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Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Radio essay "The Language of SPIEGEL"

2022-11-25T15:03:06.069Z


"The 'German news magazine' is not a news magazine": In 1957 the young author Hans Magnus Enzensberger criticized the language and style of SPIEGEL on the radio. We document his contribution here.


Enlarge image

Hans Magnus Enzensberger giving a lecture at Hessischer Rundfunk (1968)

Photo: Manfred Rehm/ picture alliance/ dpa

my wisdom is a bulrush cut your finger with it to paint a red ideogram on my shoulder ki, wit ki wit

(From the poem »lock lied« by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 1955)

On February 8, 1957, the Süddeutscher Rundfunk broadcast a "radio essay" with the same title as this reprint. Its author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, attempted to dismiss SPIEGEL's "moral" as a "scam." expose.

Enzensberger, who allows himself to be described as a "cultural critic" in his "radio essay," is a member of the editorial board of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk;

he is also known to readers of literary magazines as a young essayist (born in 1929).

He studied literature and philosophy at German universities and at the Sorbonne, receiving his doctorate in 1955.

phil.

and published poems, essays and reviews.

A first volume of poetry is due to appear later this year.

In his “radio essay” about DER SPIEGEL, Enzensberger – with whose consent a slightly abridged version of the essay is printed here – contrasts the author, i.e. himself, with a “reader” as an adversary.

AUTHOR:

I have an attack in mind that will launch a number of strong propositions.

Thesis 1: The SPIEGEL style is not a style, but a scam.

Thesis 2: The "German news magazine" is not a news magazine.

Thesis 3: DER SPIEGEL does not practice criticism, but pseudo-criticism.

Thesis 4: The SPIEGEL reader is not oriented, but disoriented

Please forgive the malicious formulation of the fourth thesis.

It is of course not meant personally.

READER:

I don't forgive them at all.

Rather, I will deny them to the best of my ability.

Furthermore, I allow myself to put forward a thesis:

Thesis 5: DER SPIEGEL is a necessity.

But before we argue about these sentences, we should get rid of a few factual preliminary questions.

There follows some generally known information as well as some speculation and misconceptions about the history, circulation and business success of SPIEGEL.

Then the "critical investigation" continues:

READER:

If you want to do me a favor, come back to the provocative theses that you put forward earlier but didn't explain, let alone prove.

AUTHOR:

With pleasure.

I repeat:

The SPIEGEL style is not a style, but a scam

READER:

Proof?

AUTHOR:

Very simple: The SPIEGEL language is applicable to everything;

it is of poor universality.

Bad because what it captures is made unrecognizable.

LESER: At

most, you could claim that the SPIEGEL style is bad, not that it doesn't exist.

AUTHOR:

Style is selective, never applicable to anything different: style is tied to the one who writes it.

The SPIEGEL language is anonymous, a product of a collective.

It masks the one who writes it, as well as what is being described: language of a bad universality that thinks itself competent for everything.

From early Christianity to rock and roll, from poetry to antitrust laws, from drug riots to Minoan art, everything is brought together.

The ubiquitous jargon covers everything and everyone with its coarse net: the world becomes a prisoner of the scam.

READER:

What you accuse the magazine of is nothing other than its comprehensibility.

It makes the objects in their diversity commensurable to the reader.

This is not a mistake.

AUTHOR:

The reader you speak of is a mythological figure, like Lieschen Müller in German cinema.

A character that is of course very real.

But this reader is not a natural phenomenon: it is bred.

Not only does SPIEGEL make its articles commensurate with the reader, but also the reader with the magazine itself. It transforms the reader, it draws them to the level of their language, it educates them.

Don't think this would be an easy process.

You have to learn the SPIEGEL language, it is by no means simple, but extremely baroque, it flirts with its own cunning, with quickly applied terminology, with buzzwords, with the slang of the season.

It exploits the deep need to be able to have a say and is in this respect related to the language of the »Reader's Digest«.

Of course she is less conservative: she doesn't act,

as if she were "the best," but as if she were "the last."

You see, even snobbery has its fate.

In his work on the culture industry, Theodor W. Adorno described how the same thing is packaged as a specialty and sold to unsuspecting people in the know.

Such packaging is the language of SPIEGEL.

READER: Please quote

!

AUTHOR:

The quote is my best argument.

Incidentally, you are right: ideologically, the scam is of course justified by the desire for general comprehensibility.

