column

Once I was in London at a party where Astrid Proll was also a guest. Proll, one of the co-founders of the RAF, spent nearly four years in jail for arson, robbery and forgery. In 1979, she was released from custody.

Also with Bommi Baumann I was already at a party. This was organized in Berlin by SPIEGEL. Baumann spent five years behind bars for involvement in a bank robbery and a bomb attack. He was one of the central figures of the left-wing radical scene in Berlin and co-founder of the movement June 2. By the standards that are set today for the composition of parties, my participation would no longer be possible.

Neighbors, brothers, colleagues - and rights

On Saturday I was back at a party. A friend of mine, my longtime colleague Matthias Matussek, had invited to his home on the occasion of his 65th birthday. I have known Matussek for 30 years. We started at SPIEGEL almost at the same time. Our sons are the same age, a few times we were together with the families on vacation.

If I were smart, I would say, I was careless. I should have asked who else is coming when Matussek celebrates his birthday. Among the guests were neighbors of the house, his brothers and a number of companions who already knew him while he was still at the "Stern", as well as several publicists and authors who had to be assigned to the new right.

One of the invitees is known as the Activist of the Identity Movement, as I learned afterwards. In 2013, he was sentenced to seven and a half months on probation for causing serious bodily harm, because he had a left-wing teenager hit with a blackjack. I did not know the man. I did not say a word to him because there were too many guests I had not seen in a long time. Now it is said that I celebrated with neo-Nazis.

You should have expected it

May one take part in a celebration as an editor of SPIEGEL, to which people are invited who are right-wing or perhaps even right-wing?

The ZDF presenter Jan Böhmermann has written that arise from the participation questions for the journalistic and ethical standards of SPIEGEL. In a questionnaire, he asked my editor-in-chief if she had any prior knowledge of the meeting and how she judged it when members of the editorial staff party with neo-Nazis. To be on the safe side, the questions went round on Monday once again via Rundmail.

I also believe that questions arise, only others. If one shares the opinion of the bystanders when making a toast to the host, one would be. Or: Are you already fraternised with rights when you are at the buffet, instead of running away? That is the reproach: Whoever stands together with such people at a birthday party, normalizes right thinking and thus carries it into the middle class.

If you think this thought through, then every contact, no matter how random, is a proof of guilt. In principle, it is enough to sit if someone with the wrong attitude approaches the table. The fact that you were only instructed in retrospect with whom you had to do it, is not a sufficient relief argument. You would have to expect that the host maintains dubious dealings, it says.

The break of friendship

There is a point where you no longer want to be friends with someone. Even long-standing friendships have a break point. Sometimes people you know for a long time develop in a direction that alienates you forever. I think Matussek is a mess. I never took him seriously politically. Anyone who rises to beer crates in the sober state of downtown Hamburg to call up the audience for an uprising is, at best, a bajazzo, in the worst case, he is ready for the slap grinder.

But deciding whether to renounce friendship to a friend is a private matter, and nothing that the public has a right to demand education. Respectively, it can demand the distancing, but then one no longer moves in a liberal society, which for good reason on the separation of private and public space value, but in one, in the television fun, journalists or other representatives of the concerned public to set the tone as Joseph McCarthy Revenants.

The thinking of segregation calls for rigid decisions. His goal is the isolation of the human, who was identified as an opponent. Friendship, family, loyalty - all this is in the way. Anyone who claims that he has been considered an old friend must give his opinion. Whoever declares that closer contact does not mean that one shares the other's positions, is answered that the inspection is decisive.

How big does the fear have to be?

You must not be fooled. The suspicions and denunciations have consequences. Among the guests of the Hamburg birthday party was the ARD presenter Reinhold Beckmann. Beckmann sang a song by Bob Dylan, "Things have changed", in a German translation. On Sunday morning, barely twelve hours after he left the party, Beckmann published a statement on Facebook apologizing for participating in the party.

He got lost, he wrote in it. The song was meant as a "poisoned gift", he had wanted to express his opposition to the erroneous way of his friend. But that was a mistake: "I should not have gone there." It was a public defection, a kowtowing.

Beckmann has achieved everything that can be achieved as a moderator. He has had a talk show on ARD for over 15 years, which bore his name. He was one of the most famous faces of public service broadcasting in the meantime. What does a man like him have to fear for making himself so small? How big does the fear have to be, if even a successful ARD moderator goes to his knees?

I talked to Beckmann a little longer at Matussek that evening. He told me about his father, who was shunned from one day to the next in town because he went bankrupt with his feed business. Beckmann reported how the people in the village had whispered behind his back and pointed with his finger to him: "Is not that the son of Beckmann?" Declaring bankruptcy was considered disgraceful at the time. The whole family went through what it means to be cut by everyone. This was a lesson for him, said Beckmann, that's also why he had come to the birthday party of his old friend.

The doubling of one's own opinion

Today it's a birthday party you saw, a funeral tomorrow. Enmity goes beyond death, and one should not be fooled about that either. We have experienced it all before. When the RAF terrorists Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe and Andreas Baader were buried, the names of all the mourners who had gathered for the funeral were recorded. At that time people spoke of sympathizers, the concept of the "normalization" of anti-social thinking was not yet invented. The same thing was meant.

The most dangerous person Jan Böhmermann knows is probably Katrin Göring-Eckardt. Böhmermann guarantees only to people who think so similar to him. I was never interested in doubling my opinion. For good reason, I have chosen a business in which it is part of the working conditions that one encounters people whom others would not even shake hands with.

I have a very wide circle of friends and acquaintances. My friends include people who are far left. There are anarchists among them who dream of a life without a state, feminists who would set up the gender paradise tomorrow if they were allowed to. I am even friends with people who have pursued occupations in their lives that some can not talk about without blushing.

On Monday, the former Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany has spoken. His topic was not the current development in Iran or Brexit, his topic was a birthday party in Hamburg. "I think the bourgeois elites should stand up for democracy instead of sawing it!" He wrote. "The #Matussek case is another negative example."

As far as the defense of civil liberties is concerned, I strongly disagree with Sigmar Gabriel. I do not want to live in a society where the question of whether to attend a friend's birthday party becomes a test of courage. I believe, and for my own comfort, that most people in Germany think the same way as I do.