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Katharina Schlothauer and Bjarne Mädel as investigators in "Ferdinand von Schirach: Enemies - Against Time"
Photo:
Stephan Rabold / picture alliance / dpa / ARD Degeto / Moovie
The television year began with a clap of thunder.
Nothing less than “historical programming” was the order of the day, and the program director of ARD, Volker Herres, explained the reason for the “exciting experiment” in the interview as follows: “We expect the greatest possible attention to the central, socially relevant topic of law and justice " (The first).
One likes to hear that: We would not have guessed right and justice as the »central topic« of ARD so far.
But the program management may also include the 1000 Tatort episodes.
In any case, on January 3, 2021, the poet Ferdinand von Schirach was once again chosen to bring us closer to social relevance by means of an »experiment«.
There was a certain amount of disagreement about the experimental set-up: In the film, the experiment was described as a »project« by the author Schirach, because 300 cinema-goers in the tried and tested Schirach setting were confronted with the highly relevant question: »just or unjust«.
In previous interactive justice events, the question was "right or wrong" or "guilty or not guilty".
The historically interesting aspect of the project's character was again the missed question on the basis of a roughly manipulative presentation of facts.
Thomas Fischer, arrow to the right
Born in 1953, is a legal scholar and was chairman of the 2nd criminal division of the Federal Court of Justice.
He is the author of an annually revised standard short commentary on the criminal code and numerous other specialist books.
According to the program directorate, the experiment consisted in broadcasting two versions of a feature film at the same time, in which the same case was allegedly portrayed from different perspectives: in the first "The Commissioner's View", in the third programs "The Defender's View".
The experiment, the program director said, consisted in allowing viewers to “choose this or that channel” and choose which perspective they would prefer to watch.
One could almost have guessed: the inspector on the "Tatort" slot won.
One does not quite know when to seriously answer the "experiment" claims.
We leave it at the point that, firstly, switching on a film that one does not know says little about the opinion one has on a fictitious question asked at the end, and secondly the answer to the question whether on Sunday at 8.15 p.m. probably more people would switch on the first or a third one, which would be able to predict with significantly less effort.
What was it about?
The question of the content is more difficult than you might think because it has been veiled to the best of our ability.
Program director Herres called it "a kidnapping case", the reports in advance announced a processing of the "Daschner case" or the "Gäfgen case".
Schirach moved the event to another city and swapped the victim's gender, but otherwise designed the story in such a way that 95 percent of viewers had to mistake the whole thing for a re-enacted documentary of the 18-year-old case from Frankfurt.
(For this from the handbook for unscrupulous money-making: If you cannot interview the corpse personally, show the mother crying or read the diary.) It was probably no coincidence that the ARD and the poet did not explain to us why names and Places were exchanged.
In addition to the question of justice, an explanation would also have raised the question of the threshold of disgust given the voyeuristic self-importance with the suffering of third parties.
more on the subject
TV experiment: more than ten million viewers saw »enemies«
The Schirach story is told quickly and once again of astonishing simplicity, which is hidden behind all sorts of stage theatrics: The ice-cold perpetrator kidnaps 12-year-old child of rich parents and tries to extort ransom.
He kills the child he knows personally immediately after the kidnapping.
Heavily shaken inspector, who is investigating with a (!) Colleague, is
"convinced"
for
emotional
reasons that a mean-looking young security man is the culprit.
Who denies.
The commissioner (he doesn't seem to have a superior) makes an "application" to the police chief (!) To be allowed to torture the accused.
Since the application was rejected, the inspector went to the pre-trial detention center at 5:30 in the morning, entered himself in the visitor's book and subjects the prisoners to a 4-minute "waterboarding," that is, a sham drowning that TV viewers are familiar with from Guantanamo reports .
The accused confesses and promises, for whatever mysterious reason, to remain silent about the torture.
The dead child is found based on the confession, the perpetrator is charged.
The light figure of the play, the defendant's defense attorney (once again called the lawyer Bieger, the poet's repetitive dream of the alter ego), questions the inspector so skillfully and with presentation of the visitor's book that he, unlike the court, has at hand that the policeman / witness admits the torture.
