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Dittrich as a number man: Nice end to an insane year
Photo:
Daniel Wolcke / WDR
Zahlemann is back.
In recent years we have got to know him as the magician of dreariness, who, in his role as a public service reporter, conjured up sensations where there were no sensations.
Objectively and saxonly, he then explained his supposed journalistic scoops to the audience and looked so serious and demanding that everyone wanted to believe everything from their hearts.
Zahlemann's latest campaign, however, has it all: After buying a smartphone, he was assigned the cell phone number of Angela Merkel, from then on he texted on behalf of the Chancellor with her party and parliamentary colleagues until the fraud was exposed.
Now the reporter is accused of identity theft, presumption of office and endangering the security of the state.
The big serious theater
Sandro Zahlemann is one of the many fictional characters with whom Olli Dittrich takes on the media business once a year around Christmas.
We know Zahlemann from the breakfast television parody from 2013 and the “TalkGespräch” from 2014, for which Dittrich created a typology of public-law self-promoters.
Zahlemann embodied the type of television reporter who is downright self-drunk from his own serious theater.
In the 30-minute film "I was Angela Merkel: The Zahlemann Protocol", which Dittrich created as a mockumentary, in his Saxon Checker-Singsang, Zahlemann reports how things happened with the identity theft - and how the cell phone Number influenced the course of the election year.
As a fake Chancellor, he used a few tricks to ensure that Laschet overtook Söder as a candidate for Chancellor.
This manipulation of the big political business resulted only from the fact that Zahlemann was slightly offended: at the beginning of the nineties he got to know Söder personally, who was actually a volunteer at Bayerischer Rundfunk at the time, and Söder then approached Zahlemann's flame, Gitta.
With a few text messages, Zahlemann pushed the former rival almost 30 years later: "If you relax my wife, you won't be Chancellor either."
Cell phone gambler Zahlemann
The communication and power chaos that prevailed in the CDU and CSU before the federal election in 2021, attributed to Zahlemann, is a nice twist. In view of the back and forth in terms of the K question and party chairmanship, in which no more strategy and leadership were recognizable, it seems almost believable that the cell phone gambler Zahlemann had his fingers in the game.
Dittrich's parody, which runs on Wednesday night in the first and is already available for download in the ARD media library, is a nice end to an insane year - but possibly too nice. In some points Dittrich lacks the old bite. It may also have something to do with the fact that some real media personalities have cameos with him. For example, »Tagesthemen« moderator Caren Miosga appears, who Zahlemann describes as a »committed but exhausting colleague«.
The mockumentary doesn't like this cute, tongue-in-cheek irony - it conjures up an ideal public law world that no longer exists. This is particularly noticeable when the real outgoing ARD chairman and WDR director Tom Buhrow appears. He reports how Zahlemann used his fake Chancellor SMS to talk to him about conducting the big Angela Merkel interview for ARD: Zahlemann wrote to the powerful ARD man as Merkel and demanded that this good journalist say Zahlemann after all Talk to her. But, Buhrow jovially explains to the camera, such deals are of course not made as a non-state broadcasting company.
It would not have been bad at this point if Dittrich's financier Buhrow had to step in to let a little more of the public law madness of last year flow into the mockumentary.
Between the alarming weather reports and the unleashed debate there was so much stress for the ARD management that Buhrow's sonorous guest appearance somehow seems complacent.
"I was Angela Merkel: The Zahlemann Protocol
," Wednesday 11:45 pm, the first.
Already available in the media library