After a week, the uproar over the actor’s #allesdichtmachen action has died down, the public debate is changing. A media commentary
The latest reactions to the actor action #allesdichtmachen show: quick emporia are followed by understanding and growing approval. More and more filmmakers in particular are showing solidarity with the actors, who are often attacked in an extremely rude manner on social networks, and are defending, if not the action itself, then the freedom of expression and integrity of those involved, including Jan Josef Liefers, Meret Becker, Wotan Wilke Mohring, Heike Makatsch, Ulrich Tukur, Ulrike Folkerts and Hanns Zischler.
Especially two reactions of the last days stand out: One was a commentary by the highly influential German producer Nico Hofmann in the Bild newspaper: "Absolutely indisputable", according to Hofmann, be "Broadcasting Council, who are now calling for occupational bans or death threats (…) a hate orgy (…) I think this is completely out of line and I also oppose it." to attack discourse participants in this way, "does not work at all. And certainly not in the democratic composite system".
The artists had wanted to point out the emergency in their industry. "This is a morally intact approach". Even if language, form and content "been very exploitable in this case" are, so Hofmann.
"Scandalous, terrible, horrible"
Even more remarkable is the public retraction of Ulrich Matthes, actor and president of the German Film Academy. In this function, Matthers can never just "as a private person" speak, rather it is his task to represent both the fans and participants of #allesdichtmachen and the vehement opponents of this action equally. Above all, however, the vast majority of filmmakers, who stand somewhere in between and perhaps struggle with themselves for a position.
At the beginning of the debate, Matthes had 3sat-Culture time "enraged, disappointed, dismayed" and the action several times "completely cynical" and "downright ballaballa" called.
Perhaps inspired by comments like the one by Ulrike Folkerts – "we could have been defended instead of continuing to pick on it" – Matthes rowed back a few days later.
In Deutschlandfunk he still found the video action itself "failed", but now clearly said that even the most unsuccessful action can not justify some of the current reactions. Demands for occupational bans or even death threats were "scandalous" and "awful", said Matthes. "I find it terrible how my colleagues are now being threatened", he goes on to say: "The calls for any kind of professional bans are grotesque."
We have to talk to each other in a civilized way, even argue sometimes, Matthes thinks, and advocates approaching each other: "I can really only beg both sides to stop, to stay in dialogue with each other or to come back into dialogue at all."
One could also mention comments by journalists: One important voice from them is that of Harald Martenstein in the Daily Mirror, Titles: "How mouths are stuffed".
The fact that many artists disagree with much has long been standard, worldwide. Those who today have the courage to oppose the government and the part of public opinion associated with it have been experiencing the same thing for years: every day the groundhog digs. Such people are defamed, …in this case with words like ‘screamer’, ‘filth’, ‘nasty’ or ‘no longer tight’, all from media commentary, not from the filth-slinger Twitter. Criticism’ sounds different. Need I mention where you get this pitch from??
Here mouths are to be plugged, it is a matter of smoking in. A decision to which there are alternatives is presented as having no alternatives. It is pretended that the critics, who speak for many, belong to a small, radical minority. Their positions are presented, if at all, only distorted or derisive. … Where am I, what year, what country?
Harald Martenstein
"We are not here now"
Jan Josef Liefers, as one of the actors involved in the program, also received a relatively high level of approval "Maybrit Illner". He sabe now not here, if he had criticized friendly, so Liefers. "And then to demand a very differentiated critique of relatively undifferentiated measures, that doesn’t go together. It is about what our art action anstobt."
FDP politician Wolfgang Kubicki commented with the words: "Not everyone who criticizes curfews is a lateral thinker".
When the mayor of Hamburg, Peter Tschentscher, then argued: "What is the message? The message leaves out the care workers" – where Liefers vehemently contradicted:
"If you look at it the way they say: Wouldn’t it be cool to say, for the time of the pandemic, we’ll simply double the salaries of the nursing staff?? That would be a nice thing to do."
