We have no doubt that the defendant made a serious effort and applied the full powers of his conscience to making the correct decision. Lars Koch did not shoot from personal motives, but in order to save the people in the stadium. He therefore chose what was objectively the lesser evil. For this reason no criminal blame can be attached to him.
The argument of the State Prosecutor that passengers might have been able to force their way into the cockpit or the pilot might have been able to make the aircraft fly higher, is an interesting one but is not ultimately persuasive. For one thing, it cannot be proven. For another, miracles may happen but our duty is not to deal with miracles but with facts. Otherwise it would be impossible to express a verdict. The Prosecution’s view that lives which have been given up for lost may not be curtailed further is doubtless correct. But such cases – we think of organ transplants from the dying, for example – are different from this one. This case bears no parallels to the remaining reality of our lives, so that the Prosecution’s otherwise correct argument to avoid precedent is not applicable.
To summarise we wish to observe: even though this may be hard to bear, we must accept that our laws are evidently not in a position to solve every moral problem in a manner free from contradiction. Lars Koch became a judge of life and death. We possess no legal criteria to test the decision of his conscience definitively. The law, the constitution and the courts left him alone with his decision. It is therefore our considered view that it is wrong to condemn him for it now.
The defendant has therefore been found not guilty.
This trial is now closed. The lay judges are released from their duties with our thanks.
The Presiding Judge rises. At the same time everyone else – except the Defendant – stands up. The Presiding Judge exits via the door behind the judge’s bench.
Curtain.
‘Keep Going Come What May’
Bonsoir, Monsieur Biard. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
On 2nd November 2011 the magazine Charlie Hebdo was firebombed. A few days before, a drawing of the prophet Mohammed had been printed on its front cover. Its offices were burnt out, its equipment destroyed and the magazine’s website was hacked. This now read: ‘God’s curse fall upon you.’ Next to these words was a picture of the mosque in Mecca.
Barely four years later, on 7th January 2015, at around 11.30 a.m., two masked men force their way into the editorial offices. Journalists, cartoonists and a visitor are sitting around a conference table with a cake on it. It’s someone’s birthday. The attackers kill eleven people. While on the run through Paris, the murderers shoot in the face a police man who is lying on the ground. He also dies. Later a third Islamist kills five more people in Paris, including customers of a Jewish supermarket.
These men, the sons of Algerian immigrants, were trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda. And indeed a few days later one of the leaders of that terrorist organisation claims responsibility for the attack. This was the most violent terrorist attack in France since 1961 and seventeen people were murdered. A bloodbath because of a couple of cartoons.
Today this prize honours the dead. And it also honours the survivors. Everyone would have understood if the journalists and artists had not kept going. The fact that you and your colleagues have done so, dear Mr Biard, that Charlie Hebdo still exists, comes despite many things. Despite the murder of your friends, despite the grief you feel for them and despite the conditions under which you now have to work. For this you deserve every prize there is and for this I pay tribute to you.
In the discussion that followed the murders of 7th January almost every newspaper in Germany quoted an essay written by the author Kurt Tucholsky in the year 1919. Here Tucholsky had asked, ‘What is satire allowed to do?’ to which he promptly supplied his own answer: ‘Everything.’ Arts journalists wrote their pieces, almost every editor composed a leading article and practically all of them agreed with Tucholsky. Their solidarity is understandable – but in fact Tucholsky meant something else entirely.
He wrote those words at a very different time. The First World War had been lost, the Kaiser had fled the country, society had collapsed. Tucholsky’s hopes, like those of so many, lay with democracy. This was what he was fighting for as a writer and essayist, and that is why he did not care in the slightest whether the authorities allowed his writings. Quite often they didn’t. At the time artists such as George Grosz and Karl Arnold were also charged with criminal offences. What Tucholsky meant was that satire could allow itself to do anything, that artists were disappointed idealists taking on reality.
He only experienced Hitler’s regime in its infancy. When he wrote those words, the Nazi magazine Der Stürmer did not yet exist. If he had been aware of the outrageous caricatures of Jews it would publish, he would certainly have written those words very differently.
Ladies and gentlemen, cartoons can be art and artistic freedom is now guaranteed in our constitutions. But it is enormously difficult to define what art actually is. In Paris in 1917 Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on top of a plinth and said that this was art because he declared it was art. Subsequently Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys would advocate the view that everyone is an artist and everything is art. If that were true and if it were also true that art is entirely free then everyone would be allowed to do everything. That would be the end of our society. ‘Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “art”. There are only artists,’ said the leading art historian of the twentieth century, Ernst Gombrich. It is a wise statement. Who is doing the drawing and the writing is always important too. Art is what artists do.
Quite apart from this, the issue of how far satire and caricature are allowed to go is one that should never concern a satirical magazine. Satire stays alive by being transgressive. Once it stops doing that, it stops being satire. If everything is allowed, there is no need for it any more. Satire has to be sharp, critical and provocative. It has to hurt and upset people. If it doesn’t hurt anyone, it doesn’t mean anything. Artists cannot care whether what they are doing is allowed. And now they have no need to care because they no longer have to fear for their lives because in our enlightened society discussions about the limits of art, satire and caricature take place in a courtroom. That is perhaps art’s true freedom.
And precisely that was also Charlie Hebdo’s story up until the attacks. A few months ago the newspaper Le Monde published an article entitled ‘Charlie Hebdo: Twenty-Two Years of Trials’. Indeed the magazine has been sued by practically everyone who could sue – from every possible religious organisation to politicians and journalists. The Catholic Church alone took out fourteen different lawsuits against Charlie Hebdo – and lost every one of them. This places the magazine in a long tradition.