If you bring up his name with most west Germans.....99-percent have no idea who he is. If you bring his name with eastern Germans under fifty years old....almost no one knows him or his significance. But then you go to the eastern Germans who are approach mid-50s or more, and they kinda grin for a minute. With them....Karl is remembered.
In the late 1930s, coming from a well-to-do family in Berlin.....Karl was destined for the medical profession. A year or two into this....Karl kinda got frustrated with the medical study business, and jumped ship. His new interest? Business...along the logistical side of commerce. This lasted for basically a year and then he was drafted into the German Army.
There's not a lot said about the next six years except in 1944....Karl ends up captured by the British near Normandy.
For some unknown reason, Karl gets side-tracked with the Brits, and ends up as a employee of the BBC in Germany. Maybe it was his voice....his tactful wit....or just plain luck. But he's a radio-jockey for the British sector in the north as the war ends. Karl moves up and by the early part of 1946, he's moved to Koln and considered prime-management materiel.
But here's the thing about Karl, in 1946, in his mid-20's.....he has been put into the politics department of the Koln radio network, and it's more than a bit obvious that he's left-leaning (maybe to the extreme of communism). Maybe it was his youth in Berlin, or just the guys he hung out with during the war period....but he's a out-spoken critic of the way things are shaping up in West Germany in 1946.
By 1947, Karl has been fired from the BBC services.
Karl packs up and ends up moving east....across into the Soviet zone of Germany, and in 1948....is a member of the East German Communist Party. Things are looking good, and he's hired-up with the radio services. Karl is probably pretty happy at this point....getting a chance daily to criticism western influence, democracy, and capitalism. As a propagandist....he's got a wide-open platform.
So around 1960, East Germany has to go and compete against West Germany....creating a TV network, and Karl gets his big chance....running a TV show for 20 minutes on Monday nights.
The show? Der Schwarze Kanal (The Black Channel). They basically go, cut-and-paste, and compact twenty minutes of western-video from western Europe, West Germany, and the US....condemning the evil actions of capitalism.
Lets be kinda honest here....if you lived in East Germany, and there's only one network....you kinda watch what they have, and simple be happy to get 'anything'.
This show ran from 1960 all the way to 1989 (29 years). Karl would probably tell you that he was a household name. The reality is....whether the numbers told are correct or not....roughly only 5-percent of the population ever watched his slam on capitalism and West Germany.
But here's the thing....while Karl was so far to the left and Communism....some people took to watching Karl's show and would openly remark that they felt Karl was only doing fake criticism and satire. Yes, it was such an unbelievable act, that even if you tried to take it serious.....people tended to feel otherwise. This is what I refer to....as the 'opposite-opposite' syndrome.
It's like watching Trump so much, that you tend to laugh, but then you feel in your gut that he's only telling you the truth. You get the same feeling with Macron of France....that he's part of comical French act, but maybe he's got some hidden message in his chatter. Some Germans will even suggest that Chancellor Merkel is such a mess.....that you feel like laughing but you keep thinking she's got some blunt element of truth in her final product.
Occasionally, some German journalist or historian will bring up Karl, and his Monday night show. There's no doubt that it was pure and absolute propaganda....slamming capitalism, Western landscapes, politics, and democracy. But if you watched enough of it....maybe you felt all that propaganda was just fake, and maybe it was satire (when it wasn't).
Some satirists in Germany today will even go and suggest certain evening hosts of ARD and ZDF (the public TV networks) have their own versions of Karl on....delivering news and propaganda....with people now convinced that they are faking up the news enough and that it's more or less satire (when it's not).
So here we are....Karl's been dead now for roughly 18 years, and remembered mostly for propaganda....or maybe truthful satire, depending on your view.
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