Behind the News

Behind the Scenes! Behind the scenes! 

I'm interested in the background stories, the ironic, the hidden and the bizarre. I'm interested in the discarded footage, also known as outtakes. Especially small things that you only recognize at second glance are often great things. 

Do you know this? You look at an old family photo and only notice an important detail in the background when you look at it for the hundredth time. Or you enjoy an old classic movie for the umpteenth time and only then do you laugh at a punch line that you hadn't noticed before. What applies to photos and films applies even more to news. People look at a news item, get briefly outraged and then jump to the next scandal to get outraged again. 

Today's column will focus on three news items from the past week. Instead of indignantly jumping to conclusions, I invite you to linger and scratch the surface of the news. What follows is a "Behind the News" with interesting outtakes and background stories.

Were they doing coke? Did Emmanuel Macron embarrassingly let a drug bag disappear from the noble desk in the command compartment of the Bravery Express or was it just a paper handkerchief? Nothing could be less important to me. The really important thing about the scene was that a James Bond movie was being staged for the TV viewer in their living room at home. The director's plot? Accompany the three double-zero agents Merz, Macron & Starmer on a secret mission to Kiev! Camera rolling! Incidentally, Bravery Express translates as Bravery Train. No movie hero travels on a conventional ICE train. Be that as it may. It was probably just a used paper handkerchief, although I do wonder why the most powerful man in France, who tends to buy expensive luxury items, sneezed into a 10-cent product and not a silk scarf. Enough with the conspiracy theories! Of course, people who are intoxicated with power would never be caught doing cocaine. That would be like a designated national coach of the national soccer team voluntarily (!) giving a hair sample to prove his innocence of cocaine and this hair sample then turning out positive to the surprise of all Germans. I think that's out of the question. Merz, Macron & Starmer are merely taking an offensive line with regard to the war in Ukraine. Nothing more. Period.

From coke to doxing. What was Jan Böhmermann, who is also loyal to the party line, thinking when he put a YouTuber behind a clown avatar in the public pillory by publishing the most private things and ultimately revealing his real name? Not much, if you ask me. The satirist who isn't a satirist, the TV presenter who can't present, reads text from a teleprompter and makes faces. That's his well-paid job. The actual ideas, the concepts and gags, come from his writers. Of course, these authors don't want to be doxed, which I welcome and, unlike Jan Böhmermann, would never do. That's why I only mention the artists' names. A former Böhmermann author called himself Conny Runner [1]. I find it amusing that the aforementioned Conny once dressed up as a clown himself and pressed a cake into the face of AfD politician Beatrix von Storch [2]. The whole of Germany thought that was funny. How funny would the whole of Germany find it if the clown outed by Böhmermann attacked Robert Habeck with a cake? Probably jail instead of a career leap. Conny Runner - never heard of him? I understand that. Böhmermann's former gag writer is better known under the name Jean Peters. Under this pseudonym, he wrote the play "Secret Plan against Germany" for Correctiv. You see? The phenomenon of projection is widespread. You don't have to be a psychological expert to recognize it.

Speaking of expert reports! The secret report from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution that everyone has been talking about for weeks, the oh-so-secret report from which Der Spiegel quoted excerpts a week ago, is now finally available in full. Thanks to Cicero and Nius [3]! Is the AfD securely right-wing extremist? Every citizen can now form their own opinion on this question on 1108 pages. The only spontaneous certainty is that Nancy Faeser's justification for not proactively publishing the report was a brazen lie. It was never about protecting sources. Unlike the Böhmermann case, the entire document does not contain the real names of VS employees, nor does it publish any other sensitive data. And behind the news? I have to drive around the village with the church for that.

Have you ever taken a cover from the bookshelf, opened it up and put it on the photocopier to copy or scan a page or double page? It looks terrible because of the shadows on the gutter. The gutter is the blank space between the text and the symmetry axis of the book. If you are unlucky, i.e. with particularly thick books and with little empty space, the shadows even extend into the text area when digitizing a book. This is exactly what happened when the report on the AfD was leaked. The positive aspect of this information is the realization that the 1108-page secret report already exists in perfect-bound form. Whether as a hardcover or softcover and in which edition, whether the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has already commissioned the Federal Printing Office to print millions of copies of the secret report so that it can be distributed in schools and universities - that is beyond my knowledge.

Only the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution knows that. But what? Germany has had no President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution since Thomas Haldenwang resigned on November 13, 2024. The post has been vacant for over half a year. I find that strange because it has been repeatedly announced that a successor must be found soon. This is what former Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on November 18, 2024:

"I will decide on Thomas Haldenwang's successor as President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as soon as possible. And that means before the general election and, if possible, before the end of this year. Because I don't think it's responsible for us not to fill the office for a long period of time in these times of such major threats to our internal security." [4]

You only see this at second glance. This lie is also behind the news.