Stephan Zantke

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Stephan Zantke (born 1961 in North Rhine-Westphalia ) is a German magistrate and author of the book If Germany is so shit, why are you here then? (2018), which triggered broad media coverage across Germany.

Life

Zantke grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia and studied law at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . After a legal clerkship at the Saxon State Ministry for Culture , he was a public prosecutor in Zwickau from 1993 ; since 2000 he has been a local judge at the Zwickau district court . He also gives lectures for organizations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Known judgment

In 2017, Zantke conducted the trial against 29-year-old Mohammed F., who had applied for asylum in the summer of 2015 as an alleged Libyan war refugee (his Libyan origin was later questioned by an interpreter in court who classified F. as a Tunisian ). The defendant had attacked the employee of an asylum seekers' home with a knife and caused considerable property damage, threw a beer bottle at a seven-year-old child in a supermarket, spat on police officers and insulted women as "Nazi whores" and "fucking Germans". Before that, F. had already been noticed by shoplifting , an attack with a broken beer bottle in which the victim suffered cuts in the face, drug possession and multiple rioting in the asylum seekers' home. When the defendant was still talking about “shitty Germans” and “shitty Germany” in the courtroom, Zantke countered him: “If it's so shitty here, why are you here?” He then sentenced the man to two and a half years in prison while the public prosecutor's office had only requested 15 months probation . In the grounds of the judgment he stated: “You will get a roof over your head from our taxes - and now we have to pay your damage. (...) What would have happened if we had committed such crimes in Libya? "

Zantke received an enormous response, protests initially failed to materialize: “I only got approval, Europe-wide (...) From Lieschen Müller, from police officers, from politicians. There was not a single negative voice. ”The convicted man was on trial again shortly afterwards after attacking a Moroccan with a broken beer bottle.

Book publication

In 2018 Zantke published the book If Germany is so shit, why are you here then? with reports on his most drastic cases and insights into parallel societies , criminal milieus that took advantage of the weakness of the state, and a judiciary that was overwhelmed and under pressure to save. District courts as the next higher instance would overturn harsh judgments "not only occasionally, but daily" and allow a "sometimes incomprehensible leniency" to prevail. Everyone deserves a second chance, but too much leniency is wrong. Zantke anonymously described ten real cases, including domestic violence , assault and robbery .

resonance

Reinhold Michels compared Zantke at RP Online with the judge, "courageous colleague and bourgeois taboo breaker" Kirsten Heisig , whose bestseller The End of Patience - consistently against juvenile violent criminals - was published in 2010 and who took her own life shortly before it was published. Zantke and Heisig stand for the practitioners' experience that the state is still too slow or too despondent to make their actions and their consequences clear to young criminals and violent family clans .

In September 2018, Zantke was deposed as spokesman for the Zwickau District Court. Reasons were not disclosed, but the media suspected disciplinary action related to his book publication. Shortly afterwards there was a complaint against Zantke at the Higher Regional Court because of the title of his book, which violated the principle of neutrality and objectivity and " shook the foundations of the rule of law". The result was treated confidentially.

The first edition of the book was already out of print at this point.

Ulrich Wickert called the case to which Zantke's book title referred in 2019 “symptomatic” of the problems facing the German constitutional state in asserting itself against unjustified asylum seekers who are unwilling to integrate . The public excitement after the judgment was "hardly tangible". Zantke made it clear that he was not blind in either the right or left eye, but "of course, in his pointed statements, he was playing with people's prejudices."

The seventh edition of the book was published at the end of 2019.

book

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Author Profile Stephan Zantke in Munich publishing group . Retrieved December 17, 2019
  2. ↑ a b Ulrich Wickert : Identify yourselves !: Why we need a new sense of home , Piper, 2019. ISBN 978-3-492-05954-1 (excerpt from Google Books ).
  3. ↑ Cornelia Karin Hendrich: "When he then said 'Scheißdeutschland', it was enough for me" , WeltN24, December 12, 2017.
  4. ↑ Intensive offender in Zwickau: Richter asks refugee - "Why are you here then?" WeltN24, December 8, 2019.
  5. ^ Trial in Zwickau: Criminal refugee brings judges into a rage , Focus, December 8, 2017
  6. ^ Case in Zwickau: Judge bursting his collar: Criminal Libyan back in court , Focus, December 12, 2017.
  7. ↑ He put defendants in their place: Klartext-Richter gets fan mail , Focus, December 18, 2017.
  8. ↑ Klartext-Richter today at Lanz: "If Germany is so shit ..." , TAG24 , March 14, 2019.
  9. ↑ Stephan Zantke: Knallhart-Richter about justice: "District courts allow too much leniency" , Focus, October 8, 2018.
  10. ↑ Karin Schlottmann: “We judges can't be that stupid” , Sächsische Zeitung, December 29, 2018.
  11. ↑ a b Because of the book: Supervision complaint against plain text judges , TAG24, December 5, 2018.
  12. ↑ Reinhold Michels: Cheers to two angry but courageous criminal judges , RP Online, December 15, 2017.
  13. ↑ Muzzle for plain text judges? Zantke no longer a court spokesman, TAG24, October 27, 2018.
  14. ↑ "Tough Enough" -Richter Zantke not more speakers at the district court , Radio Zwickau, October 27, 2018th
personal data
SURNAME Zantke, Stephan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German magistrate and non-fiction author
DATE OF BIRTH 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH North Rhine-Westphalia