Eberhart Herrmann

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Eberhart Herrmann (* in Munich ) is a German carpet art dealer and millionaire who lives in Switzerland since 1995th He became known to the general public in particular through a legal dispute that lasted around 13 years against the psychiatrist Hans-Jürgen Möller and the Free State of Bavaria as his employer.

The psychiatrist Möller had - without ever having spoken to Herrmann himself - diagnosed a mental illness with "endangering himself and others" at Herrmann in December 1994 and issued a "specialist psychiatric certificate for placement in a psychiatric hospital", in which it was claimed that one Immediate instruction from Herrmann is "absolutely necessary". Möller then illegally sent this “specialist psychiatric certificate” to Herrmann's then wife, on whose behalf he had made it.

Life

Herrmann is a trained lawyer . He inherited from his mother a oriental carpet treatment in the center of Munich and converted it with his then-wife Ulrike in an art gallery in order. Until December 1994 he ran the carpet and art painting gallery on Theatinerstrasse and was a world-famous dealer for precious carpets with close contacts to auction houses in London and New York. He wrote specialist books on antique carpets and published them himself.

Certificate and consequences

The retired psychiatry professor Detlev von Zerssen , long-time customer of the gallery, observed Herrmann in November 1994 during an exhibition opening and, according to his own statements, was concerned about changes in Herrmann. Zerssen turned to Herrmann's wife with suspicion of hypomania and recommended her to the then head of psychiatry at Munich's Maximilians University , Hans-Jürgen Möller . Herrmann had his wife describe him to him. Möller diagnosed Herrmann's endogenous psychosis after his wife's descriptions and a half-hour observation of Herrmann in a customer conversation, without Herrmann's examination and questioning . In violation of medical confidentiality, Möller handed the wife a certificate in which Herrmann was described as "dangerous to himself and others" and "immediate placement in a closed ward of a psychiatric clinic" as "absolutely necessary".

Herrmann subsequently cleared his gallery at night, according to his own statements, for fear of the impending housing, and sold works of art worth millions in Switzerland . Since the works of art also included items that had been assigned as security to a bank , he was arrested on December 15, 1994 and taken to the Munich correctional facility . There he sat five days remand . Herrmann's mother-in-law initiated a care procedure with reference to Möller's certificate .

After Herrmann's eviction and escape, word got around in the carpet collector scene that he had gone crazy, to which the carpet art market reacted nervously. Spiegel author Alexander Osang compares the business with old carpets with the stock market , saying it is just as sensitive. The value of Herrmann's carpets fell from 30 million marks (valuation by Hypo-Bank Munich in the summer of 1994) to around 6 to 8 million marks (estimate by Sotheby’s in 1995). The most important German collectors turned away from Herrmann, credit lines were canceled and international trade fairs denied Herrmann access.

After moving to Switzerland, Herrmann set up new trading centers in Zurich , Emmetten and Lucerne . After moving from Munich, only about 30 customers remained of around 1,500 customers and interested parties. He had to build up a large part of his business from scratch, and in doing so, he had to stand up to the damage to the public image that had ultimately been triggered by the psychiatrist's remote diagnosis. According to Herrmann, for example, at the beginning of 1995, Wirtschaftswoche spread the harmful rumors about him; it was not until 2001 that it was again listed as a top European dealer in Wirtschaftswoche .

Litigation

In December 1997 Herrmann sued Hans-Jürgen Möller and his employer, the Free State of Bavaria , for a total of eight million DM in damages . According to its own information, Herrmann invested almost 500,000 euros in the legal disputes by 2008. Herrmann was not only concerned with the financial damage suffered. In the context of the legal dispute, he also wanted to clarify that he never had a mental illness and that "the doctor acted completely against any rule".

In the course of the legal dispute, numerous experts were occupied with the question of whether Herrmann was mentally disturbed at the time of the certificate. Both Möller and Herrmann commissioned professors of psychiatry with corresponding expert opinions. The experts commissioned by Möller confirmed his diagnosis at the time. According to Herrmann, however, like Möller at the time, these experts made remote diagnoses and judged them solely on the basis of files; none of them thought it necessary to meet the test person personally. The experts brought in by Herrmann all spoke to him; they confirmed that mentally “nothing is missing”. According to Herrmann, everyone who spoke to him personally came to this conclusion, including a psychiatrist in Zurich with whom Herrmann spoke shortly after moving to Switzerland. By 2008, contradicting statements and reports on Herrmann's state of health from ten doctors from four countries came together in the files.

On August 20, 2008, the Munich Regional Court I sentenced Hans-Jürgen Möller to 5,000 euros in compensation for pain and suffering because the medical confidentiality obligation had been violated by the handing over of the certificate to the wife . The further action for compensation for all damage suffered as a result of the certificate was rejected. It was only after the carpet gallery was cleared and the flight to Switzerland that the information about the diagnosed state of mind reached the business world, which is why Herrmann's alleged destruction of existence was due to his own behavior. The court did not come to a decision on the question of whether Möller's certificate was substantively justified, i.e. whether Herrmann was mentally ill at the time or not. In connection with the lawsuit, it is important that the diagnosis of a mental disorder and the urgent recommendation to place someone in psychiatry hit the personality of the person affected “at their base”, and that “regardless of whether the diagnosis is correct or not wrong is". Both complained Möller and Herrmann laid appeal against the judgment.

