Was for a show! A talk show in which connections were not torn out, but rather such connections were made in an almost penetrating manner and repeated over and over again. Norbert Röttgen calls it staying focused: “One should focus on one goal: How do we create peace? And the step to peace is to conquer war. He must be defeated.” It is only in this context that the statement that Putin wants war, that defeating the war means defeating Putin, and it is in this context that the word “victorious peace” then gains its meaning, has its place : “Ukraine must win so that Putin does not continue.”
Basically, Röttgen did nothing else with “Maischberger” than to make sure that this connection remained in view, not just torn up, was overridden. Röttgen – experienced talker, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, unfreaked CDU politician – knows, of course, that talk shows thrive on setting the wrong track, on occasional ideas that can only be placed in a rhetorical field that is susceptible to distractions, unhindered by disruptive contexts. Hence this tremendous challenge to the genre, when someone really cares about staying on task, determined to check every new trail laid against the maintained context. Röttgen was just focused on that, the talk show turned into a rhetorical experiment under his test instructions, in which Röttgen’s counterpart, the parliamentary group leader of the left, Amira Mohamed Ali, had the thankless role of not really knowing what was happening to her.
That would not have happened to Sahra Wagenknecht. If in doubt, she would have noticed immediately what was being played and for her part committed Röttgen to a different kind of connection. But Amira Mohamed Ali unsuspectingly presented positions, not unconcerned about connections, but only using them to the extent that it was fitting, and it didn’t help her that the positions, which she presented honestly but on the whole in a decontextualized way, hardly differed from those with whom Wagenknecht had caused a sensation and would do so again, again and again, if only they were allowed to do so (in return for arms deliveries, against sanctions, etc.).
Röttgen considers the use of nuclear weapons unrealistic
So what did Röttgen say, what connections did he open up? Unusually enough, he did not reply to the presenter’s questions with the usual “Well,” which would have a suspensive effect, in order to then be able to get rid of all sorts of ideas (as a “Stern” editor-in-chief named Schmitz, Gregor Peter, demonstrated on the show, with a strange permanent friendliness, mimicking as a permanent smile, even where it was a matter of life and death). Röttgen, meanwhile, answered with “yes” or “no” and then justified both in the context, calmly, politely, but cuttingly, “the reality” and “the people” as reference values ready and thus unspoken against a backdrop of the not wanting to believe shooting.
