When Karin Struck argued with Angela Merkel and left the talk show
Struck versus Merkel (r.): Screenshot from the NDR talk show of July 3, 1992
Source: Screenshot WORLD
In July 1992 there was a scandal on the “NDR Talkshow”. The writer Karin Struck is angry about the then Federal Minister for Women, Angela Merkel. It’s about abortion – and Struck doesn’t want to be muzzled.
Angela Merkel, Federal Minister for Women and Youth in 1992, sits on the “NDR Talk Show” and speaks with a noticeably more Uckermark accent than today. It’s July 3, 1992, and Merkel is talking about counseling centers for abortions. Above all, however, she has to speak up against Karin Struck, because the writer and then prominent anti-abortion opponent keeps interrupting Merkel: “No general babble!”, which is a pretty word creation – somewhere in the middle between rambling and swaggering. When the moderator of the show, Wolf Schneider, warns Struck to please let Merkel answer his question, Struck frowns and asks back: “Should I go now?” Her voice and her eyes are charged with adrenaline.
“I don’t think blackmail can be the motto of this talk show.” With these words, the later Chancellor intervenes as a moderator and wants to continue her argument – which only further infuriates Karin Struck: how many millions the federal government pays for educational offers on the subject of unwanted pregnancy , she wanted to know here and now. Merkel says she doesn’t have the number in her head. Schneider warns Struck again, who hisses at him: “Don’t you want to get a muzzle? Why don’t you get a muzzle!’
Angela Merkel smiles
Merkel smiles in embarrassment and says: “I’ll try again.” Struck gets up and wants to get rid of her microphone, the wiring of which is stuck under her dress. Angrily, she lifts the dress up so far that she is standing around in her underwear. The scene looks lascivious. Hooters in the studio, a voice that sounds like Schneider’s co-host Alida Gundlach yells, “No. It’s horrible.” Karin Struck rips the micro wiring off her body and hurls it at the studio audience in a high arc. She throws a wine glass behind her, very close to Angela Merkel’s head. She flinches. It rattles. Indignation, someone shouts: “That can’t be true.” Without a word, Struck grabs her handbag and stomps out of the studio in front of the cameras. Struck’s appearance and departure can still be seen on YouTube today.
The scandal only became news in the newspapers the following Tuesday. One notices that in 1992 there were no fast-spreading media like Twitter and that the Monday editors only had to confer about it. Talk show host Wolf Schneider reports to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”: “We knew that Ms. Struck was rhetorically difficult. But it was not foreseeable that she would freak out like that.”
Karin Struck, born near Greifswald in 1947 and who fled to the West with her family in 1953, became known in the mid-1970s as a rebellious feminist writer. also abroad. In the diary-like novel, a student named Karin writes ruthlessly about her emotional and sexual life and at the same time about her class origins.
In 1991, Struck published the novel “Bluebeard’s Shadow”, in which she – based on the fairy tale of King Bluebeard and apparently autobiographically motivated – negotiated the subject of abortion.
Karin Struck in 1975
Quelle: picture alliance/United Archives
In her essays and pamphlets, too, the mother of four children is now increasingly and radically targeting the “abortion society”. Struck converted to the Catholic faith in 1996 and died in 2006, of all things from abdominal cancer, as the “taz” stated in its obituary. The talk show scandal with Angela Merkel in 1992 coincided with the time when the German Bundestag was merging the different legal regulations of the Federal Republic and the GDR.
It is said that all writer’s life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.