Berlin Bulletin No. 21

Barring the Bavarian Baron 
March 1, 2011

By Victor Grossman,

This time the handsome young knight in shining armor
lost the tilting match. Some Germans grieved, others
cheered, not a few laughed with that happy joy at
other's loss called Schadenfreude. The proportions are
an open question, and not the only one. There are
reasons to believe that plans were forming, with the
aid of much of the German media, to elevate Baron Karl-
Theodor zu Guttenberg to the position of chancellor
after the Bundestag elections in 2013. His most
vigorous ally was Germany's mass-appeal tabloid
newspaper BILD (= picture), a mainstay of the Springer
media empire which, in methods and influence, is a
German version of the Murdock empire. It wins its
nearly 12 million readers with giant headlines,
sensation-mongering, a daily nudie photo and, in
between, catchy political injections, all way off in
right field. Most recently, aside from "hate the
Muslims" propaganda and bad-mouthing welfare
recipients, it beat the drums for "Gutti". Until the
very end its dubious polls plugged him as the most
popular politician in Germany, well ahead of his boss
Angela Merkel, and build him up to be her successor.
But his publicity was not only found in BILD. Every
second issue of Der Spiegel had an article about him,
and this was typical.

But any such plans by the media and its backers to
build up Guttenberg as a far right ruler in 2013 at the
latest - with almost inevitable echoes of the past -
suffered a big blow on March 1st when the otherwise
mostly smiling Minister of Defense in Angela Merkel's
government, after two weeks of revelations and
controversy, finally stepped down in disgrace. Until
mid-February this scion of a noble Bavarian family
going back to the 1100s could seemingly do no wrong, or
none that got past the Teflon. Visiting the troops in
Afghanistan with his glamorous wife and a friendly TV
crew, misleading reports about killings of both German
soldiers and Afghan civilians, covering up the death of
a young woman trainee after a fall from the rigging of
a three-masted schooner, then bowing to pressure from
the BILD and suspending the captain without a proper
hearing, all that was smoothed over more or less
successfully while he went about transforming the armed
forces into an  all-voluntary force of highly-skilled
warriors, ready to be sent to any spot in the world -
as they have already been sent to Afghanistan, Congo,
and the waters off Lebanon and the Horn of Africa. He
was going to put not just German weapons but German
officers back onto the world military map with a
vengeance (almost literally), while  BILD and the
others  gathered support among all those bold, brave,
blue-blooded bar-room Germans with dangerously short
memories or poor history teachers.

Then on February 12th a young professor in Bremen
wanted to review Guttenberg's dissertation, nearly 500
printed pages about constitutional law in the USA and
Europe. Somehow a number of lines seemed familiar. They
had neither quotation marks nor a footnote but he soon
found them in an article by someone else. He checked
further, got a newspaper story, and soon he and others
found plagiarized material on 271 pages, making up
almost 22 percent of the total text. They had been
diligently copied, with only the alteration of a word
or two, from a wide range of other publications. Even
the opening paragraphs were almost exactly plagiarized.

At first Guttenberg denied everything and threatened a
libel suit. As the evidence multiplied he began to
speak of possible "mistakes", caused by the fact that
he had been so very busy politically and also had to
raise a young family. Then it was found that as a
deputy in the Bundestag he had ordered discussions of
books prepared by the staff and used that, without
paying of course, thus breaking all the relevant rules.

The head of his party, the Christian Social Union
(CSU), a Bavarian branch of Merkel's CDU, refused to
find anything wrong with all this. Angela Merkel,
though perhaps secretly glad that one very menacing
rival was losing ground, also feared the effect of a
big scandal in a year with six important state
elections looming, and after her party had hardly
recovered from a terrible beating it took in the year's
first election in Hamburg. He was one of the top men in
her Cabinet, after all, and almost the only one with
any charisma. So she stuck up for him until the end.
After all, she said sweetly, "I didn't hire him as a
literary adviser or as an academic doctor," she said,
"but as Minister of Defense, and he is an extremely
good one."

The question of honesty and dependability seemed not to
bother her, although she also has a doctorate title and
her husband is a professor. One opponent responded by
saying that she hadn't hired Guttenberg as a driver,
either, but if he had committed a drunken driving
offense she would certainly have had to draw some
conclusions about his status in the Cabinet.

 Bayreuth University, which granted him the summa cum
 laude degree, was close to his very well-endowed
 ancestral estate - from which it had received an
 indirect but very munificent grant. All this was
 extremely embarrassing. At first it rejected any
 reflections on the degree granting but, forced into a
 corner, it finally withdrew the doctorate - though not
 before he had himself already dropped the title, first
 only "temporarily", then permanently, with
 announcements which somehow looked almost magnanimous.
 The professors' cancellation was done in a hasty way
 meant to be least painful to him and themselves.

While BILD kept defending Gutti against all those
nasty, elitist and probably leftist detractors, other
media were getting more cautious, and soon not only
people from the opposition parties but even some from
the Christian Democrats and his own Christian Social
Union, aside from its head and Angela Merkel, began to
desert him, one after the other. A website, its name
recalling the famous legendary liar, Baron Munchhausen,
started collecting names of professors, doctors and
those working on their doctorates, demanding that he
step down or be dismissed, before the whole scientific
reputation of Germany and all credibility of its
government was lost. Over 60,000 signed an indignant
open letter. Talk about legal consequences of this
deception began to make the rounds, a few state
prosecutors began to grumble about consequences of
fraud, and finally, a red-faced, angry baron gave a
press conference lasting a few minutes, implying that,
although he had not consciously done anything wrong
(like 270 cases of plagiarism), he had been unjustly
mobbed. Not a word of apology, the same old arrogance
and the final sentence: "I was always willing to put up
a fight, but now I have reached the limits of my
strength. Many thanks" and he walked away and
disappeared up the nearest stairway. Perhaps some soft-
hearted sympathizers even wept for this poor victim.

Merkel now has the difficult task of finding a
successor, one who will follow the same military
policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but will make
fewer blunders, while not threatening her as a rival.
It would soon be learned whether the election results
will be affected; the three most important ones are due
on March 20th, two in western Germany, one in the East.

It would seem that an extremely dangerous man with
powerful ties and influence has at least for the near
future, and perhaps permanently, been removed from the
scene. That is an important gain.

___________________________________________

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