Enlarge image
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier: Where did he fail?
Photo: Bernd von Jutrczenka / picture alliance / dpa
Afford
Occasionally, experts in the readers' forum recommend that I stick to my last.
This refers to questions of substantive criminal law doctrine and criminal procedural law, while the readers tend to be at home in political science, philosophy and virology, and recently also in military history, geostrategy and folklore.
Today, the treasure chest of the criminal shoemaker deals with error and guilt, two keywords that are not suspected of coming from a subject area of which the author knows nothing, but his readers understand a great deal.
basics
Let's take the Federal President as an example.
He was recently quoted in "Bild" as saying: "We failed".
A portrait photo of him was also printed, which showed him with a very failed facial expression.
The visualization is already a step towards knowledge.
Because "having failed" is not a state that can be experienced directly and mimicked unfiltered.
So many and so many fail every day and are happy about it;
others, on the other hand, not so few, do not realize at all during their lifetime that they are failing.
In addition to an objective task, a subjective goal, personal action and a measurable result, failure always includes a third party who firstly notices everything and secondly judges it.
It can be outside the world (e.g. God, the cloud or the archive of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation), in the middle of the outside world (e.g. a good enemy, a dear partner or a critical press) or within ourselves (e.g .the conscience, the superego or daddy's voice in the ear of the soul).
It is complicated by the fact that the actual existence of the third party is irrelevant.
It is enough, erroneously or not, to accept his presence.
That's why Mr. Robinson Crusoe, alone with himself and the dominant culture, dines with a knife and fork while the SUV driver picks her nose in a traffic jam.
Whether the Minister of War fails
The question always arises: What is/was the task?
Here life is unmanageable, the possibilities are endless: failure at school, in love or at the decisive moment are classic, functional failure of the voice, memory or control, tragic failure in the face of a challenge, the future or the Reality.
What did Federal President Steinmeier fail at, and with him those whom he calls »we«?
It is said to have been a self-accusation of the greatest importance in Steinmeier history, comparable to the scream of the father who, leaving his specialist doctor’s office, finds his dear son lying under the bridge in a drunken state and sinks down sobbing: "I have failed!"
Alongside medicine, criminal justice is a notorious failure.
No sooner have 1,000 prisoners served their sentence than 300 of them dream of making quick money at the expense of others.
The forensic psychiatric department has barely released ten child abusers with personality disorders when two are sneaking around playgrounds again.
And sometimes bad things happen.
In the reality of judges or psychiatrists, prosecutors or administrators, such prognostic failure is relative: the prognosis did not materialize.
It would only be “wrong” if it had read: “100 percent security”.
But nobody says that, because it would go against rational knowledge and experience.
Probability of recidivism, criminal prognosis, security are always only statements of probability.
In the living environment of the Federal President, parliamentary group leaders or talk show moderators, it feels different.
The prognosis as a fact-based probability statement about reality is linked to an inner process in which the protagonist's enormous responsibility himself becomes a factor in the prediction conditions.
If you, reader, do not understand this, you can guess what Mr. Steinmeier might mean when he says:
»We have, ladies and gentlemen, and I am also saying this quite consciously at this point to our own address, which we have all reassured ourselves for years and again and again in a perhaps understandable but today all the more painful way and also, yes, looked the other way, ended up failing in our quest for a more peaceful world for our citizens and the people of Europe we hoped for.«
mistake
Man is not omniscient.
Let's say: He could know everything, but doesn't know it.
What distinguishes him is his compulsion to causality.
The herring takes the world as it comes.
The chimpanzee doubts.
Man is sure that everything in the universe has a cause.
If he doesn't know them, he doesn't change this view: he doesn't know the causes "yet".
When all science is accomplished, we will know all causes and consequences of the cosmos.
If you don't believe that, you can still believe in God.
Only he who thinks the world is causeless is crazy.
Life is a chain of errors for this very reason.
Since human beings are endowed with imagination, they have motives, plans, ideas and "prefigures".
Most of them cannot be controlled or can only be controlled with difficulty;
the conscious and the preconscious are constantly busy comparing "imaginations" with realities, feelings with experiences, in order to enable orientation in reality.
Each new perception proves that all divergent ideas were errors.
Error has a special place of honor in criminal law: it sits in the subject, which is sometimes called "perpetrator", sometimes "victim", sometimes "tool", sometimes "participant", and in the end even "judge".
