Just satire, not a criminal offense. The Mainz public prosecutor’s office came to this conclusion when assessing Jan Böhmermann’s statement “Dear 3sat viewers, please don’t forget: don’t always bring out the Nazi club, but maybe just club a few Nazis.”
Böhmermann used this sentence to end an issue of “ZDF Magazin Royale” in February of this year, in which he dealt with the Austrian FPÖ party. According to a report in the Austrian daily newspaper Standard.at, the Mainz public prosecutor’s office is refraining from initiating an investigation.
Several reports were filed after the broadcast. The reporters, including FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl, who was attacked in the broadcast, claimed to have recognized the wording as a call to kill AfD and FPÖ politicians. Böhmermann was also accused of incitement to hatred.
Proven to be a pun
The Mainz public prosecutor’s office did not follow this assessment. “Against the background of the overall context and the content of the program in which the statements complained about in the criminal complaints were made, an interpretation of the statement as a ‘call for murder’ ultimately falls short,” the “Standard” quotes the lead public prosecutor in Mainz, Andrea Keller.
What is particularly important in this context is that the phrase “club a few Nazis” is linked to the CDU party leader’s statement quoted in the program, “this Nazi club won’t get us anywhere” and turns out to be a play on words with it. The term “Nazi club” and its context of meaning are taken up several times in a humorous way in the program.”
Jan Böhmermann has tested the limits of satire several times with his ZDF show. One of the most spectacular cases is the so-called “abusive poem” against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – published in “Neo Magazine Royale” in 2016. At the time, the Mainz public prosecutor’s office was investigating suspicions of insulting a foreign head of state. However, the lawyers stopped the investigation because a caricature was not an insult.
At the same time, in another procedure, Erdogan ensured that Böhmermann was not allowed to repeat parts of the “abusive poem”. The Hamburg Higher Regional Court ruled that massive criticism of the Turkish head of state was permitted, but that some passages of the text had a different aim and were therefore not protected by freedom of expression. Böhmermann’s attempt to reach a different assessment before the Federal Constitutional Court failed. Karlsruhe did not accept the complaint.