Kulturradio today can no longer function without arrogance of distinction, at least public cultural radio.

That should be low-threshold and have few prerequisites.

So today, Kulturradio has to carry its ignorance like a monstrance on Corpus Christi.

Moderators emphasize that they are not "connoisseurs";

and if they do know a little more than the “Tchibo housewife”, who was configured as the ideal addressee of the program in a notorious listener study by WDR, then they'd better play dumb.

"Kiss your hand, madam?"

Holger Schmidt, moderator of the "True Crime Podcasts 'Let's talk about murder'" on SWR 2 (slogan: "Rediscover culture"), plays stupid.

Can he simply address his studio guest as "Ms. Merkel?" he asks.

"In the foyer of the opera it might be better to say: Kiss your hand, lady." Bang, distinction marked!

Schmidt acts as if he hasn't been to the opera for seventy years (longer than he was alive) and as if he doesn't know how people treat each other there.

So the best conditions to talk to former Chancellor Angela Merkel and criminal lawyer Thomas Fischer in the "Christmas Special" of the "True Crime Podcast" about murder in Richard Wagner's "Ring des Nibelungen".

Merkel parried calmly: “Nope!

I'd say you'd better stay with Ms. Merkel." She is thoroughly prepared, knows the history of the origins of the "Ring", knows central lines of the libretto by heart, draws on several performance visits, not only at the Bayreuth Festival, and clumsily points them out -Popular use of the buzzword "Zeitenwende" on the "Ring" back: "Zeitenwende?

So I mean, in the end we're back where we started.

It is more the recurring course of time.”

And while the criminal lawyer Fischer quickly agrees with the moderator Schmidt that the killing of the giant Fasolt by his brother Fafner was murder out of greed, Merkel expressed doubts.

Although she does not want to plead for killing in the affect, all arguments have not yet been exchanged.

Ah, arguments!

It's not about that anyway, it's more about eliciting comments from Merkel about her time as Chancellor.

Where this can be related to Wagner's "Ring", Merkel is not stingy with it either.

She says that you should stop politics if you "can't get revenge and vengeance out of your head".

And about the fact that reading books and listening to music is "not passive reception", but that insights for one's own life can be gained from it.

Merkel's warning that Wagner's "Ring" is also "musically strong" comes to nothing.

In this podcast, music is only a pretext for discourse, not the object of discourse.

The fact that leitmotifs in Wagner also contain traces of crime motives does not occur to any chatterer.

What remains is a celebrity podcast with an intellectually unchallenged Angela Merkel,