I would like to welcome Joachim Steinhöfel, certainly one of the best-known and most successful
media lawyers in Germany, to our discussion today.
It is about the fact that the Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser had the magazine Compact and the publishing
house banned and at the same time organized house searches in the editorial office and private rooms.
You have to stand together, no matter what it's about, and of course this really is a magazine where nobody says: "Yes wow, I
like reading Compact - great mess", but what it says is in fact, as far as I've followed it, highly
unappetizing and disgusting, but that doesn't matter.
As far as I can tell, it is almost entirely within the framework of fundamental rights.
Then you can write that and if you say that fundamental rights only apply to those who write the right thing,
then we might as well throw them in the garbage can.
So, answer: Everyone should check what the basis of this ban is, only as far as the publications are concerned with
the usual dispensation - yes, very bad, very terrible - I did that too - but you are allowed to say that.
And what the minister is doing here is the real thing - she is a greater danger to the free
democratic basic order, Ms. Faeser, than this magazine.
I simply printed out a short passage from a recent decision by the Federal Constitutional
Court - from 2018 - and I'll read it out now.
I've already done that so many times in this interview.
It actually states very clearly what you are allowed to do:
The possible confrontation with disturbing opinions, even if they are dangerous in their intellectual consequence and
even if they are aimed at a fundamental upheaval of the current order, is part of the liberal state.
Protection against the poisoning of the intellectual climate is no more a reason for intervention than the protection of the
population against an affront to their sense of justice by totalitarian ideologies or
an obviously false interpretation of history.
A trivialization of National Socialism as an ideology or an offensive interpretation of the history of
this period alone do not justify criminal liability.
Says the Federal Constitutional Court.