Max Moor: No German because of too much bureaucracy

Moderator Max Moor (65) has lived in Germany for more than 20 years – but the Swiss citizen canceled his naturalization process. Like him, he did so out of despair at German bureaucracy. “I once applied for a German passport and had already passed all the exams,” he told the newspaper.

But then the office wanted to know exactly when he was employed by which employer. As a freelancer, this was impossible for Moor to reconstruct: “It was so tedious that I thought to myself: I’ll just leave it with the German passport.”

Max Moor has lived in Brandenburg with his wife Sonja (66) since 2003. The couple runs a biodynamic farm near Berlin. They had previously lived on a farm in the Zurich Oberland in Moor’s native country.

As a non-German, Max Moor is not allowed to vote in the state elections in Brandenburg this year either. According to surveys, the AfD could become the strongest force in the election on September 22, 2024. However, the television man does not see the current success of the right-wing populists as a purely East German phenomenon. “I have lived in East Germany since 2003 and have never believed in an East German special path,” he told the NOZ.

Understanding of frustration in East Germany

The “ttt – title, theses, temperament” moderator describes the AfD as a “classic West German invention”. After all, many of the game’s top players such as Björn Höcke (51) or Alice Weidel (45) come from the West. But the potential for frustration is higher in the East. And for Moor, “partly for good reason.” In the period shortly after reunification, there was a “gold rush mood” among West German investors. As a result, a lot of “messes happened”.

In addition, through the protests before the fall of the Berlin Wall, people in the East “experienced that systems can collapse, that if you take to the streets you can even actively cause them to collapse.”