He\u2019s the middle-manager who talks as if he\u2019s the CEO, a beacon of workplace inclusivity in his own head but a bigoted chauvinist as soon as he opens his mouth. And listening to him creates a mix of familiarity and embarrassment-by-proxy that turns out to be surprisingly pleasurable.<\/p>\n
Ricky Gervais\u2019s cringe-making general manager of a soul-destroyingly dull Slough-based paper merchant stopped being a regular presence on British TV over two decades ago, but the many comedic characters that he spawned across the globe have outlived him.<\/p>\n
In Germany, where a feature film<\/a> based on a German sitcom inspired by The Office opens in cinemas on Thursday, some are even starting to suspect that their own David Brent is now leading the country.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The mockumentary sitcom Stromberg launched on German TV in 2004, three years after the start of the British series; its makers denied it was based on the British show until the BBC threatened legal action<\/a>. It ran for eight years, and the self-aggrandising wisdom of its titular character, Bernd \u201cLet papa sort it\u201d Stromberg, has proven inescapable on social media.<\/p>\n German federal elections at the start of this year gave Stromberg meme culture a new lease of life, and not just because the slender physique and partial baldness of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, resembles that<\/a> of the office authoritarian played by the comedian Christoph Maria Herbst.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are both boomers to the core and seem to lack any sensitivity to social cues,\u201d said Lukas Lohmer, a German comedy writer for television. \u201cThe only difference is that Stromberg realises when he makes a faux pas and often corrects himself.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent weeks, Merz elicited fremdsch\u00e4men (\u201cvicarious embarrassment\u201d), especially among younger Germans, when proclaiming during a trip to Angola how much he missed German bread<\/a>, or when he asserted upon returning from Bel\u00e9m, Brazil, that \u201ceveryone was delighted to be back in Germany and to have left that place\u201d.<\/p>\n Like Stromberg, Merz is adamant that he treats women as equals, but cannot stop himself from making comments that seem to suggest otherwise. The Christian Democrat politician, whose cabinet\u2019s top roles are all held by men<\/a>, told a party conference in 2021: \u201cIf I really had a problem with women, then my daughters would have shown me a yellow card by now \u2013 and my wife wouldn\u2019t have married me 40 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n That remark formed part of a \u201cWho said it: Merz or Stromberg?\u201d quiz in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper<\/a> earlier this year. Other comments included: \u201cIt\u2019s all about equal rights until the ship starts sinking, and then it\u2019s \u2018women and children first\u2019\u201d (Stromberg) and \u201csheer coincidence that all the [meteorological] lows carry female names at the moment\u201d (Merz).<\/p>\n Bernd Stromberg is \u2018an opportunist who yearns for an enviable career\u2019, said the comedian Lukas Lohmer. Photograph: Brainpool TV<\/p>\n On Instagram and TikTok, accounts hashtagged #Strommerz have taken clips of Merz and dubbed them with the TV show\u2019s theme tune, a jazz cover of Aphex Twin\u2019s Flim. In one of them, the veteran conservative is joined in the Bundestag\u2019s lift by a female politician from the Green party. \u201cWith us, things are moving upwards,\u201d he greets her. \u201cAnd now I\u2019m joining you,\u201d she responds. \u201cThat makes the lift a bit heavier,\u201d says Merz, to awkward laughter from his entourage.<\/p>\n As Herbst said this week: \u201cStromberg couldn\u2019t have come up with a better line than that.\u201d<\/p>\n In this week\u2019s episode of the podcast Schlag und Fertig<\/a>, the comedian Fabian K\u00f6ster could not contain his mirth as he presented his latest assortment of the chancellor\u2019s Stromberg-isms: Merz playing to the camera as he waltzes into the chancellory for the first time, announcing: \u201cRight, let\u2019s take up the challenge\u201d; Merz dressing down his social media team for making spelling mistakes on his teleprompter; Merz greeting the European parliament\u2019s president, Roberta Metsola, with a flamboyant \u201cRobertaaa\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to say, it\u2019s a completely different vibe than what we had with Olaf Scholz,\u201d said K\u00f6ster.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Merz\u2019s own spokesperson has conceded that at least in terms of his hairstyle, \u201cthe chancellor can presumably not reject the comparison\u201d. In all other aspects, he insisted, \u201cthe office culture and conversational tone inside the chancellory are clearly different to that in the series\u201d.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to This is Europe<\/p>\n The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans \u2013 from identity to economics to the environment<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n While Stromberg takes the same workplace mockumentary format as the BBC show, the comedic tone and character traits of the protagonists differ in significant ways. \u201cDavid Brent is at heart an entertainer who is desperate for applause,\u201d said Lohmer. \u201cStromberg is an opportunist who yearns for an enviable career.\u201d<\/p>\n Whereas The Office is set inside a dead-end business, Stromberg plays out inside a more aspirational insurance firm, Capitol Versicherung AG. The German show is played more as a straight-up comedy and does not stray as far into kitchen-sink realism as Gervais\u2019s and Stephen Merchant\u2019s creation. Yet its plot lines are arguably bleaker, involving a suicide attempt and the death of a main character.<\/p>\n \u201cOut of the British, American and German versions of The Office, Stromberg is probably the darkest,\u201d said Kai Hanno Schwind, an associate professor at Kristiania University College, Oslo, who wrote his doctorate on a comparison of the German and the British takes on the theme.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Office is essentially about failure, and in the British context the biggest failure a character can experience is social embarrassment. In the German context, the biggest failure is not playing to the rules but not being able to subvert them properly either.\u201d<\/p>\n This predicament meant that while embarrassing, Stromberg was not always an entirely unsympathetic character, Schwind added. In the German show, there were moments when the audience was laughing not just at but with him.<\/p>\n Stromberg was more of a straight-up comedy than The Office, said the academic Kai Hanno Schwind, but \u2018probably the darkest\u2019. Photograph: Brainpool TV<\/p>\n The new film, Stromberg \u2013 Wieder Alles Wie Immer (Everything as Usual Again), plays with this double-bind. Set on the eve of a televised reunion of the original cast of the documentary, it has Stromberg super-fans with glued-on goatees gather outside the TV studio and quote his most sexist lines at feminist protesters.<\/p>\n Bernd Stromberg appears at first to have found a job at a modern company with shiny offices, though his role emerges as being little more than a marketing gimmick to teach employees about outmoded workplace practices. Yet when he suffers a breakdown on live TV, Herbst\u2019s character is rehabilitated in the public eye.<\/p>\n In one sequence, the film\u2019s makers have secured the real-life general secretary of Merz\u2019s CDU to endorse their protagonist with all his dinosaur attitudes. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t get everything right, but at least he does it,\u201d says Carsten Linnemann.<\/p>\n \u201cThe joke about Stromberg was that he was past his his sell-by date even 20 years ago,\u201d said Lohmer. \u201cThe scary thing now is that that means he is now embodying the zeitgeist more than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He\u2019s the middle-manager who talks as if he\u2019s the CEO, a beacon of workplace inclusivity in his own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-329718","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}