Michael Schumacher, the raging saint
Photo: ARD
As is well known, one should not speak ill of the dead. Especially if they are still alive. Michael Schumacher, for example, has existed in the media gray area between being and non-being for almost exactly ten years. After all, the megastar fell so badly while skiing on December 29th that although he disappeared from the flashbulbs, he remained a constant topic of discussion for the tabloid lying barons.
It is a strange state of suspension that the documentary “Being Michael Schumacher” will be showing in the ARD media library from Thursday. As with the similar portrait of Jan Ullrich from spring, Andreas Troll spends five episodes following the trail of a globally popular figure whose career ended differently than he had hoped. In contrast to the doping offender “Ulle”, the author finds practically no fault with “Schumi”, as everyone from Kerpen to Maranello to the world of the Formula 1 billion-dollar circus calls him.
Why should it? When Troll follows the son of a Kerpen chimney mason, he finds a man of amazing down-to-earth spirit. Because he literally grew up on his dad’s go-kart track on the left bank of the Rhine, the big Schumacher has retained the values of little Micha. The gravel pit near Cologne, says “Faz” sports department head Anno Hecker, while Andreas Troll puts magical archive images of it in a row, “despite the many millions, this enormous success” has always been and is his home.
Seven World Cup trophies at home, origins in the heart, this is how companions of all kinds describe the career of a legend through the institutions of his passion. And in a testosterone-saturated activity like this, apart from PR manager Sabine Kehm, it is naturally gray men like Mercedes team boss Norbert Haug or kart track boss Gerd Noack and racing drivers like Jochen Maas or David Coulthard who pay homage to their idol. Every now and then, Sabine Christiansen is allowed to read about successes in the “Tagesthemen”.
But white-haired guys like “Bild” reporter Helmut Uhl, who basks in Schumacher’s light with noticeable excitement and expresses how sports journalism at the time lost all distance from the subject of the report, have the sovereignty of interpretation. From “Micah’s” sporting foundation on the edge of the opencast mine to Schumacher’s living room in the Belgian spa to the end of Schumi’s career, they also comment on a moral portrait of the old FRG between reunification and the attention industry.
We see the title character as a fabulous racing driver and wonderful family man, a humorous professional and a sensitive normal man, an empathetic millionaire and a dogged fitness guru, and more rarely as an overzealous, ambitious bully and testimonial for tobacco products. But what he isn’t for 9,000 seconds in this public broadcast, a state treaty-oriented broadcast for the common good: an environmental pig. Already in episode 2 of the three-hour eulogy, “cheating Schumi” is mentioned, for whom victories were more important than rules and honesty.
But the fact that he single-handedly polluted the earth’s atmosphere with exhaust gases from half of the big cities and thereby damaged the climate more than all the CSU transport ministers, that he helped tens of millions of asphalt cowboys push through the lead feet and, by way of his professional role model function, is indirectly responsible for countless traffic deaths: through such Andreas Troll doesn’t say a word about the dark side of motorsport or about tax evasion in Switzerland. Until the skiing accident, Schumacher mostly drove over asphalt loops in democratic countries.
His successors, on the other hand, are increasingly turning them into dictatorships and making the turbo-capitalist game of fossil tail comparisons not only ecologically but politically reprehensible. Unfortunately, we don’t hear any of this in “Being Michael Schumacher.” This obviously dictates respect for the injured victim in convalescence. A media multiplier who (even if journalism caricatures in the rainbow forest of newspapers from Bauer- to Saisons-Verlag are relentlessly telling the opposite) has not commented publicly on anything since then.
It is all the more interesting to listen to similarly famous sports stars such as Dirk Nowitzki, Franziska van Almsick, Fernando Alonso and Bastian Schweinsteiger paying tribute to their idol. This has a lot of what the sports world wants even more than the abdication of Gianni Infantino and Thomas Bach: values, attitude, the ability to know the birthdays of his mechanics’ wives. If he had had a less toxic job, according to this documentary, you could easily love Michael Schumacher even without gasoline in your blood.
Available in the ARD media library from December 14th.
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