Liefers cut a fine figure. Calmly, civilly in the tone, uncompromisingly in the thing he stressed: What would have been then the alternative to the actor action?
A thought experiment: #makeallcold
A thought experiment: If a bunch of German actors had stood up in public in the past months and recorded short videos for an action called #alleskaltmachen, in which an actress, for example, sobs under tranes: "I am afraid of climate change!"
And a second one without interspersed irony signals proclaims: "We must all become vegans by law right now!". And a third, in which a Kolner Crime scene-The commissioner with a determined look on his face throws a bitten curry sausage into the organic waste garbage can and says: "I liked veggie day every day! The government needs to ban all fast food restaurants and all cars and all coal plants immediately." And a fourth with suffisant gesture says: "I think it’s great that it’s now as warm in Hamburg as it is in Mallorca!" – what would have happened then?
Presumably there had been broad public approval. Luisa Neubauer had shared the videos and supported them via tweets. Katrin Goring-Eckardt had liked it and had said: "It is good that actors are engaged in this important ie."
Film organizations had created the hashtag #gleichausschalten (switch off the same), in which one publicly considers how film production without emissions is possible – for example, by using the camera hand crank again as in the 1920s and by returning to silent film, because this saves energy and the sound department can be dispensed with. And by centralizing the entire German film production in Berlin, which naturally saves on burdensome travel expenses. Film studios in other parts of the republic could be rebuilt and converted into studios for startups working on sustainable climate neutrality.
No one had bothered with trivialities, i.e. the question of whether instead of climate change it might not be better to talk of "Global warming" or "Global warming" should be used, because climate change was already the ice age. And whether it is not politically correct to use the vocabulary "man-made" had to be added to clarify the question of guilt. No one was concerned about whether the comparison between Hamburg and Mallorca might be cynical about the people in the Sahel, for whom global warming means something different than it does for German actors.
And nobody had philosophized about misunderstanding irony or accused the actors of quoting arguments for an eco-dictatorship, or that their videos could encourage bio-terrorists.
The weekly Maybrit-Illner broadcast, however, had left the action to the left and negotiated more important: "New Mutti needs the country: What brings a chancellor Annalena Baerbock?!" or: "From Team Loosening to Team Permanent Struggle: Is Laschet Splitting the CDU??"
Stupidly, however, the 52 German actors in #allesdichtmachen have turned into the Corona pandemic. In this case everything is once again quite different. Once again, the pandemic is becoming a litmus test – this time for the German public’s perception.
Without Reflection and Thoughtfulness: Fundamental Mechanisms of Recent Publicity
A discussion in itself is the question, why – in this case – old-established newspapers and radio stations, which have the self-imposed claim to be quality media, first of all only quote from Twitter tweets and Facebook postings and have constructed a debate about the corresponding acting videos, in which they hardly let the videos themselves appear – and if so, then only by taking over the negative ratings of their critics.
One cause, but not a sufficient reason, is certainly the desire to react as quickly as possible. But reflection and thoughtfulness fall by the wayside here. Own points of view also fall by the wayside. De facto, in this case, the quality media, which by their very nature are slower, act only as echo chambers of the social networks.
They are giving up their unique selling proposition. All this has nothing to do directly with #allesdichtmachen; it is about fundamental mechanisms (and defects)?) of the newer public and its change, which is to be analyzed without question also fundamentally and beyond the pandemic reporting.
Perhaps Heike Makatsch, Meret Becker and others will regret that they hastily withdrew from the group of participants just a few hours after the publication of #allesdichtmachen.
In any case, they were very ill-advised to do so – even if one can well understand that one first has to endure the corresponding shitstorm, the moral contempt in the social networks and the fact that one is very easily lumped in with neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists there, although in one’s own perception one has blobly exercised the right to one’s own opinion cleansing, and how the parliamentary opposition criticizes the government’s pandemic amptions.