Introduction

Now the time has come for me to review the German national final for Eurovision 2025. It’s titled Chefsache ESC 2025: Wer singt für Deutschland? (Top Priority ESC 2025: Who will sing for Germany?) and it’s organized by none other than Stefan Raab, a German TV host and musician who came back to the screen in 2024 after seven years working only behind the stage. Among Eurovision fans, he’s most famous for organizing the German selection in 2010 which led to their second victory. He has a long history in Eurovision but hadn’t been involved in the contest since 2012. Most of Germany’s entries since then have been boring as hell and got bad results, so the more years passed, the more fans wanted Stefan Raab back in Eurovision. He’s back to Eurovision at long last and he says at every opportunity that his goal is for his country to win Eurovision.

Several of Stefan Raab’s decisions in this show have been questioned among fans. For one thing, the show consists of two heats, a semifinal, and a final, but in the heats the contestants didn’t sing their competing songs. Instead, they all sang covers of other popular songs or their older songs, and the juries selected who should make it to the final based on those performances. Additionally, the jury consists of only four people per show: Stefan Raab himself, his TV co-host Elton who is a music lover but doesn’t make music himself, the German singer Yvonne Catterfeld, and a different fourth jury member each show. The juries eliminate contestants in the heats and semifinal, and in the final, only the televoters decide who wins. No wait, that was changed a few days before the final, so that the juries now eliminate further down to five last songs. That’s pretty annoying because I had mentally prepared myself for a fully televote final.

I tried watching the heats live (February 14 and 15), but the covers weren’t very interesting to me, mostly just renditions of American and British pop songs. I think this was an idea that Stefan Raab insisted on, and the rest of his team didn’t question him at all because they trust every single idea he has. I was going to watch the semifinal live the next Saturday (February 22), but unfortunately that day I had to put down one of my cats. So instead, I watched the semifinal the day after—a good way to take my mind off the heartbreak of losing a pet.

The shows were all hosted by a familiar name to German Eurovision fans: Barbara Schöneberger, who hosted most of the German national finals of the past decade and seems to be the only holdover from the slop pop fests that were the last few German selections. She’s a TV and radio host from Munich, and my mom happens to be a fan of hers because of her observant humor and ability to improvise.

In this post, I won’t review the covers from the heats, nor will I split the songs between non-qualifiers and qualifiers like I did in my Supernova review. Instead, I’ll review the fourteen competing songs in their order from the semifinal, then discuss the show as a whole.