Icon: enlarge
Wendler in March during his appearance on the show "Pocher vs. Wendler"
Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd / dpa
Laura Müller had a problem last night.
"I'm still looking for our Frankenstein," sighed the wife of pop singer Michael Wendler in her Instagram story, then positioned two skeletons as Halloween decorations in the couple's Florida front yard, waved briefly over a "very cool tombstone" and placed for the next few days the artistic carving of three pumpkins is in prospect.
While her husband resigned at the same time and also on Instagram as a juror for "Deutschland sucht den Superstar", accused the federal government of violating the Basic Law with its measures to contain the coronavirus and described the media as "synchronized", Laura made do with the same Maneuver with which she is doing so well in her social media business: She put a filter on it.
With a little decoration everything looks much better.
You can take refuge in aphoristic considerations, what exactly she was just symbolically buried with her tombstone dummy, or draw parallels to Melania Trump, whose husband also has a problematic view of Covid-19, and who was in a recently leaked phone call also dealt extensively with domestic jewelry, although one would think that one might have completely different problems at the side of a madman than the fairy lights on the South Lawn.
But if you look at the text-image scissors in the stories of the Wendler couple for the third time, because you can't believe it, you can sincerely wish Laura's apparently indestructible disposition, because good nerves are worth gold, And gold is the only currency that will soon be accepted at all after the great coup, Wendler is said to have said recently.
Lead overwhelmed
It was an evening when people said "I really don't know either" even more often than before, not out of laziness, but out of leaden overwhelm.
A mood in which you actually watched the freshly streamed roaring from the "summer house of the stars" to relax a bit.
This is probably why this really exhausting Trash TV format is so popular: When the whole world is on fire, a blazing summer house looks almost as cozy as a campfire.
The fact that Michael Wendler has now also joined the prominent corona deniers around Attila Hildmann and Xavier Naidoo seems bizarre in itself, and the Laura decoration work at the same time makes it even more scary, because it is strangely casual - Müller and Wendler recently advertised tooth whitening trays together on their channels, Therefore, through this intellectual closeness, it now almost seems as if the opening of a Telegram channel with the usual crude conspiracy videos is now just a lifestyle decision - or a kind of friend book in which like-minded people sign up.
Wendler was often an impertinence during his Schlager work, aesthetically, tastefully, also morally, but the number of strokes increased so quickly that the nerves couldn't keep up.
How tired you are from the world race, you can tell by how strenuous it is to watch it.
Wendler was often an impertinence during his Schlager work, aesthetically, tastefully, also morally, but the number of strokes increased so quickly that the nerves couldn't keep up.
At the beginning of the noughties, I once spent a Saturday evening with Wendler when I accompanied him for a report on three appearances in large discos in various industrial areas in the greater Oberhausen area, and his glaring at that time was already exhausting: When he was devoted, completely euphoric fans to a dark one Electric wholesale market car park reached out to their toddlers, possibly as a blessing, proudly showing his old signature on his upper arm, which he had retouched as a tattoo, or when you were sitting in his car with high blood pressure because the driver was racing through the rain so fast and doing it Deafening loudly, only Wendler music blasted out of the speakers.
Like a coiffed royal poodle
In the end it was mainly his pimp-like display of the young girlfriend that repelled.
Like every kitsch work, it remained a fascination, because you also marvel at a coiffed royal poodle.
At least that's my justification for why I actually bought the fake engagement ring that Wendler and Müller sold off in a gracious junk sale right away with the announcement of the happy occasion.
As a Telegram whistle reinforcement, Wendler can actually do more damage than with his music.
One should simply not make the wrong people famous, it is now said, Trump, too, was born out of the froth of trash so that they do not accidentally become powerful.
But who are the right ones?
So far, Michael Wendler has looked like a harmless Discofox apologist, with lines of text like "Your witch's house is burning / but I'm not going to get the fire department" and lard songs in which females whisper "protect me".
The fact that he is said to have been on the phone with Hildmann for hours comes as a surprise, but his susceptibility to such messages is not implausible.
You have to believe, at least to a small extent, in the simplicity of some texts in order to be able to sing them.
And anyone who takes himself so seriously that he applies a certain article and thus proclaims himself a sight, is certainly easy to grasp on the vanity and the ego: Hercules, Goldelse, Wendler!
The uncertainty that the Wendler case triggered while watching yesterday has a deeper component.
On Thursday evening she was not fed by the disappointment of having lost someone to the oaths who had been thought to be smarter, from whom one really would not have expected that.
The uncertainty was much more fundamental because one could not be calmly dismayed by the video of the recruiting success in which Hildmann cheered the new comrade on Telegram, but at the same time still had to draw a perforation seam into this dismay and think along with it.
And with every new piece of information, I had to constantly calculate the likelihood of whether the whole thing might just be an elaborately staged joke, as was immediately speculated, especially on Twitter.
An insecure Manneken
The way in which Wendler read his Insta statement from the sheet, repeatedly had to look at key words such as "Constitution" and "Basic Law", spoke equally against and for its authenticity.
On the other hand, because you should be able to shout your deep conviction into the world by heart with the full heart of conviction, which drives you to simply give up your purring career.
But also for it, because this lecture showed Wendler, in spite of all the striking clarity, as the unsettled Manneken that one could always see shining through in various other of his productions.
At the latest, when Oliver and Amira Pocher announced in dutiful vulture circles - again on Instagram, of course - that they wanted to bring their RTL live broadcast planned for the later evening an hour forward in the light of current events, the whole thing was considered a bad joke itself, which on the said show after half an hour of dismay would certainly be resolved as an alleged social experiment.
Last night, when people were still thinking about it, it became abundantly clear that there is finally no longer any plausibility and responsibility dam behind which one could briefly crouch in such confusing moments.
No reliable "Well, you will not do that" and no self-assuring "You will definitely not go that far right now".
The doubts about the authenticity of Wendler's departure are ultimately not entirely dispelled when his manager actually sits in the Pocherstudio and cries because he considers his client to be seriously ill, and you feel ashamed that you are now also a crying person not yet fully convinced.
One can really believe that Wendler's change to the milkmaid is really meant seriously, only when his current advertising partner Kaufland, who has just been revealed with a lot of fanfare, explicitly distances himself from him and deletes all the spots online, because it really can't be that this should still be part of a possible prank.
Because when it comes to money, the fun still stops.
At least that can remain a reliable guiding principle for the time being.
Or?
You really don't know anymore, and that is the real tragedy.
Icon: The mirror