A delicate smell of Stalinism in German air

German Federal Minister of the Interior is considered Minister of the Constitution. He is therefore also in charge of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), the federal office responsible for collecting and evaluating information on actions efforts against the free basic order.

In recent years, the domestic intelligence service has suffered more and more from the impression that it could be instrumentalised politically. Since the Social Democratic Interior Minister Nancy Faeser took office, the question has been raised in Germany whether, as a matter of principle, a ministry with an ideological slant does not by itself violate the constitution.

Faeser has been the minister since December 2021. Already in her first month in office, it came to light that she had written an article for the radical left-wing magazine "antifa". The magazine is published by an association that is under observation of the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The incident had a signalling effect: the new government made it clear from day one that apparently different standards apply to left-wing extremism than to right-wing extremism. There is no other way to interpret Faeser’s dismissal of critical questions about that act as a "campaign" during her time as a Hessian Land politician, without addressing the accusations.

It was only the prelude to a term of office with a remarkable slant. Support for mass migration, rejection of upper borders as well as border controls are still on a completely separate page, which one might explain with the "Refugees Welcome" ideology. More important was the introduction of a new "phenomenon area" that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution now wants to monitor. While the categories of Islamism, right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism have at least emerged historically and are thus easier to define, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has found a field with a new danger of "delegitimisation of the state" that is so vague that it can subsume almost anything under it. Lawyers have rightly noted that the state thus dissolves the boundary between criticism of the government and criticism of the state in principle. Is one already an extremist if one is against the utopian projects of an ideological left-wing government? In case of doubt: maybe.

The "Faeser file" therefore has a precedent. But Faeser's current scandal has not only drawn attention to her lack of feeling for the rule of law – it has also raised doubts about the extent to which the constitution still applies in Germany. Specifically, Faeser's is being given hard time by the case of Arne Schönbohm. Arne Schönbohm was responsible for cyber security in the Ministry of the Interior, where he was at loggerheads with Faeser. He pleaded for mobile phone platforms to be made aware of security gaps in their operating systems that allow penetration of communications from the outside. The ministry was against it, because the security holes allowed the police and secret services to read the data transmitted. The issue was therefore the conflict between Faeser's desire to wiretap and Schönbohm's security concerns.

Then, in a programme on the Second German Television (ZDF), comedian Jan Böhmermann, in an allegedly investigative edition of his programme "ZDF Magazin Royale", circulated a whole series of narratives, accusations and insinuations which were supposed to suggest Schönbohm's closeness to Russia. It has since emerged that in the course of this broadcast there was also allegedly telephone contact between the Ministry of the Interior and Böhmermann's editorial team. In other words, the state was playing fast and loose with state television. The public pressure was supposed to initiate Schönbohm's destruction - because for lack of evidence, the accusations were without substance from the beginning.

In this situation, things got tight for Faeser. She played poker: by banning the official from continuing his official duties, she suggested that there was indeed material against the head of cyber defence. In reality, however, there was nothing that would have justified disciplinary proceedings - which is why she did not initiate any. Instead, she instructed the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to find something to disavow Schönbohm. This is the kind of situation that we know from Stalinism, but not from the Federal Republic: if someone is innocent, you have to hire someone to find something which makes him guilty. Schönbohm was spied on, but despite Faeser’s demands, the domestic secret service found nothing. According to a document, she was unhappy about this. Quote:

"She [Faeser] was [...] visibly dissatisfied. She found the things we supplied her with too 'thin' - we should query BfV again and gather all secret documents. I told her that we had already involved all relevant authorities and departments and that there was simply no more".

But the scandal did not end there. For despite being summoned to appear before parliament several times, Faeser ignored all questions. When the Interior Committee wanted to question her about inconsistencies in the Schönbohm case, Faeser simply called in sick - even though she had been fit as a fiddle the day before at an election event in Hesse. During a speech in the Bundestag, she did not allow any questions. Alexander Wendt, one of the most important German journalists in the critical media landscape, summed up the incident remarkably succinctly in the magazine Tichys Einblick:

"If the Polish or Hungarian head of the interior ministry had set the secret service in motion to procure, by hook or by crook, something compromising against a disgraced top official, the German government would have taken up the issue under guarantee. And so would most of the media in unison".

But none of this is happening. Not only because the Interior Ministry and the secret service are involved in an affair that should actually be one of the biggest post-war scandals in the Federal Republic. But also because the ZDF had a due share in it. The consequence: the public media hushed up the subject for weeks. Television viewers learned next to nothing. These, too, are phenomena familiar from socialist systems. Well, presumably such comparison of the Federal Republic to socialist systems will soon be reason enough for the sender to be tapped as a "delegitimiser of the state".