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Thomas Fischer, formerly a federal judge, today again a SPIEGEL columnist
Photo: imago images / Future Image
Dear Readers!
Everything has an end, and this column will be no exception.
Now you don't have to make a principle out of every slice of apple and a longing for death out of a need for a break.
But today's text is my last for the time being: break, and bye!
The timing is right. The annoyance of the abuse and suspicion comments in the readers' forum has increased unpleasantly recently; There are just a lot of people on the go, looking for projection surfaces and valves, who consider the usual limits of expertise, intelligence and interaction to be a hindrance, quite apart from the fact that charismatically received, higher truths as well as the enlightenment of them are not allowed to take into account anyhow; that is, so to speak, innate in them.
A weighty reason for the need for a break is that the columnist recently decided to do something new professionally, which is actually forbidden to the old white retired judge as such in the opinion of the Internet Higher Tribunal, but firstly it is still fun and secondly The anonymous keyboard operators concern exactly as much as the columnists concern the holes in the socks of the righteous.
In short: you cannot always do everything at the same time.
So there should be a while column break.
How long it will take remains to be seen.
But if that seems a threat to you, you can't expect any pity from me.
Thomas Fischer
Born in 1953, is a legal scholar and was Chairman of the 2nd Criminal Senate 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.
A column is a column.
She serves some wishes more, sometimes less well, and not others.
Sometimes she serves wishes that have not been expressed with means that not everyone immediately recognizes.
And finally, like all art, it also has a life of its own that is alien to the author.
I say this, with a certain degree of empathic (!) Connectedness, to the indomitable, who have suffered long and hard from the length of the texts, the interweaving of thoughts, the back-referencing of the subordinate clauses and the contrast of the associations were prepared every week to take on the agony of reading again and to let the others participate in their suffering and protest against it.
The reasons for such a strong will to self-harm as to joy or at least for their public demonstration are, as I well know, not all good and pure.
But, dear oath-phobics, that was priced into the concept: a Rorschach test in conjunctives.
You must learn to live with that too.
II.
The world, the people, the law are complicated matters; their interaction and interrelationships are often extremely confusing. That is why it would be stupid and despicable to pretend to others that the world is easy to understand with little effort and that life can be mastered without mental, moral and intellectual effort. That is wrong, and whoever believes it will in the long run tend to be among the losers in the world in which such categories are important.
Every day one can experience and observe how the structures of the old securities, communications and liabilities collapse or dissolve into insubstantial chatter. This also and especially applies to the sphere of law and its demarcation from morality. This is not coincidence or arbitrariness, but the good old, objective necessity. The whole enormous superstructure, as the Mohr from Trier once said, turns over and at times, here and then, it gets into great confusion. Complaining is of little use, and behind the flourishes of the delicate excitement it is better to look for the straight lines of the foundations.
Today in Germany people fear that the Thirty Years' War and the plague are just around the corner. Whether that is true remains to be seen; it presumably does not depend on which manifestos of the narrow-mindedness that is resolute in all matters are written in the circles of the once again completely new identity. The beginning of the apocalyptic phase of world affairs is also not characterized by the fact that the price for 3-room condominiums has risen from nine hundred to nine hundred and fifty thousand thalers or the local district administration has failed to lay out plans in good time for the smooth end of the world. The world is not going to end because the privileged, lazy and hypochondriac layers of the middle class lose their orientation in the globalized market and no longer know how to saywhat is proper, which men's fragrance you have to buy and when you should love whom, how often and why, as long as there is still a little space next to the needy, swollen self. So it is, as there is, actually as always: When the gods are exchanged, it has least to do with heaven.
You have to talk about content, not about forms, about rules, not about sentimentality.
Public life is not group therapy, the state is not a substitute for father and mother who were thrown away in the garbage in the identity frenzy of the eternally childish.
I think the column did quite well at some point in speaking about content, thanks to the help of its readers.
Because under the surfaces, in my opinion, in the column forum and in the reception, a rather idiosyncratic and unruly form has developed, in which the essentials repeatedly asserted themselves: opening up thinking, speaking and exchanging ideas.
Recognition of association as a means of rationality.
Responsibility of speaking beyond infantile babble.
Recognition of differences and limits.
It doesn't work without that.
You have to talk about content, not about forms, about rules, not about sentimentality.
I will definitely miss that.
Over time, images, ideas, reflections from the other person and even predictions about upcoming arguments, misunderstandings or mistakes of the author develop over time.
That's how you learn too.
So I would like to thank (almost) everyone who took part in the forum discussion.
Incidentally, of course, also to all other readers.
And I would like to thank the editorial director of "Opinion and Debate", Stefan Kuzmany, for the wonderful collaboration, the patience of waiting for texts at the last minute and for the suggestions for deleting the most unnecessary passages .
And the “filter” team of the forum moderation, which I don't know, but who probably kept a lot of malevolent at bay.
With this in mind: keep talking to one another, dear readers, think about the value of law, even beyond your own horizon of emotions and interests, and stay healthy.
See you.
Editor's note: We would like to thank Thomas Fischer for his never too short, never comfortable, never shallow texts - and we are pleased that he remains connected to us as an occasional guest author.