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Scholz while recording the New Year's speech: Soft clasping of the left fist
Photo: Pool / Getty Images
Every New Years address consists of a balancing act in which it is only about the finest differences: On the one hand, the ritual demands that the Germans share the greatest common denominator (above all community, decent pay and solidarity, we all know and love that!) And To really take everyone with you at least once a year - which leads to a rhetorical resistance to changes and thus to a certain risk of confusion.
At the same time, you don't want to look exactly like the chancellor before you.
At Olaf Scholz's first New Year's address, the first thing that strikes you next to the fact that he is not Angela Merkel and has extremely exposed ears: the notorious flower arrangement has disappeared.
It is true that, even in previous years, it was never possible to finally say on what occasion it was tied. Burial? Confirmation? Or maybe there was: a special Chancellor flower arrangement for the occasion, which was jokingly called a "gentleman's arrangement" among the florists in the capital before Angela Merkel took office? In any case, the flowers were always there at the New Year's address.
They rested in the lower left quadrant of the image section, until the Chancellor was slowly zoomed in, almost like a "zoomania" sloth.
Here one always imagined a Rainer-Werner-Fassbinder double with a slouch hat, brooding and smoking all night long, only to then announce the two zoom decisions to the assembled New Year's address team - including florists in the capital city - that will fundamentally determine the film artistically: »Now I have it!
Get out again to raise your eyebrows at 9.38! "
For Scholz, the New Year's address is exactly the right corset to remain vague about the content, but at last to listen to something concrete.
But Scholz is there all alone.
In a black suit with tiny dots on the tie that can't hide the fact that this is one of those men who are still serious when it's New Year's Eve.
Only in the half-close, of course not with Merkel diamond, but in a kind of soft clasping of the left fist.
Then in the near, but of course without it being somehow intense or even personal.
Not that it is misunderstood: Scholz's renouncing even the last bit of chichi is - despite all the floral melancholy - a good decision.
Because nothing really distracts from him.
And for someone like him, who is already notorious among political journalists for his propaganda (in a sense it goes in one direction: "I think we should start to rethink together, to check which decision might be the right one"), this is Finely-turned New Year's address exactly the right corset to remain vague about the content, but finally to listen to it in concrete terms. It also helps that he has a talent for well-planned breaks and, unlike many of his predecessors, drags less.
It's about the flood, about charging stations for electric cars and a strong Europe, and of course about Corona (there it is finally, the long-sought advantage of Corona: It's easier to find the ONE topic for the New Year's address - Merkel was still vague at the end of 2019 from digitization, a few months later was lockdown).
Of course, this year too, you could completely dismantle all of this general monster: Anyone who claims that a strong community can withstand contradictions "if we listen to each other" has apparently not tried to explain to Uncle Guido under the Christmas tree that he does not have his opinion on Corona should depend on conspiracy theorists.
And anyone who now urges not to postpone the vaccination "until the next day" is almost a year late, to say the least.
But you don't have to.
After all, this is still a New Years address.
Or, to shout it out directly to our dear fellow citizens with Olaf Scholz: “We are at the beginning of a new decade.
We are setting out into a new time.
A time that will be good if we actively shape it.
Because it makes a difference that we resolutely take our fate into our own hands! "
And, as already mentioned, only subtle differences are possible anyway.
Above all, individual words that are exchanged and testify even more to the time in which we live than to the political personality who proclaimed it.
While Kohl still spoke of the "fatherland" and unemployment in the eighties, today Scholz speaks of "respect" and Omikron.
In 1986, Helmut Kohl's New Years address from the previous year was actually broadcast, probably accidentally.
To use the word "interesting" in connection with a Chancellor's New Year address is, of course, a risk.
But basically it would be really more interesting to record the speech and broadcast it a year later.
Because only then does it become clear how the whole thing, what is to come, what is being planned, relates to the real.
That Merkel thanked the nurses last year, for example, seems weird, almost cynical today.
That she was optimistic about the World Cup in Germany at the end of 2005, but downright prophetic - at that time, by the way, she was wearing glasses, maybe Scholz can learn a disc from her stylistic design enthusiasm in the coming year.
Because my proposal for a historical broadcast will probably not be accepted, but the New Year will come as it comes, I recommend SPIEGEL's alternative New Year's address at this point.
You can find it here.
And if you ask me now why exactly I recommend them, and whether there really is a serious consideration behind it or it is just a service of friendship between colleagues, I call out to you, because this is really not the moment in front of this large audience to say something wrong: I think we should start to rethink together, to check which decision might be the right one.
The New Year's address will be broadcast on December 31 at 7.15 p.m. on ZDF and at 8.10 p.m. on ARD.
