This expression I encountered in La fille de la ville:
A few days ago, Flojindamesa over at Eat Drink Nola posted about Baru, a Caribbean/Tapas restaurant on Magazine Street. Of course after reading her post, Baader-Meinhof Syndrome set in and I saw Baru mentioned everywhere!
The meaning is obvious from the context; Wikipedia has more:
The “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” was coined by a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Terry Mullen. The Minnesota newspaper runs a daily column called “Bulletin Board,” for which readers, using pseudonyms (in this case it was ‘Gigetto on Lincoln’), submit humorous or interesting anecdotes. The term was coined when Mullen submitted a story around 1986,[1] about how he first heard about the terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and then heard about it again a short while later from a different source.
What term do Germans use for this phenomenon? After all, Baader-Meinhof is scarcely trivial information over here.
What a dumb name. The BMG was anything but “obscure” and was well covered by international mainstream media (and in books, movies etc.).
This could just as well be called the “Michael Jackson phenomenon”, depending on the ignoramus experiencing it.
Yes, of course, but on the other hand, the better-known a term is, the more likely one is to encounter it again the next day. Which takes me to your ignoramus point.
Nothing speaks against using a direct translation, like “Baader-Meinhoff-Phänomen”.
A more neutral expression would be “Frequenzillusion” (frequency illusion), as used on this site: https://ad.hominem.info/psychologie/kognitive_verzerrungen/frequenzillusion