CNN title: Trump’s been president for two years. Germans still can’t look away. Nor will they look away. Because they can’t.
Why should this surprise anyone? This a perfectly normal everady pathological German obsession, no different than their irrational infatuation with Obama before Trump and their Verteufelung (demonization) of Bush before him (and on and on it goes). Germans are hysterical in these matters. It’s a collective psychological issue, an obsession with US-Amerika in the end. What is more, this collective hysteria is very profitable for the brain police in German media who milk it daily.
I’ve always liked this guy’s take on it (a Spiegel man himself): “German schadenfreude knows no bounds, particularly when it comes to the United States. The country loves to feel superior to a superpower like America. Yet Germany also harbors a childish infatuation with Obama — one which has little political grounding. The reasons are psychological. …The criticism of America has always been a bit infantile. One is familiar with the theory from psychoanalysis, when people talk about transference, or when suppressed feelings or emotions are overcome by projecting them onto others. It may work for a while, improving one’s feeling of self-worth by devaluing an imagined adversary. But it always falls short. Which is why the ritual must be constantly carried out anew.” – Jan Fleischhauer
Over two floors of Der Spiegel’s glasshouse building, walls bearing seven decades of the magazine’s covers serve as a colorful chronology of modern history. On one wall are cartoons of an angry yellow-haired man that are so provocative they’re impossible to miss.
“Trump still clicks, people are interested in those stories — and the same applies to our magazine stories and covers.”
