2 - 2000

Morality and Politics

"No Mitigating Circumstances"

A conversation with Bishop Wolfgang Huber

The party donations scandal has brought many prominent representatives of the churches to speak out publicly, to call the politicians to task and Christians to active involvement on behalf of democratic governance and of truthfulness in politics.

The party donations affair is deeply distressing for our Republic. How far can money corrupt morality? Illegal bank transfers, secret accounts... Bishop Huber, what is for you the really outrageous aspect of the CDU donations scandal?

I am outraged most of all by the indifference, the passing over of the fact that such machinations erode peoples willingness to participate in politics. All this is fuelling the prejudice that politics is a dirty business. It is stirring up cynical commentaries on political activities and the judgment that politicians get their needs met, financially as well, without regard for law or morality. And the negative consequences for the political culture are being underestimated. It is especially bad when the basic facts are known but there is still refusal, unpreparedness to help with the necessary clarifications. So now we have two problems: party financing by evasion of law and morality, and the subsequent attempt at cover-up being supported by someones word of honour.

Helmut Kohl is meeting with plenty of understanding for his refusal to give away the donors names. His confessor among others, the Dominican Pater Heinrich Basilius Streithofen, is defending the ex-Chancellors attitude by saying that ones word of honour, once given, must be kept under all circumstances. It is perfectly clear that this word of honour should never have been given. If Helmut Kohl is offered money on condition that he smuggles it past the rules of party law, then he should refuse the money, not give his word of honour. Since he didn’t do that, some day he will have to be big enough to admit his error and take the consequences.

In justifying Kohl, Streithofen referred to a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to the effect that fanatics for the truth always have a pact with the devil.

That is true: in his great essay, "What does it mean to tell the truth?", Bonhoeffer pointed out that one has a duty to tell the truth, but one does not have to say everything that is true. And he emphasised - having a compelling reason to do so in his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler - that situations exist in which one must withhold the truth, because this is the only way to stay close to the truth.

But considerations of this kind are of no help to Helmut Kohl in his situation. It is clear that an offence against law and morality must be given more weight than a word of honour. A word of honour cannot be claimed for any and every situation, certainly not for wrongdoing. A word of honour does not justify personal disloyalty any more than political disloyalty. It is also true that in a personal confidential relationship, I cannot claim that I gave somebody else my word of honour and therefore the breach of trust cannot be clarified any further.

Can it be considered a mitigating circumstance that Helmut Kohl was seeking the good of his party and not trying to enrich himself personally?

Enrichment of the party through bypassing the rule of law is every bit as unacceptable as personal enrichment. It is really annoying that many people are now saying that the law on political parties should be changed. The law is perfectly adequate if it is kept. I see no mitigating circumstances. I see a disquieting event: that the former incumbent of the most important political office in the Federal Republic of Germany has declared that human relationships are more important to him than formal rules, which means in plain language that relationships are more important for the exercise of power than the law which is in force. The fact that this can be said, and people agree, is something we will have to look at very seriously. It is pretty difficult to reconcile with the fundamental idea of the rule of law.

Some church leaders have said that this is not so much a problem which CDU politicians have, but rather that money is playing a more and more dominant role in the entire society. That, they say, is the real problem.

That sort of argument takes problems which have to do with concrete responsibility and puts them out of reach. Of course money plays an important role in our society. But pointing out this overall problem doesn’t make the political problems which we now have to deal with any less important. It is surely important to look seriously at the influence of money in the society as a whole. But one cannot infer from it that, because money plays such a huge role in our society, the CDU politicians could not have behaved differently from the way they did. That excuse does not hold water.

Does the donations scandal show that our society is in the process of losing its elementary standards of behaviour?

An attitude like that promotes cynicism. The standards are certainly still there, in our consciousness. But there is an emerging impression that the higher ones position, the greater ones indifference to such standards. And this has a poisonous effect.

A word about the donations affair in Hesse. The former Minister of the Interior, Manfred Kanther, invented bequests from Jews in order to conceal illegal income. How do you evaluate the fact that in the cover-up a minority got the blame?

What is striking is that this was done completely thoughtlessly, and that no notice has been taken of the appeal to our latent anti-Semitic prejudice which is involved. This shows how deeply rooted these ideas still are in our society. I expect it was simply a reflex: Where in particular is there a lot of money? and the answer was, Jews have it. That sounds like the anti-Semitic commentator Heinrich von Treitschke, over a hundred years ago.

What should the church be doing, in a time in which the prodigious morally aberrant behaviour of the previous government is being revealed?

First of all, the church should recall to our minds the inner coherence between responsibility and truthfulness. Another thing would be to help make it possible for the politicians to find the way to the self-purification they require; direct contact with persons in positions of political responsibility would be among the approaches the church could use.