The Hamburg blogger Maria Roma R. has submitted an application for an interim injunction to the press chamber of the Hamburg Regional Court through her lawyer Jan Fröhlich. “Despite the sustained critical publicity, various public solidarity actions on the part of various authors and an editor, there has so far been no self-critical reaction from Ms. Gruber and Mr. Höck. Piper Verlag also saw itself as committed to a sustained and binding response and the necessary clear one In my opinion and in my client’s opinion, we are not able to distance ourselves,” says lawyer Fröhlich to stern. That’s why his client is now calling the court. Roma Maria M. wants, among other things, to prohibit the cabaret artist Monika Gruber from publishing her full name in her book and mentioning it in the context of the National Socialist youth organization “Bund Deutscher Mädel”.
As reported, Monika Gruber, who is one of Germany’s most successful cabaret artists, has written a book together with the journalist Andreas Hock: “Welcome to the wrong film.” In it, the authors take on “green heat pump fetishists” and other “deluded woke activists”. Under the heading: “When Nazis knit,” Gruber quotes a post that the blogger Roma Maria M. published on X (formerly Twitter) in March 2023. She warned against the infiltration of handicraft courses by right-wing extremist women: “Right-wing extremist women are currently actively infiltrating the textile hobby scene (e.g. on the subject of knitting). Please actively engage with who is offering what,” she wrote to her followers, there are a few Thousands. Roma Maria M. has worked as a professional craftswoman for several years and knows the scene firsthand. She also referred, among other things, to warnings from the Federal Agency for Civic Education and the Amadeu Antonio Foundation.
In her book, Gruber devotes several paragraphs to this post: A friend recently sent her a tweet from a “self-proclaimed influencer and guardian of virtue.” At this point, Gruber mentions the full name of Roma Maria R., whose father was Indian. Gruber ridicules the warning about right-wing extremists in the hobby scene and speculates: “Apart from such disturbing thoughts, it is a mystery to me what someone with a name like that is doing in the ‘textile hobby scene’? I would rather have seen them in the tantric Shakren- Gymnastics or a vegan primal scream seminar.” Gruber further speculates whether that is really the blogger’s name or whether it is a pseudonym. Roma is probably called Maria M. “in real life it’s just ‘Maria Müller’,” which “sounds a lot like ‘Association of German Girls’.” The blogger said through her lawyer that she had received threats that spoke of “rape and even murder.”
So far, Gruber, her co-author and the publisher have shown no understanding. Gruber declined to apologize. She has “no sense of injustice whatsoever.” Her attorney, Ben M. Irle, issued a statement: “Satire neither condones censorship nor requires an apology.”
The press chamber of the Hamburg Regional Court now has the floor. A decision is expected in the coming week.
