The book “‘May the entire republic point the finger at you’: Corona injustice and its perpetrators” was published on November 7, 2022 by Rubikon-Verlag. It was written by Marcus Klöckner and Jens Wernicke. Ulrike Guérot wrote the foreword and Tom-Oliver Regenauer the afterword. The book is currently number two on the Spiegel bestseller list.
The editors of the Berliner Zeitung want to deal with the topic of Corona and the social consequences for society. That’s why we asked a journalist who works for the editorial team as a freelancer to review the book impartially.
Since he believes he has to fear consequences for his work, he has asked us that his criticism may exceptionally appear anonymously under a pseudonym. For reasons of fairness, we have given the author Dietrich Brüggemann, who is explicitly criticized in the anonymously published review here, the opportunity to comment. The two authors involved agreed to this approach.
The result is a kind of pros and cons. Feedback to: [email protected]
The statement by the former Health Minister Jens Spahn, which he made at the height of the Corona crisis and later made into a book, has become famous: “We will have to forgive each other a lot”. At the moment, German society has reached a phase in which the rift created by the different reactions to the virus threat has not been closed or healed, but is being covered by issues that feel more urgent.
The authors of a new book do not want to allow this repression and call for a reappraisal of the “corona injustice”, which they include serious encroachments on fundamental rights and, above all, the defamation and stigmatization of the unvaccinated.
Will they spark a debate? Probably not, because the book’s comprehensible argumentation, which is mainly documented by reputable sources, is devalued by an afterword.
“Magazine for the critical mass”
The problem: The book “May the entire republic point a finger at you” is published by Rubikon-Verlag. One of the two authors, cultural scientist Jens Wernicke, is deputy editor-in-chief of the online magazine Rubikon. Rubikon calls itself “Magazine for the Critical Mass”, the first main topic under which the texts are sorted is “Facade Democracy and Deep State”. In the hot phase of the Corona crisis, for example, texts in the style of revival could be read there, with which the first large-scale protests against the government measures were commented on in an undifferentiated way. The style of the “reporting” of this portal is often populist, the border to the spectrum of conspiracy thinking is often crossed.
Co-author Marcus Klöckner, sociologist and media scientist, also writes for Rubicon, as well as for the “Nachdenkseiten” or books with pithy titles such as “Zombie Journalism: What comes after the death of freedom of expression?”.
Incredible verbal gaffes
In the new book, too, the authors are pithy and provocative, consciously working with trigger terms such as fascism, betrayal, (trauma) perpetrators, comparisons to the Nazi era. For example, in the introduction they write: “Having seen the unvaccinated and critics of the corona measures marginalized, devalued, defamed and threatened during the pandemic, there are some very uncomfortable ‘things’ that need to be talked about . This means that the question of ‘denazification’ asked at the beginning of the introduction, no matter how disturbing or absurd it may seem to one or the other, is not only asked maybut to be asked got to.“
Many people will get out at this point, finding that dealing with the book is not worthwhile, that the authors deserve the label “lateral thinker” or “legally open”. It’s still worth discussing: because they write in a well-considered manner, anticipating and also defusing criticism in this way, their argumentation seems coherent in many places, they use almost exclusively reputable media and scientific sources – and the book is based on an overwhelming collection of quotations, with which politicians, journalists and other public figures actually showed incredible verbal gaffes during the time of the 2G regulation (and the preparation for it).
A differentiated look at the publication
Incidentally, a breach for the book project is made by a critic of the measures who has not yet been completely branded or canceled in the German public. Film director Dietrich Brüggemann wishes: “May this book enter the bestseller list at number 1.” Political scientist Ulrike Guérot, who has recently been navigating more and more to the sidelines through provocative objections (e.g. about the war in Ukraine), contributes a foreword: “The Corona -Politics was and is a great crime against mankind and humanity. In a democracy, this needs to be clarified so that the societal cancer does not lead to society and democracy being eaten away from within.”
