There is probably nobody in this country who would not have an opinion on Michel Friedman.

Unlike the Queen, whose sudden death a few hours before Friedman's book premiere dominated the foyer conversation in the Berliner Ensemble, the former chairman of the Central Council of Jews - known to the wider audience as a sharp-tongued talk show host - is not only loved.

In any case, even in the darkened auditorium, he tells his life story along an axis characterized by attraction and repulsion.

Created in early childhood, it continued to develop into a dizzying arc of suspense in one's own misfortune dramaturgy.

Michel Friedman's life has a lot to do with intoxication, flight reflexes and self-destruction.

The so-called "Friedman Affair" suddenly brought the talk show host with the charm of a hawk into the headlines with half-silver things: prostitution, drug possession, human trafficking.

Friedman resigned from all offices as a CDU politician and journalist.

Asking the public for a second chance, he studied philosophy and built a new and quieter career alongside his wife Bärbel Schäfer, with whom he has two sons.

In the country of the perpetrators of all places

About his parents, Holocaust survivors thanks to Schindler's list, he says in the BE that their joy was brief, their sorrow eternal.

Friedman's purpose as a child was to make the traumatized parents happy.

A father who worked a lot, smiled little and hardly spoke.

A mother who cried a lot and gave presents to others.

The book says, “'What for?' dad asks.

,It makes me feel good.'

'It won't help,' says dad.

'They won't protect you,' says dad.

'You won't remember,' says Dad."

Michel Friedman was born in Paris in 1956, where his parents from Kraków had emigrated.

Almost ten years later, the family moved to Frankfurt, in the country of the perpetrators of all places.

Balancing the contradictions of this decision becomes Friedman's unconscious child's duty.

"We," he says of the burden of those born later, "stole the I." Friedman admitted that he did not want to write this book to the "taz" journalist Tania Martini, who wrote the evening on which the pianist Igor Levit participated, moderated.

Why not?

Because he was afraid that people would only want to read it biographically.

His only chance

At least not in the Berliner Ensemble.

Several passages of childhood memories are read first by Constanze Becker, then by Michel Friedman himself, which quickly shows that the author of "Fremd" is not only concerned with the exemplary individual case.

In conversation with Levit, the fundamental experience of non-belonging comes up.

Anti-Semitism, but also many other forms of discrimination against all those people who stand for something different, foreign and new, are still the order of the day.

Igor Levit says angrily: If well-meaning friends advised him not to give the bullying opponent “no stage”, then that would ultimately mean that one would be forced to go home alone with the feeling of powerlessness.

Tania Martini wants to know whether mistakes have been made in the German culture of remembrance.

That's the cue for Friedman.

He calls the German culture of remembrance just as misleading a legend as the famous speech about zero hour.

If there were a German culture of remembrance, then it would at best be the living story of the Jews who murdered Jesus and poisoned the well – everything has long since been deconstructed in terms of cultural history and yet has a toxic effect.

History is not divisible, as proclaimed in the post-war period, says Friedman.

You just keep going.

The Queen once said that good memories are a second chance at happiness.

For Friedman, who today describes himself as “the happiest of all unlucky people”, the task in life was to play back the commemoration order that his parents indirectly gave him to the society of the perpetrators and thus get rid of it.

This was his only chance.