A perpetrator who makes a mistake in what he does as a perpetrator is still a perpetrator, but perhaps not responsible for what comes out: someone who takes someone else's wallet in his pocket, which he thinks is his own, takes someone else's thing away, but has none Theft "intention" because he is wrong (§ 16 StGB).
And anyone who thinks that a creditor is allowed to take the debtor's wallet is wrong about an alleged right (§ 17 StGB).
In both cases, modern criminal law deals mercifully with the wrongdoer: his misconception reduces guilt or even leads to innocence.
Fault
A cat that eludes the mouse remains hungry, but doesn't apologize for its failure, aiming better the next time it jumps.
To put it in terms of world politics: Mr. Selenskyj and his famous ambassador are disappointed in Doctor Steinmeier, but do not interpret this as a sign of their own failure, but as an incentive to increase their insolence.
Failure as guilt is responsibility for an evil.
It comes into the world when events are viewed retrospectively, causalities are reconstructed and behavioral consequences are »attributed«.
If the mother had not given birth to the perpetrator, he would not have become a murderer.
If the tram hadn't taken him to the scene of the crime, he would have arrived later and the victim would no longer have been there.
And so on: bicycle chain theory.
People are used to not automatically generating "responsibilities" from causalities, because otherwise they would not be able to do anything else because of sheer failures and punishments.
One has to make a choice: How much causality is still enough for the "attribution";
when does cause and consequence become just coincidence and destiny?
In general, this works quite well because it is constantly being discussed and negotiated at all social levels: 90 percent of the »leading culture« consists of it.
On the fringes there are exceptions: the murderer mother, for example, unlike the tram driver, still gets a bit of social revenge for causal responsibility: contempt, exclusion, distrust.
If someone is Rastafarian, Romanian or Russian, a few curls or a nationality are often enough,
to be laden with immortal responsibility.
In the Christian West, where guilt is considered something individual, this is felt to be unfair in quiet times.
If the pressure of fear increases, the uniqueness of the dignified individual is quickly over.
we
If President Steinmeier had not shaken hands with President Putin, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.
If Mrs. Merkel had spent one hundred billion euros on the Bundeswehr in 2013, Russia would not have annexed Crimea.
If Gorbachev and Yeltsin hadn't led the Soviet Union into utter chaos, Putin wouldn't have become president and the value-soaked free trade West wouldn't need a frontline state against him.
Who knows?
It is not impossible;
but on the other hand not likely either.
In these weeks we are experiencing a wondrous movement of inner contemplation, self-reflection and repentance in Germany.
Not since 1945 has one experienced such a level of consternation at one's own error.
After World War II, the realization that good faith had failed was tempered by the certainty that, out of sheer good-naturedness, one had become the victim of lunatics in the Reich Chancellery and Reich Ministry of Propaganda.
In view of Ukraine II, this does not work without further ado.
Mercilessly the new exploration of having failed: in retrospect, the lives of politicians, industrialists, poets and publicists sink to the dust.
Generations of engineers, violinists, members of parliament and Pushkin readers confess with tears that they have been wrong for 60, 40 or 20 years.
Fortunately, most of the formerly trusting people know enough third parties who have failed even more than themselves. This is how you help each other to remember.
Only a few have remained blameless.
In the search for exemplary failure-free we followed our intuition and found what we were looking for on page 2 of a large Sunday newspaper, where the columnist bko confesses after a small Tuscany denunciation by Mrs. Merkel and her bosom friend:
"However, we have always warned against Putin (...) Of course, we didn't believe for a second the fairy tale of our politicians that (the gas) from Siberia is a bridge to our future as well as to our Russian neighbors."
Blessed is he who can say such things of himself!
If you add Ms. Emcke, who in the SZ, as always, calls for the eternal maximum dismay of everyone, the poet's words apply:
»They both lie in each other’s arms/ And weep with pain and joy/ You don’t see a tearful eye...«
guilty verdicts
Jurisdiction: The opinion has grown accustomed to that the judiciary always fails.
In everyday questions of error about elements of the offense, justification or reasons for excusing, German fully qualified lawyers definitely manage to clear up years of failure in such a way that a guilty verdict seems acceptable to the people;
if necessary, a committee of inquiry, a Schirach vote or hard-but-fair will help.
Only in very difficult cases does history itself have to step in: occasionally as a tribunal, later as a habilitation.
She is usually called by the failure commissioner according to Art. 5 Para. 1 Sentence 2 GG, i.e. the free, independent and critical press, which is happy to help with the decision-making process.
In this respect, exemplary work has been done for the last six weeks.
The list of failures that has been compiled is long.
