More than 100 prominent German writers and artists have signed an open letter refusing to appear on one of Germany’s top cultural programs on state television after the broadcaster announced a new host who was accused of sexism and racism in its writing.
In late December, ARD hired Thilo Mischke, 43, to present its flagship culture, ttt – Titel, Thesen, Temperamente (Titles, Theses, Temperamente), after veteran program host Max Moor retired.
The election immediately provoked criticism, since a feminist podcast hosted by journalists Annika Brockschmidt and Rebekka Endler highlighted what they called misogyny, racism, ableism and homophobia in Mishke’s books as well as in a series of recent essays.
In his 2010 book Around the World in 80 Women, the first-person narrator tries to seduce the titular number of women and details his successes using broad ethnic stereotypes. His 2013 book The Love of Your Life Doesn’t Big Breasts has also come in for fresh scrutiny. Mischke distanced himself in 2021 from some of what the authors of the open letter writing movement now call “enough.”
In his 2019 podcast, Mischke said that “male sexuality is perhaps based on rape,” calling the act something “primarily male,” Brockschmidt and Endler reported.
In an open letter, high-profile members of the German-language arts are involved, including the best authors Saša Stanišic, Margarete Stokowski and Anna Rabe, actor Julius Feldmeier of Kleo Netflix and Austrian photographer Stephan Draschan said they were “terrified”. Mischke’s hiring and wanted to boycott ttt until it was released.
They wrote: “We want students who study cultural ethics on TV, those who are sensitive and empathetic, and can respond to today’s discourse and even address the complexities of today’s cultural debates.”
Brockschmidt told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung that she had no intention of trying to “cancel” Mischke but was asking “whether the army is fit to deal with the forms of public culture with the biggest questions of the zeitgeist.”
First broadcast in December 1967, tt is a weekly show with interviews and features about the latest cultural establishment in the German-speaking world and beyond. Moor started hosting the show in 2007 and since 2021 Siham El-Maimouni has been co-host. He will continue to work with Mischke from February.
In response to the initial request, ttt released a . said in December on Instagramwhich he said “we are listening”, adding that the aim is “decisively confronting problems such as sexism and toxic masculinity”. He said he would “review the allegations” against Mischke and asked for time to process them.
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ARD Mischke said that he “will intensively and critically engage with accusations of presenting a sexist view of women and using racist words in places”.
The radio magazine ProSieben, which ran a series of reports by Mischke, said in runner X * after the publication of the open letter he praised his work. “What a wild hunt against @ThiloMischke. We appreciate him because he has delivered incredibly great reports that have won many awards. Judging only his own book from the latter day is a very fair approach, which says a lot about people who do the right thing.”
Mischke won a prestigious German television prize in 2023 for his report on the Taliban in Afghanistan and previously acclaimed a documentary about Germans fighting for the Islamic State group.
Journalist and author Hasnain Kazim said that Mischke had also worked on the foundation by uncovering far-right networks in Germany and in in X * He said it was wrong to bring him back to the “stupid book he published 15 years ago”.
Gerrit Bartels, editor of the cultural newspaper Tagesspiegel in Berlin; He said that in addition to the accusationsfor public radio to choose Mischke to cover the arts, despite the lack of secular arts, shows that the role of culture in Germany at the time was “lax, subordinate”. severe budget cuts.