ARD: TV talk “Caren Miosga”: Come along to the misery!

Talk is an invitation: come with us into the misery! Because talk is part of an epidemic of entertainment in the midst of worldwide communication incontinence. Television, a spacious and overcrowded talkhouse, knows a remedy against its own talk shows: new talk shows. One of them: “Caren Miosga” on ARD, Sunday evening. Miosga, who moderated the “Tagesthemen” for many years, succeeds Anne Will.

Instead of the distances between several armchairs in the studio, there is now an oval wooden table, very functional chairs. Not coziness, but still closeness, encompassed by muted tones, green, earthy, turquoise. The conversation plateau is surrounded by a blue area that resembles a river around a fortified castle. And Caren Miosga? She doesn’t pose with icy coolness, and her charm remains slightly treacherous. The demeanor is meant to indicate territorial ownership and will probably wear off over time.

Each program begins with an individual conversation. It was learned on the premiere evening in mid-January that Friedrich Merz cannot sleep with the windows closed, and on the following Sunday Volodymir Selenskyi was seen smiling exceptionally and gently. The people accompanying the previous episodes, two interviewees per program, came from journalism, science and a boardroom.

Currently, political discussions can only be about one thing: What will become of Germany? How does everything continue since nothing seems to be working anymore? Specifically, yesterday Sunday: Are the traffic lights overwhelming Germany? Vocabulary rockfall: debt-financed special fund for companies, network expansion, infrastructure costs, climate money. Brittle material. Political economy. Almost seminar-worthy, in any case deeply serious. And it was precisely this seriousness that led to a core: you heard numbers, but you watched suffering. Robert Habeck suffered. His entire expressive being told: Whatever I’m currently touching, it’s touching me. He wasn’t looking for escape, but for support, which he also said didn’t exist. He paused; Even the assessors, a business boss and an editor, seemed to remain spellbound in silence, even when they spoke. Spellbound – or even pitied?

Friedrich Merz, 14 evenings ago, had offered his usual smoothness, Caren Miosga wanted to give him a piggy of phrases (five euros per empty sentence). Now, on the other hand, the revelation of a torment – admittedly, that was touching, even if you knew that the next day would bring back the old, young anger about the conditions. Zorn, who also meets the Economics Minister Habeck. Because of the current conditions that Volker Braun described years ago: “A jagged, winding place for generalities, softened by the media, a harsh structure without a subject… bastions, political cartels, solid banks surrounded by democratic discounts.”

As is well known, at the moment of a question being asked, people follow the pressure to legitimize themselves and, when answering, act as if they were filled with a single point of view. In public appearances, objections against oneself are not really used. But strange Habeck sentences found their way into the economic vocabulary of the evening: “Am I actually doing the right thing as economics minister? … I don’t know if the country can stand it … Let’s try to square the circle.” We, who is that?

The audience in the studio – it is not included, but provides the atmospheric vibration of direct witness – was invited to the announcements, frankness and rhetorical standards of a tightly pressed public figure. Frightened or sobered or softened. It became clear that all politics is always based on a limited human dimension. This calms and yet also makes you extremely anxious.

»Caren Miosga« is not isolated in time and space. But of course the show honorably defends itself against the legacy of the most stupid nonsense that comes to us at three to nine or five to twelve. Whether hot seat or cold interrogation – quite a few talk shows have revolutionized our biology for years: by propagating stupidity through banal intercourse. Botho Strauss, pointedly: “The regime of the telecratic public is the most bloodless tyranny: it doesn’t let heads roll, it makes them superfluous.” It was always like this: If people want to find themselves by the shortest route, they have to, even if they stays in place, dares to go around the world. If he wants to get lost quickly, all he has to do is look directly into a camera.

Of course, there are other examples to remember. For example, Günter Gaus and his series “On the Person”. decades ago. Gaus dreamed the (admittedly futile) dream of a balancing contact between two publics, namely the active political elite and the masses of those who are allowed to remain in good hands in inconspicuousness. Because they can see their interests safely protected in the representative democratic system. Gaus developed his two-person plays out of his defiant trust in the rational maturity of a nation taught by evil times. To keep a seership awake to a sense of truth that is fed by contradictions. When will this (maybe) return?

No time returns transferably, no pattern, no model. Hard-edged political figures who once entered a television studio with their hearts pounding have long since become streamlined zeitgeist figures who are well-versed in rhetorical evasion. In some talk shows, this elevated the flight of ideas and contempt into the first signs of sociability. Some count the victims, others count the money, the bottom line is nothing.

One sometimes asks oneself: real television conversations today? Is that still possible, on the edge of this volcanic crater? Between Ukraine, the Middle East and ugly internal conditions? In which the rough wedges blossom like cherry trees – everyone hits everyone else, the enemy images are enthusiastically thrown out of the frame. Habeck once said that he wanted to “get rid of” a certain ideological language. So demonstrators stand up in encouragement against right-wing extremists, but put up signs against the “right” – probably forgetting that this is a value-free synonym for the conservative. And Democrats constantly accuse Democrats of pandering to racists – division is a beloved outrage in politics. You feel like turning away from everything that is called discourse.

The benchmark, of course, remains: in every better question-answer flow, those involved remind each other of their more intelligent options. You discover the joy of being able to navigate a problem space. In the back and forth of a good conversation, I realize how many opinions I have room for. Man is more complicated than any social consensus that he is supposed to reinforce. Isn’t every individual an institution for licensing the most irreconcilable contradictions?

Robert Habeck says the world is not fair and “the mood in Germany is minor. Maybe I can add a little bit of major.” It’s not the traffic lights that overwhelm people, but the times in which we live. Of course, that is a sentence that would be enough to fire enemy missiles at this minister and everyone he represents. He rows in the ice water of the realities that roil him, and in “Caren Miosga” he revealed, deep on the ground, a higher truth, and higher truths are often the bitterest: There are lessons and lessons, but new experiences can also, to a certain extent, prevail in politics only make people blind (human beings in general, says Heiner Müller), and knowledge and reason always remain just a floating architecture over abysses. You can hardly call that: good prospects.