Frank Esser & Uwe Hartung. The American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 47, Issue 8, April 2004.
Scandal as Communication Pattern
To make scandals available for communication research, it is imperative to clarify the notion of scandal. Unfortunately, in everyday language, scandal refers to both defects and shortcomings of any kind-including social problems, malfunctions of facilities, and misbehavior of people-and to a particular type of public communication that sometimes ensues from defects and shortcomings. This article proceeds to separate the two meanings and suggests scandal should be reserved for describing the communication pattern alone.
Other communication patterns share the confounding of meaning with the notion of scandal. Gossip (Gluckman, 1963; Paine, 1967) refers to both the message content that is communicated and the activity of communicating (and in English to the person indulging in the activity). Rumor (Shibutani, 1966) also means the content of a particular communication as well the activity that spreads it. For other communication patterns, such as conflict (Kepplinger, 1994), crisis (Kepplinger, 1983; Kepplinger & Roth, 1978), campaign (Rogers & Storey, 1987), and social movement (Kilian, 1964; Simons & Mechling, 1981; Strodthoff, Hawkins, & Schoenfeld, 1985), the confounding is less troublesome.
To distinguish scandal from the grievance that is addressed in a scandal opens the view to some basic questions communication research must address in relation to scandal: Which grievances (social problems, malfunctions, misbehavior) does a society select for scandal, and which of them does it ignore? Who makes the choices in scandal selection? What are the motives? What are the chances of creating a scandal when a person is outraged? What are the conditions under which a scandal can be terminated? And so on.
Such questions rest on the assumption that there are a large number of grievances to be addressed but a limited societal capacity for scandal (see Kepplinger, Ehmig, & Hartung, 2002). We can define scandal as the intense public communication about a real or imagined defect that is by consensus condemned, and that meets universal indignation or outrage. The two unspecific elements in this definition, the intensity of communication and the degree of consensus about the condemnation of the defect, must be made more concrete for an operational definition, but this is of no concern here. It should also be stressed that this definition of scandal does not assume that a defect actually exists.
Generally speaking, the defect-real or alleged-at the center of a scandal requires some form of injury to a social norm (Gross, 1965a, 1965b; Hondrich, 1989; Kaesler, 1991; Laermann, 1984; Neckel, 1986, 1989; Schuetze, 1985). This norm can be a law, a value, a rule of conduct, or a legitimate expectation-in the sense of something generally considered legitimate. In scandal, someone stands up and claims something is amiss and needs to be changed. It needs more than tastes, aesthetical judgments, idiosyncratic normative conceptions, or group values to do this successfully. If a claim that a norm no longer be breached does not meet general approval, at least of this norm, the person to propagate the claim either will not be listened to, if he or she is lucky, or will be considered a lunatic if not.
Often scandal is accompanied by the qualifier political. In a narrow sense, political scandals can be considered those that concern political actors as opposed to business scandals, sports scandals, theater scandals, or religious scandals, all of which are defined by the position an offender holds or by the societal subsystem whose norms were breached. Political scandal, however, can also be defined in a much broader sense, referring to the function of politics to define the norms that everyone must adhere to. Any discussion of the validity and applicability of general social norms can therefore be termed political. In this sense, a political scandal is any one in which the validity and applicability of norms is addressed (see also Moser, 1989; Neckel, 1989; Schmitz, 1981; Thompson, 2000). This is most likely true of every scandal that takes its natural course and lasts for a while. Our arguments are based on the broader conception of political scandal.
Selection of Scandals
Most studies of scandal are case studies, in Germany (Kaesler, 1991; Kepplinger, 2001b; Kepplinger, Eps, & Augustin, 1995; Kepplinger, Eps, Esser, & Gattwinkel, 1993; Kepplinger & Hartung, 1993, 1995; Mathes, 1987, 1989) and elsewhere. In an attempt to go beyond case studies, the question of the selection of scandal must be asked. It can be addressed in two ways, a macro perspective and a micro perspective. On the macro level, social science in Germany has found three answers to the question of which scandals a society chooses. They will be dealt with below. The fact that scandal is socially selected-or constructed, if you like-is also the basis for the application of the reflection hypothesis on scandal. This hypothesis holds that societal and cultural entities are reflected in media content and art (Albrecht, 1954, 1956; Berelsen, 1952, pp. 90-98). Many authors believe-rightly so, we think-that by looking at scandals, one may learn something about the normative and cultural bases of a society.
Macro-Level Perspective
Sociologist Karl Otto Hondrich (1989; Beule & Hondrich, 1990) conceived of scandal as part of the discourse on values and norms consisting of misbehavior of elite persons, its discovery, and the ensuing public outrage. Hondrich saw two stages of selection. On the first stage, the mass media decide whether a grievance that is made known to them is published or not. Reasons not to publish include absence of news value, lack of willingness to grind someone else’s axe, loyalty toward the person or group that misbehaved, and saving the material for later use or for exerting pressure. These criteria can be said to be professional or political.
On the second stage, the public decides whether outrage is appropriate or inadequate. This will happen, according to Hondrich (1989; Beule & Hondrich, 1990), when the misbehavior would help one side in an existing conflict of values. Hondrich saw society split into various value communities. When the spread of indignation about a particular defect is instrumental for a value community, scandal will occur. One camp will propagate the case and try to inflict a defeat of outrage (Empoerungsniederlage in German) on the other. Instrumentality in value discourse is therefore the crucial selection criterion for scandal, according to Hondrich’s approach.
Earlier than Hondrich, political scientist Manfred Schmilz (1981) applied the labeling approach to the study of scandal. In this approach, society creates its own deviants by making rules and applying them to individuals. Institutions decide whether a rule was broken and put an appropriate label, such as murderer or weak minded, on the culprit. Inspired by a version of the labeling approach that is concerned with how this process functions as a device of ruling elites to secure their power, Schmitz adopted it to scandal, which he conceived of as an institution that operates similarly but more informally. For Schmitz, the question of whether the label of scandal can be put on a particular misbehavior or defect is a question of power. The crucial criterion for societal selection of scandal in this view is, therefore, the instrumentality of misbehavior, defects in the struggle for power, or the distribution of power at a certain time.
A third perspective was introduced by sociologist Sighard Neckel (1986, 1988, 1989) and was to some degree inspired by the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. Neckel started from the notion that politicians are subject to a twofold normative bond: The first originates from the legislative function of politics (i.e., its claim to set the rules for others); the second grows out of the politicians’ need for legitimizing their position as rulers, which implies that they may use force or put constraints on people. A frequent strategy for legitimizing rulership is to present oneself as a trustee of social norms, allowing for covering up the personal benefits one draws from having power. To propagate misbehavior of politicians unmasks the legitimation strategies of those who wield power and challenges the existing distribution of power. The crucial criterion for the selection of scandal in this perspective is, therefore, its enlightening and emancipatory potential.
In the future, it might be possible to test which-if any-of the three approaches is the most appropriate. Growing out of sociological theory not primarily concerned with communication, all three approaches rest on implicit assumptions as to what really moves public communication, value discourse, power struggle, or the desire to expose the rulers. Unless we adopt any one of these views, communication research cannot, at present, opt for or against any one of the three criteria. Let us treat them as hypotheses that deserve further study. If a misbehavior, defect, or shortcoming is made into a scandal, this might be because it was instrumental in value conflicts, because it served someone in the struggle for power, or because it enabled people to expose their rulers. It might also be due to other forces.
