If you are planning to go on holiday to Italy this summer, you will stab our former chancellor in the back. But you may have just forgotten what dominated the news 20 years ago in the absence of, well, news: Gerhard Schröder’s refusal to go on holiday to Bella Italia in 2003 was preceded by the insults to Italian State Secretary Stefano Stefani, who the Germans – You have to imagine this! – described as the “uniform, blond supernationalists” who “raid our beaches noisily” every year.
As my colleague Nico Fried explains, the chancellor canceled his vacation on the Adriatic and stayed in Hanover. A punishment that Doris Schröder-Köpf should have hit harder than Berlusconi’s people. Today, the man is sailing along the wet and cold Norway route on the “Aida” with white wine that is compatible with the mob, which, considering his Putin cuddles, should be balancing justice.
Similar to how Schröder defiantly looked out of the Maschsee at the time, Kaiman Sammy peered out of a quarry pond in 1994 and thus became the “Loch Neuss Monster”. Both for themselves representatives of this wonderfully stupid time, in which there was still the classic summer slump. This boring steppe of substance somewhere between July and August, in which even the smallest drop of banality becomes an oasis of information.
Sammy and Gerd shouldn’t be the only ones. The flora and fauna between Flensburg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen had a lot to offer: Skippy, the Sauerland kangaroo. Kuno, the dachshund-eating killer catfish. The laptop sow from Teufelssee. Problem bear Bruno, whose furry epigone tore a jogger out of his slippers.
As if to prove the contrary, an escaped lion roamed through Berlin. Which, however, should quickly turn out to be a commercially available Bache. So Berlin was lucky again, and let’s see it this way: that in our modern gender-fluid times even a wild boar can be read as a lioness – that’s something.
Incidentally, Schröder’s defiant summer of 2003 was so hot that the “Bild” feared an ethnic mass transformation for the grilled Teutons: “Are we all going to be Africans?” What a wonderfully mindless slide through the dog days it was, like before in the 90’s: we bought fake shirts from Cantona or Raúl in Lloret de Mar for 2000 pesetas; Helmut Kohl, already frighteningly emaciated from the summer diet, staged the Familienstadl on Lake Wolfgang, and some bald Bulgarian beheaded us from the World Cup. Every few years, a youth without a fleppe dashes through the media 30 zone at 140: crash kid Andi, crash kid Dennis, crash kid Mehmet.
My name is Mickey Beisenherz. In Castrop-Rauxel I am a world star. Elsewhere I have to pay for everything myself. I’m a multimedia (single) general store. Author (Extra3, Jungle Camp), presenter (ZDF, NDR, ProSieben, ntv), podcast host (“Apocalypse and Filter Coffee”), occasional cartoonist. There are things that strike me. Sometimes even upset me. And since the impulse control is constantly jammed, they probably have to get out. My religious symbol is the crosshair. The razor blade is my dance floor. And just now it itches in the feet again.
The summer break of the Bundestag, which is free of decisions and legislation, is also today the great hour of those who can still use a bit of PR. Annalena Baerbock is dividing the country with her preferences for spreads (Nutella bread and games!), while the new CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann has to step on the populist accelerator pedal a little. So Crash-Kid Casi demands quick meals for Berlin’s outdoor pool thugs, and if you really think about it: Whether it’s a caiman in the Neuss bathing lake or the violent 15-year-old in the swimming pool – it’s only when something peeps grimly out of the water hole, then it’s summer silly!
