Our first thought was way too American: the inmates are running the asylum.
That thought came about because the traditional German name for a public broadcasting service generally had the word "Anstalt" in it, which just so happens to be a constituent of the German term for that asylum where those were kept that society deemed crazy.
I hereby apologize to the one friend I might still have in the German public broadcasting system. Our status is possibly contingent on her not reading any of my recent rants on the power grab that took place here in public broadcasting.
Get a historical perspective of the mandatory tax/fee that even the most dirt poor immigrant who is not eligible for basic living allowance must now pay to satisfy the insatiable appetite of an industry already sucking up in excess of 7.5 billion euros of public money a year.
The official name of the thing is "fee" because it would be illegal if it were a tax.
As the disturbing picture becomes clearer, it begins to resemble a silent coup d'etat. The stunning realization that it had been decades in the making caused a few sleepless nights.
We were not here when the Germans debated how to change their "fee" structure. The Frankenfee monster born under the applause of the German main stream media --- the public broadcasting services, the beneficiaries -- is a masterpiece of legal engineering.
The keystone of the pro-Frankenfee campaigners was the term "Bestandswahrung". The easy translation would be "maintain current levels of public financing", but this translation cannot capture the emotional content of the two component words "Bestand" and "Wahrung".
"Bestand" is kind of "that which is", a state of existence radiating a sense of hard work, of great achievement. "Wahrung" is a slightly dated word which is best rendered as "to guard".
The public broadcasters and their plentiful army of political, legal and contracting supporters thus set out merely to guard the achievements of public broadcasting for the future benefit of German society.
What's wrong with not wanting to give up money, you ask?
Nothing, entitlements are sticky, and it is okay.
What is bad is this: all of this was fought out in the Great Recession and its aftermath. German governments had for almost a decade slashed "that which is" in social security, payroll taxes, health care and the whole shebang.
And there, right in the middle of it all, the public broadcasters who have long since branched out into full for profit businesses in all humility, with just a tiny dose of end of the world hype, explain to the country that they want nothing more than keep the level of financing unchanged.
And they pull it off!
Huge swaths of civil society had pleaded for a decade: please, we are not asking for more, just let us keep what we have now!
Pensions for workers and lower middle class Germans were slashed not once, not twice but several times under the rallying cry "we are no longer competitive in the world".
We'll just cut a little more, it won''t hurt, promise. Today, Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, has one of the lowest retirement benefit levels of the Western World.
And the public broadcasters make out like bandits.
It looks, well, it looks like payback. Payback for decades of quietly providing well paid jobs for former politicians and their offspring, payback for building all these transmitters along the western side of the Iron Curtain, beaming as far into East Germany as possible, payback for not panicking during the social unrest of the late 1960s, for staying calm enough and in the right political corner during the 70s, for being actually pretty good at that strangely distant time in the past when the German people (with a little help from their Polish, Hungarian, and Russian friends) brought down THE WALL. Payback for keeping up morale during the "liberal" decade death by a thousand cuts.
It may seem in retrospect that the German government took notice of the quiet strength of its people. Candle light holding demure preachers and socialist housewifes did what armies had not been able to do.
I challenge you to look at the relationship of most public broadcasters and the newly powerful to see if the previous healthy distance starts to fade around that time. Thoughtful voices remain in German public broadcasting, fewer and fewer of them.
Has any social scientist researched the literal family trees in German public broadcasting?
The surnames indicate the formation of dynasties. Tally them.
The bitter battle over one of the most pathetically unjust fees [as far was we know of] is not quite over yet. But barring a German supreme court spanking, the politico-media industrial complex has won.
Note: In a fit of indignation, one specific other German word, a composite noun popped up in the imagination of the author. What a wonderfully outrageous comparison that one would make. A rational decision was made to not use this term in the present post.
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