Micro-Level Perspective
The micro perspective deals with scandal in a way that may be termed phenomenological (Gross, 1965a; see also Laermann, 1984; Neckel, 1989). A scandal as an ideal type requires certain elements:
- the defect denounced-keeping in mind that it may be a misbehavior, a shortcoming, a malfunction, a social problem, and so forth;
- the culprit, that is, the person or group that can be blamed rightfully or wrongfully for the defect-keeping in mind that it is not necessary for the defect to actually exist and that the “culprit” can be quite innocent;
- the denouncer, that is, the person or group of persons who stand up and argue that something is amiss; and
- the public for whose attention, affection, and compliance the scandal is performed.
Based on these role definitions, the communication pattern of scandal can, in our own view, be described as follows.
Scandal starts by someone publicly suggesting scandal. Persons who do this may be called denouncers, those who contradict defenders. A denouncer may have learned about a defect from an informer, someone from the inside who knows about a possibly scandalous state but who is not willing to stand in publicly for it. To suggest scandal carries several layers of meaning: Factual information is given, value judgment is passed as one’s personal indignation is communicated, the validity of a norm is reaffirmed, others are appealed to to share one’s value judgments, and action to end the scandalous state is demanded. Giving factual information might not be evident as part of an attempt to create a scandal, but usually an effort has to be made to prove the defect really exists, the more so the more covert the activity. Of course, scandal can also be suggested for obvious shortcomings such as unemployment or pollution.
There can be many motives for suggesting scandals (see, e.g., Thompson, 2000, pp. 78-84), but they can be grouped in three categories. The most obvious is sincere outrage at the defect denounced. Another would be the desire to harm someone, mostly someone in power whose politics one does not like or whose position one covets. A third motive may be personal gain of prestige or of money. The latter may be the least obvious, but there are careers built on making scandal, such as the German writer Guenter Wallraff who became famous in the 1960s for exposing exploitation in German companies, or Richard Nixon who became a nationally known politician by pursuing Alger Hiss. This is not to say their motives, in either case, were egoistical; it shows only that one may gain recognition by suggesting scandal. Moral, political, and egoistical motives may, of course, all be present at the same time.
In an open society, anyone may take the role of denouncer as one pleases. However, four typical groups may be pointed out. The first group is composed of the opposition to the political system who may hope to undermine the legitimacy of the system by continuously stressing its shortcomings. In Germany, this created a number of scandals during the cold war when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) provided material that was made into scandal by West German media. In some cases, East German politicians served openly as denouncers, as was the case with a 1962 press conference by Socialist Unity Party of East Germany politician Albert Norden, who accused several West German politicians, journalists, and others of participation in the Nazi regime. In other cases, East German sources supplied Western journalists with harmful material. A number of such cases are mentioned in a book that two former officers of the East German service published in 1992. They related how the Eastern side injected factual or forged material into the Western media system, influencing such scandals as the 1966 discussion of President Heinrich Luebke’s alleged involvement in the construction of concentration camps, the 1978 incident accusing State Premier Hans Filbinger of involvement in death sentences by military courts shortly before the end of World War II, and the 1984 scandal centered on the dismissal of German NATO General Guenther Kiessling because of alleged homosexuality (see Bohnsack & Brehmer, 1992, pp. 48-65, 142-178 for these and other cases).
A second group of likely denouncers is composed of politicians from other parties or companies in competition. This is probably the most obvious group and the one most often suspected of having a hand in scandal. A third group, at first glance less obvious, is composed of rivals in one’s own party, company, or organization. This group deserves special attention because when a politician resigns over a scandal, it is usually a member of his or her own party who succeeds in the position to be filled. The caveat here, however, is that interparty rivals would be much more likely to choose the role of secret informer than of public denouncer.
The fourth group of denouncers is composed of journalists in the mass media. Aside from political motives, this group also has a professional inclination to suggest scandal, for the control of government and the exposure of deficiencies are among the most important functions of the mass media. In this observation, media theory (Lasswell, 1964; Wright, 1960) and journalists themselves (Schoenbach, Stuerzebecher, & Schneider, 1998; Weischenberg, Loeffelholz, & Scholl, 1998) agree, and the German media laws consider criticism of the government as part of the public function of the press (Karpen, 1993).
If anyone can take the role of denouncer in an open society, it is also true that anyone can be the culprit in a scandal. However, people who do not hold public office or belong to powerful institutions hardly run any risk of this happening. There are many explanations for this, all coming down to the fact that persons on lower levels of social hierarchies can be called to order in a number of other ways besides by scandal, and that nothing much can be gained by challenging those who do not hold power or reputation.
The denounced person has only a limited number of defenses at hand. First, he or she can admit wrongdoing and take responsibility, usually either resigning or asking forgiveness. Second, he or she can deny everything. Third, the denounced person can admit to some wrongdoing and justify it, for instance, by reevaluating one’s actions, by stressing that others did something similar, or by arguing that the action in question did not run against the law. Either defense bears risk. This is especially true for denial, which almost always inspires journalists to do more research. A frequent pattern of development then is scandals of a higher order. Rather than concentrating on the first misbehavior denounced, journalists focus on whether the culprit’s defense was true or not. Many of the big scandals, in Germany and elsewhere, are of this type. British Defense Secretary John Profumo, for example, was brought down not so much because of his affair with Christine Keeler as because he lied about it (Schuetze, 1985, pp. 78-123).
The culprit’s camp can either support or move against him or her. In the first case, the camp risks drawing some of the public outrage on itself. In the second case, tension within the camp is likely. Whether a scandal will lead to resignation is mostly dependent on whether the denouncers succeed in distancing the culprit from his or her own camp. This is more likely to happen when rivals in the culprit’s camp see a chance of winning dominance over the accused and when the misbehavior in question is morally more clearly reprehensible and less ambiguous.
Functions of Scandal
On a manifest level, the function of scandal is social control. It functions as a way to sanction behavior that runs against social norms and to punish the offender. It is mostly used against members of the elite and in cases where the law does not function as a device of social control. The latter may be the case when the offender is so powerful that the judiciary either cannot move against him or her, or does not dare to, or has no grounds in the law to do so because the breached rules are unwritten. The function of social control is manifest in scandal communication as we know it from the media and from everyday talk. The instrument of scandal as a device for social control is not controlled by any person or institution. It is informally applied; that is, there are no written rules for it. However, there is one influential group of agents in scandal communication-the mass media-that will be dealt with below.
The latent function of scandal (Merton, 1957) is to serve as a device in the struggle for power, money, and reputation. Exposure of this layer in scandal communication usually harms an effort to make scandal. The exposure of the less honorable motives is a good argument against denouncers and is used frequently. Tampering with scandal is sometimes even the target of successful efforts to suggest scandal. Watergate is a famous example. One of the reasons behind the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee was to get information about the assumed involvement of Committee Chairman Larry O’Brien with Howard Hughes (Dean, 1976, pp. 66-73; Kutler, 1990, pp. 202-205). We do not know what would have happened if the burglars had not been caught and the desired information obtained, but it is easy to imagine that the information would have been used either for suggesting scandal or blackmail. For Germany, the Barschel affair (Green-Meschke, 1993), discussed below, fits this pattern in an even more complicated way.
