Furor of the People

While lounging the Sunday away a great drama of Munich style class warfare unfolded below our window. The tram car couldn't pass, because some Porsche with double wide sports wheels was parked just a bit too far into the street. Aaah, the furor of the people. Some tattooed mullet head coming to the help of the tram car conductor went as far as activating the Porsche's alarm, then tried to lift the car to no avail, which got him to resort to a wonderful tourette cascade of Bavarian expletives. When the blocked tram cars were finally four trains deep a rather embarrassed young yuppie in short shorts appeared and sped away in horrified silence.

The scene reminded me of one of the latest editorials of German Vanity Fair editor Ulf Poschardt. His editorials are a treasure trove of fun quotes somewhere between "Neo-conservatism For Dummies" and serious contenders for the Marie Antoinette Award (we read them to each other aloud almost every week). So there he was complaining in length how some "eco squares" let out the air of the tires of the Alfa Romeo he was test driving that week, not realizing how little gas such a sports car uses and how many solar panels can be found on the roofs of the mansions in the posh neighborhoods around Berlin. Hard to capture the brilliance of the original.

So far German Vanity Fair's been quite a fresh air in the German magazine landscape though, which has been dominated by lad mags and TV guides for the past ten or something years. It's weekly and has been projecting a kind of worldliness missing from German media. Well, it's not quite up to par with the US original. Besides the fact that the editorials make you wonder, if liberal doyen Graydon Carter knows what rabid neocon ideologue has been hired as his German equivalent, there's the chronic lack of glamorous celebrities in Germany (chancellorette Angela Merkel and orphaned polar bear cub Knut being the only German covers of international relevance so far).

The latest issue had fun failure of marketing though. Attached to the issue was a CD with 10 "Vanity Fair summer music hits 2007". Now American Vanity Fair has enclosed CDs before, which mostly featured music for people who are too rich, too successful or otherwise too busy to pay attention to the latest evolutions of pop history, i.e. white jazz vocals, maudlin indie Rock that has made it to the Top 10 or retro soul from Britain. So it's quite compatible to the brand and target group of Vanity Fair. Something went seriously wrong on the German compilation though, which starts with Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" and ends with Kool & the Gang's "Celebration", two songs that have no redeeming values, no matter how much camp irony you put into it. Neither do Euro Dance classics like Chocolate's "Ritmo de la noche" or Shannon's "Let the Music Play". The key to this strange array of margarita party faves is found on the cover. "Selected by you", it says there, so there must've been some readers' poll or sweepstakes. Which reveals the real reason why there hasn't been a German equivalent to Vanity Fair or the New Yorker before, even though German journalists have been fantasizing about doing them for decades.

The reason for the lack of sophisticated general interest magazines other than two or three newsweeklies in Germany lies in Jean Baudrillard's quote: "America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version." As a consequence German glamour rags regularly run out of native celebrities to cover, so they always come back to the same geriatric cast of polo tournaments and product placement galas. This is the only reason, why oddities like the countess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and her offspring can sustain their status as hipster celebrities, even though the countess' only claim to Pop fame were hairstyles which she wore in the 80s, that would've made A Flock Of Seagulls look like a bunch of skinheads. Now that she's a rabid catholic fundamentalist, very much opposed to secular democracy, she maybe shouldn't be given the type of adulating coverage normally reserved for harmless film stars. But what you gonna do.