I will quote a few programmatic sentences from »Time«, the SPIEGEL model:

The whole magazine should be understandable to a busy man - a conception quite different from that of the columns in the dailies, each addressed to particular groups.

In order for the entire contents of Time to find its way into the reader's mind, it had first to be translated into a language a man could understand.

The maxim was later formulated from this idea: »Time« is as if it were written by a man for a man.

Let's safely leave »Time« out of the game.

As far as SPIEGEL is concerned, he also translates, but not into simple German, but into the mesh.

I pick some blossoms at random:

At the closing ceremony of the XVI.

At the Summer Olympics, the Australian salute gunners sent a martial echo to Melbourne's muscle war.

Her Majesty's artillerymen provided the Queen of England with the current warlike backdrop thunder to that Olympic spectacle, which had become a bad play in the midst of a very unpeaceful world vain smoke and mirrors

Simple German?

Would you like a detailed analysis?

If we experimentally degrease the text, if we massage away the swollen idioms, if we reduce the poses of the syntax, little more than one line remains:

The salute was fired at the closing ceremony of the Olympics.

We didn't like that

If SPIEGEL had put it that way, the reader, the busy man, would not only have saved nine lines of superfluous reading, he would also have had a clearer head.

Also, he could distinguish the message from its interpretation, which are being hopelessly confounded with the help of the scam.

We will come back to that later.

READER: Make

me out to be a philistine all you want.

I find SPIEGEL's version more amusing than yours.

AUTHOR:

Arguing about humor is bad.

When the magazine writes about the American pop singer Presley that he is "extraordinary" and "transports" his listeners "from Dixieland to Kinseyland," that's miserable German, but certainly not without a certain comedy that corresponds to the primitiveness of the subject.

According to SPIEGEL, the convulsions of the singer, who was given an eleven-page cover story, "gave the impression that he had swallowed a jackhammer."

The roar of laughter at such jokes becomes fatal when Gide and Claudel, Sartre and Freud are characterized by their own kind.

When the young philosopher professor Wolfgang Harich was arrested in East Berlin, the SPIEGEL dug out an episode with a lady from Thailand from his life and asked himself

whether it was for "metaphysical or physical reasons" that he had moved to Berlin's Podbielski-Allee 1 with the "Siamese lady."

Do you still find that amusing?

This is KdF humor, 1956 model, chrome-plated.

A crooked and sad laughter at crooked and sad figures: may it stay that way!

That it would not be the laughter of those who handle paintings with pocketknives and cheer when the blackjack takes action.

Ridiculousness kills: This is a phrase that can take on a very sinister meaning.

attack the paintings with pocket knives, and cheer when the blackjack springs into action.

Ridiculousness kills: This is a phrase that can take on a very sinister meaning.

attack the paintings with pocket knives, and cheer when the blackjack springs into action.

Ridiculousness kills: This is a phrase that can take on a very sinister meaning.

READER:

Like all cultural critics, you exaggerate.

A bad joke doesn't kill a newspaper.

A newspaper is alive as long as it tells the truth.

As I said before, an objective news magazine is a necessity in Germany.

It's not a question of style, it's a question of morality.

AUTHOR:

Style and morality are related;

that's a truism, by the way.

So in our case: scam and morality.

I come to my second thesis:

»The German news magazine« is not a news magazine.

READER:

What?

AUTHOR:

A collection of stories and anecdotes, jokes, suppositions, letters, speculations, malicious remarks, pictures and advertisements.

I hope I make myself clear and don't forget anything.

Occasionally an editorial, a map, a statistic.

Of all the forms of communication, the one after which the paper is named is the least common: the simple message.

LESER:

But that's SPIEGEL's advantage: It relieves me, the reader, of the synthetic work and arranges the individual fragments of information in a meaningful way from the outset.

He processes them into a whole...

AUTHOR:

... a "story," as the SPIEGEL statute says:

The form in which SPIEGEL conveys its news content to the reader is the story

The purpose of the story is to turn the message into a pseudo-aesthetic entity, to remove it from the context of the situation.

A real message has an identifiable source;

it is not for nothing that it is not reproduced in any newspaper without the source, the time and place of its origin being stated.

News are generally unsuitable for entertainment purposes, they are not a means of enjoyment but a means of orientation.

The story, on the other hand, has completely different requirements: it must have a beginning and an end, a plot, and above all a hero.

Unfortunately, real news often lacks these qualities.

