The question cannot be answered, she appears to believe: the point is, that there is no point. Which got me thinking about what you might call Hanna Schygulla’s acting methodology. So, I took out those old DVDs – and the even older videos. And then I started reading what the reviewers of those movies had said at the time. An interesting exercise.  I find one prominent critic, for instance, talking about Miss Schygulla (that’s what he really called her!) as, “an enchanted actress who, at any one moment in a Fassbinder movie, is the sum of all its parts, plus a little more.” So what is that little bit more? Not sure, concedes the author, but: “Whatever it is, it's splendid and mysterious.” A fellow critic put it like this: Hanna Schygulla has “an uncanny ability to float just out of range of analysis.” Which is precisely how I found her to be: the diva who refuses to be a diva. The diva who refuses to be defined.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 01.04.2012 |
|
||||||||
Deutsche Welle television is marking its twentieth anniversary. So, we decided to celebrate by inviting a special guest to Talking Germany – somebody who’s been part of the team since the very beginning: Christoph Lanz, currently DW’s Managing Director Multimedia Global. I should add that it’s quite an occasion for me, too, as I’ve also been on board throughout the whole exciting journey. DW television’s first twenty years have included many emotionally challenging ‘stories’ – as we news people like to call them. Stories that ask questions of your very humanity: 9/11, the Asian tsunami, Fukushima, to mention just three. There have, of course, also been joyous moments – not least two other twentieth anniversaries: twenty years of German Reunification and twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both events that Christoph Lanz was personally involved in – and very personally moved by.  There have also been massive changes when it comes to the technology. When I started working in the DW newsroom, for instance, the World Wide Web and the Internet simply didn’t exist as tools of broadcasting. The digital age hadn’t quite come to TV – so we still carried tapes around the building. And nobody had heard of the social media that would later have such huge impact, not least during the Arab Spring. These changes have been closely followed by Christoph Lanz, who has a very keen eye for technological developments.  It all makes you wonder what the next twenty years will bring. For now, the good news for DW’s television service is that we’ve recently substantially expanded our programming. We now offer highly competitive services in four languages: German, English, Spanish and Arabic. But despite all the changes, Christoph Lanz is eager to point out that DW’s role has remained much the same as in our early days: portraying and coming to terms with Germany’s terrible history and portraying Germany as the dynamic, liberal, democratic society that it has become.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 23.03.2012 |
|
||||||||
At a conference I recently attended there was an American professor of media studies who talked, as he extolled the role of social media, about “a new community,” “shared values,” “a forum for national debate.” So, I asked him, why was the US such a disturbingly divided society? “Well, you need to understand generational theory,” he replied. “Our” generation – that’s people over 40 – cling obsessively to dogmas and ideologies. The next generation – men and women under 40 – are, he plausibly generalised, pragmatists and problem solvers. He wasn’t referring to Germany, but he could easily have been talking about Marie-Christine Ostermann – entrepreneur, businesswoman, lobbyist, and my latest guest on Talking Germany.  Yes, she’s tells me, she did study business at the elite St. Gallen University in Switzerland. “But,” she adds, “it isn’t an elite university because there’s a very tough entrance exam. And,” she adds, “I just happened to pass it!” Of course. And yes, she tells me, she did work for an import-export company in Hong Kong. And yes, she tells me, she did do a stint as a riding instructor on a ranch in San Diego!  But here’s another twist that tells us even more about the generation Ostermann. Her father, she tells me, always encouraged her to enter the family business. And at sixteen she knew that was exactly what she was going to do. So, did she never rebel, I ask from my blinkered generational perspective? Never slam the door or listen to loud music? You do come up with some strange questions, I could almost hear her thinking.  And when I ask her which is her favourite movie of all time, she replies simply: “Harry Potter!” Which one in particular? “All of them!” And then – pushing a recent favourite – she asks: “What’s that great new French movie called? You know the one about the two guys …” Ah, I say: Untouchables. So, I wonder, did she cry in that most moving of movies? Cry? You do come up with some strange questions, I could almost hear her thinking.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| 16.03.2012 |
|
||||||||
Just minutes before the show starts and we’re talking though some of the areas that we might be touching on when we get going. “And of course,” I say, “we might discuss the whole idea of the Landesvater.” “Landesvater,” he repeats, mulling it over. “So how do you translate that?” The answer is – you can’t. The dictionary offers the unhelpful sovereign, father, or daddy!! So what does it describe? Well, my latest guest on Talking Germany – Bernhard Vogel – has been a Landesvater twice. In eastern and western Germany to boot. Nominally, it signifies the chief minister of one of Germany’s 16 federal states. However, there’s much more to it than that.  And that’s where the daddy bit comes in. Because Landesvater also means, quite literally, the father of the state. Which makes us, the citizens, his children – metaphorically at least. And is a woman who makes it to the top job at state level (which is rare) a Landesmutter – a mother of the state? It does exist, but … let’s not go there. And, even for men, the term is, it seems, slowly dying out. But Bernhard Vogel remains the very incarnation of a Landesvater: jovial, gemütlich, wine-quaffing, and equipped with plenty of political guile. And when I ask him whether the term doesn’t carry some difficult connotations, whether it doesn’t smack of a paternalistic, even a patriarchal approach to politics – he looks at me as though I’m a rather dizzy fellow.  This in a Germany where typical headlines currently read “Women still far behind” (the wage gap compared with men in the same work) or “29 from 906” (women in senior posts in the country’s top businesses). And where, only recently, hundreds of leading female journalists issued a passionate demand for greater representation in the higher echelons of the media. Germany – which is stuck far too deep in the mud when it comes to women and work – clearly still has a lot of work to do. So it’s an interesting moment in the show when I ask Bernhard Vogel how comfortable his Christian Democrat party feels about being led by a certain Frau Merkel. “No problem, no problem,” is the message. Still, you sense that a second women anywhere near the heart of power could well trigger many misgivings.  One thing, though, must be said: Bernhard Vogel, who was born way back in 1932, has been round the block a few times in German politics. And his two stints as Landesvater are largely viewed as a success story. Especially the decade he spent at the helm of the eastern German state of Thüringen. He took up office there in 1992, just as the state was bearing the full brunt of the transition from communism to capitalism. And perhaps a Landesvater was just what was required: a steadying hand, a wise word, a man with old-fashioned dedication, and – never to be underestimated – a well-developed sense of humour.  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