On February 4, 2010, Möller was sentenced in appeal proceedings by the Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG Munich) for "encroaching on general personal rights " to pay Herrmann an increase in compensation for pain and suffering to 15,000 euros and to compensate for "any material damage caused by the production and transfer of Certificate has been issued or will be issued ". However, Möller is not liable for Herrmann's business difficulties. Rather, these were caused by the behavior of the plaintiff, in particular by the evacuation of his shop and his flight to Switzerland, but also because he himself communicated the content of the certificate to business partners. According to the judgment of the Munich Higher Regional Court, Herrmann is "not entitled to any legal aspects of damage or compensation for pain and suffering". Because the preparation of the certificate on behalf of the wife of the plaintiff was to be classified as a secondary activity of the doctor, which had nothing to do with the management of the clinic. The fact that the certificate was written on the clinic's stationery is not relevant. The revision was not allowed.

classification

Professor Möller had written the certificate almost exclusively on the basis of the information provided by Herrmann's then wife, without having spoken to Eberhart Herrmann himself. As part of a ZDF broadcast dealing with the case, the psychiatrist Martin von Hagen pointed out that a medical certificate “of course also includes the information provided by the person concerned”. It is best "if you bring relatives and those affected together in order to then form your own judgment". In this case, he sees the problem “in the procedure” in diagnostics. One of the consequences of the behavior of the psychiatrist Möller was that Eberhart Herrmann was only heard in court and in press reports. In principle, the wife should not have been the sole source for the diagnosis, especially because the marriage was broken at the time and the couple was in a "war of divorce". The press release of the Regional Court Munich I on the judgment in 2008 is entitled "Scenes from a marriage". The presiding judge at the Munich Higher Regional Court criticized the serious neglect of the psychiatrist Möller with the indignant exclamation “It doesn't work that way!”.

The medical expert Ursula Gresser , who has published an article on the question of the dubious neutrality of psychiatric experts, sees parallels to the cases of Horst Arnold , Gustl Mollath and Jörg Kachelmann , which have led to "that trust in the psychiatric and also in the psychological reviewer has been massively shaken ”. She considers the Herrmann case to be "particularly blatant" because the head of a psychiatric university clinic had issued the questionable certificate here. Möller's report was "unjustified" and "inadmissible". The high financial damage was ultimately a consequence of this opinion, since Herrmann had to flee abroad in order not to be admitted to the closed psychiatry on the basis of the opinion. In their opinion, Möller should have been held liable for his “rule violations”.

Herrmann himself sees his escape at the time confirmed by many other cases in which people were wrongly admitted to psychiatry on the basis of expert reports . He refers, for example, to Gustl Mollath , who was locked up in psychiatry for seven years. Another comparable case is that of Ilona Haslbauer .

Publications

Herrmann published the following publications, among others:

  • with Gerhard Arandt: From Uschak to Yarkand. Rare oriental carpets from four centuries . Self-published, Munich 1979, DNB 800691113 .
  • with Gerhard Arandt: From Konya to Kokand. Rare oriental carpets . Self-published, Munich 1980, DNB 810278960 .
  • Asian carpet and textile art . 4 vols. Self-published, Munich 1989–1992, DNB 551659610 .

literature

  • Alexander Osang : The curse of the carpets. How the Munich art dealer Eberhardt Herrmann wants to prove in his new life that he wasn't crazy in his old one . In: ders .: In the next life. Reports and portraits . CH. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-571-3 , pp. 176-189. (Article is largely identical to: the other: The curse of the carpets . In: Der Spiegel , No. 52/2008, pp. 48–53).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Munich Higher Regional Court, judgment of February 4, 2010, Az. 1 U 4650/08 (online at openJur).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Alexander Osang: The curse of the carpets. In: Der Spiegel , No. 52/2008, December 20, 2008, pp. 48–53.
  3. ↑ a b c d Eberhard Unfried: Declared crazy and locked away. In: tz , June 25, 2009.
  4. ↑ Interview with Wolfgang Heim in SWR 1 , February 13, 2009 (here 4:52 p.m. to 5:16 p.m.).
  5. ↑ Interview with Wolfgang Heim in SWR 1 , February 13, 2009 (here 7:50 p.m. to 8:40 p.m.).
  6. ↑ Interview with Wolfgang Heim in SWR 1 , February 13, 2009 (here 13:51 to 14:28).
  7. ↑ Interview with Wolfgang Heim in SWR 1 , February 13, 2009 (here 6:00 p.m. to 7:25 p.m.).
  8. ↑ Interview with Wolfgang Heim in SWR 1 , February 13, 2009 (here 16:16 to 16:45).
  9. ↑ Regional Court Munich I , Az. 9 O ​​22406/97, judgment of August 20, 2008.
  10. ↑ a b Tobias Pichlmaier: Scenes from a marriage . District Court Munich I , press release of August 21, 2008 (archived website).
  11. ^ A b John Schneider: Psychiatrist has to pay. In: Abendzeitung February 4, 2010.
  12. ^ Article in ZDF magazine Mit mir nicht! (YouTube video, 12:15 min.), Here 8:04 to 8:28 and 11:34 to 11:41.
  13. ↑ U. Gresser: Influence on the expert - from the point of view of the psychiatric expert , in: The medical expert 5/2016, pp. 198–203.
  14. ↑ In the expert trap. When the judiciary is at the end SWR documentation (YouTube video, 44:41 min.), Here 7:13 to 8:01.
  15. ↑ In the expert trap. When the judiciary is at the end SWR documentation (YouTube video, 44:41 min.), Here 42:40 to 43:25.
  16. ↑ In the expert trap. When the judiciary is finished SWR documentation (YouTube video, 44:41 min.), Here 6:03 to 7:04.
personal data
SURNAME Herrmann, Eberhart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German carpet art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich