Portrait: Bettina Böttinger

By maxime68 on Saturday, July 4, 2009 - 15:30

“Have you seen B.trifft?” a question my father asked me years ago. Mind you, I had him repeat that question several times, until he finally explained that this was a talk show hosted by Bettina Böttinger. I had no idea who she was, but have followed her career and her shows ever since.

(photo WDR)

Bettina Böttinger is one of the faces of the regional, public TV channel “WDR” (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), thanks to satellite TV also available via Astra (19.2). Böttinger, born on July 4^th 1956, is a German talk show host, producer of her own and several other popular shows. She joined WDR in 1985, where she could be seen in various news programs.

She had planned to become an editor chief when one day fate – in a positive way – happened upon her. One colleague left and the station’s director asked her to take over a talk show. Her first own talk show was called “B.trifft” (B.meets) which is pronounced “betrifft” and then translates into “it concerns”. Her invitees knew they weren’t the only guests, but weren’t told who the others were beforehand.

She left WDR as an employee and founded her own production company encanto TV. This company not only produces her own talk shows but some very popular docu soaps where animals and their handlers are the stars.

(photo WDR)

 She has been hosting „Kölner Treff“ (Club Cologne) since September 2006, a talk-show with a long tradition; former hosts include Elke Heidenreich and Alfred Biolek. And something else she shares with Alfred Biolek is that they both were outed to the broad public by persons who wanted to shock. While Biolek was outed by another gay man, Rosa von Praunheim, who had visibility in mind; Böttinger though was outed by Harald Schmidt, actor and comedian, who only wanted to make a sick joke at her expense. Why he thought that to be necessary lies beyond me, especially after I read an interview from 2007 where she talks about that time. Both, Böttinger and Biolek weren’t in the closet, they lived their private life like so many others, but their friends, family and co-workers knew about their sexuality.

What I personally like about her shows, is the fact that she often has gay or extremely gay-friendly guests in her show. It is her show where I first spotted Dunja Haylali, where my girlfriend wondered why Mirjam Müntefering looked so familiar, Simone Laudehr “six pack” visited after the Olympics and Ruth Westheimer was surprised herself how well Böttinger had prepared for her guest.

(photo WDR)

This is what makes her shows so special, she treats each of her guests equal, she mixes popular and famous people with unknown, athletes with musicians, cooks with politicians – and all of this in one show. Some of her guests are real treasures because they copy Böttinger’s style to include the other guests in the discussions. And whenever someone is there to promote a book or a film, she makes sure to read or watch it herself.

Besides hosting another talk-show where she is alternating with other hosts on Sunday mornings, her TV-appearances are very rare. She and her dog participated in one of her docu soaps where both were trained by a dog whisperer. She also participated in the German version of “perfect dinner”, in its first season of “Promi dinner”, when the famous people were still people I knew. She won that round, by lengths.

(photo WDR)

She has received an endless list of awards, the most outstanding being the “Deutsches Bundesverdienstkreuz” (Federal Cross of Merit) for her engagement “medica mondiale” an organization that supports traumatized women and girls in war and crisis zones.

Böttinger likes fast cars and even has a license to drive in the formula 3 series. She stopped running marathons because “it’s no fun, at some point it only hurts”.

(photo: Max Grönert)

Very amusing is a questionnaire she answered for German news magazine Focus, my favorite q&a is

Q: What would be your last meal?

A: Only liquid food would count. This occasion calls for the best Red from the Ahr (a wine region in the Eifel)

Kölner Treff airs Fridays, at 9.45 pm and most times there is a rerun Sunday mornings around 8 am.