How the “King of Pop Hits” triumphed and then lost

Michael Wendler used to be loved or joked about. But everyone could agree that the pop singer was a phenomenon. Not much of it remains. Now he is 50 years old.

Where is Michael Wendler? Well, not at michaelwendler.de. On the page “A new Internet presence is being created”, as one learns, which also sounds a bit like a threat. On Instagram, the medium of beautiful pictures? Neither. The channel was then blocked. On Facebook? At least findable, but the last entry is more than a year old.

So you end up with Telegram, the network that has become a haven for people spreading conspiracy stories. A Wendler channel is bubbling there. “WHO DOESN’T NOTICE ANYTHING NOW CAN NO LONGER BE SAVED” is written there – of course written in capital letters.

If you want to find out what Michael Wendler is doing on his birthday, you have to go into the depths of the internet in 2022. Inquiries come to nothing. It used to be different. Sometimes it was enough to just turn on the television or browse the gossip columns. On Wednesday (June 22), the self-proclaimed “King of Pop Hits” will be 50 years old. One searches in vain for a throne. What happened there?

In any case, the personal Wendler tells a lot about how fun can become serious and how fragile the partition is. The singing forwarding agent from Dinslaken used to be considered a phenomenon. His lyrics weren’t the most sophisticated, but his fans loved him. The Wendler brought a bit of the sunny mood of the Ballermann to the large disco milieu in North Rhine-Westphalia. He sang “She loves the DJ”, slapped his chest and said sentences like: “Building my ranch will make Dinslaken a little Dallas.”

This wide-legged clatter (“I’m the hottest sow in the world”), that could also fascinate outside of the Wendler cosmos. When someone stands up and simply says they’re the greatest, you take a look. Especially when sweet headlines gradually round off the picture (“Thousands of Wendler CDs discovered in old clothes containers”).

Michael Wendler was there everywhere – then the corona virus came

What was an allegation and what was reality was sometimes unclear to Wendler. But that’s exactly what made him a perfect candidate for reality shows, where you want everything but bores: jungle camp, “Beat the Star”, “Celebrity Big Brother”, “Summer House of the Stars”, he was there everywhere.

He finally became a celebrity phenomenon when Laura Müller from Tangermünde on the Elbe, who was almost 30 years his junior, entered his life. A public flirtation (“Honey!”) followed, videos from their adopted home of Florida, a “Playboy” shoot (for Laura) and a civil wedding. Well, and then the bang.

In autumn 2020, Wendler commented on corona politics in Germany in an irritating video. The broadcaster RTL, which hired him as a juror for the talent show “Deutschland sucht den Superstar”, then called him a conspiracy theorist and immediately distanced himself from him. After another statement by Wendler about Germany as a “concentration camp”, he was then completely cut out of episodes that had already been shot.

Michael Wendler’s concert dates are not known

Speech bubbles replaced statements from him. Allegedly, “KZ” was an abbreviation for “crisis center,” he later claimed. In the general public, however, the letters were perceived as a synonym for the “concentration camps” of the National Socialists.

What Wendler has been doing in the USA since then – a little unclear. He told the “Bild” newspaper last year that he wanted to make music again and come to Germany. Concert dates are not known. Laura has an Instagram channel with more than 500,000 followers. Among other things, she also advertises a “Die Wendlers” account on the erotic portal OnlyFans, which, however, does not seem to have sent any shock waves through the network so far.

Wendler sometimes sings to those who roam the Internet. There is a small video snippet with him. Wendler looks boldly into the camera and sings: “It doesn’t matter!”. The clip is still popular because its message fits many situations in life. One would like to know whether this also applies to Michael Wendler.

dpa

–