All the worse for the news, DER SPIEGEL seems to be saying.

READER:

But the hero of such a story can certainly be a new type of locomotive or - a method of operation!

AUTHOR:

I'll quote you again from the SPIEGEL statute:

Nothing interests man as much as man.

That's why old SPIEGEL stories should have a high human connection.

They should be about the people who make a difference.

I don't know exactly what is meant by the »high human connection«.

"Neither particularly beautiful nor particularly attractive" as the caption for a portrait of Sartre, who is known to have cross eyes?

But »Time« can tell us more about the hero of the story, namely his ideological background:

The news does not come about through "historical forces or governments or classes, but through individuals

With this the hero is justified;

history consists of little stories.

Human interest, stories made of flesh and blood: Such slogans are based on the illusion that history is made by individuals: the primarily social character of historical phenomena is denied with a dig at the Marxist concept of class.

The anecdote determines the structure of such reporting, history becomes a little story.

READER:

If you are already looking for a view of history behind the simple trick of the story, then it is in any case democratic, precisely because it is aimed at the individual, not the collective.

AUTHOR: But

this individual, as he can be seen on the cover of the magazine, is precisely the celebrity;

not the simple citizen, but the potential leader is presented here as a naturalistic icon.

The law of story dictates that history becomes biographical detail: The Hungarian October Revolution, for example, suddenly turned into a cover story about Nagy, who also appeared on the cover.

Any insurgent worker would have represented the historical event better than this helpless man.

History is made by people, but not by prominent individuals, by fetish-like figures who could be seen clearing their throats and spitting...

READER:

It's still better to have a fat politician on the cover than the same glamor girl every week.

But let the weary heroes rest.

I readily concede that every piece of news must have a source.

SPIEGEL's sources may be murky at times, but they are almost always reliable.

This is very important.

Apparently, the magazine has a very large and well-functioning network of correspondents.

The average daily newspaper makes getting the news pretty easy for itself: it taps into teletypewriters and clerks and extracts from this material what seems to be important to the editors.

DER SPIEGEL charges a little for its information and: it checks it.

AUTHOR:

That is correct;

only it is of little use to you, the reader.

Because the facts that are so laboriously and carefully determined remain hidden from you.

They will be packed.

We've seen how.

The postulate of the SPIEGEL statute,

All news processed in SPIEGEL must be correct.

applies from the reporter's point of view, not that of the reader.

If in a survey in 1954 91 percent of the participating readers were of the opinion that SPIEGEL was objective, then they probably succumbed to the same deception as you.

Objectivity is a criterion that is absolutely not applicable to the story.

The only decisive factor for the success of a story is its effect.

The demand for correctness does not arise from its essence, as is the case with the news: it is brought to you from outside, yes, strictly speaking, a story cannot be correct at all, but at most the details processed in it.

Only in this sense can it be said that SPIEGEL wants to, indeed has to, tell the truth.

Not correctness, but unassailability is demanded of it, and that for purely legal reasons.

In this sense, only an allegation that can lead to a lawsuit that would be hopeless for the magazine is considered false.

Instead of correctness, one should therefore, if you allow me the word, rather speak of inaccuracy.

Morally speaking, a double negation is not, as in logic, identical with an affirmation.

I hope to have convinced you.

LESER:

Even if I were to agree with your thesis that SPIEGEL is not a news magazine, that would only prove that its subtitle, but not that its procedure, could be attacked.

The news is by no means the only, not even necessarily the most important form of journalistic expression.

Think of the comment, the gloss or the editorial...

AUTHOR:

I have nothing but respect and admiration for SPIEGEL's leading article writer, Jens Daniel.

His procedure is unassailable, whether he is right or wrong in what he says.

To paraphrase Voltaire, if he himself were my most bitter opponent, I would defend his rights to the end, publicly expressing his opinion.

The case of the editorialist is perfectly clear.

He vouches for what he says with his name and, more importantly, he makes no claims of "objectivity"; on the contrary, he seems never tempted by the very subjectivity of his utterance, by his conviction, by his commitment to present his interpretation of the news as the news itself.

But that is exactly what the story writer does.

The story writer remains basically anonymous, he does not lay the cards on the table,

he works from the invisible.

This does not stem from his personal malice, but from the laws of his form, which is an aesthetic form.

Story is fiction: accordingly, its author must behave as a narrator, as an omnipresent demon from whom nothing remains hidden and who can look into the heart of Don Quixote, into the heart of his hero, as only Cervantes ever could.

