It may sound strange, but: One of the biggest political scandals in the Federal Republic brought about one of the most stable political phases in the country: It was the CDU donation affair that made Chancellor Merkel possible.
Who knows how otherwise everything would have turned out if a stubborn, stubborn ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl had not accepted millions of secret donations, then refused to name the donors, and investigators had not subsequently found black accounts with the largest party in Germany.
The column
Podcasts have long deserved to be discussed, praised and criticized just as seriously as other media. Do it every two weeks Marcus Engert and Sandro Schroeder alternately for us.
Marcus Engert Has been telling people who haven’t asked about the big podcast boom since 2008. He was co-founder and editor-in-chief of detektor.fm. He has been making podcasts for a good ten years and thinking about the future of radio and audio on the Internet. He has worked as a reporter and author for the BBC World Service, ARD and the news agency dapd, and was a lecturer at various universities and journalism schools. Today he’s a reporter at BuzzFeed News.
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But that’s exactly how it was 20 years ago. The podcast “Affäre Deutschland” from FYEO traces the history of the CDU donation affair – and it does so in a surprisingly entertaining way, although it is not a very topical, not a very attractive, not even a simple topic.
If there is a lot of discussion today about party financing, about donations to political parties – specifically: If the AfD has to pay three times the fine for donations that it has wrongly accepted – then it also happens because there was the CDU donation scandal.
The AfD donations are the most current (and most obvious) example of the topicality of this podcast, but by no means the only one. In eight episodes, Cornelia Neumeyer tells this important piece of German party history – in a light-footed, calm and pleasantly relaxed way. Yes, that’s storytelling too, but actually it’s more of a documentation. Or a reconstruction.
The currently so popular staged experience of the listener with the reporter was dispensed with here: Nobody takes us along somewhere to narrate and decorate. Instead: a narrator and many interviewees, archive snippets, old sound recordings, minutes and Bundestag debates. This dramaturgical decision was exactly the right one. …
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