The latent functions of scandal make clear that the pattern is rooted in the existing societal conflicts between parties, within parties, between government and opposition, between trade unions and companies, and so on. A scandal is usually instrumental in one or more of these conflicts, and it is sometimes a rather effective device (Geiger & Steinbach, 1996). Within a scandal, there are usually a number of minor conflicts. The most important is at the center-the conflict over whether misconduct really occurred. Even if it is often very hard to determine conclusively, this conflict can at least theoretically be decided by the facts. Once these facts are established, value judgment inseparably plays a role, especially when many people are interested and the behavior in question is reprehensible to many. A recent perfect example of this is President Bill Clinton’s DNA on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. This scandal took a decisive turn once the White House learned that the evidence was in the hands of the prosecution. The talk of the smoking gun in Watergate is another good example.
The Role of the Mass Media
In scandal, both the denouncer and the culprit woo the public. Much of what happens in scandal, however, can be described as interaction between the two sides, denouncer and culprit, and the mass media.
Three functions of the mass media have to be distinguished. First, the media provide a stage for the denouncer to suggest scandal; that is, at least one newspaper, magazine, or broadcasting station has to decide that a denouncer’s concern is legitimate enough to reach the public. Other stages are conceivable, including public oration, flyers, and interpersonal communication. One would guess, however, that none of these have much effect when the media ignore them. It is plausible to assume the media route is the one most often chosen or at least most often sought by people who intend to suggest scandal.
Second, the media system as a whole has to react to make the pattern evolve from the stage of suggesting scandal to a fully developed one. It is conceivable that the mere suggestion of scandal generates immediate and widespread indignation in the public, but it is very hard to come up with an example. What usually happens after scandal is suggested is either nothing-the suggestion failed-or a diffusion of the issue into the media system. Speaking in ideal types, that can either occur as scandal or as conflict. In conflict, disagreement on whether the defect really existed, or whether it was really reprehensible, would prevail. In scandal, consensus about the reprehensibility would dominate. As consensus is hardly ever 100%, most cases in reality contain elements of scandal as well as conflict, with conflict elements decreasing with time in developing scandals.
Third, for offenders in scandal, as well as for most other people involved, it is very hard to determine the real extent of outrage in the public when misbehavior or other defects are discussed in a scandal. For determining public outrage, a number of devices are at hand. One’s assumptions about the public, one’s feelings for it, can help to guess its extent, but one can never be sure. Party organizations might send messages from the people, but they may be biased. Everyday contacts may tell a politician something about the people’s reactions, but many of them live in a world apart. Surveys can be done, but they cost time and money. As all these methods have their limits, we can assume that the mass media frequently serve as a proxy-or more formally speaking, as a functional equivalent-for the public in scandal communication. The offender assumes that the public is outraged when the media are outraged. This conclusion may in many cases be flawed but nevertheless has to be considered as a crucial element in scandal communication. An example of this, used in scandal and outside, is the trial balloon, where politicians let information leak to the media, usually on background and with someone from the lower levels of the hierarchy as a source, to test the reaction. If it is unfavorable, the information can be denied officially.
Scandal Research in Comparative Perspective
Although scandals occur everywhere, a scandal in one country can often hardly be understood in another. One reason for this is that the public in one country is not excited or outraged by events that excite and outrage people in another country (Kepplinger, 2001a, pp. 54-61). That excitation and outrage hardly ever spill over to other countries has mostly structural reasons: What is the point in worrying about the misbehavior of another nation’s politicians? It is unlikely that either the media or the people in another country would get excited or outraged over such misbehavior, even if the same behavior in one’s own political leaders would be considered scandalous. Therefore, scandal research in an international perspective must give attention to two major questions:
- Which similarities exist in the course of scandals between different countries and which fundamental rules can be deduced from those similarities?
- Which differences in the course of scandals exist between countries and by which specific characteristics of the national and social culture can these differences be explained?
In this study, scandals are understood in the sense of being possible only in open and democratic societies with a free press. Because in communist East Germany, scandals simply could not exist (the public sphere and the press were under state control), this analysis concentrates mainly on the events in democratic West Germany and the reunited Germany (since 1989). It will be shown that the roots of important scandals in West Germany can be traced back to National Socialism and important scandals of the united Germany to the communist GDR.
The occurrence of German scandals is well documented. Several authors have published chronologies that record major and minor cases of misgovernment and mismanagement as well as political mistakes, social mischief, and prominent controversies (Hafner & Jacoby 1990, 1994; Leif, 1998; Liedtke, 1989; Moser, 1989). By far, most of these have indeed been addressed publicly and can therefore be said to constitute scandals in the sense described above, although much less is known about how the German public (including the mass media) communicated about these detects than about the defects themselves. These cases form the “data base” of the following analysis.
Political Scandals and Political Culture
From an international perspective, it is particularly important to link political scandals with the political culture. Political culture research examines citizens’ perspectives, including the way citizens see themselves as political actors, their support of democratic values and norms, their satisfaction with the functioning of democracy, and their confidence in the government, Parliament, judicial system, police, and administration. Political culture research deals with norms and norm violations (which can be made into scandals with the help of the media) in a society. The political culture of Germany has undergone bigger and quicker changes than most other countries. Germany provides the unusual case where four entirely different political systems (the Wilhelminian empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the German Federal Republic) have succeeded each other within less than half a century. Finally, the sudden and unexpected unification gave rise to some uneasiness abroad but also to many concrete problems for Germans from both East and West when coming to grips with their newly found national identity. Against this background, one can distinguish and analyze four types of scandals in Germany with regard to the political culture: scandals formative to the development of political culture, scandals linked to the particular history of Germany, scandals that happened elsewhere as well, and scandals missed in Germany.
The most important typology of political culture research is that of Almond and Verba (1963). They determined the degree of a society’s development on a democracy scale, the least marked degree of which is that of a “parochial culture” and the highest that of a “civic culture.” In the 1950s, for instance, Great Britain was supposed to be the ideal type of civic culture, whereas West Germany corresponded more to the model of parochial culture. The reason for Almond and Verba’s (1963) research was Germany: In the eyes of the world, it was still unclear how, in a country that had been highly respected for its education and culture, the Weimar brand of democracy could have failed and the National Socialist dictatorship prevailed. Although in the 1950s authoritarian and rule-obeying attitudes were still clearly detectable, more recent surveys state that the political culture of West Germany has changed fundamentally. The follow-up study of Almond and Verba (1980) documents a thorough transformation of West German political culture from the apolitical passive pattern pictured in the 1963 study to the prodemocratic, politicized, and participation-oriented culture of the 1970s and 1980s. “On some measures, Germany today is closer to the civic culture than Britain or the United States,” concluded Conradt (1980, p. 221). “West Germany has become a ‘model stable democracy'” (Conradt, 1980, p. 265). A recent comparative European analysis (Gabriel, 1994) confirmed that Germany-together with Denmark, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg-belongs to the top group of countries with the most developed democratic culture in Europe. The reunification of 1989 has generated a further increase in interest in research into political culture in Germany. The question arises: Can the democratic system of West Germany be transferred successfully to East Germany, which lived under dictatorship for so long? The joining of two social systems as different from one another as East and West Germany within a very short period of time is being discussed as one of the most outstanding social experiments of the present time (Berg-Schlosser & Rytlewski, 1993). How can the present state of affairs be evaluated? Support for the type of democracy of the unified Germany is high in the West but relatively low in the East. Recent findings indicate that East Germans tend to favor a socialist model of democracy, whereas West Germans prefer a liberal model (in the mold of Britain and the United States). The “inner unity” of the political community of unified Germany has not yet been achieved (Fuchs, 1999).
