Culture is mysterious. Terrible, obnoxious and repressive things can happen for a long time without anybody ever seeming to care about them – until, suddenly, for seemingly no reason at all, they spark enormous outrage.

Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his online critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined. Most of the rest (513) were brought by his fellow Green, the Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Their repressions have been part of a much broader campaign by the defunct traffic light government and their ideological allies to shut up critics, and the cases have been too numerous to keep track of. The police have gone after farmers who put up signs saying they would refuse to do business with Green voters. They searched the house of a Bavarian businessmen because he displayed satirical posters mocking Habeck, Baerbock and other prominent Greens. Calling Habeck a “dumbass” on social media can cost you 2,100 Euros in fines; calling Baerbock the “dumbest foreign minister in the world” can cost you 6,000 Euros. 

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All of this is part of our new, post-Covid politics. In 2020, it was still possible for the German press to denounce Vladimir Putin for daring to fine people who mocked him on the internet. “In Germany,” journalists could yet report, “derogatory remarks about politicians are protected by the right of freedom of expression”: 

The slogan “Putin is a thief” is one of the most widespread battle cries of the opposition in Russia. An “absolutely offensive” formulation, as Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, once said. But the expression is still one of the more harmless ones. Especially on internet social media networks, wild insults against the president are widespread. In response, parliament passed a law in spring 2019 that makes it easier to punish insults against the president and state symbols.

A year has passed since then – and from the point of view of human rights activists, the law has served primarily to suppress diversity of opinion, politically persecute people, instil fear in them and promote self-censorship. “The law was enacted to protect the honour and dignity of the president,” says Stanislav Selesnev, a lawyer with the human rights organisation Agora … He has found 51 cases in which proceedings have been initiated due to derogatory remarks about Putin.

… Pensioner Anatoly Lileykin called Putin a “criminal” who holds onto power by falsifying elections. For this, a court … imposed a fine of 70,000 rubles (about 850 Euros). … In Germany and other Western democracies, derogatory remarks about politicians are protected by the right to freedom of expression …

According to Agora’s analysis, comments made by citizens on the internet … are being tracked. Denunciation is also widespread. Informers loyal to the Kremlin are scouring the internet to track down critics of Putin. A total of more than 1.6 million roubles in fines have been imposed so far, more than two-thirds of which were for comments about Putin, as Selesnjow has calculated …

“I am convinced that this law exists to create self-censorship and fear among people,” says media expert Galina Arapova. “Everything is being done to make people bite their tongues – and if they do complain, they should do it at home in their kitchens, but never in public,” says the director of the Centre for the Protection of Mass Media in Moscow.

… The nebulous wording of the law sets no limits. Experts such as Arapova believe that the aim from the outset was to curb growing criticism … Because of the deterrent penalties, this has also been successful. The human rights activist Selesnev suspects that in view of the widespread dissatisfaction caused by the economic crisis, criticism of the Kremlin will also increase. In that case, the sentences would be even harsher in the future.

That world exists no more, but its vanishing has long escaped popular notice. We here on the dark and nefarious internet might write about the authoritarian turn in German politics, but as everyone knows we’re mere Russian trolls and what we say doesn’t matter. Something about the police raiding the home of 64 year-old Franconian pensioner Stefan Niehoff for retweeting a meme calling Habeck a moron, however, has caused the scales to fall from millions of eyes. The case has provoked an enormous scandal all across the internet and the press, to the point that anybody who googles “Schwachkopf” will find nothing but article after article about Robert Habeck. 

In his zeal to stop people from calling him a moron, Habeck has associated himself with the slur for all time; he might as well have his picture printed in dictionaries next to the word, that is what a massive own-goal our ministerial moron has achieved here.

The police raided Niehoff’s home as part of their “Eleventh Action Day against Antisemitic Hate Crimes on the Internet.” Our Interior Minister Nancy Faeser gleefully reported afterwards that this dubious holiday of judicial repression had consisted of 127 different operations, among them that against Niehoff. At this point you might be asking how calling Habeck a moron could possibly be antisemitic, and this question turns out to have a very revealing answer. The Bamberg Prosecutors’ Office later announced that, while they had raided Niehoff’s house in response to Habeck’s personally-filed criminal complaint, they were also investigating the man for the crime of incitement: 

There is an initial suspicion of incitement … since the 64-year-old is also accused of having uploaded an image to the internet platform X in spring 2024, on which an SS or SA man can be seen holding a placard with the inscription “Germans don’t buy from Jews” … adding the additional text “True Democrats! We’ve seen it all before!”

We need some tedious context to understand this. It’s worth it, I promise. 

Last spring, when we were having our great societal paroxysm “against the right,” there was much hue and cry about the dairy brand Müller, because its owner, Theo Müller, turned out to be friends with Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Alice Weidel. The usual suspects announced boycott campaigns against Müller, and activists started pasting stickers in supermarkets telling shoppers not to buy Müller products. Niehoff committed his grave antisemitic crime in response to a tweet about this boycott campaign.

Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts campaigns against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement. 

