A total of 1,000 acts have applied to take part in the German selection process for the Eurovision Song Contest according to NDR’s Head of Entertainment.
Thomas Schreiber the Head of Entertainment at NDR has revealed to Prinz Blog that a total of 1,000 acts have applied to represent Germany in Israel. Furthermore more 150 songs were submitted as part of the call for entries.
From the 1,000 submissions the list of potential participants has been cut down to 198. The 198 were selected by a panel formed of Head of Delegation Christoph Pellander, Digame representatives Thomas Niedermeyer and Werner Klötsch as well as others at NDR.
These 198 acts will be presented to the Eurovision jury formed of 100 people selected via an online search. The Eurovision jury will cut the list of potential participants down to 50, with the second international jury cutting the list down to 20 acts. The first meeting of the Eurovision jury will be held in Cologne on August 26, there will be a further seven events in four other cities across Germany.
The search for songs to take part in the German selection will get underway in October once the final list of singers has been determined. In November a series of songwriting workshops will then be held with the aim of selecting all of the competing songs before Christmas.
Source: Prinz Blog
Germany was one of seven countries to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1956. The country has taken part in every contest since then, apart from in 1996 when they failed to make it through the qualifying round. To date Germany has won the contest twice, the first time being in 1982 when Nicole sang “Ein Bisschen Frieden” in Harrogate, which later became a global hit. Germany didn’t win again until 2010, when Lena sang “Satellite” in Oslo. She received 9 sets of 12 points, scoring 236 points overall.