But while Don Quixote depends on Cervantes, the journalist is at the mercy of reality.

Therefore its procedure is fundamentally dishonest, its omnipresence presumptuous.

He has to cheat his way between the simple truth of the news, which he spurns, and the higher truth of the real story, which remains closed to him.

He must interpret, order, model, arrange the facts, but he must not admit

don't show your colors, don't show yourself naked.

A desperate position.

To keep her, the story writer is forced to retouch, to write between the lines.

I don't know of any publication that has progressed further in the technique of suggestion, of letting things be seen, of insinuation than SPIEGEL.

However, the truth is not illuminated by this technique, but rather paralyzed.

She is defenseless against her.

but rather paralyzed.

She is defenseless against her.

but rather paralyzed.

She is defenseless against her.

READER:

Do you notice the advantages of a journalistic process like the one you describe?

It's no secret that here and now, as always, there are truths that can only be made public between the lines.

For my part, I believe that it is better to write about them in hindsight than not at all.

I have nothing to oppose to your aesthetic arguments against the story other than the experience that a SPIEGEL story usually contains a higher dose of criticism than thirty issues of a serious daily newspaper.

AUTHOR:

That brings us to my third thesis:

DER SPIEGEL does not criticize, but pseudo-criticism.

LESER:

With this thesis you have decidedly ventured too far.

I look forward to the tricks you will have to resort to to defend them.

AUTHOR:

Don't rejoice too soon.

My argument is extremely simple.

To be genuinely critical, you have to take a stand, which is exactly what the story writer, as we've seen, can't do.

So far, all observers have failed to ascribe any beliefs to SPIEGEL.

Those who try only reap triumphant references to the paper's independence and objectivity.

The ideology of SPIEGEL is a skeptical omniscience that doubts everything but itself. A critique that has no other approach than this imaginary fulcrum makes itself the handmaid of events from the outset.

It confines itself to pure tactics and, even before it is practiced, admits that nothing will throw it off its hinges.

Although she pretends to want to change the world, she doesn't know to what end.

Your goal changes with the tactical needs, which in turn change as the story unfolds.

To that extent it is blind: a surrogate for genuine criticism.

LESER:

If I may flatten your sentences a little, that probably means that SPIEGEL has very concrete effects without riding on principles.

That seems to me to be a real journalistic achievement.

Journalism and philosophy are two different things.

AUTHOR:

At least turn what I'm saying into a positive.

This reversal doesn't change anything about the matter.

I am even obliged to go a few steps further with my thesis.

We have seen that the tactical realism of the magazine does not allow for radical questioning.

To this it must be added that the touch of radicalism is carefully given to every line that appears in it.

The surrogate presents itself as the real thing, and vice versa: wherever radical questions are asked, the realpolitik SPIEGEL suspects them, smiling smugly, as a surrogate.

As always, the false criticism discredits the true one.

She has no other choice.

READER:

You dodge my reply.

Questions of principle are, as I said, not a matter for journalism.

For the publicist, tactical realism is not a flaw to be reproached for, but a working requirement that is to be conceded to him.

AUTHOR:

Europe's best weeklies, The New Statesman and Nation, L'Express, France Observateur, and many others, prove the opposite.

The smallest tactical detail becomes the reason for a critical root canal treatment.

You don't see the incident you are attacking as an affair, but as a symptom.

READER:

DER SPIEGEL leaves that to its readers.

He just hands him the material...

AUTHOR: Processed into a

story with the pseudo-critical interpretation already attached.

Note the inquisitorial character of the procedure, the gesture of "collecting material against" that predominates.

With the help of its network of informants and its huge archive, DER SPIEGEL has perfected the technique of the dossier.

A SPIEGEL story is very often similar to the initiation of proceedings against its hero.

Note an infamous linguistic detail that betrays the inquisitorial nature of the procedure: the dative in expressions like: 'The Khrushchev letter betrayed

Tito' or 'He

followed

him

Dylan Thomas is even back in Wales at last.' This manner of speaking turns the man in question into a defendant from the outset: a defendant to be tried and convicted under rules that remain the secret of the editorial board.

READER:

Most of those who are subjected to such a procedure probably deserve it, whether they are movie greats or pop singers...

AUTHOR:

In the best case, the tearjerker is criticized by the tearjerker of the second degree.