From an internationally comparative perspective,
- The political culture of Germany has undergone deep changes. Pessimists stress the instability, optimists the move toward democracy.
- Contrary to the traditions of Britons and U.S. Americans, the national self-conception of the Germans emerges less from their problematic past than from the achievements of the present. This holds particularly true for the younger and more highly educated generations in West Germany. It is less true for East Germans, as well as for older and less-educated people in West Germany. This group tends to stick to a more traditional form of national pride belonging to the past.
For the scandals mentioned below, we largely adhere to the popular versions about them. In scandal research, the facts of the case often look very different on closer scrutiny; that is, in none of the cases do we claim that our summary is the definitive description of what really happened. The way alleged misdoings are discussed and the way scandals are remembered, however, is much more indicative of a political culture than the truth about the presumed deficiencies. This is why the popular versions suffice here.
Type I: Scandals Formative to the Development of Political Culture
In a necessarily subjective choice, four political scandals can be named that had, or are expected to have, particular significance for the development of the political culture in Germany. The earliest of these, the Spiegel affair of 1962, may well have formed the still young democracy of West Germany that had to establish and prove itself after 1949. The later scandals-the Flick party donation affair of 1982, the Barschel/Desk Drawer affair of 1987/1993, and Helmut Kohl’s secret slush funds affair of 1999/2000-may have reinforced the development that started in the formative 1950s and 1960s. They all could have happened in other counties, but in Germany they were, or may be, particularly formative for the awareness of the country’s political culture. Like the Watergate affair and the Irangate affair in the United States, they concerned power and the limitation of power in politics. All four were discussed in terms of a deficiency in political culture; that is, the defects were believed to have originated from a lack of democratic control of those in power. On one hand, disclosures by the media have been unlikely to strengthen the public’s confidence in the moral standards of politicians; on the other hand, these revelations heightened the awareness of the fact that there are binding rules for politicians in a democracy, although these are often disregarded.
The Spiegel Affair (1962)
The affair about the conflict between the conservative government of Konrad Adenauer and the news magazine Spiegel is supposed to be “the classic example of a political scandal in the German Federal Republic” (Hafner & Jacoby, 1990, p. 67). It marks, in the view of many, the end of a reactionary period and thus, the end of the parochial culture in West Germany (Hafner & Jacoby, 1990, p. 67). In the words of Schoenbaum (1968), “For a few blessed weeks the German democracy behaved like it were one” (p. 10). What in fact took place? On October 10, 1962, Spiegel published an article dealing with the fitness for action of the armed forces (Bundeswehr). In the course of a then-recent NATO maneuver, some strategic and logistic shortcomings of the Bundeswehr had been revealed in the opinions of military experts. It later turned out that the source of information had been a colonel from the Ministry of Defense. Spiegel, at this time having a circulation of 500,000 copies, was often seen as a kind of substitute for the opposition, because the left-wing Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was currently steering a course of approachment to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that later led to the Grand Coalition (1966-1969).
One conservative politician instituted legal proceedings against Spiegel for treason. Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss, who had been criticized on a regular basis by Spiegel, intervened personally. With his consent, the police occupied the headquarters of the news magazine on October 26, 1962. A special police unit searched the editorial office as well as the private homes of journalists. The police confiscated documents, arrested several executive editors, and arrested Editor in Chief Rudolf Augstein. In the course of a very controversial measure, Conrad Ahlers (the journalist who wrote the report) was arrested in Spain, where he had unsuspectingly gone on holiday.
This action led to a public reaction not expected by those responsible. The media overwhelmingly criticized the move against Spiegel headquarters and Ahlers’s arrest (Bunn, 1966; Seifert, 1966, pp. 42, 66). Many people became aware of the fact that this was an affair that not only had bearing on Spiegel or treason but also that the freedom of the press, the rule of law, and democracy itself were at stake. In many places, there were demonstrations and rallies against the actions of the police (Schoenbaum, 1968, pp. 159-182). The scandal ended in a governmental crisis; Minister of Defense Strauss resigned. In the years that followed, the affair led to a trial before the German Constitutional Court. Legally, the result was a 1:1 draw; that is, the Court did not agree that constitutional rights were violated, but morally, Spiegel and the freedom of the press are often considered the winners (Seifert, 1966). In judicial terms, the Court’s ruling said that the press had to be granted an institutional guarantee, which has since become one of the cornerstones of media power in Germany. The affair also set off an intense discussion of the laws against treason that resulted in a legal reform giving the press more leeway in publishing state secrets (Schneider, 1971, pp. 283-286). In addition, and to this day, the affair affected the reputation of Spiegel as an unbending institution committed to revealing the truth no matter what rests on the events. That the first formative scandal of postwar Germany was one in which a news magazine had allegedly been wronged, and that therefore much of the media scandalizing waspra domo, is one of the many ironies of the case.
The Flick Party Donation Affair (1982)
The Flick party donation affair is seen as a “scandal of the first degree” (Liedtke, 1989, p. 123). It was about illegal party donations, tax evasion, and the suspicion of corruption. In the mid-1970s, the Flick Company sought a way to pay as little tax as possible for a profit it had made by selling a large amount of its Daimler Benz shares (a value of euro1 billion). The law says tax exemption is possible only if the profit from sales is reinvested and the reinvestment is classified by the Ministry of Trade and Commerce as “economically particularly deserving of support.” This was exactly what happened. Later legal proceedings, however, showed the exemption was unjustified. However, proof was found that the Flick Company gave generous donations to all politicians and ministers involved. The smell of corruption and nepotism grew stronger when it became obvious that nearly all leading German politicians had, during the years, benefited from the donations of the Flick Company, then the biggest private industrial company in Germany. The donations were for the party coffers, but some seem to have disappeared into private pockets. Spiegel broke the story, with a suspicious revenue service official as its major source, and spoke of the “buying off of the republic.” The general assumption was that Flick had tried to buy political decisions by donating money.
The Flick scandal also reopened discussion of a frequently used way to circumvent strict laws for party donations. Rather than being handed directly to a party, donations were first given to a nonprofit club, allowing for tax exemptions for large sums. The club then passed the money on to the party. This manner of party financing was established in the 1950s and used mostly by the Christian Democrats and the Liberals. It even created a small scandal in 1954, without much effect on practice. After the Flick scandal, however, the laws dealing with party donations were changed.
The Barschel/Desk Drawer Affair (1987/1993)
This affair is considered to be the undisputed and ultimate extreme in the German history of scandals (Hafner & Jacoby, 1994, p. 331). It was about dirty tricks in the Schleswig-Holstein state election campaign of 1987. The Conservative Premier Minister Uwe Barschel employed a tabloid press journalist by the name of Reiner Pfeiffer as an aide. In a series of clandestine activities, he initiated several schemes to make liberal left-wing opponent Bjoern Engholm insecure, to threaten him, and to make him the likely victim of scandal. These activities included observation by private detectives, making someone sue Engholm for tax evasion, bringing a possible infection with HIV to his door, and depicting him as a womanizer, a homosexual, and someone who endorses sex with children. None of these tricks turned out to be successful. The devious adviser Pfeiffer then informed Spiegel about the secret campaign. A day before election day, Spiegel spectacularly disclosed the dirty tricks of the Barschel camp. The election ended in a tie and Barschel found himself faced with an outraged public. he later resigned under pressure and a few weeks later was found dead in a Swiss hotel room under mysterious circumstances.