The book’s biggest problem is the afterword, which at first glance seems inconspicuous. On four pages, Tom-Oliver Regenauer, an entrepreneur, music producer and Rubicon author, is allowed to mix together all the ingredients that make society’s critics of corona measures so controversial: He considers the pandemic to be “willfully dramatized”, a “stirrup bracket for the recalibration of the World Economy”, “a historic opportunity for a manageable number of crisis capitalists, banking cartels, international corporations, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech and an unmanageable armada of supranational NGOs”. To place oneself in a context with such assumptions puts the authors of the book in a bad light, as does Dietrich Brüggemann and Ulrike Guérot.
Nevertheless, an attempt should be made to take a differentiated look at the rest of the publication.
About compulsory vaccination and other measures
The quotes: The book wants to be “a private documentation center for Corona injustice”, “operated by an anonymous group”. It is not intended to denounce, but to attempt to snatch defamatory statements from oblivion. The title of the book is also a quote that the journalist Nikolaus Blome put into the world in a Spiegel column in December 2020: “I, on the other hand, would like to expressly ask for social disadvantages for all those who voluntarily do not have a vaccination. May the entire republic point the finger at her.”
Vaccination obligation iconimago/Wolfgang Maria Weber
Each chapter of the book, which deals with the attitude towards the corona pandemic (the authors do not deny that there really was a pandemic) of politics, the media, society and the elite, begins with a particularly outrageous quote. For example, from World Medical Association Chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery: “But if you can no longer work without being vaccinated, you no longer need public transport to get there. Yes, it’s that hard!” Or from Tübingen’s Mayor Boris Palmer: “People like you have to be vaccinated. If necessary, up to detention.”
“The state’s encroachment is a traumatizing experience for many”
Or Zeit editor Christian Vooren: “What is needed now is no longer openness, but a sharp wedge. One who divides society. […] Driven right and deep, it separates the dangerous from the vulnerable part of society.”
With their documentation, the book authors keep alive the memory of how a frightening verbal armament of parts of the public took place in the course of 2021, an open defamation and exclusion of a social group that had not existed for a long time.
A whole chapter deals with the question “Why not just forget it?”: The social damage caused by the temporary elimination of fundamental rights is too great, the authors write. “In personal conversations, but also from countless posts on social media, we learned that the encroachment of the state was a traumatizing experience for many. Even in their own homes, citizens were no longer protected from encroachments by the state. A call from an informer in the neighborhood was enough for the police to break into the apartment to check how many people were in it.”
Fascist tendencies in the Corona debate
The Nazi comparison: Although they are often and willingly used in public debates in Germany, comparisons with the Nazi era usually bring them to a quick end. The authors dare to do it anyway, but make it clear in several places: “Of course, the devaluation and exclusion of unvaccinated people during the pandemic is not to be equated with the actions of the Nazis towards the Jews.” And yet they are similar in the sense of “resist the beginnings”. see “base impulses” or “fascist tendencies” flaring up again: “A mixture of authority, a feeling of superiority, sadism, rule fetishism, compensation for one’s own shortcomings are among other drivers when it comes to the devaluation of groups of people.”
And further: “Parts of the leadership and interpretation elite have acted against fellow citizens with a linguistic brutality that is unworthy of our democracy. Many have ‘participated’ in the past two years.”
It’s a necessary debate
Conclusion: As already indicated at the beginning, it is extremely questionable whether the authors will spark a serious debate with the controversial arguments they cite or whether they will initiate the required reappraisal. In a relatively short chapter, they also touch on a half-baked media criticism, which, with Bourdieu, Precht and Welzer among others, advocates the thesis that journalists mostly belong to the middle class, accordingly “buck up, step down” and therefore tend to do so to join the dominant narrative.
Despite everything: the documentation of the verbal lapses from demands for harsh restrictions on fundamental rights to the blatant exclusion of the unvaccinated holds the finger in a gaping wound – and society would do well to close it through differentiated processing.
Marcus Kloeckner and Jens Wernicke: “‘May the entire republic point a finger at you’: Corona injustice and its perpetrators”, Rubikon, Mainz 2022, 208 p., 20 euros.
Ambiguous statements were published in a previous version of this text, which the editorial team clarified after publication. We apologize for the mistakes. The editorial office.
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