Where this is the case, one can accept the magazine as a kind of broken illustrated magazine, as a picture newspaper for the upscale needs.

The fact that demands and methods are refined in the process does not change the matter much.

In no way does it legitimize the treatment of vital questions of the present.

READER:

You persistently leave out one factor, perhaps the most important, in your analysis: the reader.

I can remind you of its existence.

The SPIEGEL reader is not identical with the magazine consumer, not even comparable.

Anyone who reads a magazine will be entertained.

Anyone who reads SPIEGEL does not get bored either (a circumstance that you never tire of turning into reproaches), but when he closes the magazine he was not just a spectator of a revue, a stargazer, a quick observer, but at the same time a student, Learner: while he remains clueless, he knows.

AUTHOR:

You pass the balls to me.

Let's move on to thesis four:

The SPIEGEL reader is not oriented, but disoriented.

Do you know, dear SPIEGEL reader, that your last sentence echoes the advertising slogan that the magazine used in an advertising campaign?

Who doesn't want to be safe like Theseus?

How nice is the feeling: »I know!«

DER SPIEGEL is – you will see for yourself –

The Ariadne thread of our time!

These slogans provide very useful features for the portrait of the ideal SPIEGEL reader, which I now want to devalue in a sketchy way.

I quote two more of them:

DER SPIEGEL shines a light behind the scenes of our noisy world theater...

and..

On the other hand, I, the wise man, read the background in SPIEGEL.

So I begin: The starting point can be that the reader is presented as a tabula rasa.

Nothing is assumed from him other than knowledge of the jargon.

Apparently immovable, objective images are projected onto this tabula rasa, but they only exist virtually.

They are phantoms.

If the facts depicted appear again, they are gone.

The context has to be offered again and again.

The SPIEGEL reader is a being without origin, without history and without memory.

He is the truly ahistorical being.

The archive of the magazine, an enormous silo of facts, replaces historicity and memory.

All the past is omnipresent in him, like the present in the reporter.

The historical dimension is missing for the reader as well as the form of the story negates it.

Since all given facts are presented as fundamentally unknown, it is only the magazine that gives them the dignity of what is there.

To paraphrase the critic Günter Anders, the world becomes the matrix of the magazine, the story its phantom.

Although totally ignorant, the SPIEGEL reader claims to be able to understand and judge everything.

He thinks he's smart and believes you can't fool him.

He is strengthened in this belief by the fact that something is constantly being done to him.

you can't fool him.

He is strengthened in this belief by the fact that something is constantly being done to him.

you can't fool him.

He is strengthened in this belief by the fact that something is constantly being done to him.

READER:

Are.

You finished with your Philippika?

AUTHOR: Not yet.

The reader - you, if I may say so - is suggested a superiority that he does not really have.

He is not given the role of an actor, but that of a spectator.

The insights and revelations that the magazine gives him make him a voyeur: without being responsible for anything, he can look "behind the scenes."

What he is offered is the position at the keyhole.

The magazine makes the decision for him;

it is prefabricated in the story.

While the news serves as a reliable means of orienting one's own behavior and is therefore a means of production, the story remains a pure consumer good.

It is consumed and leaves behind only emotional residues that become effective as resentment: for example envy or malicious joy.

While many stories contain hidden calls to action, these calls are never directed at the reader, but at the other who is being attacked, "exposed."

Morally, the procedure even relieves the consumer by relieving him of all responsibility and reminding him once a week of the wickedness of the world, of the others with whom he has nothing to do, for whom he does not have to take responsibility, whom he cannot influence leads.

Intellectually

, it in no way enlightens him about his factual state of ignorance, but on the contrary veils it by all means.

The result is not orientation, but the loss of it.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

READER:

I have the impression that you mean me, the reader, with all of this.

But your reasoning doesn't reach me.

You proceed a priori: I am an empiricist.

There is no such thing as the ideal SPIEGEL reader, only people like you and me, who will continue to read them until a better magazine replaces them.

Incidentally, you can only expect your theses to be recognized if you substantiate them philologically in the text instead of deducing them abstractly.

AUTHOR:

I'm willing to do that

Es folgen – zwölf Manuskriptseiten lang – Zitate nebst Erläuterungen aus drei SPlEGEL-Geschichten über Jean Paul Sartre, mit denen bewiesen wird, daß der SPIEGEL in den Jahren 1948, 1949 und 1956 jeweils etwas anderes über den Pariser Existenzphilosophen geschrieben hat – ein Faktum, das von der SPIEGEL-Redaktion nicht bestritten wird.

