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Everyday life seems to be getting faster and faster and the attention span is getting shorter and shorter.
"Open End" counteracts this development.
The second episode of the new WELT Talk lasts three hours and a minute.
Compared to the premiere last Saturday, that sounds almost modest - the moderator Michel Friedman only ended the conversation after almost four hours.
Each episode lasts exactly as long as the guests or the moderator want - the name says it all.
"We have all the time in the world," Friedman said at the beginning of the show.
Time is not of the essence, it offers space for development, and you can also feel the relaxation in the guests.
Only once did Stephan Kramer, President of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, answer a question that was actually addressed to Julia Leeb, photographer and war reporter.
Otherwise all the participants in the discussion behave as attentively and relaxed as you seldom see it on German television.
As detailed as the guests have their say, the subject “fear” is just as precise.
The start was made last week by "anger".
Feelings.
Without a one-sided question, without provocation, without hidden assertions.
So not only is the end open, but also the beginning: the program is committed to “Open Beginning”.
Host Michel Friedman and intensive care physician Uwe Janssens
Source: WORLD
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“The oldest and strongest feeling,” quotes presenter Michel Friedman, the writer HP Lovecraft.
Instead of laboriously trying to find definitions, it becomes directly personal: “I've often felt fear in my life,” confesses Friedman himself. Then the question in the group: “When was the last time you were scared?” The answers shiver.
After all, all three guests have professions in which they not only deal with their own fear, but also with the fear of other people.
Julia Leeb talks about her nocturnal, uncontrollable anxiety attacks, which are different from the concrete, positive fear during the day, Stephan Kramer about the fear of death threats, which he often receives as a Jew, and the intensive care doctor Uwe Janssens about the fear of making mistakes. as well as the difficult situation of communicating their diagnoses to patients and relatives.
It turns out that being afraid and spreading fear are sometimes close together.
"I hate adrenaline"
Is it all worth it?
“I'm not interested in danger at all,” says Leeb, “I hate adrenaline and horror films, I would never do bungee jumping.” Rather, her stays in war zones are about documenting injustice that simply continues to exist without witnesses: “We only ever see those who are in the light, who are digital, who post on Facebook.
Where are the feminist women from Saudi Arabia?
They can't just post like that.
Still, they exist.
They know everything about us and we know nothing about them.
That is unacceptable for the 21st century, for the information age. "
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Janssens feels the same way: he doesn't do his job for a “tickle”, but because it fulfills him if he succeeds in making even the worst situation, death, bearable.
In the course of the program, Leeb drops terrifying sentences like "I was once abducted from Egypt", "Grenades were thrown at me" and "I should have died twice".
She deals with the fear of those around her "very selfishly" that she has no children.
"My job is my calling."
Some statements are difficult to digest, but the atmosphere remains pleasant.
The feel-good living room decoration made of warm orange-red tones also contributes to this.
There are seldom contradictions, at most the statement of one guest is exacerbated by another.
For example, when Kramer thinks that Janssens formulated his criticism of the actor's action #allesdichtmachen too nicely, so that Kramer has to go back and angrily denounces the “decadence and ignorance” of those involved.
Leeb then suggests to the intensive care doctor to invite the actors over to the ward and then ask them to confirm their videos again.
Not such a bad idea, thinks Janssens.
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The renunciation of riot is not a weakness, but the great strength of the show.
"Less is more" in this case means the almost complete reduction to the guests and their words, which speak for themselves.
Again and again it is about the pictures in Bergamo and New York, about refrigerated trucks and corpses, but they are not shown.
No clips, no illustrations, just the conversation and the imagination that was set in motion.
Refrain from riot
Alarmism and the senseless stirring up of fears are really not to be blamed for “open end”. In spite of this, or rather for this very reason, the real fear that reveals itself in all those situations that we are talking about is so understandable. Instead of being right, it is about joint reflection, which the program locates less in the area of political trench warfare than in philosophical debates - names such as Plato, Susan Sontag and Martha Nussbaum are regularly mentioned.
Just as there are “a thousand ways to die,” according to Leeb, there are also a thousand things to be afraid of.
Before mistakes, masks, vaccinations, corona and death.
The latter takes up almost the entire room from about halfway through the conversation, if not earlier.
Even if the references to the actual topic cannot always be made perfectly, this does not harm the program.
On the contrary: it takes the show idea - "Open End" - to extremes.
Protection of the constitution Stephan Kramer at "Open End": "I believe in the good"
Source: WORLD
If the guests can already talk in the living room as they are at home without putting an artificial end to their discussions, why not allow a rapid change of topic, which all guests seem to be pushing for together? Because it is a good one: The thoughts that come up about a beautiful death, dying lonely, dealing with one's own finitude, suppressing death and what it is like to convey a cancer diagnosis to someone are at least as exciting, personal and existential like the one about what's scary.
It remains to be seen whether the opposite of fear is optimism, as Friedman finally suggests when he asks the guests what they are making optimistic despite everything.
In any case, your answers are encouraging.
Kramer quotes an observation by Julia Leeb that he made at the beginning of the program and that he couldn't get out of his head: that she would rather take older than younger people with her to crisis areas because younger people still believed in the good.
Kramer's answer: “I believe in the good.
I am a realist, but I believe in miracles.
This gives me the opportunity not to go completely insane with what I see and experience every day.
I believe in miracles, and I believe that we will come out stronger from this whole thing.
"
The conversation is over when all participants get up and leave the room together, but not.
Three hours were probably still not enough for the guests, so that they could continue the discussion behind the stage forever, as if it made no difference whether with a camera or without.
Maybe the fear goes away like this, together, in conversation and while listening at home.
Uwe Janssens, Julia Leeb and Stephan Kramer are guests at "Open End" with Michel Friedman, Saturday, April 24th from 11:05 pm. "Open End" also in the live stream on WELT.de and in the WELT TV app. More information about the program and the entire episode after it has been broadcast at WELT.de/openend.