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Participation Tribunal: Scene from Lars Kraume's TV game »Gott«
Photo: Julia Ter / ARD
What exactly drove the important public broadcaster association ARD to dedicate a long evening of discussion and audience voting in November 2020 to the desire of a 78-year-old to leave life?
Why is there more than two and a half hours of talking about the pros and cons and possibilities of "assisted suicide" under the title "God" in the dark virus autumn?
While hundreds of residents in German retirement and nursing homes turn out to be corona infected every day, while many thousands of older (and also younger) people fear an infection and its consequences, Frank Plasberg's "hard but fair" talk is about on Monday evening there was talk of a social "pressure to use" against older, frail people.
Opposite Plasberg, the medical association woman Susanne Johna conjures up a conceivable horror scenario for the future.
Advertising banners in front of old people's homes could announce: "We are promoting a medically assisted suicide." The bottom line is that the first with the extensively acclaimed euthanasia event "God" did nothing else.
"Who, whom not us, does our death belong to?"
But one after anonther.
The lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach wrote a play with the title »God«, the director Lars Kraume filmed it with a star cast.
The TV version will be presented on Monday immediately after the »Tagesschau«.
Matthias Habich, who is pretty furrowed by many heroic acts, plays a 78-year-old widower named Richard Gärtner, who presents his concerns to the German Ethics Council in a kind of talk show.
Although Mr. Gärtner is healthy, he no longer likes to live after the death of his wife.
He would like to be killed with medication by his family doctor.
The doctor, portrayed by Anna Maria Mühe with sober defiance, has moral concerns.
Rightly so, thinks one of the actor Götz Schubert's arrogant and arrogant lug into the witness chair.
Rightly so, believes a Catholic bishop who is fervently embodied by Ulrich Matthes.
Wrongly, thinks the vain but clever lawyer for the dying man who Lars Eidinger plays.
"Who, who not to us, does our death belong to?" Asks the super-smart Eidinger-Mephisto.
Already during the TV broadcast (and up to five minutes afterwards) the audience can vote on whether or not the sweet, pleading-looking, physically and mentally super fit Mr. Gärtner will get the medical help he wants when leaving the afterlife.
The result of the vote is announced in the subsequent "tough but fair" talk and is very clear with 70.8 percent of votes in favor of Mr. Gärtner's death wish and a corresponding 29.2 percent of votes against.
Ferdinand von Schirach is a celebrated bestselling author and an extremely likeable German intellectual, whom many people would most likely elect to be Federal President.
But unfortunately "God" is a boredom sermon worthy of every Federal President to a long-converted audience.
She opposes historical concerns based on the fact that in her eyes the Nazis killed "unworthy of life" people.
She turns against theological objections, according to which human death may occur only according to God's will.
Schirach proclaims (like his doppelganger in the play, the lawyer Biegler played by Eidinger) that in principle every individual can decide how to die.
Apparently, this is how many people in Germany think today.
“I almost expected it”, says the Catholic Bishop Georg Bätzing, who was by no means troubled by pastoral care, but relaxed and relaxed in “Hard but Fair”, when the public vote was announced.
Laws cannot prevent spontaneous suicides
There is surprisingly little to discuss in Plasberg's panel discussion.
In February 2020, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in a spectacular ruling that every German citizen has the unrestricted freedom to put an end to their own life - regardless of whether they are terminally ill or in very good health.
The Bundestag still has to put into concrete laws what exactly this judgment means for the interaction between sick people and doctors.
On Monday, studio guest Olaf Sander touchingly described how much he suffered from the unclear legal situation prior to this judgment when he helped his seriously suffering, terminally ill mother to die in 2017.
The medical ethicist Bettina Schöne-Seifert explains that the new legal situation will not prevent people from rushing from houses and throwing themselves onto train tracks in the future and thus, as she calls it, committing “brutal suicides”.
Brutalsuicide perpetrators are usually spontaneously determined and not guided by legal considerations.
Hadn't Eidinger's lawyer argued exactly the opposite in the TV piece?
No matter.
In between, host Plasberg apologizes, beaming with pride over all the horror that what is on offer is "heavy fare".
Kraume's »Gott« celebrity shows are brilliant courtroom drama craft, like Kraume's Schirach adaptation “Terror” from 2016. Most likely, the »Hart aber fair« makers also consider their »Gott« show to be an educational achievement that has proven world-class - with them death is a teacher from Germany.
On this Monday evening I wondered for many minutes how I should think that the ARD program makers in a TV drama in which the actress Barbara Auer, as chairman of the ethics council, asks her viewers with a heartfelt look whether »doctors are helping« should "end life" urgently need to get a broadcast date in these Corona days.
Should you call it frivolous?
Is it obscene?
You can find it at least brutally insensitive.
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