Aufgabe Vorschlag A - Medien, Öffentlichkeit und Zivilges… · Abitur Hessen Politik und Wirtschaft GK · bilingual Englisch 2021

The media and democracy

Material

Georg Diez: Post-Truth Germany – The Chemnitz Attacks and the Crisis for German Democracy (2018)

And if it never happened? Then, of course, nobody is to blame. There is no responsibility, and there are no consequences. The end of a common understanding of what happened is in many ways the end of politics, because to define problems and work on solutions requires common ground. Germany, like the United States, has entered this post-truth hall of mirrors 1. The stakes are particularly high, because a violent far-right is rising, in a country still troubled by its racist and murderous past. The embrace of a discourse of “alternative facts” signals that Germany has moved far from the role it played during the early days of the refugee crisis […].

How did we get here? At the end of August, following the alleged murder of a German citizen by two refugees, a right-wing mob of several thousand people took to the streets in the eastern city of Chemnitz, shouting racist slogans, threatening and chasing refugees (or just about anybody who looked different), and fighting an overwhelmed and outnumbered local police force. The images quickly spread on social media. One video showed a group of few men first shouting at, and then running after, a man who is seen fleeing across a busy street, avoiding several cars as he speeds along. The German media used the term Hetzjagd, normally applied to the hunting of animals, to describe this scene and others captured during the riots. German Chancellor Angela Merkel used this word, too, in her public statement condemning the violence.

But then something strange happened. When the minister president of the German state of Saxonia, Michael Kretschmer of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), addressed the events in Chemnitz in the state parliament a few days later, he claimed that “there was no mob, there was no chase, there was no pogrom” – directly contradicting not only Merkel but also nearly all of the mainstream press that had reported on the events. The violence, the racist epithets 2, and the people chanting “We want to kill” were all well documented, not only by eye-witnesses but also on video, as were the scenes of people being threatened and chased. But following Kretschmer’s remarks, a public debate over the use of the word Hetzjagd diverted 3 attention from the clashes in Chemnitz to the way the news was produced and, according to those critical of the term, politicized.

Like “fake news” in the United States, the German word Lügenpresse, or lying press, challenges the authority of the media as a democratic institution. Right-wing politicians and protesters use the term to discredit the work of journalists covering the most controversial subject of all – migration and refugees – but also any other topic related to what the right calls the “system Merkel”. The attraction of formerly mainstream figures to this rhetoric is likely political. With the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) breathing down its neck 4 (and more popular by four percent, according to a recent poll), Kretschmer’s party, the CDU, has been driven rightward. […]

Not long ago, any of these incidents – a neo-Nazi mob sporting 5 Hitler salutes, an attack on a Jewish restaurant, attacks on left-wing demonstrators, attacks on refugees – would have been enough to spark an emotional political debate in Germany. But something fundamental seems to have changed, and the fact of conservative politicians showing open sympathy for right-wing positions is just part of this.

Perhaps even more troubling is the structural attack on the very notion of rational discourse governed by rules held in common – among them, that even ideological opponents accept the existence of a verifiable 6 truth, that the press is a respected fourth pillar of democracy, and that there is room for disagreement but not for obvious lies and falsehoods. In the United States, all of these assumptions have been tested since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. In Europe, this brazen 7 version of politics is reactionary in more than one sense, perpetrated 8 by politicians copying Trump’s tactics but without his open ruthlessness.

Georg Diez: Post-Truth Germany – The Chemnitz Attacks and the Crisis of German Democracy, in: Foreign Affairs, 19.09.2018, URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/germany/2018-09-19/post-truth-germany (abgerufen am 29.05.2020).

Annotations

1 hall of mirrors – Spiegellabyrinth

2 racist epithets – rassistische Schimpfwörter

3 to divert – ablenken

4 to breathe down someone’s neck – to stay close to someone, watching everything they do (in a disapproving way)

5 to sport – here: show proudly

6 verifiable – nachprüfbar

7 brazen – open and without shame, usually about sth. that people find shocking (disapproving); shameless

8 perpetrated by – verübt von

1

Summarize the text. (Material) (30 BE)

2

Examine the influence of new political forms of communication on the Internet (like Twitter) on the role of classic media forms (such as printed newspapers, radio and television) in the democratic system in Germany. (40 BE)