Contemporary history: Selfie from the traffic light start: eight attempts for the future smile

It looked like the backstage photo of a newcomer band and was celebrated as an expression of a “new political culture”: on Instagram selfie of the former opponent FDP and Greens from the pre-sounds for the later traffic light coalition, there was no medium in September 2021. Now the photographer, Minister of Transport Volker Wissing, has revealed that there was hard work, which looked like a snapshot. Eight attempts needed until everything looked cool and for the future, says the FDP general secretary at the time in the podcast “My hardest decision” by the Funke media group.

The photo session already had a forerunner with the later Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (both Greens) and FDP boss Christian Lindner until Wissing himself stretched out and pushed it out. “I think we had given someone a cell phone and asked to take a picture of us. And that just didn’t get anything,” he recalls. “There were a lot of pictures that you couldn’t do anything with them.” At some point you wanted to give it up. “And then I said, no, we’re going to make selfie again.”

Wissing: It was about sending a message

Then finally “so this spirit” came across. “So we probably had to do it ourselves because we just knew what we were about,” says Wissing. The photo did not meet the demands of the four straight away. Wissing still saved eight variants of selfies on his cell phone today. “You don’t see Robert Habeck so happy.” “Okay, there is not this expectation in the eyes.” After all, it was done. “It was really about simply sending a message. And it also arrived.”

In fact, the picture was immediately considered a time document. A cable seemed to hang out of the ceiling, which made it seem even more casual. But the Munich sociologist and author Armin Nassehi (“Theory of Digital Society”) already suspected in an interview with the German Press Agency: “It is not a random picture, but fully styled.”

In any case, the initiation of the coalition relationship used it, the threesome with the SPD came about. But it was like many bands that climbed young to stars: over faster than originally planned. And now, with the Union and SPD? There are photos of women and men again in suits on balconies and in front of elevators, like before.