Talking the Talk with German Talk Shows (Discuss.)

What do you get when you combine Oprah, David Letterman, Meet the Press, Around the Horn and the McLaughlin Group? You get an average German talk show.

You see, most American talk shows center around a theme and either do one on ones with celebrities, gurus or experts - think Oprah or Letterman - or have a panel to either (depending on the day of the week and the network in question) cooly analyze the significance of the topic or screech like howler monkeys about how the opposing political party uses the shredded pieces of the Constitution for floss. But most of them at least have a focus and guests who can either talk intelligently about a topic or scream in panic until we either believe them or switch to that episode of Modern Family we've tivoed for later.

German talk shows usually have a theme and a minimum of seven guests to discuss the theme and it's at this point that the German sense of Ordnung (order, but with much more stability and cleanliness) that has kept the German economy going and the streets swept clean, breaks down into the chaos of a good German discussion. The panel introduction usually goes something like this:

Moderator: "The theme of today's show is 'The German Economic Miracle: A Nostalgic Look Back.' Our guests are a junior politician from the Green Party who has published a pamphlet called 'Solar Powered Cars: It's Not Rocket Science,' a woman from Hannover who just published a romance novel about the forbidden love between a zoo keeper and a taxi driver, Schalke 04 Football Club's new Korean Striker (will be speaking through an interpreter), the public relations director for Audi, a professor from the University of Bonn who's expertise is modern history and recently wrote a critically proclaimed book called The German Economic Miracle: Why It Should Still Make You Angry or Maybe It Shouldn't, the new light-weight women's kickboxing champion, the pirate party's senior press officer who will be live tweeting the event, and a thirteen year old boy who overcame protests from the local health department to start his own doner kebab stand."

The host then proceeds to bounce through his roundtable like a butterfly in a daisy garden while each of the guests tries to use his or her three and a half minutes of fame to promote their book/cause/film/lifestyle while attempting to say something intelligent about the topic at hand. Sometimes, of course, it makes great television - I remember when a pirate party candidate came on for the first time and a guy who looks like the guy who updates your software at work except with green hair had some interesting ideas about trade law while some woman (an actress... maybe? On a German talk show it's really hard to keep track of who is who) told him she hopes he doesn't sell out like Joschka Fisher. Well, I guess that was great... But more often I get dizzy.