Beginning in 1972, when I was 29 years old and on my own, after initially being supported for a few months by my then publisher and boss Klaus Wagenbach (whose literary editor I was as a part-time job), I had to spend four years with the Defending my book “Unsere Siemens-Welt” (Our World of Siemens) with the assistance of a young lawyer recommended by the Stuttgart bookseller Wendelintchen.

This satirical "commemorative publication for the 125th anniversary of the house S." had so disturbed the Deutsche Bank, namely its board spokesman Hermann Josef Abs, and Siemens AG that they had commissioned the then most renowned law firm for press law, which was based in Stuttgart, before the regional court there and later also higher regional court to bring an action for an injunction against certain sentences.

The 96 pages of my little book from 1972 still seem cheeky today, but harmless.

Back then I was struggling to be an author and not to be a coward.

The latter would have been understandable, but it didn't fit my Protestant background.

At that time, the PEN took me in and helped me, not with money for the high legal costs - just the flights from Berlin to Stuttgart and back swallowed up a lot of money during the Wall era - but the PEN was the moral backing I needed.

Conflicts between political ideologues and agenda ideologues on the one hand and freer, independent authors repeated themselves in PEN every few years - only not under Wilfried F. Schoeller and Herbert Wiesner - and there were often enough reasons to leave.

I stayed in PEN anyway, out of old gratitude, even though I've been a passive member for about twenty-five years.

How low a club can sink!

I never imagined that PEN could stoop so low as to publicly humiliate such a brave and clever man as Deniz Yücel (by a vote of 75 to 73 for him), leaving this sincere President, whatever he might say to the one or may have said to other small minds, there was nothing left but to withdraw and withdraw.

Although, an old hand may throw that in, he made a forgivable mistake.

Instead of talking about an association of bratwurst stall operators, who still have a few bratwurst to offer every now and then, I would say: The 73 members who voted against him are a club of little people who chew little or nothing have to offer - in contrast to the bratwurst functionaries,

"You don't leave PEN!" I can still hear Heinrich Böll's tone, with which he urged us younger people to think at the beginning of the 1980s during the first major ideological conflict (Solidarność versus DKP and GDR ideology).

He always thought first of the imprisoned colleagues and only then of the club disputes.

But if you want to donate to imprisoned authors (four hundred to five hundred are currently known worldwide), you can do that without being a PEN member.

I am leaving the German PEN as of today, I greet and congratulate Deniz Yücel, whom I do not know personally, only eat the good Thuringian bratwurst in Thuringia and roast the only bratwurst that suits me, the lamb merguez, how I always prefer to do things on my own rather than in a club, especially in such a small-minded club.

Friedrich Christian Delius

is a writer.

Most recently he published "The Seven Languages ​​of Silence" (Rowohlt Berlin).