For a number of years, books and TV documentaries discussed at great measure to what extent the personality and political style of Barschel revealed signs of psychic disease and whether the affair was indicative of serious deficiencies of German political parties (and the CDU in particular). The case became completely bizarre when in 1993, it emerged that the adviser Pfeiffer had received large amounts of money from the competing party SPD (said to be the private savings from a minister’s desk drawer, therefore, the second part of the scandal is known as the Desk Drawer affair). Furthermore, an independent parliamentary investigation found that the SPD knew about Pfeiffer’s dirty tricks at an early stage but kept this hidden from the public and the media. The SPD politician Engholm, who by that time had won another election against the CDU and was the national chairman and likely candidate for chancellor for the SPD, was forced to resign because he had lied. Up to this day, it has not been proved without any doubt whether the dirty tricks were actually ordered by Barschel himself or whether Pfeiffer acted on his own. The original Spiegel report that set off the scandal, and for which the news magazine paid Pfeiffer euro80,000, did not give a realistic picture of the situation but merely reflected Pfeiffer’s side of the story. The same can be said of the results of an all-party inquiry into the story. On both sides of the political spectrum, there were flagrant violations of the rules that likely contributed to a wave of disenchantment with politics in the mid-1990s.
Kohl-Gate: The Secret Slush Funds Affair of Helmut Kohl’s CDU Party (1999-2002)
“Germany’s Watergate?” asked Newsweek when the CDU, the dominant party in German postwar history, plunged into its worst crisis in 54 years (“Germany’s Watergate?” 2000). The crisis started with a legal investigation into a euro223 million arms deal that occurred in 1991 between the German manufacturer Thyssen and Saudi Arabia. Prosecutors tracked down a sum of euro110 million of bribes and provisions that Thyssen allegedly paid mostly to Saudi partners, but prosecutors also found evidence of euro500,000 having been paid by businessman Karlheinz Schreiber to the treasurer of Kohl’s CDU party, Leisler Kiep. The treasurer, in an attempt to get out of a tight spot, told prosecutors in early November of 1999 that the money was a party donation to the CDU. In cross-examination, he also described a covert system of bank accounts the CDU had kept for funds that were not properly reported as required by law. The secret funds comprised tens of millions of euros, the origin of which is unclear in part. The treasurer’s story, of course, prompted official investigations and numerous media reports. A subplot of covert party finances in the German state of Hesse followed a few weeks later. Some of Kohl’s former rivals came forth and criticized the covert funds heavily.
A third incident involved Kohl’s admission of having accepted about euro1 million in cash from anonymous donors between 1993 and 1998 and having channeled the funds to CDU branches. This was a clear breach of the party financing law. He blatantly refused to name the donors, a refusal that caused quite a clamor in politics, in the media, and especially in the CDU itself. For months, the question of who Kohl’s donors were and whether he would name them dominated the news and party discussions up to a point were Kohl was removed as honorary chairman of his party. In a fourth development, Kohl’s successor, party chairman and longtime ally Wolfgang Schaeuble, came under pressure for accepting another donation to the party from the shady arms dealer Schreiber. Conflicting statements on his meetings with Schreiber and contrasting versions of how the donation found its way into the party coffers led to his resignation after only 16 months in office.
Behind the various subscandals on CDU finances lurked the Saudi arms deal, a very generous donation by a wealthy Hamburg realtor (who was said to have been allowed to make a bargain in purchasing a large number of apartments from the government in turn), and long-term investigations into the sale of the Leuna oil refinery in former East Germany to Elf Aquitaine, a French oil company. The Thyssen and Leuna issues were investigated long before the CDU finance scandal broke. The assumption was that payoffs in these matters were what filled the secret party accounts. The Hesse money was suspected to have come from party accounts that became illegal after the rules for party finances were altered in the wake of the Flick party donation affair of 1982.
After more than 2 years of investigations by the Parliament and the news media, some allegations could be proved, many could not. In July 2002, when presenting the results of a 941-page final report to the German Bundestag, the chairman of a special all-party inquiry admitted that committee members were divided on the central question of whether illegal donations had influenced the Kohl government’s policy decisions. In fact, representatives of three parties (Party of Democratic Socialism, Free Democratic Party, CDU) agreed in their conclusion that no evidence could be established that proved the original accusation of decisions being bought. Members of the other two German parties (SPD, Greens) argued that three of the investigated cases smelled strongly of political corruption. Political corruption is not a juridical term in German law but a newly created moral phrase comparable to sleaze. The three cases-all mentioned above-encompassed a euro500,000 donation by businessman Schreiber coinciding with a Saudi Arabian arms deal, another smaller donation by Schreiber to CDU party chairman Schaeuble coinciding with plans for a German arms plant in Canada, and a euro2.5 million donation by a realtor coinciding with an estate deal between him and the government. A direct causal relationship could not be established in any of these cases; nor was it possible to shed any light on the donations Kohl received in person. The parliamentary inquiry did, however, find out about party funding irregularities and briberies in the other big party, the SPD, which came as an embarrassment to SPD committee members who had been highly critical of the CDU in the past. Both scandals undermined the perception that Germany maintains a relatively clean political system, but in the end, the damage was bigger for Kohl’s CDU than for Schroeder’s SPD. For its bad bookkeeping and acceptance of undeclared donations, the CDU had to pay back euro21 million in federal matching funds earned from illegal party contributions and a hefty euro6 million fine for the illegal cash Kohl admitted personally taking between 1993 and 1998. The Society of German Language chose Schwarzgeldaffare (slush funds scandal) as the “Word of the Year 2000” because it dominated that year’s media coverage.
The scandal about the CDU finances changed the political climate in Germany for approximately 2 years. When it began, roughly a year after Kohl’s defeat in the September 1998 elections, the new government under SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was trailing hopelessly in the polls, and the SPD had lost three important state elections in 1999. Then public opinion sharply reversed, giving the Schroeder government a clear lead that lasted for about 2 years. More important was the reevaluation of Kohl’s long chancellorship that the scandal brought about. Shortly before it broke, Helmut Kohl was voted by the German public as one of the top 10 “greatest Germans” of all time, alongside Einstein, Luther, and Goethe (Rumler, 2000). Several weeks later, Kohl was put under formal criminal investigation in connection with what The Economist called “Germany’s biggest political corruption scandal since the second world war” (“The Toppling of Helmut Kohl,” 2000). His ways of securing power came under intense attack, not only by the press but also by politicians and intellectuals (Pflueger, 2000; Scheuch & Scheuch, 2000). His influence in the CDU seems to have evaporated with Angela Merkel, who as the new chairperson, launched her move to the top job by joining Kohl’s critics early on in the scandal about his secret donors.
Rightly or not, this scandal was discussed as a watershed for political culture and media culture in Germany. It was the first major scandal to occur after the government and national media had moved from Bonn to the new capital of Berlin in 1999. It was said to mark the end of a cold-war political culture in which division between the parties was so deep that violations of democratic rules were justified by the end of keeping one’s party in power. At least this is what Newsweek implied:
Kohl apparently justified the expenditures [of black money to party branches and election campaign teams] as being vital to the national interest … As a member of the cold-war generation, Kohl saw the CDU as a bulwark against communism, socialism and economic chaos and increasingly came to identify the party’s strength, and his own, with the good of Germany. (Hammer & Theil, 2000, p. 50)
The scandal was also depicted as a turning point in the history of the German media. Newspapers were perceived as no longer reporting along party lines or serving the purposes of the camp they belonged to but were seen as all equally trying hard to inform the public. In addition, Spiegel was said to have lost its monopoly as an investigative magazine.
