“What’s wrong with Karsten? That doesn’t look good at all.” Two sentences that many Germans might find familiar due to a well-known meme. Now the man behind the meme himself explains what was actually going on with him.
What was wrong with Karsten? The man behind the famous German meme, Karsten Wöllner, agreed to talk about the moment that aired on television in 2007 in a YouTube video by Kannemilsch that ultimately made him a meme.
He was part of the series “Wildes Wohnzimmer,” whose film crew accompanied Karsten during his move and ultimately captured the moment when Karsten fell against the wall of his living room.
What many initially found funny due to the voiced words “What’s wrong with Karsten?” appears almost staged; however, it was less funny than many might think. Karsten Wöllner suffers from diabetes and felt at that moment how his body “hit the emergency brake.”
He had already noticed moments before that his blood sugar level was dropping, and therefore he got a box of chocolate, but then, according to his own words, everything happened very quickly.
The voiceover turned the moment into a joke
How did the film crew react? Karsten reports in the video that they helped him immediately after the fall and that he got something to eat a few minutes later and then recovered. He further explains that they showed him the video recording before airing the episode, but it did not yet include the final voiceover. In retrospect, Karsten wished for a significantly different approach.
“Those were two sentences that actually had no resolution,” he says in a conversation with Kannemilsch. He had hoped for something that would have explained his situation – the stress, the hypoglycemia, the needed break. That would have cast his television appearance in a completely different light.
Here you can see the conversation with Karsten on YouTube:
How did Karsten deal with the meme? Karsten is aware that many people were not conscious that the meme was about a health-related accident. Nevertheless, the meme became increasingly annoying for him especially a few years later. Students imitated the video, and a group of young people pretended to be lawyers to remove the video.
Karsten Wöllner did not let that get to him. He knew that it would be too expensive and nearly impossible to completely remove the video due to its reach. Besides, after some time, he also made peace with the meme.
The only thing he really regrets is that he could have leveraged the reach differently with a different approach from the broadcaster or with more initiative. Had he built on that, perhaps other formats – he himself mentions 7 vs. Wild – could have been accessible to him. That would have been a way to create more visibility for his illness and for other diabetics.
Another piece of German culture has made its way into American television and was shown on a late-night show. The host was ecstatic, but our German “Kastenbrot” was less so and shows itself as authentically as one knows it: Bernd das Brot appears on American TV show, delights the audience: “I want him to be famous here as well”
