Director İlker Çatak recently complained that his name had hardly appeared in reports about German Oscar nominations. Çatak shot “The Teacher’s Room” and was nominated in the “Best Foreign Film” category. According to the director, if he was ever mentioned in a subordinate clause, his name was usually spelled incorrectly. Çatak considers this to be structural racism, “which is also caused by inaccuracy, negligence or ignorance,” as he told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.
Author Hasnain Kazim took up the complaint in the same newspaper. Under the somewhat misleading headline “My name is not Pimmelgruber,” Kazim complained that his name was also often corrupted. However, he is careful with the accusation of racism because he fears its impact if it is used too often. He suspects that the incorrect spelling is “more like carelessness, perhaps ignorance, a certain brashness, sometimes stupidity.”
The reasons are probably fluid, individual and occasionally multi-causal. Inattention is not the same as racism. But if racism is the reason, it is always accompanied by stupidity. However, there is a case in politics that suggests that false names describe a fundamental problem in journalism that may include racism but goes far beyond it. And this case is called Katrin Göring-Eckardt.
The native Thuringian has been sitting in the Bundestag for Alliance 90/The Greens since 1998. She was parliamentary group leader twice and is currently Vice President of the Bundestag for the second time – a politician of a certain prominence. Nevertheless, her name is repeatedly spelled incorrectly.
Since 1998, Katrin Göring-Eckardt has been mentioned 20 times in the German media. She was called Kathrin Göring-Eckardt well over 100 times. The most common incorrect spelling is Katrin Göring-Eckhardt, with around 400 hits. Almost everyone is there, many repeated over the years: “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, “Spiegel”, “Handelsblatt”, “Taz”, “Welt”, also stern.de.
In 2015, Göring-Eckardt once defended herself on Twitter: “I don’t want to seem bitchy and I know it’s hard,” she wrote, “but my name is really spelled without any ‘h’.” It was of no use.
Even if the h were suddenly all deleted, other incorrect spellings would remain: For Katrin Göring-Eckart, without h and still incorrect, you can find more than 200 hits. There are also spellings with two errors, such as Kathrin Göring-Eckart or Kathrin Goering-Eckardt. There is even a variant with three errors: Kathrin Göring-Eckhart. German journalism is deeply indebted to Katrin Göring-Eckardt.
Mistakes happen. I once even gave the SPD politician Matthias Miersch a completely new first name: Michael. And with star colleague Giuseppe Di Grazia, I accidentally swapped i and u in internal chats.
Perhaps a little more care would be needed from everyone involved, including me. With false names we not only treat those affected badly, we harm ourselves. If I don’t have the names right, what should readers think of the rest of the article?
Göring-Eckardt now takes the whole thing with resigned humor. It’s just a shame, she told me, that she occasionally gives an interview and then can’t find herself when she googles it.