These contentions breed skepticism. First of all, the question arises of why the media had not uncovered the scandal earlier, given that it extended 20 years into the past and that Kohl had enjoyed little sympathy among journalists. Second, one may well doubt whether the scandal was in fact investigated and disclosed by the media. Even some journalists admit that most of the disclosing work was done by the public prosecutors and by the leading CDU politicians themselves. But because German parliamentary commissions hold much fewer sanctionary powers than their U.S. counterparts, they feel much more tempted to play ball with the media. On closer examination though, the CDU finance scandal can count neither as proof of a greater spirit of investigation in German journalism nor as an indicator of a de-ideologization of the German press (Haller, 2000; Weidmann, 2000).
***
Reviewing the four formative scandals, we have to stress that none of them resulted in profound changes in the political culture. Their impact is incremental at best. The Spiegel affair, however, is strongly linked with the emerging spirit of the 1960s. It has become a symbol of the then-prevalent, widespread criticism of the political system, and it is a source, in spirit as well as in the law, of the institutional independence of the German press. The Flick and the Barschel/Desk Drawer affairs may well have contributed to political alienation, but for all one can say, this would have occurred anyway. The effects of the CDU finances affair remain to be seen. Whether this issue will be looked on as the beginning of a new media culture, as some have claimed, as an episode of revenge at an extremely successful politician after his fall, or as a struggle over his historical performance is still in the open.
Two of the four cases discussed had party finances at their center; and more could be said about party finance scandals. For instance, early in 2002 the local SPD leadership in the city of Cologne was almost completely toppled by a party finance scandal, and the way the SPD accounts for its income from business shares that the party holds has long been a major concern of the party’s critics, though an attempt to create a scandal from this in 2000 failed. The monies moved around in the party donation affairs are mostly seven- or eight-digit figures. Cases of personal gains, nepotism, and patronage (some mentioned below) mostly reveal transactions of five-digit-figure amounts of money that pale beside the sums discussed in the finance affairs. All of this may well be considered indicative of the strong and somewhat ambiguous position of parties in the German political system. As power in Germany cannot really be acquired without a political party, it is but reasonable to assume that attempts at buying power, if they do occur at all, would fill party coffers.
Scandals are exceptional situations. This is especially true for the major scandals referred to above. The question arises of whether the way scandals evolve is, in the long run, beneficial or detrimental for the political system (Kepplinger, 1996). We will, of course, not even try to answer that question here. One could argue scandals are beneficial because they are an effective device of social control used against culprits in power. The argument for detrimental effects would stress that in scandal, a mixture of true and false accusations is communicated that can never be corrected, and that personal decisions are made under stress that would deserve more distanced reflection and deliberation (Kepplinger, 2001a). Whatever the final answer, the immense attention given to the most recent of our cases should keep us from being overly optimistic.
Type II: Scandals Linked to the Particular History of Germany
In this respect, there are four categories of scandals that should be examined: Nazis who later held high positions, attempts of politicians to consider the Nazi past finished, a new wave of neo-Nazism and xenophobia since the reunification, and East German politicians who, after reunification, concealed their former contacts with the GDR secret service and GDR leadership.
Nazi Involvement
Liedtke (1989) listed 22 cases, occurring between 1949 and 1989, in which the involvement of politicians, doctors, lawyers, or other prominent figures in the Nazi regime caused a public outrage in Germany. The best known cases follow.
Hans Globke served from 1950 to 1963 as personnel manager and undersecretary of state in the Federal Chancellery where he was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s closest adviser. From 1938 to 1945, he had been assistant secretary and “specialist for Jewish questions” in Heinrich Himmler’s Ministry of the Interior and drew up the official commentary to the and-Jewish “Nuremberg Race Laws.”
Heinrich Luebke was West Germany’s federal president from 1959 to 1969. During World War II, he had worked in an architect’s office with responsibility for drawing up plans for military buildings and allegedly, concentration camp buildings.
Kurt Georg Kiesinger was West Germany’s chancellor from 1966 to 1969. He had been a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party since 1933, had served as assistant head of the political broadcasting department in the Foreign Ministry, and had also worked for Goebbel’s Ministry for Propaganda.
Hans Filbinger was the leader of the German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg from 1966 to 1978. During the war he had served as a navy judge and had been involved in several death sentences against sailors.
Karl Carstens was West Germany’s federal president from 1979 to 1984. From 1933 to 1935, he was a member of the Sturm-Abteilung (a special political police force) and applied for membership to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1937.
Werner Hoefer had been a popular liberal television journalist since the 1950s. In 1987, he had to resign from his post as political talk show host because of an article he wrote on the execution of a dissident artist during the Nazi era (Eps, Hartung, & Dahlem, 1996).
The most conspicuous fact about this type of scandal is that they accompanied the history of the German Federal Republic from the start and last to this day.
Controversial Dealings with German History
These are cases that reveal a lack of determination on the part of judges and politicians to prosecute and punish Nazi crimes rigorously: statutes of limitation, acquittals, reprieves, and bans on making use of East European archives (Hafner & Jacoby, 1994, pp. 94-101; Liedtke, 1989, pp. 56, 201). There are also cases in which politicians of high standing made statements that were ill considered and likely to be misunderstood (e.g., the president of the West German Parliament, Philipp Jenninger, or a candidate for the federal presidency, Steffen Heitmann). With reference to this point, there is also the so-called historians’ dispute of 1986, in which various historians were accused of comparing National Socialism and Stalinism in relative terms. For many, this appeared to be as spurious as Helmut Kohl’s remark that “the saving grace of a later date of birth” could absolve from individual guilt. Also controversial was Kohl’s wish to publicly set a seal on the fact that the former enemies the United States and West Germany had become friends once and for all in 1985. Therefore he invited Ronald Reagan to a ceremony that took place at the military cemetery in Bitburg where-to the indignation of American Jews-49 SS soldiers also lay buried (Olson, 1995).
Subsuming these cases, although listed frequently in the available scandal chronologies, under scandal is a little bit doubtful. It is not very likely that outrage about these events reached circles beyond intellectuals and the media. Most Germans, it can be assumed, would not care much about these matters. Also, the instrumentality of two of the cases mentioned is very apparent. The late leader of German Jewry, Ignatz Bubis, used chunks of Jenninger’s much-misunderstood speech on World War II in an address of his own, and no one took issue. And the much-derided remark by Kohl is actually a quote. Its source is Guenter Gaus, former envoy to East Germany under Willy Brandt and managing editor of Spiegel before that. No one ever suspected Gaus of intending to cleanse German conscience from the Nazi past as happened to Kohl.
Neo-Nazism, Right-Wing Extremism, and Xenophobia since Reunification
The spread of right-wing violence increased dramatically after reunification. Between 1996 and 1998, the number of right-wing offences as recorded by the police rose from 8,730 to 11,049. Four exceptionally brutal key events triggered extensive media coverage: In the two East German cities of Hoyerswerda (on September 17, 1991) and Rostock (on August 22, 1992), several hundred right-wing youths attacked hostels for asylum seekers by throwing stones, Molotov cocktails, and incendiary devices at the buildings. The riots carried on for several days and were accompanied by neighbors applauding the violent attacks. In the two West German cities of Moelln (on November 23, 1992) and Solingen (on May 29, 1993), three Turkish women and five Turkish children died as a result of two arson attacks. In many German cities, many people took part in counterdemonstrations, primarily staged as candlelit processions and directed against right-wing extremism and xenophobia. In the latter two cases, the young German offenders were arrested. There was nonetheless a widely shared opinion, particularly in East Germany, that the politicians were incapable of tackling what people considered the “problem of immigration” and that “something has to be done.” Especially in certain parts of East Germany, a proper right-wing youth culture has spread that is particularly hostile to foreigners (Esser & Brosius, 1996).
