Merkel's Free Speech Dilemma

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media, I'm Bob Garfield. It will come as no surprise that in Turkey you can be jailed for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. What is shocking is that a critic of Erdogan has been charged with that crime - in Germany. A little-used and little-noticed German law prohibits ad hominem attacks against heads of state, if the foreign leader requests prosecution and if the German leader agrees. Erdogan filed his complaints last week, putting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a tough spot, pitting free speech against Germany's urgent need for Turkey's help in the refugee crisis.

When we recorded the next interview she had not yet announced her decision, but on Friday Merkel did announce that she has, indeed, authorized Erdogan’s request. The whole mess all started with a poem read by a TV comedian named Jan Boehmermann. The first line describes Erdogan as “dumb, cowardly and repressed.”

 [CLIP IN GERMAN]:

JAN BOEHMERMANN:  Sackdoof, feige und verklemmt, ist Erdogan der Präsident.

 [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER/END CLIP]

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  But this wasn’t the really rude part, actually, once you play it. [?] [LAUGHS]

BOB GARFIELD:  Christiane Hoffmann is deputy head of the Berlin office of the German newsweekly, Der Spiegel.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  His so-called “poem” is actually a very simple rhyme, with extremely insulting wording involving animals, involving size of intimate body parts, and so on. He is trying to insult.

BOB GARFIELD:  Like teenagers in a locker room.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Very much so. And it was actually broadcast on an Internet platform and was supposed to be broadcast also in the second program of public television. Later, the German television extinguished the poem from its library, so it couldn't be watched there anymore.

BOB GARFIELD:  What was the occasion for Jan Boehmermann to take off on Erdogan?

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Well, there had been another television program before that that was a more substantial political criticism of Erdogan, and the Turkish president complained about this TV program. So this was actually the reason why Boehmermann took the case up. Like you would say to a little child, now I show you what you are forbidden to do -

 [BOB LAUGHS]

- he said, now I will make a poem that is really forbidden.

BOB GARFIELD:  You want to see insulting, I’ll show you insulting.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Exactly.

BOB GARFIELD:  Let’s play a little bit of the video that originally annoyed Erdogan and started this whole cycle of ad hominems.

 [SATIRICAL VIDEO CLIP IN GERMAN]

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] Das is sehr catchy.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Yeah, it’s a famous German song that everyone would know, and he – they just rewrote the song with the name of “Erdogan.”

BOB GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm, and it’s criticizing his authoritarianism, his abuse of political critics.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  And the – you know, the way he goes against demonstrators and freedom of press. But it’s not rude, you know, that’s the big difference. It’s not insulting. This is criticism. What Boehmermann did was insult.

BOB GARFIELD:  All right, but the astonishing part of this story is that Germany, smack in the middle of the EU, indeed, the biggest player in the EU, does not protect even insulting speech, that it's a crime. Who knew? When was this law written and how often has it been used?

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Well, I don’t really think anyone was aware of the law until we had this. We now learned that it has been used in the 60s when demonstrations went on against the Shah of Persia with insulting slogans, and it has been used about 10 years ago when the Swiss president felt that he had been insulted. But no one even knew about that case. So it was very surprising that this paragraph from the 19th century was found again, so to say.

BOB GARFIELD:  I’m a, a bit stunned that a 19th-century law, Paragraph 103, could have survived the forming of the German Republic, two world wars, Nazification and deNazification, a new Constitution. How in the world do you suppose Erdogan found it?

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  I have no idea. But, actually, Germany is not the only country to have a law like this. Switzerland does too, and in the late 40s when Germany was still under administration of the Four Powers, this law was applied against Spiegel, actually, against my newsmagazine, by the British authority at that time because, obviously, Spiegel insulted the Dutch queen.

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] Now, we are speaking on Thursday, by which time the Chancellor was supposed to have had made a decision on whether to assuage Erdogan by invoking the law. At this moment, you know of no such decision. She doesn’t have to like Erdogan but she absolutely needs him. There is this grave refugee crisis that affects Germany probably disproportionately to other European countries and he is, in many ways, the solution.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Exactly. I mean, that’s what makes this case so big, is that it demonstrates how Germany has become dependent on Erdogan’s good will and especially Chancellor Merkel, because she has founded her whole way of handling the refugee crisis on Turkey and on Erdogan. She has made a, I think, strategic mistake in the beginning of this affair when she announced that she thought the poem was deliberately insulting, so she gave her verdict on the poem without even being asked. Everyone could understand that she did this to pacify Erdogan, and this is what put her in a very difficult position.

BOB GARFIELD:  You know, there’s some irony in this. Erdogan came to power largely because at one point he was in the political opposition and he himself recited a poem that landed his sorry butt in jail. It’s hard for me to imagine that there would be any domestic support for her kowtowing to an authoritarian bully.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Well, it has been quite mixed, actually. There is a majority in Germany who accept that there should be limits to freedom of speech and expression. And a lot of people think that Boehmermann’s poem is unnecessarily insulting.

But, on the other hand, there are certainly no sympathies for Erdogan. Commentators say that it would be a good thing if politics stayed out of the case and it would be left for the German court to decide where are the limits of freedom of expression.

BOB GARFIELD:  Mm, it’s a tough one to penetrate the American psyche, where almost no speech is too much speech.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Well, I don’t know. I mean, probably the most rude word that was used in the poem was “goat [BLEEP]er.” I don’t know if anyone said that to anyone in a public discussion in the US, if no one would care about it, is that really the case?

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, I don’t know. I do know that this is America and if you call somebody a no-good thieving authoritarian goat [BLEEPS]er, you’d better be able to produce the goat. [LAUGHING]

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Exactly, that’s what I'm saying.

BOB GARFIELD:  That was Thursday night. The next morning, Angela Merkel made her decision, so we called Christiane back. Christiane, you told us there was a chance that Merkel would let this go to the courts, which is exactly –

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Exactly.

BOB GARFIELD:  - what she did.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  She said in her press conference it was not for the government to decide the limits of freedom of press, freedom of expression. It was to [ ? ] to decide about that. There had been differences of opinion inside her coalition government, but in the end she was the one who took the decision.

BOB GARFIELD:  Merkel did say that Paragraph 103 at the heart of this controversy is not long for this world, that they're going to get rid of this article. So this, I presume, can never come up again?

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  I think so, yes. She announced the Paragraph 103 should be abolished within this legislation period. That means the end of 2017. And I think, actually, that was the compromise she made with her coalition partners. They had demanded for the paragraph to be abolished. Yeah, this might actually be the last case under this law.

BOB GARFIELD:  Let’s just say the public prosecutor decides, no, there’s really no case or simply prosecutes it and the comedian is acquitted, is this necessarily over?

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Not necessarily. I mean, Erdogan’s lawyer - he has a German lawyer now, and he has already announced that he will take this to the highest court possible. So Erdogan will keep on pressing, even if we don't have Article 103, and I think this is going to go on.

BOB GARFIELD:  Christiane, thank you very, very much.

CHRISTIANE HOFFMANN:  Okay, you are very welcome.

BOB GARFIELD:  Christiane Hoffmann is deputy head of the Berlin office of the German newsweekly, Der Spiegel.

 [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

Coming up, another man whose character was famously called into question on TV, in the United States. This is On the Media.