Thanks to Harald Schmidt, the town of Landau in the Palatinate became well-known throughout Germany, much to the chagrin of the people of Landau. The entertainer Schmidt and his gag writers used a clip of dancing children at a carnival session as an opportunity to develop a running gag at the expense of, say, somewhat more voluminous young people. In Landau itself, the enthusiasm for the double Lottchen, who eats her way through, and Mayo the Bee, which appeared in “The Fat Children of Landau”, was limited. To be honest, the people of the Palatinate were really upset about Schmidt’s jokes. Luckily not so much that more would have happened.
However, it is doubtful that the people of Landau still remember the great-grandfather of the Munich District Administrator Christoph Göbel. He was once a winegrower in the city and even made it to the district winegrower, as Göbel recently reported in the Committee for Energy Transition, Agriculture and the Environment, to which the district chairman of the farmers’ association Anton Stürzer also belongs. Before the meeting, in conversation with CSU colleagues, he had to get so upset about federal politics that District Administrator Göbel remembered his great-grandfather and Stürzer talked about him.
At a meeting of the Landau city council on July 4, 1926, the ancestor was so upset about the politicians’ patronizing of the winegrowers that he suffered a stroke and dropped dead in the meeting room, Göbel said. Suddenly it was very quiet in the meeting room of the district office on Mariahilfplatz, where fortunately no one has fallen over for a very long time, not even the district farmer Anton Stürzer, who then had to smile a little.
What does that have to do with the poor, fat children from Landau? Nothing at all. But the cynic Harald Schmidt would probably have liked the anecdote a little. And perhaps not only the people of Landau, who once belonged to Bavaria, but also the people in the district of Munich should remember that constant anger is useless. Or in Göbel’s words: “Don’t get so upset!”