© Screenshot Youtube ARD
Even the Germans laugh. When it happens, however, it is almost always a fou rire. An uncontrolled onslaught of laughter that is difficult to stop. It happened to the long-standing journalist and presenter of the Tagesschau, Susanne Daubner, one of the best-known faces on ARD public television. Why are we writing about it?
We write about it because when the Germans laugh it means that things are getting serious. So serious that there is nothing left to do but laugh.
Don't mistake Susanne Daubner's laughter for the famous but outdated laugh 'that will bury you', attributed to the anarchist Michail Bakunin and echoed by the student protests of the French May 1968.
The laughter of the otherwise very serious and very professional, iconic German news presenter is something different: it is the conclusion that the sum of the tragedy and comedy of our actions in the world only produces a fou rire as a result.
A laughter that smells of madness, but which has nothing to do with madness: it reflects, instead, and perhaps expresses the German news presenter's rational realisation that laughter is the most profiled form of resistance in the face of world news.
The last resistance we have left. To be understood, mind you, not as a last resort, but in a historical sense: it has always been the most powerful.
(gianluca grossi)