2023-04-21 16:41:42
Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre is really incredibly nice. The queue of people who want a signed first edition of his pseudo-fictional investigative novel after the reading in the Berliner Ensemble on Wednesday evening stretches down to the basement. The author takes a lot of time for his fans. And yet he’s not Taylor Swift. Unfortunately.
The big house of the Berliner Ensemble is not the Mercedes-Benz Arena either. A pity. The book presentation, long awaited by almost all thoughtful journalists from the capital, took place in a sold-out building (since December), but a larger stage would have been too big for this evening.
This was not necessarily due to the, as I said, very nice author. Of course, Stuckrad-Barre is not Christian Kracht, and certainly not Thomas Mann. After all, he writes a little too often about himself and his drug problems. Nevertheless: the man can write. Anyone who questions that is malicious.
The venerable Brecht Theater: In the evening, the Berliner Ensemble was full at Stuckrad-Barre’s reading.imago images
Little relevance in times of heat pumps and inflation
It was more about the topic of the evening: abuse of power at the Bild newspaper and at Springer. In times of heat pumps, inflation and the spring offensive in the Ukraine, these are apparently not really relevant topics for the whole of Germany, no matter how bad the allegations against certain gentlemen are, there is no need to sugarcoat anything.
The fact that many badly dressed journalists and even camera crews from ARD and ZDF made the pilgrimage to the Berliner Ensemble on Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin-Mitte yesterday shows how the capital’s journalistic bubble is buzzing around a flickering lightbulb in times of media decline.
For once, the affluent pensioners on the uncomfortable velvet armchairs were absent on this Wednesday evening. Their money was accumulated at a time when publishers made a 15 percent return on sales and financial worries were still completely unknown. To be honest, their lavish pensions also keep the capital’s increasingly one-sided cultural scene alive like a heart-lung machine.
The pensioner ensures cash flow at Bild und Spiegel
No, past the pensioner, as the election results of the SPD also show, there is no longer any politics and certainly no journalism in Germany. Because the retiree and his print subscription in the mailbox still make up a large part of the “cash flow” for most publishers. Where the pensioner is missing (or dying), the light will soon go out.
And so journalism is a navel gazing (like reading by Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, by the way), which can be seen as a missed opportunity to make one’s own business models fit for the future.
Nice guy, funny reading: Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre at his first reading of “Still awake?”.Hannes P Albert/dpa
But let’s go straight into the evening. I didn’t pay anything for my press card, despite the dwindling relevance of my industry. I am sitting in row 4 seat 11. Sven Regener (singer of Element of Crime and author of “Herr Lehmann”) is sitting directly in front of me. A week ago I saw the tall, heavy man in the pouring rain on the median of Stalinallee. Today his hair is combed.
Katja Riemann is sitting directly to my right in 12th place. The actress (“Die Apothekerin”) can best be described as a celebrity that evening. She is wearing a white pantsuit and smells strongly but pleasantly of perfume. All evening she will laugh a lot and very loudly, which I think is wonderful. It’s beautiful and puts you in a good mood.
The Spiegel journalists caress Stucki’s back
Most journalists are completely unknown to me. But then you recognize a few faces. In the middle of the floor, the powerful media journalist Stefan Niggemeier sits like a Buddha and stoically awaits the start of the event. After all, he’s not here for fun.
Sitting directly to my left, a little exhilarated, are the Spiegel journalists Tobias Rapp (wearing a black T-shirt in a brown suit) and Isabell Huelsen (white starched collar, in the style of a strict governess).
Hours earlier they had published the first major interview with the author and therefore feel – rightly so – a bit important. Later, after the event, the two reporters will hug Stuckrad-Barre tightly and fondly stroke his back. Hmm, very professional.
Cocaine: drug use is still a taboo subject
Here comes the protagonist of the evening. Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre jumped onto the stage for the Falco hit “Out of the Dark” (1998). Bows politely and hobbles around a bit, which seems insecure and vulnerable, but also a bit fake. But kinda nice.
He’s very excited, he says. That is understandable. As so often, Stuckrad-Barre wears a blue and white sailor shirt and white jeans. A remarkably funky outfit for a 48-year-old with gray hair. The pastor’s son almost seems a bit childish.
For viewers today, the frail but energetic author is the fish in the aquarium. Also because many people do coke but, unlike the author, are reluctant to spread this topic in public. After all, drug use is still a taboo subject.
