Fleischhauer, Martenstein and Co. | The arbor is ready!

Maybe a bit of a good atmosphere would help when writing? Photo: Wiki Commons Imagine you write a regular column for a German daily or weekly newspaper. This is a tough business. Every week or even every day the editorial team expects from you a short story that is either touching, enlightening or makes the reader smile, or a know-it-all assessment of the general world situation or a clever polemic in which the Gendergaga faction is ridiculed or the stupid left-wing liberals, do-gooders and political correctness nuts are verbally dismissed or dismissed.

That means: Every morning or every evening or every weekend you have to interrupt your strenuous everyday life for at least a few hours and make your way from the golf course or the Paris bar directly to your well-designed apartment in Charlottenburg or Eppendorf. The good Chianti Classico can already breathe there, on the desk. Or perhaps the Reserve Gin, which exudes light nutty and caramel notes, is already ready.

You could do as the Martensteins and Fleischhauers of this world do and simply pour, unchecked, the potpourri of rancid resentments that have accumulated in your head over the years into a text.

But the strenuous creative work still lies ahead of you. There you then, in your role as a thought leader, opinion maker and visionary, have to think about current political events or another subject of your choice (art, food, weather, sex, Jewish question) about which, if you are honest with yourself, you only have a limited knowledge. And you would have to try to put these - well, let's just call them that for the sake of simplicity - ideas into words as precisely and generally understandable as possible. It is ideal if the result of your efforts is a compact, entertaining text that - how do you say this nowadays? – “picks you up and takes you along emotionally” and neither overwhelms nor underwhelms you. This isn't quite as easy as you think.

In any case, you have two options as to how you can go about it: You could do it like the Martensteins and Fleischhauers of this world and simply pour the potpourri of rancid resentments that have accumulated in your head over the years into a text without checking and then only need to vary it slightly week by week: the left are simple-minded and morally pissed off, women shouldn't always act like that, the foreigner could finally give it a rest. Sprinkle in a bit of cheap old-boy humor here, a bit of neo-Nazi trivialization there, and the arbor is ready!

Thomas Blum fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing so-called reality. He won't be able to change her for the time being, but he can reprimand her, admonish her or, if necessary, give her a beating. So that the bad retreats. We stand in solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, from now on, “The Good Column” will appear here on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

And everyone is well served, even the stupid leftists hyperventilate and pass your column around on the Internet for days, driving up the number of clicks. If your text is simple enough and at the same time sharply formulated ("the real heroes of today are those brave freedom friends who are slandered as 'right-wing extremists' by the gay-communist rainbow mafia," etc. etc.) and strikes the tone that is popular at the German Internet men's regulars' table, you have a good chance of making it big as a previously suppressed "voice of the people", "controversial head" or "courageous lateral thinker". The shallower, more reactionary and absurd your column is, the more likely your path to the German bestseller list and to Lanz, Miosga and Maischberger will be.

But you don't necessarily have to choose the I'll-make-you-big-max route if you lack the necessary broad-leggedness and braggadocio. You can also take the I-advocate-for-social-reason route in your columns. Experience has shown that this is less well received by the mentally simply equipped angry citizens, but is better received by the educated people who consider themselves to be liberal. This means that if you choose this option, you should use unctuous words to promote balance and balance in your columns. The more avuncular, conservative and opportunistic your sentences sound, the more obviously they are assembled from well-worn government-speaking German and Frank Walter Steinmeier feel-good phrases, the more likely they are to be well received by the editorial team and the readership.

Experience has shown that it can't hurt if you mix a bit of Friedrich Schorlemmer/Eugen Drewermann sound into your column - sparingly, of course. As long as you only diligently invoke "the democratic center", condemn the "political fringes" with a wagging index finger (it's best to lump fascists and anti-fascists into the same bucket, regardless of any serious history and political science), call for "social cohesion" and warn against a "split in society", everything will run smoothly. Then nothing can go wrong. You should just include "on the one hand/on the other hand" and the phrase "it is important to keep in mind" often enough in the text and point out with an old-fashioned gesture that it is now important that politicians do not act hastily and rashly.

If you follow these rules, I guarantee that the entire liberal milieu, from the so-called reformers in the Left Party to the platform of the Protestant religious teachers in the Greens and the Seeheimer Circle of the SPD to the last two remaining left-wing liberals in the CDU, will appreciate your columns (even without having read them).

However, I am not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, both column variants outlined here should not be banned. In any case, one thing is certain: this column (mine) will continue to appear for the time being.

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