Aurel Mertz in an interview: “I think feelings outside of the normal state are cool”

We all deserve a bit of escapism, says Aurel Mertz. And that’s exactly why the 34-year-old has now started a quiz show. “The Great Human Guess with Aurel Mertz” is about empathizing with other people, looking into other people’s lives and guessing about their peculiarities – everything viewed with humor, curiosity and from a wide variety of perspectives. Mertz puzzles with guests like Alli Neumann, Phenix and Parshad Esmaeili. The approximately 30-minute episodes are available to binge here and to zoom out from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

In the conversation, the entertainer, comedian and presenter explains why he has nothing against failure on the show or otherwise, why he could imagine becoming a pizza baker, what he was able to learn from Frank Elstner and Alli Neumann and what, for him, is bad provocation .

Do you have good people skills?

Aurel Mertz: It’s true that I can assess quite well how someone is feeling at the moment. So yeah, I guess I’m not unempathetic. Which isn’t a bad thing, because people who have no empathy at all are usually relatively dangerous…

But they can have a career…

…at the expense of others, exactly.

Your answer regarding your knowledge of human nature doesn’t sound particularly convincing. You call yourself “Ratebaron” on your show.

Because that gives the whole thing a certain height. I see it like this: fake it ’til you make it. Of course I want to achieve the maximum, even if I don’t know whether that will work. But the pressure helps. And of course I failed too. But failure is also fun. It takes me out of my comfort zone and even if I do feel shame, that’s fundamentally better than feeling nothing.

Does failure have a positive connotation for you?

If I constantly failed at guessing people, it could still be a success. Then it has a dramaturgy and is entertaining. But failure can also be important apart from the show, because only when things go wrong often do you have the impulse to change something. With failure comes motivation. Or does a boxer who only wins even train? In any case, I think feelings outside of the normal state are cool. Always the same thing means boredom. I’m just thinking about the time in your early 20s, when you’ve never really been in love, haven’t felt anything right – just boring.

Does that have to be boring? I’m not sure.

Do you prefer things to be normal?

Exactly, and my guess show on Saturday evening. Cozy.

Yes or? That was kind of the idea behind it. It’s a feel-good show. So far I have covered a lot of political and problematic topics in my formats. Also so that I don’t feel so helpless anymore. But this time I thought to myself: the world is going up in flames, it’s a very complicated time, we all deserve a bit of escapism. I was also keen to take part in the guesswork.

What do you want to do next, what’s on your bucket list?

I recently want to become a pizza maker. I’m often obsessed with things, and right now that’s pizza. I would love to go to Italy and learn it there. Otherwise I would like more cats. I always had a list professionally, but I’m slowly getting closer to the end game. I really want to do a quiz show now and do it with my own company, Space Cabana, and produce it myself. Next I might want to do another current affairs show or a fictional series. Overall, checking off goals isn’t that important to me. Rather, I just want to have a great life. The people who set such blatant career goals for themselves are also very much about themselves or something in their bubble…

… they tend to only hang out with people who promote their careers, right?

Exactly. A strange phenomenon. For example, I don’t have any famous friends at all. I’ve been hanging out with the same people for twenty years. Maybe I’m not likeable enough… But ultimately I don’t care. I like that my inner circle talks about normal life and that my own publicity isn’t always an issue.

There isn’t much celebrity hype in Berlin anyway, is there? Especially in Kreuzberg, where you spend a lot of time, most people seem relaxed even at the sight of royals.

Whether you’re wearing a flaming sombrero or a suit, you’ll be treated with the same respect. And I like that.

Is “The Big Human Guess” also intended to break down stereotypes?

Yes, we want to break the cliché. I think it’s nice that the show allowed me to see this incredible unpredictability in people.

To what extent are you unpredictable yourself?

Aminata Belli once said to me that she thought I came from a very rich family. That’s the weirdest prejudice anyone could have about me, and it really shocked me. But that must be because of my name. Depending on how you pronounce it, you imagine a different person. And everyone says my name differently.

Well, with your different formats, you are somehow always someone different.

Do you find? I feel like I’m always the same. I just do different things. But I also put a lot of myself into everything I do. That’s the only thing I can do.