Then it goes quickly: advice, judgment, acquittal, credits, end.
The alternative version "from the point of view of the defense attorney" saves us the intense, empathic looks of the inspector ("I also have a daughter of that age") and adds the aspect that the attorney has stress with his wife while eating because he is defending the child murderer .
Otherwise it remains essentially the same.
A third, shortened version is running in the media library, allegedly “reduced to the legal issue” in order, according to Herres, to accommodate the “viewing habits of the streaming audience” (scil .: it doesn't last 90 minutes).
Finally, a strange documentary about the Gäfgen / Daschner case was added, supplemented by the cases of the kidnapping of Richard Oetker on December 14, 1976 (judgment of the regional court on June 9, 1980) and the kidnapping and murder of Anneli-Marie Riss on December 13, 1976. August 2015 (judgment of the regional court on September 5, 2016).
The poet himself explained to the audience that the answer to the question of whether torture was permitted should be answered with "no".
That was a bit surprising in view of the film preparation, but it was able
to achieve a
high majority because Schirach / Bieger is a
specialist
(lawyer) and therefore reveals a side of the matter that is known as "formal legal" in the television cosmos and is notoriously characterized by serious moral deficits to recognize there.
But the poet then, personally and heavily smoking, also represents the moral, that is, "just" cause.
On the fateful question of whether the law was fair, 300 inexpensive "project" statists were allowed to vote by ballot and, as expected, were of the opinion that the commissioner had acted "legally" wrongly, but correctly in terms of justice.
It is hardly worth mentioning that, of course, everyone thought it was unfair that the guilty murderer was acquitted in the film.
However, Mr. Bieger in the film and Mr. Schirach in the credits say in a mild voice that human dignity is inviolable and that torture is a very unreliable method of proof.
In fact, everything is a little different: The child kidnapper and murderer
Gäfgen
is
serving
a life sentence (with an affirmation of particularly serious guilt).
He was arrested after the ransom was handed over under surveillance.
When he was questioned, he initially denied everything, then "confessed" to unbelievable details.
Deputy Chief of Police D., assuming the child was still alive, ordered the interrogator to threaten the accused with "pain as he had never experienced it before" so that he could reveal the victim's hiding place.
So it happened, Gaefgen betrayed the hiding place out of fear;
but he had already killed the child shortly after the kidnapping.
Gäfgen later repeated his forced confession without coercion.
The criminal chamber of the regional court considered the confession, renewed without coercion, to be usable despite the earlier illegal threat.
The defendant's appeal against this was rejected by the 2nd criminal division of the BGH, and his constitutional complaint was also unsuccessful.
He later received compensation for the illegal treatment by the police, which was offset against his debts;
that did not change his conviction.
The police officer who carried out the threat and his superior D. were found guilty, subject to minor fines, and warned.
ask
The film and the so-called »Project« were entitled »Enemies«.
The author and ARD failed to provide information about what this title should mean.
The documentation attached to the film also raised questions about the seriousness of the alleged "project": On the one hand, no mention was made of the fact that and why the Schirach version deviated from the authentic case in some important points.
On the other hand, it remained a mystery what the other two kidnapping cases were supposed to have to do with the Schirach case and the alleged "central question of law and justice": It was not about torture.
Apparently some bad abduction cases were chosen at random in order to give the viewers a bit more "authentic" horror and to make them understand that kidnappers are bad people who can be tortured a bit in the heat.
And thirdly, the only halfway exciting question wasn't even mentioned: What would it be like if the film turned out that the tortured suspect was
innocent
?
With the highest probability, the project participants and the audience would mean the exact opposite of what they explained in the film.
As certain as most people are that the guilty have to atone, they are so certain that nothing should be done to innocent people.
more on the subject
ARD drama »Feinde« based on Ferdinand von Schirach: An evening of torture by Volker Weidermann
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Star author von Schirach in the documentary portrait: Ferdinand meets ... and smokes ... and thinks of Arno Frank
This brings us closer to one of the two crucial questions: who is guilty here, and how do we know that?
