He’s the middle-manager who talks as if he’s 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.
Ricky gervais’s 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.
in Germany, where a feature film 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.
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. It ran for eight years, and the self-aggrandising wisdom of its titular character, Bernd “Let papa sort it” Stromberg, has proven inescapable on social media.
german federal elections at the start of this year gave Stromberg meme culture a new lease of life, and not just becuase the slender physique and partial baldness of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, resembles that of the office authoritarian played by the comedian Christoph Maria Herbst.
“They are both boomers to the core and seem to lack any sensitivity to social cues,” said Lukas Lohmer, a German comedy writer for television. “The only difference is that Stromberg realises when he makes a faux pas and often corrects himself.”
In recent weeks, Merz elicited fremdschämen (“vicarious embarrassment”), especially among younger Germans, when proclaiming during a trip to Angola how much he enjoyed the country’s “excellent” Portuguese cuisine.”you have to say, it’s a fully different vibe than what we had with Olaf Scholz,” said Köster.
Merz’s own spokesperson has conceded that at least in terms of his hairstyle,”the chancellor can presumably not reject the comparison”. In all other aspects, he insisted, “the office culture and conversational tone inside the chancellory are clearly different to that in the series”.
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