383 - Immer wieder aufgestanden

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Miriam says Hannes's death was 'one of the greatest gifts' in her life — it ended the naive illusion that being good and working hard would guarantee the life she imagined.

1. Paula Lieben Lernen host Paula interviews Miriam Höller, known from Germany's Next Topmodel 2010 and her career as a professional stuntwoman, about love, loss, and rebuilding a life after grief. 2. Miriam Höller is a German public figure who appeared on GNTM 2010, built a career as an action model and stuntwoman, lost her partner Hannes in a helicopter crash ten years ago, and now gives talks about resilience and loss. 3. The episode's central frame is the scar metaphor: physical scars from stunt work as evidence of surviving what tried to destroy you, extended to the emotional 'largest scar' left by Hannes's death. 4. Miriam describes being recognized on the street still as 'the stunt woman from GNTM' and attributes her memorability to having been rebellious and unlike the other contestants — she wanted to bring her 'big fire wings' and fascination with action and adventure to the show. 5. She notes that GNTM has evolved: the current season includes men, older women, and a trans man named Jill who was previously a guest on her own show — the first trans man, she says, to openly discuss the topic on German television. 6. Paula establishes that Hannes's death was six weeks after Miriam's own serious stunt accident in which she broke both feet — two major traumas separated by six weeks. 7. Miriam explains that people told her to tattoo over her physical scars so she wouldn't have to see them, and she refused; today she looks at each scar with appreciation as proof she was stronger than whatever caused it. 8. She introduces the emotional wound: when she stands on stage and truly enters the memory of the phone call telling her Hannes had died, the wound is still present — healed like scar tissue, but with harder and more sensitive edges. 9. At 13, following her mother's model (who met her father at 13 and has been with him ever since), Miriam chose her first boyfriend: a small, red-haired, slightly overweight boy with a gap tooth and bitten nails, because he made her laugh, not because he was the coolest boy. 10. After her first sexual experience with him, she discovered he had been sleeping with a childhood friend for three months, and that the entire village had known — she felt not just betrayed by him but abandoned by her entire social circle. 11. This experience — the whole village knowing and no one telling her — became the defining wound of her life, surfacing decades later in a Bali meditation as the worst day she had experienced, ahead of both Hannes's death and her own near-fatal stunt accident. 12. The betrayal drove her to leave the village and decide to make something extraordinary of herself: 'I will make a work of art out of my life, because this is all hypocrisy.' 13. A regression meditation in Bali, where the practitioner asked her to return to the worst day of her life, surfaced the party at 15 rather than the helicopter crash — revealing that the most deeply wounded part of her was not the grieving adult but the 15-year-old who first learned that trusted people could deceive her. 14. She had a subsequent six-year relationship with a man 17 years her senior, then met Hannes — also 20 years older — and describes the knowledge that he was the right person as coming 'from deep inside, not as a plan.' 15. Hannes and Miriam were both stuntpeople who traveled together and built an adventurous life over six years; she held the eulogy at his farewell ceremony herself. 16. She visited his body before the funeral, knowing he would be badly injured from the helicopter crash, and describes what she saw as 'my destroyed life' — but also as the closure that let her move forward. 17. She states that Hannes's death was 'one of the greatest gifts in her life' because it ended the naive illusion that being good and hardworking would guarantee the future she imagined, replacing it with a present-tense gratitude for each morning she wakes up beside her current partner. 18. The conversation also covers her mother's lifelong relationship (parents met at 13, still together; grandparents met at 12, also lifelong) as the model Miriam internalized for what love should look like. 19. This episode suits adults who have experienced serious loss, grief, or major relationship patterns and are looking for a frank conversation about how those experiences leave lasting marks and can be reframed. 20. Listeners who prefer light relationship content, are not interested in grief or death, or who do not follow German-language media are unlikely to find this episode engaging.

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