What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column. In all of this, our speech police demonstrated a typical social media illiteracy – an inability to understand what retweets are (in the case of the original “Schwachkopf” repost), and an inability to understand irony (in the case of the “Deutsche-kauft-nicht-bei-Juden” post). Perhaps censors have always been towering idiots who fail even to understand the media that they are sent to control. 

Habeck submitted the complaint against Niehoff personally, and this has lent the Schwachkopf controversy particular significance. Generally Habeck works with an agency called “So Done,” which files criminal complaints to protect their social media-obsessed clients from mean internet people. So Done, however, are in full retreat from this scandal, eagerly telling all and sundry that they had nothing to do with the Schwachkopf case and that they would never, ever, in a million years, have brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities. No, Niehoff did not have his home raided via some bureaucratic accident; Habeck filed the complaint himself. Being called a moron before all 901 of this man’s followers so enraged our Minister of Economic Affairs that he went straight to the police. 

That is who Habeck is, and it is a reality that the man has gone to great lengths to suppress. Online he poses as just some guy having a conversation in a pullover …

minister.habeck

A post shared by @minister.habeck

… or as an average sweaty urbanite out for a run:

minister.habeck

A post shared by @minister.habeck

He announced his hopeless candidacy for the chancellorship sitting at some kitchen table, assuring Germans that he’s just one of us. 

Habeck, however, is plainly not one of us. All of this is a standard-issue Green political fantasy – one developed by marketing agencies and focus groups, and it is very nearly the opposite of the truth. The Greens are a political elite who employ anti-elitist aesthetics and rhetoric to discredit the traditional conservative politics of the Federal Republic. The fiction is a delicate one, because people like Habeck are overtly disliked by ordinary people above all. This discontent has to be bottled up, explained away and shut down, all to maintain the myth that Habeck is just an average dude. In Habeck Land, his critics are an illusion of the algorithms, a product of Russian troll farms and also antisemitic criminals who are full of hate and deserve criminal prosecution. In this way elites who spend their days pretending that they are not elites prove to be very dangerous. 

Schwachkopf-Gate has generated such waves, that Habeck himself has been forced to talk about it a few times. Yesterday he offered this justification to an ARD journalist:

At the beginning of the legislative period, when things were so tough, I decided to report insults and threats. There are a lot of them. This is filtered through agencies and in this case it came from the Bavarian police. Of course, “moron” is not the worst insult that has ever been uttered. But what happened then, namely that the public prosecutor’s office then confiscated the laptop or the end device – in other words went into the house – my report only triggered that, I believe. Because in the police statement, there was talk of racist or antisemitic motives. That’s why I think that … my report was only the trigger.

We’ve seen that Habeck’s personal social media snitches at So Done did not report the Schwachkopf retweet, so it’s hard to know what his appeal to mysterious filtering agencies can mean. Otherwise, Niehoff’s allegedly antisemitic post had nothing to do with the police search. Habeck would rather lie than apologise, which is very consistent with the kind of person who is deeply invested in ratting out every last one of his detractors to authorities.

Yesterday, Habeck was asked by ZDF journalists what he would do if someone called him a moron in the future. After a great sigh, he made this statement: 

Then, I would look more closely at the file and consider whether to make a complaint, but I already have a policy of reporting insults, threats and hate. There are hundreds of messages like that. Afterwards, by the way, the courts decide how to deal with them. So… what happened there is a court decision, I have no influence over that. 

And in response to a follow-up question about whether he thought the police raid was disproportionate, Habeck said this:

Well, if it was just that statement, that probably would have been disproportionate, but if I remember the Bavarian police’s press release correctly, it’s about something completely different. This statement was only one of the things they mentioned. I think there were other facts to be clarified.

It is the same misdirections all over again, although you’ll note that Habeck – between his first and his second statements – has gotten a lot more careful about throwing around words like “racist” and “antisemitic.” There are presumably lawyers on the other side of this now, and cabinet ministers are not (yet) above the law.

More disturbing were oblique remarks Habeck made a few days ago at the recent Green Party conference. The guiding theme of his candidacy for the chancellorship is the importance of liberal democracy and the coming clash between our European democratic order and rising (Russian or, I guess, American) authoritarianism. These are awkward topics for a man who enjoys punishing his critics, and so when Habeck came to praise “this idea of popular self-determination” or “freedom,” he felt the need to address the contradiction: 

[I mean] freedom in the sense of the rule of law, not in the vulgar sense – if I may say that much, in view of the reporting of the last 24 hours. It is a mistake to believe that liberalism means thinking only of oneself. That is not freedom. Nor is it political freedom. Freedom is interwoven with conditions, with institutions.

I am not entirely sure what this means, and I’m not sure that Habeck does, either. What he is trying to say, though, is something like this: “Freedom” does not mean that Germans get to do whatever they want, politically or otherwise. They cannot just call Habeck a moron. “Freedom” is rather a conditional thing – some mysterious property that is mediated by “institutions,” like those institutions Habeck happens to control. Other understandings of “freedom,” particularly unconditional and institutionally unmediated understandings, are “vulgar” and mistaken. 

All of that sounds pretty bad to me.