Intimate friendship: book presentation on the 30th anniversary of the death of publisher Axel Caesar Springer. Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre (left) and Mathias Döpfner (right).Jacob Hoff/imago
Ambassadors, construction sites and a tabloid
Stuckrad-Barre will now start reading. In the first chapter of his novel, a young journalist from a tabloid station, who is of course supposed to embody the picture media, meets the unspecified American ambassador to Germany. Starting a novel about the power of a tabloid medium with such a scene is interesting.
One wonders whether the author wants to show how powerful such media really are. An ambassador, even from a large industrialized country, is usually just a kind of breakfast director today in times of direct communication between governments. And it only becomes important when, as in the case of Ukraine, it is about publicly and media-effectively demanding a few tanks and banging them on the table. On the other hand, other people are really powerful.
In the second chapter, read by the author, the protagonist of the novel meets his friend, a CEO of a large publishing company. He strolls with him over the construction site of the new publishing house headquarters. Of course, it’s actually about Mathias Döpfner. The descriptions of the CEO’s business bullshit, which seems to have long since disappeared from the confines of the Federal Republic, are very funny. But also a bit to be expected. Business clowns who speak like that are meanwhile in the middle management of every company.
The new Death Star from Axel Springer SE: Is that the triangular construction site described in the book?STPP/imago
Elon Musk: The sex life of the Tesla founder is well known
The descriptions of an at least indirectly witnessed orgy (gangbang) of several tech billionaires from Silicon Valley in a bungalow of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, in which the author himself spent a lot of the night, are again a bit too simplistic. The descriptions are too close to what has now been largely illuminated by press reports, namely too close to the sex life of Tesla founder Elon Musk.
The descriptions of the women being drained sexually and emotionally by the tabloid’s editor-in-chief – who is probably based on Julian Reichelt (or just is) – are drastic, sad, but also a bit long-winded for this one evening.
One naturally asks oneself: Is it the powerful characters portrayed who are to blame here? Or is it the described system of the tabloid behind it? Or just both?
In an interview with the Spiegel journalists Rapp and Huelsen, Stuckrad-Barre says that he is interested in “power and the magnetic field around it”. And that power and money are challenges to character. One wonders how that fits into his own connection to the Springer group. For years the author traveled through the country as a kind of godson of the CEO Döpfner and made a handsome living from Springer. Probably millions.
Loved by Springer: the ungrateful godson
A former Springer manager summed up this Stuckrad-Barre symbiosis in a few tweets on Wednesday. In 2015, the author enjoyed being “Döpfner’s darling” at a Springer executive conference. Even if you no longer understand each other, you don’t settle open scores in a novel, the manager says. “Especially not when you have gone home as a jewelry hermit every month (!) for ten years with a mid-range five-digit (!) contribution.”
Had a good laugh for a long time… A former Springer manager wrote on Twitter: The author had long been Springer’s and Döpfner’s “jewellery hermit”.Hannes P Albert/dpa
One wonders why Stuckrad-Barre did not question or criticize the Springer system much earlier. The new Wokeness and the self-sacrificing willingness to help the protagonist of his novel (or his own) towards the group of victims seems at least odd.
In this context, a section of Stuckrad-Barre’s roman à clef “Panic Heart” reads after #MeToo today. There the protagonist (or Stuckrad-Barre himself) describes his relationships with mentally ill or at least unstable girls and young women in a clinic.
In “Panic Heart” the protagonist makes out with young women
The first-person narrator is one of the few men there because of his drug addiction and eating disorders. It says: “I quickly found my role, the funny uncle, the older brother. Small, delightfully harmless romances, late-night visits to the balcony, a little snogging, startled and feigned death when you thought you heard something in the hallway: Nurses’ patrol? (…) The girls had pocket money, I had a gold credit card.”
As I said, “Panic Heart” is autobiographical and yet only a novel. That’s Stuckrad-Barre’s trick. In any case, the interview in Spiegel is entitled: “A novel can be truer than reality”.
When you do something like this, you inevitably come up with a sacred thought: Every Bible reader knows that there are no completely normal, innocent people in the Holy Scriptures. Some are more guilty than others. But the question of who plays which role is harder to answer in real life than in fiction. So who throws the first stone? Today it is definitely Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre.
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#immature #ungrateful #certainly #innocent