The Embroilments of East German Politicians with the GDR Regime
Many East German politicians who held leading positions in reunited Germany after the GDR had collapsed had to resign after a short span of time. They had kept quiet or lied about their involvement with the suppressive GDR regime. The Ministry for National Security (i.e., the political secret police) employed about 85,000 full-time spies and more than 200,000 unofficial informers. The aim of the leadership was the total surveillance of society. For every 186 GDR citizens, there was one secret police informer. Because of their contacts with the Ministry for National Security, politicians Wolfgang Schnur, Lothar de Maiziere, and Ibrahim Boehme all resigned in 1990. The role of exBrandenburg State Prime Minister Manfred Stolpe’s role in the GDR, where he held a position in the Protestant church that involved dealings with the secret service, is disputed to this day (Kepplinger et al., 1993), as is the behavior of Gregor Gysi, a prominent lawyer in GDR times and today the most prominent politician in the neo-communist Party of Democratic Socialism. Stories of this type continue to this day, and they also relate to writers, theater people, athletes, entertainers, and journalists.
Type III: Scandals that Happened Elsewhere as Well
This type includes by far the most scandals. Of the eight subcategories that can be distinguished in all, one should be particularly emphasized: In the opinion of experts, Germany reacts particularly strongly to environmental scandals; ecology is supposed to be a “typical German” concern (Beule & Hondrich, 1990; Hondrich, 1989). The eight subcategories are specified below.
The Web of Patronage in Politics and Economy-Political Corruption
Since the German Federal Republic was founded in 1949, there have repeatedly been both major and minor cases of corruption of politicians by business companies. Liedtke (1989) listed about 30 cases occurring since 1949. Most took place on the regional level where companies tried to avoid official checks (e.g., for safety, health, or environmental protection), to influence political decisions, and to win public contracts. Typical affairs include those concerning licenses for casinos in Bavaria in 1959 and Lower-Saxony in 1987. As casinos are tantamount to a license to print money, many people were interested in obtaining such licenses and consequently bribed the political decision makers heavily.
Some recent resignations of prominent politicians also serve as typical examples. In 1991, the leader of one of Germany’s federal states (Baden-Wuerttemberg), Lothar Spaeth, handed in his resignation because he had his holiday and business trips and other privileges financed by business men (Kepplinger et al., 1993). For similar reasons, the leader of another German federal state (Bavaria), Max Streibl, also resigned. He too had his holiday and business trips and other privileges financed by company executives with whom he was in close political contact. In both cases, the impartiality of the politicians in question could, many people felt, no longer be guaranteed. In 2002, Secretary of Defense Rudolf Scharping was sacked when a story was about to appear that detailed his business dealings with a public relations agency, which included a salary he was paid for his memoirs to be written after leaving government office.
The Abuse of Political Positions, Nepotism, Gaining Advantage from Politics
Politicians are also in a position to abuse their office without accepting the money that flows freely from business companies by, for instance, exploiting their privileges (official cars, airplane trips, etc.) to the limit of legitimacy; backing their relatives’ and friends’ companies through making use of their official authority; providing themselves with large salaries, pensions, and compensations; buying off votes from other parties in important parliamentary ballots by means of making promises; pursuing lucrative sidelines; financing private matters with public money; channeling public money into one’s own pocket; and so on. A typical case involved East German politician and then-Minister of Transport Guenter Krause who had to resign in 1993. According to the largely accepted version of the affair, he interpreted the rules of political business rather too generously and failed to distinguish between public funds and his own pockets. Another case in 2002 concerned private use of free air travel gained on official flights that cost Green Member of Parliament Gern Ozdemir and Berlin Party of Democratic Socialism Senator Gregor Gysi their jobs.
Fraud, Corruption, and Financial Mismanagement
There have also been numerous business scandals without the participation of politicians: ruinous collapses of banks through mismanagement that led to ordinary people losing their money, and building and real estate scandals in the course of which tax funds were squandered on a massive scale to the benefit of businesspeople. Quite exceptional were the cases of the affluent trade unions whose images have been marred by the mismanagement and financial greed of their officials. Their biggest disasters concerned the union-owned housing association Neue Heimat and the union-run grocery store chain Co op-neither of which exists anymore.
Controversial Measures and Laws Concerning Inner Security and the Battle against Terrorism
In the young and still developing German democracy, measures that were taken to guarantee inner security were often seen as highly controversial. These include, among others, the ban in 1972 that forbade “communists” and “radicals” to work in public service (e.g., as a teacher), failures by the police force and the judiciary system in the fight against left-wing terrorism, special measures (e.g., telephone tapping) in the battle against organized crime, and harsh police actions at demonstrations against nuclear power plants or new airport runways. Measures devised to expand the powers and controls of the state were often criticized as being reminiscent of totalitarian (Nazi) policies. The most prominent case is the “emergency laws” of 1968, introduced as a reaction to anti-Vietnam and antigovernment students’ protests.
Illegal Exports of Arms/Arming of West German Armed Forces
Germany’s wealth is based on its export business. A delicate matter is arms trade and gunrunning. Time and again there have been violations of national and international nonproliferation laws. German companies supplied or tried to supply Libya, South Africa, Iraq, Israel, and Turkey with goods that could be used for military purposes.
The arming of West German armed forces after World War II was a controversial issue too. It was a requirement for NATO membership in the 1950s, but many people protested against Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s rearmament policy at the time. In the following period, the costs of purchases of military aircrafts were particularly controversial. In addition, there have been umpteen cases of bribery and corruptibility concerning the acquisition of equipment and weapons by the armed services.
Pollution of the Environment and Food Scandals
Ecological and environmental issues have played a major part in German public life for the past 25 to 30 years. Substances, products, and energy industries that are considered damaging to health and the environment have stirred public indignation and outrage in Germany more easily and more frequently than in other countries such as France or Britain. According to Hondrich (1989), Germany has an ecology-dominated scandal culture whereas Switzerland’s is money dominated, France’s is magnificent patriotic dominated, and the United States’s is puritan dominated. Relevant German scandals concerned the transport and storing of toxic and radioactive waste, nuclear power and technology in general, toxic wood protection paint, asbestos, aerosol cans, the “dying” of the German forests, quality of the ground water, pollution of rivers and the North Sea, and so on.
The high sensibility for the environment also shows in the large number of food scandals: mad cow disease, hormone-treated meat, quality of eggs, olive oil, wine, baby food, North Sea fish, and so on. The entry of mad cow disease into Germany in the winter of 2000-2001 caused a reorientation of politics: The Department of Agriculture was turned into a department focused on consumer protection and its first chair was a Green politician with an urban background rather than, as tradition required, someone with an occupational background in agriculture.
Media Scandals
By far the biggest media scandal in Germany was the alleged discovery of the Hitler diaries by the liberal print magazine Stern in 1983. It took Stern more than 10 years to recover from one of the greatest embarrassments in press history. The publisher and the two editors paid euro4.5 million for the forged notebooks and announced a world exclusive title story: “Hitler’s Diary Discovered.” Major newspapers and magazines around the world, such as the London Sunday Times, the New York Times, and Newsweek also covered this sensational find, stating something along the lines of major parts of German history had to be rewritten (Harris, 1986). The weekly Stern magazine, once known for its investigative reporting, became a prime example of sensation-seeking checkbook journalism. Both editors were sacked, but their farewell was sweetened by a euro1.5 million check in compensation for each of them.
