Message to Germans: You are Michael Shumacher. You are Katarina Witt. You are Depressed.
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.17.05 | 8:25 AM ET
Has Germany abandoned Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroeder for Stuart Smalley? The country has launched a self-help public-service campaign to cheer up its citizens. Seriously. Germany has earmarked $35 million and enlisted its most famous men and women to appear in a series of commercials and magazine ads, relaying the Smalley-esque message that Germans are good and smart and they should like themselves.
“The campaign motto is Du bist Deutschland (You are Germany),” writes Jeffrey Fleishman in a story about the campaign in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “Appearing until January in movie theaters, magazines and on television, the ads tell Germans that they are pugilist Max Schmeling, race car driver Michael Schumacher, Olympic figure skater Katarina Witt and many other famous and not-so-famous citizens, living and dead. Germans are also asked to picture themselves as butterflies and Porsches.”
The reaction, Fleishman notes, has been mixed.
Oliver Kahn, goalkeeper of the national soccer team, shares his own epistle: “I’ve experienced many heavy defeats as a sportsman that sometimes sapped my courage. But, again and again, I told myself to go on and not give up.” Then a bunch of celebrities intone: “And when you’re done with that, outdo yourself. Beat your wings and uproot trees. You are the wings. You are the tree. You are Germany.”
Harald Jaehner doesn’t want to be an uprooted tree. An editor at the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, Jaehner wrote recently that the ads were “self-intoxication” that trivialized the country’s underlying economic and political problems.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
mitch 09.14.06 | 12:27 AM ET
I know this seems like a total waste of money and I usually hate these kind of government campaigns, however, after returning from Berlin I have to admit this is a good idea. The German people I met seemed like they truly underestimated themselves and their amazing country. Its like a national case of an inferiority complex over there. A self confidence booster in the form of recalling all the great German thinkers, inventors, etc seems like a good idea.