The fact that she lists surprisingly few journalists is certainly just a careless mistake.
The acknowledgment of past failures in predicting the future may be instructive for psychotherapy, stressful for the gastric mucosa, and taxing for the social environment, but otherwise it is of little importance.
It only gains this when conclusions for future behavior are to be drawn from past “failures”.
Firstly, this presupposes that the task at which the failure was performed is precisely defined.
That of course is the problem!
As far as I can see, the politicians, thinkers and writers mentioned at the moment had the task of »seeing through Putin«, »distrusting Russia« or »preparing for war«.
If you leaf through the history books, it turns out that over the millennia things have mostly turned out differently than previously assumed.
If the task of the powerful was to foresee the course of events in such a way that their strategic plans were fulfilled, then world history must be described as a continuous disaster of failure.
What is comforting about this realization is its largely banality.
Referring to the Federal President, that may be reassuring.
penalty
Second, the most important thing about failure and imputation is the punishment, sometimes enforced, sometimes waived.
Purification of guilt takes place through punishment of the culprit, also as self-punishment with general blessing.
In this respect, for example, resignation "under political pressure" or ordinary alcoholism are suboptimal.
Even hard crying doesn't always help, as you can see from Hollywood's Mr. Smith.
Also interesting
Anne Spiegel's mistake: It was politics, not pop by Tobias Rapp
Now the current race for the challenge cup of the most affected failure-Haber is characterized by the fact that the penalties are set by the guilty themselves and they also cost nothing.
After all, other people are supposed to pay their dues and die.
Although the "FAZ" claims that "tough questions" now have to be asked: "Who had which contacts?";
but I can already guess that Mr. Steinmeier, Ms. Merkel and I will no longer be called up for combat use.
Herr Stoltenberg, the Secretary General, began his punishment by pointing out that there was no real difference between defensive and offensive weapons.
Others punish themselves by referring to the famous constitutional lawyer Peter Struck for the interpretation of Art. 87a Para. 2 Basic Law.
Rheinmetall found 50 Leopard Ones in the basement as an atonement, and in the "Morning Briefing" from Berlin one heard rumors that the US President no longer wanted to be deterred by Mr. Putin's nuclear war threat in order to atone for his error.
This sounds familiar to those of us who practice punishment for a living.
The crowd always suffers a bit when the executioners do their job.
And as the guillotine, terror and salvation at the same time, rips the failure out of the spectator's body,
If it were true that those who now claim this of "us" have "failed," they would be unfit for further use in the same or equivalent task.
They should then "step back" from anything at once, and not bother us with gossip about the disappointment of their exquisite kindness.
If you're sure you've failed, make room!
However, it seems to me that the question of whether 50 years of peace in Central Europe can pass as "failure" has not yet been seriously answered.
It is doubtful that judges who suspended a sentence or measure on probation "failed" if the person concerned committed a new offense after 40 years.
That everything in the world has a reason is unaffected by this, and that one recognizes reasons after a disaster has happened is a gift.
The question of the resocialization prognosis for Mr. Steinmeier and "us" is by no means clear.
In any case, it is not a compelling idea to punish oneself by sending others into the war that one failed to prevent.
forecast
One would have to define future success.
Should »we« start preparing for a war against Hungary (Orban!), USA (Trump!) or France (Le Pen!)?
Which ambassadors and foreign ministers should be mistrusted from now on?
Which supply chains will fail in 20 years?
At which concerts, yachts, board meetings is it absolutely forbidden to be photographed?
more on the subject
British military historian on the brutality of the Kremlin ruler:»Putin wants to be feared like Stalin and Hitler«An interview by Peter Littger
Without exception, all those who admit to having failed in the task of seeing through the Russians consider themselves particularly well suited to fulfilling the same task in an exemplary manner in the future.
This self-prognosis corresponds to the usual.
Failure is said to be being surprised by evil.
"We have failed" is the whining of unswervingly virtuous parents about the wayward child, or the self-accusation of the kind-hearted shepherd of souls for not having been tough enough on the sinners.
The moaning and mutual accusation is an emanation of the whimpering hypocrisy that is characteristic of the German way of explaining the world.
It is arbitrary, arbitrary and serves to demonize the enemy.
It satisfies the crowd's need for simple causes and leads them into blind revenge that is a fruit of fear.
The worse the crime, one might think, the more likely it is that the losers are to blame.
But the failures in Russia do not want to understand their responsibility in this way.
You mean it, with regard to the autobiography, rather philosophically.
Otherwise they would have to stop failing tomorrow.