The second remarkable case was the faked television documentaries of independent producer Martin Born. He staged about a dozen film reports on a wide range of issues and sold them to several soft news TV programs. It later emerged that his films were aired even though the editors responsible were suspicious about some bizarre details-but no one really bothered as long as the story was good. In late 1996, Born was sentenced to 4 years in prison; the lax editors were acquitted.
Others
Germany has experienced other types of scandals as well. They concerned, in particular, matters of justice, medicine, culture, and secret services (Hafner & Jacoby, 1994; Liedtke, 1989). Yet compared to the other categories, they are less frequent and less characteristic.
Type IV: Scandals Missed in Germany
Some publication taboos no longer recognized in Britain and the United States (see the discussion in Thompson, 2000, pp. 124-143) are still accepted by German journalists. This applies in particular to the private lives of politicians, their marriage problems and extramarital affairs, and their sexual inclinations. There is a tacit agreement in Germany that journalists do not disclose private details. In one of the rare articles on this topic, an insider of Stern magazine recently wrote,
If a member of parliament is caught with a lady in unambiguous circumstances, one laughs but does not print it. We are not in England after all. There, respected newspapers exclude by no means the private life of their politicians but rather tell their readers confidential details… . Nor is the private life of politicians a taboo for the American colleagues either. There, every infidelity of a presidential candidate is investigated, reported, commented on and, if necessary, the candidate is dismantled for that. In order to have this not happen here, we have got the judicial term “privacy.” (U. Posche as quoted in Esser, 1999, p. 312)
In Germany, the private lives of public figures such as politicians are much better protected than, for example, in Britain or the United States. In German civil law, a clear distinction is made for three protected spheres (in the rank of growing protection): the individual sphere, the private sphere, and the intimate sphere. Sexual behavior clearly concerns the latter. In general, coverage of this sphere is illegal. Because the German press is very discreet when it comes to the private lives of politicians, communication scholars have argued, “At all events the private lives of our heroes from the world of politics … are safe from the press. From this point of view German journalists give less cause for concern. The German Press Council can be reassured” (S. Weischenberg as quoted in Esser, 1999, p. 313). In Britain, privacy is not aright that the British law recognizes as such. The power of the media to damage reputations, invade privacy, and conduct partisan campaigns is to a considerable extent unaffected by legal restrictions (Robertson & Nicol, 1992). The United States does have a privacy law, but it excludes politicians from essential parts of it. Representatives who want to lead the country have to accept the question whether they are able to keep up a marriage.
The number of political scandals has increased dramatically during the past 15 years in Germany (see Figure 1). It has to be stressed that the graph considers political scandals only in a narrow sense (i.e., those that concern political actors). It becomes clear that political mistakes and violations of standards are more likely to be scandalized today than in the past. The increase of such scandal stories coincides with a sharp drop in public trust of political institutions and systems of government. In other words, a rise in the number of publicized political scandals is paralleled by a drop in public esteem for the work of politicians. However, none of the scandals depicted in the graph involved sexual misdemeanors. This is still a taboo. In sum, political scandals are frequently covered, but the German press hardly investigates and publicizes the sex lives of politicians. This is a significant difference compared to the media cultures in Britain and the United States. From a political culture perspective, one can infer that the increase in political scandals demonstrates that democratic norms of society are firmly established and carefully observed by professional watch-dogs. The hesitation to drag the private lives of politicians into the spotlight continues to demonstrate a high respect for them.
Summary and Conclusion
Scandals are socially selected-or constructed-communication patterns. They can be defined as intense political communication about a real or imagined defect that is by consensus condemned and meets universal indignation or outrage. It follows that scandals are a phenomenon of open societies with a free press, unrestricted public opinion, and social norms based on consensus. This becomes particularly clear in the case of Germany. The communist GDR did not have scandals but state-controlled campaigns and show trials. Neither a journalist nor an independent public figure or citizen could stand up and denounce a grievance as scandal without having to fear severe punishment.
In open societies, three constellations can trigger scandals: (a) because a “defect” is instrumental in a conflict between two value communities in society (e.g., economy and ecology), (b) because it serves someone in the struggle for power, and (c) because it enables people to expose their rulers and reveal their “real” motives. In the cases mentioned, sometimes just one condition was fulfilled, sometimes all three. For really testing the constellations, one would have to know the power calculations undertaken by the actors, a field where data would certainly be very difficult to get. One would also have to measure indignation by the public. Moreover, a classification of the large number of scandals that occurred is lacking, so nothing can be said about which of the macro explanations for scandal is the most appropriate for Germany. The same is true for the micro perspective. Scandal history, as far as it is written, is more often concerned with showing the misdeeds than with analyzing the communication pattern that evolves in this valuable instrument of social control. Scandal history very often is the continuation of scandal in the form of books or scholarly articles. There is more than enough material in the events of the past 50 years in Germany for the systematic study of scandals, but the work has only just begun.
However, a few final remarks on the relation between the scandals and political culture can be made. First, there is no lack of them. This is certainly an indicator of a willingness to hold politicians accountable and thus, a sign that Germany today has definitely arrived in the family of liberal and democratic nations. As journalist Christian Schuetze (1985) once put it, “There is something rotten in the state without scandals”; we can conclude that not everything is rotten in the state of Germany.
Second, the recent increase in scandals and a clustering of cases that had politicians resigning over rather minor misdemeanors in the penumbra where private and public lives merge (e.g., Spaeth, Moellemann, Krause, Streibl, Pfarr) gives rise to some worries that the discussion of substantial political issues at times disappears behind ephemeral concerns. This, however, is not unknown to other nations. Just think of President Clinton who, in 1993, was able to find a candidate for attorney general who had not illegally hired a nanny for her children only after his third attempt.
Third, the scandals centered on the involvement of politicians and others in the German dictatorships, the Hitler regime after 1945, and the communist government after 1989 can be considered as indicators of the public’s interest in these issues. One might very well think these scandals came too late, that there were not enough, or that culprits were treated too well, but the mere fact that this type of scandal accompanied the history of democracy in Germany from 1949 on shows that the Nazi past was not suppressed completely, as is often alleged. For the GDR past, the criticism is more often that too many offenders are too often pursued, and that this signals West German ignorance of and arrogance about East Germans and their lives. It might be that the standards for evaluating the communist system differ between East and West, and this would then have its correspondence in some scandals.
Fourth, the emergence of environmental scandals demonstrates the political culture’s potential for change. Many think we exaggerate environmental concerns, and others feel we are only at the beginning of a developing environmental conscience. Whatever may be true in this regard, it cannot be denied that environmentalism developed strongly in Germany in the past 25 years and has changed the political culture as well as the party system.
Fifth, the media with a tradition of suggesting scandal are well established in the German media system. Foremost, this is true of the news magazine Spiegel that had a hand in many of the big scandals in the past 50 years. The only national tabloid, Bild, is important not so much because of its own investigative work but because of its power to spread scandal. Some television magazines have also regularly initiated scandals, as have other print magazines such as Stern. The importance of the latter two, however, is not so evident as it used to be, say in the early 1970s. The scandal-making media are certainly not threatened, at least not by politics, and remain a power to be reckoned with.