RTL is tonight about the storm in the west.

A special program is indicated in view of the disaster.

More than forty fatalities are to be mourned.

Twice as many people are missing.

Critics chalk up WDR for not being able to cope with the events, not providing enough information, and giving too little warning.

The station claims to have been affected by the storm in Wuppertal itself, but admits errors.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for features online and "media".

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Meanwhile, there will be an extra half an hour on the Cologne broadcaster RTL, the disaster area is on the doorstep. And we would bet that the chief moderator Peter Kloeppel and his colleagues, if it were up to them alone, would no longer switch over today. On days like these, media companies prove their competence - or not. Since RTL has undertaken an “information offensive”, nothing could be more natural than to report from the Eifel, Ahrweiler, Rheinbach, Euskirchen, Altena and Hagen.

But now at a quarter to nine the program that RTL has been preparing for a long time will be switched to.

Does anyone want to see that now?

Can the theme evening keep what the station promises?

"Angela Merkel - her way, her secrets & her future" is promised to the audience.

But we would be very surprised if Peter Kloeppel and Inka Bause actually coaxed “secrets” out of the Chancellor.

Bearer of secrets beyond compare

After all, that is what she is known for, that she preserves them in her political as well as in her private life.

Of course, there is already a lot to learn about her path on RTL, on the station's own TVNow platform, in the five-part, five-hour documentary "Angela Merkel - Frau Bundeskanzlerin" by Stefan Aust and Katrin Klocke.

Anyone who serves themselves this magnum opus receives an unparalleled history lesson in which one realizes how much this politician has shaped our country over the past decades.

After reunification and the era of Helmut Kohl, with Gerhard Schröder as an intermediate episode.

When not everything was "without alternative"

The first three parts of the pentalogy are particularly instructive. Because in these, Aust and Klocke recall a personality who, however volatile, situational or contradicting, the apparently unchangeable Chancellor, who has ruled for sixteen years, does not yet correspond to political decisions, no matter how erratic, situational or contradictory, as "no alternative", or not yet in rudiments. We see a young politician who has a plan that she doesn't know will work out. That changes, looks for its place, assesses the situation and the people and takes advantage of opportunities.

With a career like Angela Merkel's, that could look straightforward in retrospect, a journey of heroines, so to speak, with the kind of tension that television loves.

But the filmmakers Aust and Klocke know their way around too well and are too journalists.

They draw on research carried out by Der Spiegel magazine when Aust was its editor-in-chief, and rely on Spiegel TV's stock of images, whose reporters were in the right place at the right time.

As is well known, they were at the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing in Berlin on November 9, 1989, at the behest of the then Spiegel TV boss Aust, when the border opened at 11:29 p.m. sharp.

Only then was the Second World War - we hear this famous sentence by Aust again in the documentary - over.

She was in the sauna

And where was Angela Merkel? In the sauna. She walked over to West Berlin with friends, but immediately returned to the still existing GDR, to which her father, a Protestant pastor and known as the "red Kasner", had moved from Hamburg in 1954. How Angela Dorothea Kasner, later Merkel, fared there, how she behaved, studied natural sciences and came to terms with the regime, is described by Klocke and Aust with some skepticism, but not with the West German arrogance that some journalistic considerations have long since ceased Shapes "new" countries to this day. They don't need that. What was brought to light after the fall of the Wall about the Stasi and their unofficial employees and ended careers before they began speaks for itself.