At the beginning of her show, Sandra Maischberger smugly greets “my great audience,” and at the end she says goodbye to “my great audience.” The other processes at “maischberger” are also ritualized. Three commentators have been sitting at the counter for a while and Maischberger is questioning them from the side. Among these changing actors are journalists such as Susanne Gaschke and Markus Feldenkirchen, the film producer Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt, the publisher Wolfram Weimer and the actor Hannes Jaenicke.
Definite opinions are welcome here. In the middle part there are detailed dialogues with firebrands such as Gerhart Baum, Sahra Wagenknecht, Markus Söder and Friedrich Merz, sometimes also “The Duel”, an exchange of blows with such entertaining characters as Christian Dürr, Alexander Gauland and Robert Habeck. And Friedrich Merz! Merz is the ideal choice for “maischberger”. He is good in every position, even in the visitors’ stands after his performance.
Sandra Maischberger once hosted the famous youth program “Live from the Slaughterhouse” with Giovanni di Lorenzo and later the even more famous program “0137” with Roger Willemsen. She also often interviewed the late Helmut Schmidt on television and made a documentary about his lecture tours. The Oracle of Eidelstedt inhaled menthol cigarettes and explained the world. He liked Maischberger.
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But she is also the show. With her head tilted and a sweet and sour smile, she doesn’t let anyone escape. “You didn’t answer the question,” she often says. If necessary, she will intervene.
She seems amiable and unaffected. She is interested in politics, but her approach is immediately pragmatic. Unlike Markus Lanz, she has no pathos and no sense of mission.
She rarely invites people who don’t talk about politics. The entrepreneur Wolfgang Grupp is one of them. Grupp is the founder of the textile company Trigema, which uses a chimpanzee to advertise jerseys. He has a desk in the open-plan office at his company, thinks working from home is the devil’s work and thinks social media is idiotic. He is 81 years old and can say anything. Perhaps Wolfgang Grupp will be the new world explainer after Helmut Schmidt’s death.