The debate about errors in the book of the Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet from 2009 "The rising republic" continues.

The former Bavarian Minister of Culture Hans Maier, from whom Laschet took quotations, took the CDU politician under protection.

As the news magazine Spiegel reported, an analysis shows at least four other problematic passages in the text.

A week ago on Friday, Laschet said that there were obvious mistakes in his book for which he was responsible. "At least one author of the material used in the book is not mentioned in the text or in the list of sources." He would like to apologize for this. In order to clarify whether there were any further errors, he immediately arranged for the book to be checked.

On Monday, the Austrian plagiarism searcher Stefan Weber wrote in a blog that Laschet had written in his book “The rising republic.

Immigration as an Opportunity ”“ presumably ”almost half of page 177 of his book was taken unquoted by the Munich political scientist Hans Maier.

In Laschet's book there is a paragraph that is very similar to a passage in a text by Maier.

Maier's essay was published in the Catholic magazine “Communio” in 2006, around three years before Laschet's book was published.

The paragraph is about the coexistence of religions in Germany.

Sentences taken from the FAZ?

At the request of the German Press Agency on Friday, Maier stated that he had made sure in the meantime that Laschet was expressly referring to him and his statements on religious freedom and peace in his book on page 176 by name. “That was previously unknown to me and it changes the situation fundamentally.” In no case could one speak of plagiarism. Quite apart from that, the Laschet text is not a dissertation in which every quotation has to be explicitly documented on the spot.

Laschet writes in his book on page 176 that Maier appealed in “Rheinischer Merkur” (December 18, 2008) to “evaluate the friction between the Christian denominations, Islam and Judaism in the light of historical developments”. For passages on page 177 that are similar to statements from Maier's texts, Maier is no longer quoted. Maier explained that his name was not specifically mentioned again in a quote sent by Weber, "as Mr. Laschet notes, caused by an editorial error".

A spokesman for Laschet said on request: “Prime Minister Armin Laschet corresponded with both Prof. Hans Maier and Prof. Salomon Korn and made the relevant passages available to them.

Both have expressly confirmed to him that by naming their names with the source they feel correctly quoted and that they are clearly identifiable as the originator of the basic idea. "

The background is that the "Spiegel" wrote that Laschet had taken over two sentences in the book almost word for word from a contribution by Korn, the then Vice-President of the Central Council of Jews, in the "FAZ".

Laschet mentioned this newspaper article in the previous paragraph, but then Laschet's own thoughts followed and only then did the adopted sentences.