We do not know how far Vladimir Putin will go. And for Vladimir Putin it is very important that we do not know how far he will go. Sowing doubt is his business model, it is perhaps the most important tool of his special warfare. The Germans are particularly receptive to this kind of uncertainty, and Putin is pricing in their fear, as ex-Federal President Joachim Gauck put it. Inflation, for example, is a primal German fear.
For a long time we laughed at surveys according to which Germans were more afraid of currency devaluation than of a life-threatening illness. Now no one is laughing any more, and worries about a loss of prosperity and even more so about nuclear war are returning with grim and serious force. We have to say goodbye to our ideal world (knowing full well that it was no longer intact years ago, but a little less threatening than it is now). Renunciation is the mantra of the hour, has analyzed our title team around Stefan Schmitz.
Is there no hope at all? Oh but. You can listen to Joachim Gauck, for example. He is also a Protestant pastor, and he says: “Fear is human, but courage is also human.”
There is a superlative form of Mortal Enemy. Her name is: party friend. That’s the joke we make about fierce competition in political parties. But what if the party friend is not only career-conscious, but encroaching? Silvana Koch-Netzin, once the hope of the FDP before a plagiarism scandal slowed her down, told my colleague Kester Schlenz that sexual harassment had been part of her everyday life for years. “I was touched. Just like that. There were always hands on my knees. They touched my chest, gave me a gentle back massage without being asked,” she says. There were always innuendos, phrases like: “I would love to trade with your ice cream ball.” A party friend said of her that “her future lies between her legs”.
Why was she silent? She didn’t want to appear “bitchy”: “I participated through passivity, didn’t resist and didn’t draw any boundaries. That’s how I supported the system.” Some people now accuse Koch-mehrin of only wanting to be public. There are probably people who never had the courage to denounce injustice like this woman.
Günter Wallraff is one reason why I wanted to become a journalist. In the 1970s, Wallraff invented undercover journalism in Germany all by himself. He was the temporary worker Ali in “All the Bottoms”, he placed the classified ad “Foreigners, strong, looking for work, no matter what, even hard and dirty work, even for little money”. And then wrote down what people do to someone who is obviously ready for anything. He smuggled himself into the “Bild” newspaper as “Hans Esser” and wrote about what can happen when journalists believe they can do anything.
Now Wallraff has turned 80, he is still a colleague, because at RTL he continues to research with his “Team Wallraff”. He has just revealed in a spectacular way how hygiene is at chains like Burger King. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” certifies that he can use it to reach people who actually no longer expect anything from journalism because they despise journalists as elite. “On Twitter, however, they then write: ‘Thank you
Yours, Gregor Peter Schmitz, Editor-in-Chief
