Do intelligence work and journalism exclude each other, do they merely run parallel – or neither?
On November 23rd, journalist Josef-Otto Freudenreich delivered a speech/sermon during the “Service at 7” in Waiblingen's St. Michael's Church, after which the Zeitenspiegel exhibition “Peace Counts” was shown. Freudenreich's contribution, verbatim:
Dear Mrs. Eisrich, dear community,
As a former Assistant Head Server, I thank you
Thank you very much for the invitation, which gives me the opportunity to talk about something
speak, which I myself had to learn, which is not given to us
was aber alle brauchen, wenn wir im
To walk through life with your head held high: on civic courage. You hardly believe it: there are even adult education courses on it.
I could now, as a sociologist, which I am by training, on this
speak and reflect on the meaning of civil courage, meaning *civis* (citizen) and courage, for society, and what it means for society when it is absent. I would then have to speak a lot about solidarity, disintegrated solidarity, and anonymization.
However, I want to take a different, more practical, everyday, and closer path: the journalistic one. That simply means: look closely, ask many questions, including uncomfortable ones, document what is, even if it doesn't align with the zeitgeist.
This is my profession, I could also say: my passion, because the profession of a journalist is actually the most beautiful in the world.
We all know these everyday situations. On the tram, on the street, in public spaces. Someone is threatened, perhaps a Black person. They are beaten up, knocked down, kicked.
What do we do? Do we help? Do we look away and hurry on our way?
Does the fear of being drawn into something we don't want paralyze us?
If you travel a lot, you'll often ask yourself these questions
have to be made because violence has increased. But is it only the fist in another's eye? Is it not also bullying in the office, arbitrary dismissals at the company, violence at home, which demand a decisive no? Doesn't the recent statement by a senior hydroelectric power plant operator, who called Martin Bonhoeffer a “traitor to the fatherland,” also belong to this? We know that violence can also be exerted through words.
“Nothing requires more courage and character than to stand open before the
”...to find yourself at odds with your time and to say loudly: "No." That is by Kurt Tucholsky.
Civil courage also means saying no to what is commonplace for us
appears, normal, ordinary, what just happens. A
A democratic society needs this no. It needs the
Intolerance toward the violation of their core values, among which we count freedom, justice, and solidarity. One could also express it differently: civil courage is a genuinely democratic behavior with which each individual, without office or public mandate, can stand up against lies and injustice. But civil courage also means that we give expression to our own fears.
But what do we do? Isn't it possible that we are often tempted to shirk our responsibilities? That we strategize, equivocate, and calculate what's best for us?
what benefits us and what harms us. Absolutely no clear words, but rather to hide behind political or diplomatic jargon or behind the term “Swabian-liberal,” which is often just an attitude or cowardice. Absolutely avoid conflict, don't call a spade a spade, but instead throw smoke bombs, behind whose smoke one can quickly become invisible. Perhaps we have become a spiritless society that dares nothing and considers anything possible. Anything goes and preferably easily.
To avoid being misunderstood: I'm not talking about those who stride through life with chests puffed out, overflowing self-confidence, not to say, self-righteousness free of self-doubt. There are plenty of them. Those, for example, who always tell us we need to tighten our belts while they themselves need suspenders. I'm talking about the doubters, those who still have a sense of how a
civilized society would require. In church one would
Probably say: brotherly.
Let me return to my profession at this point, the media. You may have noticed that I inserted the word “actually” when I said that journalism is the most beautiful profession in the world. You can hear doubt in that, and this doubt has to do with the state, with the spirit of the media, which is becoming increasingly shallow.
Let's take a really close look, let's ask the right questions,
Do we have an opinion? Or are we praying – excuse me for that in
this room – only follow what politicians, bankers, and award-givers dictate into our notebooks? Could it be that we read, hear, and see the same things everywhere? We've reached the point again where we have to duck. The economic crisis, which irresponsible gluttons have brought upon us, drowns out the courage needed to re-enter the mainstream.
Forget that our Founding Fathers [warned about/were concerned with/feared] the press
have written a family chronicle, to be guardians, controllers of power, enlighteners, and guides. They are meant to contribute to opinion formation, to help recognize where something is going right or wrong, where power is being abused or used for good. What remains of that?
Hans Magnus Enzensberger coined the term "consciousness industry," with which he meant that what is in our heads is produced by media factories. Later, he spoke of television as a "zero medium," which promises even less good, but that's not too far-fetched when we consider what we're pestered with day after day.
We learn civil courage from neither the one nor the other, because they do not want, or at least do not promote, precisely what defines them: swimming against the current, fearlessly standing up for one's own convictions. What we read, see, and hear is – with exceptions – mainstream.
You remember the neoliberal phase. One could also say with Guido Westerwelle: everyone for themselves, and if you're not lucky, you're out of luck and end up on welfare. The Ackermans, Schröders, and Hundts told us that globalization would bring great blessings upon us, perhaps with some painful cuts, but if everyone just worked hard enough, it wouldn't be to their detriment. And the state should stay out of it. The market would regulate everything itself. That's what we were constantly told, read, and saw, because the media took on a parrot-like role.
But suddenly everything is different. Suddenly banks and
Car manufacturers under Angela Merkel's wing. Suddenly, the same leading article writers who once transfigured their antisocial market economy into a doctrine of salvation are discoursing about the end of capitalism. And they are calling for the state.
That's not brave. Just a reflex to the zeitgeist, which today is so
and blows differently tomorrow. Journalistic courage would look different. She chose the uncomfortable path, asking about the people who have been run over by turbo-capitalism, about the ethics of the market, the morality of managers, and a future where not everyone has to fight against everyone else. Sometimes one wishes for a Martin Luther back, who nails his theses to the church door in Wittenberg.
