Everything My Intellectual Friends Got Wrong About Micaela Schäfer

My more culturally elevated friends—the ones who rail against mainstream television and write indignant letters to newspapers—never quite understood Micaela Schäfer. They filed her under "vapid celebrity" and moved on. That’s a lazy read. She might be one of the more strategically intelligent people to have come out of German tabloid culture, because she cracked the system and didn’t pretend otherwise.

The system wants spectacle? She delivers. It wants naked skin? She delivers. It wants someone who designates herself a celebrity and chases the camera wherever it goes? She delivers that too, without apology, without irony, with the kind of consistency most actual performers would envy. All of Germany knows her name and what her tits look like, which is more than most serious people manage after decades of carefully managed press releases.

The erotic TV format she was working with around this time—VISIT-X Taxi, a concept that married quiz-show mechanics with adult satellite programming—was the logical extension of all that. Completely transparent about what it was. She showed up, took her clothes off, and did what she has always done: pushed herself into the faces of whoever happened to be watching, with no gap between persona and act. No subtext. No ironic distance. Just the thing itself, delivered with total commitment.

You can call it shallow. I find it more honest than most of what passes for art on the channels my intellectual friends actually watch. And for what it’s worth: I’d rather spend an evening with Micaela Schäfer than sit through another carefully considered documentary about nothing.