On 24 January 2019 the cartoonist Dieter Hanitzsch is to be honoured with the Ernst Hoferichter Prize for his life’s work. The city of Munich curates the prize, Munich’s former Lord Mayor Christian Ude (SPD) will give the laudatory speech, and Munich’s serving head of cultural affairs, Dr Hans-Georg Küppers, chairs the foundation’s advisory board, which is conferring the prize on Hanitzsch. This state of affairs disturbs and concerns us in the highest degree. For Dieter Hanitzsch drew a cartoon, printed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 15 May 2018, which insensitively made use of antisemitic stereotypes, and to this day he has shown no understanding of the problem or of the concerns voiced from the Jewish side. Elio Adler, Chairman of the WerteInitiative – jüdisch-deutsche Positionen, comments: “That Mr Hanitzsch is now to be honoured is thoroughly irritating. In any case, the works that take up antisemitic stereotypes must be addressed clearly when the award is conferred.” Even more irritating than the conferral of the award on Hanitzsch, however, Adler finds the tone in which the former Lord Mayor of the city of Munich, Christian Ude, speaks of those who criticise it. On 10 January 2019 Ude told the Tagesspiegel that “a small group” was trying to “exert pressure on politics with a tightly organised protest campaign”. The President of the Jewish Community of Munich, Charlotte Knobloch, was, he said, “driven along by this group”. Even if the initiative for the protest did originate with a small civil-society group, it speaks for itself when further people join it because they see themselves confirmed in the perpetuation of their injury. There can be no question of the “ritual of outrage” that Ude suspects behind the protest. Adler also asks: “Does the size of a group determine how valid its concerns are?” Adler continues: “And of our honorary member, Dr Knobloch, Mr Ude claims: ‘She cannot escape this if she wants to hold her community together.’ Does Mr Ude mean by this that Dr Knobloch’s ‘community’ would not be stable enough for controversial positions? His statement gives the impression that he is denying Dr Knobloch an opinion and conviction of her own. For when the cartoon appeared in 2018 she said that she was ‘deeply appalled and also hurt’, and that this was how ‘most Jews in Germany’ thought and felt. In other words, the exact opposite of a small circle that she supposedly has to hold together.” On the analogy Mr Ude drew between Netanyahu and Erdoğan (‘nor can the cartoonist bow to every accusation of racism when he draws Erdoğan critically’), Adler stresses: “A former mayor, too, should remain aware of his responsibility: antisemitism is not a sub-form of racism, and the Erdoğan comparison is so lame that it is simply of no use.”
