Patrick Bahners

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Patrick Bahners (2011)

Patrick Bahners (born February 10, 1967 in Paderborn ) is a German journalist and author.

Life

Patrick Bahners was born in 1967 as the eldest of three sons of the ministerial official Burkhard Bahners and his wife Brigitte, b. Löer, born and grew up in Cologne and Bonn.

Bahners attended the Beethoven-Gymnasium Bonn and studied history and philosophy at the University of Bonn and the University of Oxford (Worcester College). In 1989 he joined the feature section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) (editorial abbreviation “pba.”). From 1993 to 1997 he reported as a permanent employee of the features section based in Bonn, and in 1997 he became the deputy head of the feature section and responsible for new non-fiction books . In the same year the German Anglists' Association awarded him its journalist award. From 2001 until the end of 2011 he was head of the feature pages of the FAZ. From 2012 to 2015 he was the newspaper's cultural correspondent in New York . From July 2015 to December 2017, Bahners wrote for the FAZ as a cultural correspondent from Munich , and since January 1, 2018 - as the successor to Andreas Rossmann - he has been reporting from Cologne on culture in North Rhine-Westphalia. Since December 2016 he has also been responsible for the humanities section of the newspaper.

Bahners held teaching positions at the History Department of the University of Bonn and at the Institute for Literary Studies at the University of Frankfurt am Main . In 2003/2004 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin . In 2012 he held the Dahrendorf visiting professorship at the University of Konstanz . In addition, Bahners is, as he writes in a self-portrait, "Honorary President of the German Organization of non-commercial supporters of pure Donaldism ".

The alarmists

Origin and content

In 2011 Bahners published the book Die Panikmacher at the publishing house CH Beck . The German fear of Islam. A pamphlet based on considerations that were reflected in his FAZ articles over the past few years. There he deals with Islamophobic tendencies in Germany as in all of Europe. He had already publicly represented some aspects in speeches at the Catholic Academy Berlin and at the Humboldt University as well as in an article in the newspapers for German and international politics .

The type of text of the polemic is emphasized by the mottos of the individual chapters, the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , among other things from his classic polemic Anti-Goeze . The book dispenses with a scientific footnote apparatus; the quotations are documented in a tightly printed eleven-page section.

In seven chapters, Bahners deals with a criticism of Islam that he regards as questionable for the political climate in Germany. First of all, the controversies surrounding the statements made by the then Federal President Christian Wulff about Islam in Germany and Thilo Sarrazin's removal from the Bundesbank's executive board are at the center. The second chapter critically deals with some of Bahners' typical representatives of the thesis that Islam is fixated on world conquest, on the German side in particular Hans-Jürgen Irmer , Udo Ulfkotte and Hans-Peter Raddatz , and proposes that there is now one international networking of criticism of Islam. This is followed by an extensive discussion of the headscarf ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court and the public and state reactions to it (Chapter 3). The subject of the fourth chapter is the work and biography of Necla Kelek . The fifth chapter contains a detailed history of the naturalization test in Baden-Württemberg , which Bahners referred to as the "Muslim test".

In his pamphlet Bahners turned against critics of Islam such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali , Henryk M. Broder , Ralph Giordano , Necla Kelek , Thilo Sarrazin and Alice Schwarzer . In addition, he criticized individual statements from other personalities such as Helmut Schmidt , Joachim Gauck , Wolfgang Huber and Klaus von Dohnanyi . Bahners believed he recognized American influences on the criticism of Islam that he described. He stated: "There is an international critical of Islam."

A large part of the book deals with the neutrality of the state and the legitimation of legal norms. Bahners criticized the headscarf ban for teachers in various state laws, based on the neutrality of the state , in particular with regard to the lawsuits of the teacher Fereshta Ludin : “It is not clear from the Basic Law whether a woman should veil herself in public or not. The neutral state, as whose representative Fereshta Ludin was allegedly unsuitable, is especially neutral in such questions. ”According to Bahners, the neutrality of a believing teacher is given if he“ does not let his piety become an issue without being asked ”.

For Bahners, however, the neutrality of the state does not end with the possibility of individual religious freedom : "If the constitutional state cannot benevolently regard Sharia as the principle of religious legitimacy of legal norms or even observe it neutrally, then this state must not allow canon law to apply (... ). ”On the other hand, according to Bahners, the“ special term ”of negative religious freedom“ in the age of the voluntary nature of all religious activity ... is actually over ”.

Bahners accuses critics of Islam of increasing the attractiveness of their arguments with a "radical (n) simplification of world conditions". As evidence, he quotes Henryk M. Broder, according to which “a direct line leads from Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Intifada in Palestine to young people with a 'migration background' in Neukölln and Moabit”. The image assumed by Bahner's critics of Islam, according to which the "truants in Neukölln were comrades-in-arms with the suicide bombers of Baghdad", is apparently supported by a study by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN) on the experiences of violence among young people. However, Bahners emphatically contradicts this impression, as it was given in advance publications in the press, with reference to the results of the study.

