Germany Wins for the First Time in 28 Years

MAY 15 2010 · 12:25

Lena Meyer-Landrut · "Satellite" · Germany · 2010 Placement: 1 · Score: 246 · Language: English · Composers: Julie Frost, John Gordon · Venue: Telenor Arena · Host: Oslo, Norway · Type: winner · Broadcast: streaming era Lena Meyer-Landrut — 18-year-old German schoolgirl in a black dress — takes the Telenor Arena stage without choreography or theatrical staging. 'Satellite' is bouncy modern indie-pop with a quirky British-accented vocal delivery. 246 points. Germany wins Eurovision for the first time since Nicole's 1982 'Ein bißchen Frieden'. Stefan Raab's shepherding of Lena through 'Unser Star für Oslo' had given her six months of national-pop-star momentum. Context Stefan Raab had built a multi-episode reality-TV selection process specifically to find the right Eurovision artist. Lena's faux-British-accented English was distinctive. Julie Frost and John Gordon were international pop writers; the song had been optioned for US and UK artists before Lena recorded it. The Raab-Lena production model was German pop's most successful Eurovision modern gambit. Legacy Germany hosted Eurovision 2011 in Düsseldorf. Lena defended her title with 'Taken by a Stranger' and finished 10th. She continued as a German pop star through the 2020s. The 2010 win remains Germany's most recent. Raab left TV altogether in 2015. The 'Raab-Lena' model is still studied in European pop-management scholarship.