The poet Schirach gives a childishly simple answer: His accused is guilty in all versions because it says so in the script and the audience can therefore watch him do the crime.
Without making it problematic, the film divides it into two perspectives: the knowing viewer knows the guilt of the suspect and observes the ignorant commissioner during his well-intentioned investigation torture.
As soon as the water has spilled and the guilty party has dried off, the two strands fall into place again: The guilty party has confessed.
The
really
important question of whether torture can be used to prove that a
suspect is
guilty is twisted into the question of whether
torture can be used to extract evidence from
a
guilty
party.
Since the contortion is intentionally hidden from viewers, they do not notice that the question is as wrong as the answer is stupid.
The complicated relationship between material reality, established truth, evidence, procedural law and material threats of punishment is unknown to the vast majority of citizens, as they have been kept in the evening mood for decades with the same twists and turns.
They therefore consider the question of the admissibility of evidence gathering and use of evidence to be a legal "subtlety" that has nothing to do with justice and does not need their own attention.
In this mistaken belief they are regularly reinforced by the poet Schirach, who also obscures the spectacle with the consecration of the authentic.
The result is the extremely simple "conviction" that bad things are due to the guilty and good to the innocent.
If the law (“right”) does not allow that, one can “morally” help a little, because it does not hit the wrong person.
The TV commissioner therefore replies from the depths of the audience's soul to the defense counsel's “human dignity” of the perpetrator: And what about the human dignity of the victim?
Unfortunately, this is clearly wrong: in reality, the tortured person is not the
perpetrator
, but the
accused
, i.e. a suspect.
The question is whether he faces the victim as the perpetrator.
Of course, anyone who answers them in advance will have an easy time: Why shouldn't the guilty be harmed?
The torture at this point is nothing more than pre-trial detention in the usual excitement forums: an anticipated punishment that is just because the punished person is the guilty perpetrator.
In the end, the viewers vote on themselves: They are innocent in all cases, so they must not be tortured, locked up, shot, beaten or tortured.
The bad guys and the guilty, the perpetrators, are allowed to complain in a "formal legal" manner, but not morally.
From here it is only a logical step to the question of where the "formal legal" view actually gets its justification from.
The answer can be heard and read every day in lateral thinkers and "Pegida" demos, in AfD applications or in chat rooms: Formal legal protection against suspects is the perversion of the rule of law to protect offenders, devised by an elite who are drunk on themselves and on unrealistic abstractions.
reply
The truth is that it is different, and it is very unfortunate that those who fall for such perversions are the very ones who most often run into the knife they themselves are holding out.
Indeed, it is grossly wrong to claim that torture is not an appropriate means of exploring the truth - supposedly because people who are tortured willingly say and do anything to escape the pain.
If it were that simple, torture would have been stopped long ago because of unsuitability.
It is a bogus claim that for centuries torture specialists in all countries completely overlooked the fact that torture is a lie.
Anyone who believes this should take a look at the rules of torture in the early modern inquisition process.
Torture is a highly effective and very reliable means of researching the truth.
The prerequisite is that the torturer is not a weak-headed sadist, but an intelligent police officer who knows a hundred times more about torture than any prisoner and even more than any film viewer.
Torture is not about sounding out a single, unrepeatable piece of information.
It's all about the truth.
Therefore you ask the interrogated something that you already know.
If he lies, you check it out, torture him harder and give him a new chance.
Again and again he is asked about things, names and events that have long been known.
Every one of his lies is exposed, each time the torture gets worse.
If he tells the truth, he is given affection and hope. The tortured person never knows what the interrogators know.
It is then a question of the (short) time until the prisoner only tells the truth.
In other words: torturers have been trained in torture.
You know what interrogation psychology is.
You have absolute power.
This is one of the reasons why Schirach's story is grossly under-complex.
Because it's not about nice inspectors who "also have a daughter".
In reality, it was the superior D. who instructed the inspector to threaten torture.
It does not matter whether he or the police officer is a nice person or whether he feels sorry for the kidnapped child or the tortured accused.
