How calling a German finance minister a ‘moron’ leads to cops and criminal charges

Stefan Niehoff, a 64-year-old retiree and former sergeant in the Bundeswehr,  became something of an overnight sensation in Germany last year after police showed up at his home in rural Bavaria at 6.15 in the morning on November 12th with a warrant to search the premises.

Now the search and the warrant have inspired a new documentary, The Schwachkopf Affair (Tale of a Meme), which premiered in Los Angeles on May 16.

The object of the warrant? A meme that Niehoff had reposted on X several months earlier showing then German Minister of the Economy and Green Party Chancellor candidate Robert Habeck and the logo of the German haircare products brand “Schwarzkopf Professional”. The name “Schwarzkopf” had, however, been changed to “Schwachkopf”, thus giving “Schwachkopf Professional” – which translates as “professional moron”.

Niehoff was being investigated for having thus “insulted” the Green Party politician. “Insult” (Beleidigung) is indeed a crime under German law, and public officials even enjoy heightened protection against “insult” under what is commonly referred to – with or without irony – as the “lèse-majesté” law.

Niehoff tells filmmaker Alexander Tuschinski that the police officers seemed a bit “embarrassed” about their visit. Apparently feeling that they could not leave empty-handed, however, they seized Niehoff’s Samsung tablet: something like the “murder weapon”, so to say – even though the “perpetrator” made clear that he prefers to tweet from his computer. 

Oddly enough, as the alternative German media Apollo News has reported, the dawn raid at Niehoff’s home occurred on a national “Day of Action Against Antisemitic Hate on the Internet”. Niehoff speculates that the authorities merely wanted to top up their statistics to make the “Day of Action” a success – even though there is obviously nothing whatsoever anti-Semitic about the “Schwachkopf” meme. But they got more than they bargained for, since Niehoff decided to go public about the matter, contacting a variety of alternative media like Apollo News and Nius.

There was in fact already a clue that the raid might be somehow connected to the “Day of Action” in the warrant police presented to Niehoff, since the top of the document, as touched upon in the film, showed that Niehoff was being investigated for Volksverhetzung, which can be roughly translated as “incitement to racial hatred”. The remainder of the document, however, then went on to talk about the entirely unrelated “Schwachkopf” meme, accusing Niehoff of having “insulted” the economics minister.

In the meanwhile, the authorities appear to have realigned their ducks. Niehoff was notified last month, during the filming of the documentary, that the “insult” charge had been dropped, but that he had now indeed been charged with “incitement”, as well as with using “anti-constitutional”, i.e. Nazi, symbols. This too is illegal under German law. The charges relate to other memes and/or posts that Niehoff reposted on his X account and that allude in various ways to the Third Reich. 

But the allusions to the Third Reich appear to have all been unmistakably critical. Thus, in one case, he is reported to have reposted a meme showing a member of the Nazi paramilitary organization the SA with a poster reading “Germans, don’t buy from Jews”: the motto of the Nazi’s infamous 1933 boycott of Jewish business or “Jew boycott”. But, as Tuschinski explains in the film, the meme was a response to calls to boycott a German dairy products manufacturer whose owner is suspected of being sympathetic to the opposition AfD (Alternative for Germany) party. The critical use of the imagery was made obvious by the added caption: “True democrats! We had this all before!”

Niehoff’s lawyer Marcus Pretzell, cited by the German daily Die Welt, noted another post drew a parallel between the well-known German public TV host, Sarah Bosetti, who in December 2021 compared opponents of mass Covid-19 vaccination to “an appendix that is not essential to the survival of the whole [society]”, and the Nazi concentration camp doctor Fritz Klein, who is reported to have described the Jews as “an inflamed appendix that has to be removed from the body of the nation”.

It is a measure of the chilling effect of German “hate speech” laws and related restrictions on freedom of expression that neither Tuschinski’s documentary nor German news reports on Niehoff’s case actually show the supposedly “incriminating” memes in question. Doing so would presumably make their critical intent perfectly obvious. 

Alexander Tuschinski devotes much of his film simply to visiting with and getting-to-know the members of the Niehoff household: Stefan, his wife Daniela, their adult daughter with Down’s syndrome Alexandra, and their two little dogs Billy and Lilly. Alexandra happily shows off her computer skills and her artwork and even does a few Bollywood-inspired dance moves.

Niehoff drives the director around to some of the places he has worked and lived, as well as other notable sites in the region, like the former “intra-German” border between West and East Germany. He discusses his life and candidly offers his views on a wide variety of contemporary topics. 

Among other things, the former tank commander insists that the Bundeswehr’s mission is and should remain strictly defensive, makes clear his opposition to arms shipments to Ukraine and his support for peace negotiations – “Why do they all want war so much?” he wonders – explains how he was politicized during the Covid period and by “the discrimination against the unvaccinated”, and reminisces about his visit as a member of the Bundeswehr to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial. He wishes that some of the younger Germans who so readily throw around the term “Nazi” would also visit the camp and “learn what a Nazi really was”.

It is common for sympathetic foreign commentators to excuse German speech prohibitions as an understandable response to German history. But if German authorities want to use scary “Nazis” to justify policies and laws that restrict basic civil liberties in ways that are otherwise unparalleled in the West, then they will have to do better than the jovial and admirably historically-conscious Stefan Niehoff and his family. Maybe, after all, the shoe is on the other foot.

The Schwachkopf Affair (Tale of a Meme) premiered on May 16 at the Independent Filmmakers Showcase in Los Angeles and is available on YouTube with English subtitles here.