But what are the owners of the media, the press, doing? I could now recall the legendary statement by Paul Sethe, who once said that freedom of the press is the freedom of a few people to express their opinions. I won't, because things are more complicated, because there is no longer any need for an opinion to be executed from above. The mainstream is a product of the adaptation of all involved parties to the big media game.
Most publishers today say: quality improvement through
Cost savings. They don't say what quality means, they just say, as happened at the WAZ: 300 jobs have to go. They may also have read that the Süddeutsche Zeitung is also affected, the business titles from Gruner + Jahr, and they may have also seen the Landesschau this week, which featured the Stuttgart press house. I can assure you: this is just the beginning.
Today's publishers, at least the majority of them, could just as easily run screw factories. There are no more Augsteins who understand their newspapers and magazines as the “stormtroopers of democracy.” (Just take Stefan Aust, the former editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, who is suing us because we dared to give a platform to a public prosecutor who criticized Aust. Aust now wants to hold us liable for dissemination. The latest development is that he even wants to ban me from commenting on his actions).
Most publishers today want only one thing: return. And preferably in double digits. They overlook the fact that quality journalism is not a commodity, but a cultural asset that must be protected in the interest of a democratic civil society. Anyone who says something like that today is already suspected of having moral courage. Yet it is a pure matter of course.
Let me offer some encouragement in the second part. I'd like to tell you about our reading tour with the book “Wir können alles – Filz, Korruption und Kumpanei im Musterländle” (Felt, Corruption, and Cronyism in the Model State). It took us to 25 locations in Baden-Württemberg, brought us together with 3,000 people – and opened our eyes. To the stubbornness of people, what hopes they have, what fears, and what will to overcome them.
One of the first readings was in Ravensburg in Upper Swabia. So, in a very conservative region where the Catholic Church, the Catholic nobility, and the Catholic district administrators still have the sole right to interpretation. There is also a newspaper there that calls itself the “independent newspaper for Christian culture and politics.” The Schwäbische Zeitung.
She sued over the book because it referred to “the worst kind of bullying"
the deal was made. The process ended with a settlement that
nothing further was provided other than the addition: The Swabian Newspaper
vehemently denies this. But that is not important. What was important was the behavior of that bookseller from Ravensburg, who had dared to invite us for a reading. He had a poster hanging in his shop window that featured an advance print of the story about the Schwäbische Zeitung.
Envoys of the newspaper put him under massive pressure, wanting
at least seeing the bullying accusation blacked out, even though the court hadn't even heard the case yet. And what did the bookseller do? He left the poster hanging, well aware that the newspaper monopolist could make his life difficult. He didn't back down, he didn't consider the disadvantages he might face if he ruined his relationship with the “independent newspaper for Christian culture and politics.” He simply said no because he didn't want his mouth and opinions to be forbidden. “A newspaper, more than any other company, must accept,’ he emphasized, ’that its business practices are discussed. If the only daily newspaper available here doesn't report on the book, it's our duty as booksellers to spread the word. True to the motto: He who does not fight has already lost.".
We found many such courageous people in Upper Swabia. With "Netzwerk Süd," an association of green-alternative groups in Upper Swabia – yes, that really exists – we organized a tour through several cities. They rented municipal halls for us, handled advertising, and organized music groups. The proceeds didn't go into anyone's pockets but were intended for our legal fund.
to improve. In other words: They got involved, and they, like us, really enjoyed it. This was also because the pressure eventually became so great that the monopoly newspaper couldn't avoid reporting on subsequent events.
That's worth a lot in a region where one sometimes feels like a
Monarchy is remembered. Here they meet politicians like the
ideological director of Upper Swabia, Wilfried Steuer, who, through his
sees the Catholic faith as sufficiently legitimate to appoint a district administrator
to be alone. I will never forget the trip with him to his own
Forgot the cross. It says: “Faithfully upward, bravely forward,
”grateful backwards." His actual motto, as he says,
don't let them carve you up: “Secretly sideways.” Breaking open the secrecy of back rooms – that too is civil courage. It is growing in Upper Swabia.
However, we have also found them in other places. Citizens who resist corrupt mayors, mayors who take on overly powerful energy companies, citizens who refuse to accept a government-loyal judiciary. We have also found them within the police force, from whom they suddenly receive documents in which officers report on their work. In which they write about sharply increased suicide rates, cronyism, excessive workloads, and deliberate harassment. Merely documenting this poses an extreme risk to them; if they were caught as informants, passing it on to journalists would cost them their jobs. They would then be considered traitors of state secrets.
We live off such “whistleblowers,” and this book lives off them. Without them, most pages would remain blank, and we would lack the facts we need to write. Here again, I want to clarify: we journalists, sometimes called investigative or expository journalists, are not the main characters, nor are we the avengers of the disenfranchised.
We journalists are merely the chroniclers of the sometimes unbearable; the heroes are those informants who only meet with them at highway rest stops because Big Brother is at home in their offices and companies. This too is a consequence of ever-increasing surveillance, extending even into the private sphere, which – if one isn't careful – can escalate into paranoia. Whoever sees a secret agent behind every bush has stopped attributing rationality to reality. But civil courage grows from clarity of
Thoughts and freedom of conscience.
When we talk about civic courage, we're talking about ourselves. About our willingness to get involved, or our inability, perhaps even just our timidity, to take a stand. What remains certain is that it's about everyday freedom of speech and the acceptance of dissent. This extends to recognizing and supporting people who walk the straight path and stand up for what is right and just. The more we live by this principle, the more
This country will one day need fewer heroes.
Thank you for your attention.