Reactions

Patrick Bahners (right) with Ralph Bollmann at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011.

Ilija Trojanow agreed with Bahners in the FAZ, saying that he had "analyzed a demagogic circus". Thomas Steinfeld , himself quoted by Bahners in the book, even spoke in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of a “masterpiece of the Enlightenment”. Christian Schlueter rated Bahners' book in the Frankfurter Rundschau as an "analysis of the Islamophobic angry bourgeoisie".

The authors Sarrazin and Broder, criticized by Bahners, made negative comments about his book; Broder accused Bahners, among other things, of a "conspiracy-theoretical chain of evidence".

Other publicists and writers were critical. The publicist Bettina Röhl described Bahners as "terrible journalists". Monika Maron criticized the fact that Patrick Bahners had "written a pamphlet about the German critics of Islam", "which has little regard for Western values, despises the freedom of women and at the same time shows how little the room publicist knows about reality". Matthias Matussek described Bahners as a “false enlightener”: “Yes, isn't it downright macabre, like Bahners, from the upholstered armchair of a columnist, accusing a woman like Hirsi Ali with her passion for the passionate rejection of the religion that has crippled her? Was that the way that Catholic abuse victims were treated from above ? " Klaus von Dohnanyi said:" At no point does Bahners deal with the dynamics of political Islam. The book lacks any historical dimension ... the further one progresses in Bahner's 'panic maker', the more annoying it becomes that he either completely ignores the serious part of the criticism of Islam or cites it incompletely - and sometimes even falsely - one cannot spare Bahner's accusation, that he is apparently not interested in a serious debate. "

In 2011, Patrick Bahners was nominated for The Panic Makers for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the non-fiction / essay category.

Publications

  • In the mantle of history. Helmut Kohl or irreplaceability. Siedler, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-88680-658-8 .
  • as editor with Gerd Roellecke : 1848 - The experience of freedom (= motifs, texts, materials. MTM. Vol. 83). Müller, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8114-3599-X .
  • as editor with Gerd Roellecke: Prussian styles. A state as a feat. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-608-94290-4 .
  • The alarmists. The German fear of Islam. A polemic. CH Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-61645-7 and as a paperback, with the author's current afterword: (= German. 34721). Unabridged edition. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-423-34721-1 .
  • Duck house. The whole truth. CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-44802-7 .
  • Proust's Alexander novel. In: Jan Timmer / Rüdiger Kinsky (Ed.): Happy ancient science. Festival book for Wolfgang Will for his 65th birthday. (=  Antiquitas. Series 1: Treatises on ancient history. Vol. 64), Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn 2014, ISBN 978-3-7749-3900-4 , pp. 171-193.
  • Helmut Kohl . The character of power . CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-70886-2 .

Web links

Commons : Patrick Bahners  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patrick Bahners. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: editorial office. Retrieved July 13, 2018 .
  2. ↑ A politician's novel worlds
  3. ↑ Patrick Bahners: Fanaticism of the Enlightenment - On the Critique of Islamic Criticism , sheets for German and international politics , September 2010.
  4. ↑ Patrick Bahners: The alarmists. P. 262. The quote from Broder can be found in: Hurray, we capitulate! The pleasure of buckling. wjs, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-937989-20-X , p. 84.
  5. ^ Christian Schlueter: Patrick Bahner's "The Panic Makers". Against the Sarrazin method . In: Frankfurter Rundschau from February 23, 2011. Online .
  6. ↑ Thilo Sarrazin : Erdogan's ghostwriter . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 19, 2011, p. 31.
  7. ↑ Henryk M. Border: To be afraid of Islam is a virtue . In: Welt-Online , February 21, 2011.
  8. ↑ Bettina Röhl: Is “The Panic Makers” a terrible book? In: Hamburger Abendblatt , March 10, 2011.
  9. ↑ Monika Maron: The quiet step . In: Welt.online , from February 26, 2011.
  10. ^ Matthias Matussek: Jihad in the features section . In: spiegel.online , from February 19, 2011.
  11. ↑ Klaus von Dohnanyi: The Panic Before Panic . In: Der Tagesspiegel , March 14, 2011.
  12. ↑ Leipzig Book Prize 2011: Shortlist. The alarmists. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 10, 2011.
  13. ↑ The clumsiness of the criticism of Islam . Book review in proof of March 28, 2011 on Deutschlandfunk .
personal data
SURNAME Bahners, Patrick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist, author and editor
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Paderborn