Actor Matthias Schweighöfer was recently seen on US television, Jimmy Fallon (something like the American Jan Böhmermann) had invited him to his show and confronted him with an article that identified Schweighöfer as “German Justin Timberlake”. (The latter, for those who do not know him, is roughly the American Matthias Schweighöfer.)
Such personal comparisons are of course extremely useful, especially in a world that is becoming more and more complex. References serve as orientation, and thanks to such classifications we also know that actor Dennis Mojen is the “German Leonardo DiCaprio” (Gala), Nadeshda Brennicke “Germany’s Angelina Jolie” (Rheinische Post) and Stromberg “the German Matthew McConaughey” (Twitter user Frank Rosinbomber, 4 likes). Because these comparisons, however, arise from an inferiority complex compared to the big Hollywood that cannot be completely denied and they are basically not too creative, they are in a quality newspaper like that Süddeutsche Zeitung (German New York Times) seldom read, of course.
In any case, the German Timberlake took the comparison on US television with a lot of humor, explaining that, like the American Timberlake, he was a good, if shy dancer. A great Dutch writer comes to mind. The world, he once wrote, is a single incessant cross-reference – a beautiful sentence that the author of this little text would have liked to have come up with himself. But he’s not the German Cees Nooteboom.
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