In the show you call Alli Neumann your role model – to what extent is that true?

She is an absolute role model, definitely. On the day of filming, she arrived with plastic bags under her arm and when I asked her about it, she discovered that there were deposit bottles in them that she had forgotten to hand in. (laughs) I just like her energy. It was also difficult to reach her by phone before the show because she had forgotten to pay her cell phone bill. So you could only talk to her when she was on WiFi. I think it’s great when people build a functioning system – which isn’t necessarily the norm – and succeed. I mean, no matter what’s going on with you, if you can still give off traces of such positive, beautiful energy that puts others in a good mood, that’s worth a lot. This also gives people something back.

How do you manage to be in a good mood so often and not let bitterness come through?

I learned about myself: conversation makes me happy. When I talk to someone, it never makes me feel bad. Especially when I’m on a stand-up tour, I can drive monotonously from A to B, stressed and exhausted because I only had two hours of sleep and the backstage area even smells like piss. But when I open Instagram on my phone and see people posting photos of themselves and writing about how they’re already sitting in the venue and looking forward to my show, I get goosebumps. Just thinking about it now. And when I go on stage afterwards, I swear I’m in the best mood of the millennium. I’m the luckiest person on earth because everyone is there just to listen to me ramble. That’s so nice. I don’t have a deep psychological explanation for this, but that’s probably worrying.

When you started the master class with Frank Elstner in 2013, was he actually something of a role model for you in terms of approach, tactics and choice of topic?

I didn’t even know who that was. Then I asked my mother and she said that it was the guy from the TV lottery. (laughs) Only later did we check that he was known for “Wetten,dass..?” – German television didn’t play a role in our house. So he wasn’t a role model at first, but I found his way of working very exemplary. Because he approached things so freely and creatively. If you hung out with him, it could happen that he dropped 20 ideas at once, and most of them were stupid, but there was also one that was really good. And I think the idea of ​​not shying away from creativity is pretty valuable. You can just call them shitty ideas, whatever. But many creative people overthink everything. That slows you down. No matter how good they are, many are too shy with their thoughts and believe that everything has to be perfect before it can be made public. But our time is totally focused on quantity instead of quality, which is why many really good creative people are disappearing. I learned from Frank Elstner that you should allow yourself to put out things that might not be a blast in the end. This is how I approach X, i.e. Twitter. I throw out the loosest thoughts – sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. I’ll just figure it out by publishing it and in the end it won’t be so bad. In any case, I’m a fan of not being too timid and trying something out. Sometimes 50 percent of success is that you believe in it yourself. I would like to say that to people more often: believe in yourself! Maybe it’s also social media that creates an image of over-competence and everyone believes that everything has to be perfect and is intimidated by that. But art is never perfect. It’s surprising and I don’t necessarily know beforehand what I can perceive as art.

So do you think that something can only become art after the fact? The main thing is that it moves, disturbs?

Well, that’s what we’ve had for the last three years. Everything always had to be sensational. The more provocation, the better. Then at least people will talk about it. This is why people lick toilet seats on TikTok. On X, many people say outragous shit often enough just to start a discussion. But I don’t want to get stuck there. This is only there to generate reach and turn people against each other. For example, it made me so upset when Dennis Schröder and the German national basketball team became world champions and someone had to immediately tweet: “Well, Nazis, what does that do to you?” And I thought like this: Can’t you at least talk to him for 20 minutes Just let him be world champion before you use him for your agenda to piss on the Nazis? I want to piss on Nazis every day, but that has nothing to do with Dennis Schröder. Dennis Schröder deserves to not be directly abused for one’s own agenda. As a PoC in Germany, it must be possible to be successful or unsuccessful without being directly used for a discussion. If he had been unsuccessful, there would certainly have been comments like, “That’s it for us now.” But the other way around it was exactly the same. I’m also a token when I’m with the Federal President. And I think you have to be able to accept something without instrumentalizing it. Otherwise it’s annoying. We already have enough problems. So I want to say: let it be. I just want to be there. I don’t want to be a token, in the sense that I’m just a symbol of making Nazis mad.

Take a look here “The Great Human Guess with Aurel Mertz” pure.