It’s Friday night in Berlin and the Admiralspalast is packed. When Kurt Krömer took the stage on November 11 for his program “The stock market is rising”, it took less than half an hour before he addressed his program “Chez Krömer”. Julian Reichelt is his next guest, says the cabaret artist, ending his sentence with an imitation of a vomit sound.
He looks back at the audience, puts his hands over his face and pretends to be sick. Kurt Krömer, that’s how you have to understand it, Julian Reichelt thinks it sucks. In fact, the show’s taping took place a few weeks earlier – and Nausea is, in many ways, a good description of what was produced there.
“You make yourself a willing enforcer, in a very disgusting way.” Sentences like these fly through the air of the television studio, which RBB calls the “interrogation room.” The atmosphere is – to put it mildly – tense. Kurt Krömer was invited to his show and Julian Reichelt followed the offer. Now he is with a public broadcaster and he has to ask annoying questions at “Chez Krömer”.
The 47-year-old RBB moderator is not known for providing his guests with a feel-good atmosphere. On the contrary. An unadorned room, a simple wooden table with only an ashtray, an old telephone and two glasses on it. So this time there are two men over 40 who couldn’t be more different.
Kurt Krömer, real name Alexander Bojcan, who recently made his depression public, single father of four, has been with RBB for almost 20 years. To him Julian Reichelt, former editor-in-chief of ‘Bild’, who lost his job in October 2021 after allegations of abuse of power and has been running his own YouTube channel since this year.
But the latter becomes a side issue, Krömer degrades the tabloid journalist’s new website to a side note, tells the channel “Attention, Reichelt!” with 225,000 subscribers just the last three minutes of its half-hour broadcast. Only the opaque financing seems interesting: “How are people paid?” Krömer wants to know, referring to some former “Bild” employees that Reichelt has snatched. Answer: “This is confidential.”
Research by t-online had already shown that the media maker entered into a partnership with the conservative billionaire Frank Gotthardt. Kurt Krömer also mentions the name, indicating that Gotthardt is responsible for paying the approximately 20 employees. But Reichelt: listens to it, shuts up, tries to smile away Krömer’s tips.
A strategy that can be seen earlier in the conversation. Because the proverbial fragments mainly fly over one subject: that of the inglorious end of Reichelt’s ‘image’ career. According to research by Ippen’s investigative team, the “New York Times” and the “Spiegel”, he is accused of abuse of power in dealings with colleagues. Krömer takes 13 minutes in his show to talk about this topic – but then bites his teeth at a surprisingly clenched Julian Reichelt.
Reichelt considers this “disgusting, abhorrent and defamatory reporting as part of a campaign that controls my private life”. He does not want to say anything about it because it affects his “private life”. An argument he then repeated like a mantra. “I’m just not going to say anything about that anymore”, “It’s just my private life”, “These are the things I don’t talk about anymore because they just affect my private life”.
Springer justified the end of cooperation with Reichelt in October as follows: “As a result of press investigations, the company had gained new insights into Julian Reichelt’s current behavior in recent days. The company followed up on this information. The Executive Board found out that even after the completion of the compliance procedure in the spring of 2021, Julian Reichelt did not clearly separate private and business matters and told the Executive Board an untruth about this. »
Julian Reichelt now admits to Kurt Krömer: he was “disappointed” by Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. But the RBB moderator can’t get much more out of him. Not even if he brings an anonymous ‘victim’, as Krömer calls her, into the interrogation room via a video. She works in Reichelt’s “professional environment” and can confirm that he “uses cocaine”. “I can remember him doing five to seven lines one night and I can’t imagine him being sober the next day,” the unnamed woman said.
The 42-year-old denies the allegations and repeatedly denies that he brought drugs to Krömer. He describes the clip as “anonymized dirt”. It is the moment when the mood between the two men finally turns. “You are doing something dishonest here and I don’t want that. If you keep doing that, then I can no longer participate here,” said Reichelt, who accused the moderator: “You find that so repulsive.” This means the so-called tendentious method with which Krömer wants to lure his counterpart out of his reserve.
Kurt Krömer seems unimpressed, continues to delve into the subject and insists that his interlocutor speak out. “Now stop presenting yourself as a victim,” he replies to Reichelt, who is now visibly angry, and then takes a claim statement from his closet. A woman in the United States who worked at “Bild” under Reichelt is now suing the tabloid and Springer. “Here it says 15 times she saw herself as a victim,” Krömer quotes from the newspaper.
Reichelt considers these allegations to be “entirely false and fabricated” – and then launches the already mentioned counter-attack. “You make yourself a willing enforcer, in a very disgusting way.” It’s probably the rhetorical nadir in this TV argument, which isn’t poor at verbal skirmishes – and you can’t blame anyone for feeling nauseous afterwards.
Source: Blick
I am Dawid Malan, a news reporter for 24 Instant News. I specialize in celebrity and entertainment news, writing stories that capture the attention of readers from all walks of life. My work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications and I am passionate about delivering quality content to my readers.