It is about
justifying
state interventions, not about an individual's nervous weakness or his conscience.
Legality is the question of regularity, not what is subjectively reasonable.
In other words: If it was legitimate to torture suspects, so the state is
likely
, he would have to also
committed
when the rule-conditions are met.
Then the parents of the kidnapped child could obtain an injunction that the suspect's fingers should be broken one after the other until he reveals his accomplices or the hiding place.
Then the defense attorney or any other person would have no right to "emergency aid" and the tortured person would have no right of self-defense against the torment.
What is right cannot be wrong at the same time.
Then there are all the extensions: If torture is a right of the state, the superior can order his subordinates to torture.
The state then also has to regulate how long, how far and in what ratio can be tortured: How many fingers can you break, how many electric shocks, how long simulate drowning for which legal interest?
The alleged co-organizer of the terrorist attack on the WTC, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, is said to have been subjected to a total of 183 emails of water torture (FAZ, April 20, 2009).
The state, even if it is bad, is not a spontaneous gang of murderers.
He manages power.
The rest follows from this: In the film, Schirach has the arguments (probably derived from publications by the columnist) put forward that the state is obliged to "torture training" and a "torture regime" (in whatever form).
Both can be read in the history of the Gestapo and the Stasi.
So it is not a question of whether torture is "inappropriate".
Torture works well, and it uses all of the scientific evidence and rational purpose necessary to make it successful.
The equation with early modern extermination penalties and dull barbarism trivializes and distorts the matter.
You could actually already know that after reading "The Fixer" by Bernard Malamut (1966) or "1984" George Orwell (1949).
Nor is it a question of whether perpetrators can be harmed or pain inflicted.
The question that actually arises is easy to answer: Every reader or viewer should imagine that some detective inspector has the "feeling" that he / she is a member of a band of robbers or that his / her son has sexually abused a child.
Would it be morally okay for the police officer to smash the little toe of the suspicious reader / viewer with a hammer to find out if he knew anything pertinent?
If not: why not?
If it only occurs to you that he / she loves your own little toe, but doesn't care about others, you have read this column in vain.
All others can be offered: Because the
state
(not: Commissioner Meier) is not allowed to treat its citizens like things, objects, slaves, animals in times of peace (and mostly also in war), for whatever (good) reason.
This is what we call "human dignity."
It is not a pious wish or a "basis for claims", but a paraphrase of the foundation of what we understand as the modern state constitution: content, goal, promise, reality of 500 years of "bourgeois" revolutions in Europe, America and elsewhere.
Human dignity in this sense does not have the solemn, quasi-religious eternal character that is often attached to the term.
So it's not about murderer X or child kidnapper Y in films and case stories, but directly about every citizen.
Anyone who wants to allow Mr. G., who is suspected of murder, to be tortured "morally" would also have to agree that he himself, his spouse or child, is tortured.
One cannot reject torture for immanent reasons of "unsuitability" and only with difficulty for reasons of moral philosophy that are timeless.
It's about the state constitution and the foundations of democracy.
art
Von Schirach is what Johannes Mario Simmel was in the early years: a trivial author who pretends to "pick people up where they are" and reveals to the uneducated with a strenuous moralizing pose that life is complicated, but that its problems arise with good will clear questions can be reduced.
For this purpose he invents alleged "abysses" which, on closer inspection, are caricatures of the same.
Unfortunately, it is not really surprising that this range of events, spiced up with a dubious "interactive" democratization of the decision of prepunched answers, is popular with impresarios who still play the "million game" (WDR, 1970) in ethics seminars as a deterrent. introduce them, confidently assert in talk shows what they supposedly have learned "from Gladbeck", and then, drinking with joy, let 10 million viewers organize "experiments" on torture and vote on "law and justice".
Schirach's millionaire games could be ignored if they were nothing but entertainment.
In fact, they are a hollowing out of reality through the pretense and falsification of fictitious authenticity.
ARD's »historical program« should not be to organize interactive court and moral shows based on the suffering of crime victims.
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