AUTOR: Ein sorgfältiger Vergleich der drei Artikel, die Sie hörten, einen aus dem Jahr 1948, einen von 1949 und einen von 1956, dürfte auch den letzten Zweifel daran beheben, auf wessen Seiten der Opportunismus zu suchen ist, von dem der SPIEGEL spricht. Wollte ich das Ergebnis der Analyse resumieren, so müßte ich meine Thesen wiederholen:

DER SPIEGEL-Stil ist kein Stil, sondern eine Masche

Das »deutsche Nachrichtenmagazin« ist kein Nachrichtenmagazin

Der SPIEGEL übt nicht Kritik, sondern Pseudokritik

Der SPIEGEL-Leser wird nicht orientiert, sondern desorientiert

LESER: Und die fünfte? Die fünfte These?

AUTOR: Welche These?

LESER: Die meine!

AUTOR: Verzeihen Sie bitte, aber ich kann mich wirklich nicht besinnen ...

LESER: Ich wiederhole sie gern. These fünf, die These des Lesers:

Der SPIEGEL ist eine Notwendigkeit.

Sie wundern sich gar nicht, wie wenig ich Ihren Sätzen widersprochen habe? Das war meist überflüssig. Ich akzeptiere sie ausdrücklich oder enthalte mich der Stimme. Meine Überlegung ist ganz einfach. Wenn es der SPIEGEL zuwege bringt, daß auch nur ein korrupter Beamter entfernt wird, wenn er nur einen einzigen Preistreiber im Jahr bloßstellt, nur eine politische Zwecklüge dem Gelächter preisgibt, ist er mir willkommen. Wenn die Polizei auch nur ein einziges Exemplar beschlagnahmt, stehe ich auf seiten des Zensierten und nicht auf seiten der Zensur. Der Vorfall beweist für mich, daß eine Institution wie der SPIEGEL für uns notwendig ist. Es ist notwendig, daß es wenigstens ein Blatt gibt, das Interessenverbände, Ministerialbürokratien und Funktionäre nicht fürchtet, ein Blatt, das sich gegen den Maulkorb tapfer zu wehren weiß. Meine einzige These schlägt vier der Ihrigen, wie richtig sie auch immer sein mögen.

AUTOR: Ihre These bestreite ich nicht. Dagegen bestreite ich entschieden die Folgerungen, die Sie aus ihr ziehen. Der SPIEGEL ist, wie Sie ganz richtig sagen, eine Institution, die die Macht hat, einen korrupten Beamten aus seinem Amt zu entfernen. Er hat aber auch die Macht, die Meinungen Hunderttausender zu korrumpieren. Solange er von dieser Möglichkeit Gebrauch macht, fehlt ihm die Legitimation dazu, jene zu ergreifen. Der Nimbus der Macht, der ihm anhaftet, steigert nur seine Gefährlichkeit.

LESER: Ich werde Ihnen eine Fangfrage stellen. Wenn Sie die gesetzliche Möglichkeit hätten, das Verbot des SPIEGEL durchzusetzen, würden Sie es tun?

AUTOR: Auf keinen Fall.

LESER: Damit stimmen Sie meiner These zu, der SPIEGEL sei notwendig. Übrigens sind Sie nicht konsequent.

AUTOR: Die Konsequenz, die Sie mir abverlangen, wäre tödlich. Sie würde nicht nur dem SPIEGEL die Freiheit nehmen, Fehler zu begehen, sondern auch mir die Freiheit, sie zu kritisieren. Verbot ist kein Argument, mit dem die Unredlichkeit zu widerlegen, die Wahrheit zu zeigen wäre. Der SPIEGEL, damit haben Sie recht, ist eine Notwendigkeit, Eine bittere Notwendigkeit. Jedes Volk, so hat ein berühmter Amerikaner einmal gesagt, hat die Presse, die es verdient. Jedes Volk, so können wir hinzufügen, verdient die Presse, die es nötig hat. Daß wir ein Magazin vom Schlage des SPIEGEL nötig haben, spricht nicht für das Blatt, das die Masche zu seiner Moral gemacht hat: Es spricht gegen unsere Presse insgesamt, gegen den Zustand unserer Gesellschaft; es spricht mit einem Wort gegen uns.

Ende

Source: spiegel

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