Enter Peter Malborn

As you may know, I am currently working on my FILM 360 project (the major film project for junior year film students at LMU). It is a 10 minute documentary about freedom of speech here in Germany. I'm talking about the Holocaust revisionists, especially Ernst Zundel and the Mohammad cartoons published last year that sparked the international cartoon wars that followed.

I'm trying to get interviews with various German leaders about the subject... whatever I can fit into 10 minutes--the arbitrary limit imposed by the professors.

Anyway, I'm also trying to get an interview with a leader of the National Democratic Party, (basically Germany's neo-Nazi party), and emailed a contact that my friend Nathalie gave me named Dr. Peter Malborn. Allow me to share with you now our correspondence.

The Initiation
This morning:
Dear Dr. Malborn,

My friend Nathalie Curtis has been contacting you on my behalf in the
hope of arranging an interview for my documentary about free speech in
Germany, but I thought the time was probably right for me to write to
you directly.

My documentary is on the subject of freedom of speech in Germany. I
will talk about Mr. Ernst Zündel and Holocaust revisionism. And I
will talk about the Danish Mohammad cartoons that were reprinted in
German newspapers last year and the international cartoon wars that
they started. I will explain Zündel's situation through interviews
with various German leaders and citizens. And I will close the
documentary with a plea for open dialogue in Germany because arbitrary
censorship leads to tragedy.

I have begun interviewing German leaders, including an NRW CDU
Parliament representative, the deputy whip of the SPD in NRW, and a
leader of the Zentralrat der Juden in Cologne. Furthermore, I have
interviews scheduled with a television censorship board member and a
member of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. Finally, I'm still
working on contacting a leader of the Muslim community and a
constitutional lawyer. And at some point, I will probably go to
Altstadt and ask random people on the street about the subject.

I hope that we can arrange an interview at some point in the next
month. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Mike Litzenberg

The Response
This afternoon:
Dear Mr. Litzenberg,

thank you for your interest in our party. I expect that you are familiar
with the juridical state of being in Germany and know that the denial of
the holocaust is illegal. Frankly speaking, as what is nowadays called a
far-right politician I have more than enough experience with attempts to
trick me into saying something illegal. That is why I am definitely not
going to discuss any aspect of the holocaust.

May I suggest that you are looking for another person to interview.

Sincerely yours,
Peter Malborn

The Follow-up
This evening:
Dear Dr. Malborn,

I was merely attempting to get voices from all points of the German
political spectrum in my film as I am sure that the NPD has a unique
perspective on freedom of speech and censorship.

However, because my documentary is not on the subject of the Holocaust
but rather on free speech, I am still hoping we can work something
out. I wonder if I could send you a list of the questions I would
have potentially asked you in an interview, and you could write out
the answers rather than sitting for a filmed interview which would be
understandably less comfortable.

Once again, I know we have never met, but understand that I had no
intention of tricking anyone into doing or saying anything.

Sincerely,
Mike Litzenberg


Stay tuned, Junior Woodchucks. Should be interesting.

Defending Free Speech by Timothy Garton Ash

The Struggle to Defend Free Speech is Defining Our Age
We may not agree with a particular sentiment, but we must defend to the death the individual's right to express it

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday October 5, 2006
The Guardian

Almost every day brings a new threat to free expression. A French philosopher is in hiding, running for his life from death threats on Islamist websites, because he published an article in a French newspaper saying that Muhammad is revealed in the Qur'an as a "master of hate". A production of Mozart's Idomeneo, which at one point displays the severed (plastic? papier mache?) head of Muhammad, alongside those of Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon, is pulled off the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin after a telephoned threat of violence was reported to management by local police. And that's just the past week.

Going slightly further back, there's the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh and the murderous hounding of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie. A British anti-fascist activist is beaten up following the publication of his photograph and address on a far-right website called Redwatch. Animal rights activists make death threats to medical researchers and their families. Sikh extremists force a play they dislike to be taken off the British stage. Christian extremists threaten BBC executives because they broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera. Need I go on?
Fanatiques sans frontières are on the march. It's wrong to describe this as a single "war on terror"; our adversaries and their ideologies are so diverse. But if you think we are not engaged in a struggle against manifold enemies of freedom, as potentially deadly as those we faced in the 1930s, you are living in a fool's paradise. Which is to say: you are a fairly typical contemporary European. (And most Brits are, in this respect as in many others, closer to Europe than to America.)

In the first decade of the 21st century, the spaces of free expression, even in old-established liberal democracies, have been eroded, are being eroded and - if we don't summon ourselves to the fight - will continue to be eroded. Free expression is not just the particular preserve of writers and artists. It's a first-order freedom, the oxygen on which other liberties depend. Not for nothing did John Stuart Mill devote a whole chapter in his On Liberty to "the liberty of thought and discussion".

The erosion of free expression comes in many different ways. Most obviously, there is violence or the threat of violence: "If you say that, we will kill you." This is dramatically facilitated in our time by the internet, email and mobile phones. The French philosopher Robert Redeker went into hiding after an Islamist website called for him - "the pig" - to be "punished by the lions of France" as "the lion of Holland, Mohammed Bouyeri did", and then gave Redeker's home address, photograph and phone number. Mohammed Bouyeri was the slayer of Theo van Gogh.

Down the scale, there is peaceful public protest, sometimes with an implicit threat of violence. There are also other forms of less visible pressure, including the use of economic weapons - the boycott of Danish goods in some Islamic countries following the Danish cartoons scandal, for example, or the Chinese state's covert pressure on satellite providers, for whom China is a major customer.

Then there's self-censorship in the face of such threats. Chancellor Angela Merkel aptly described the Deutsche Oper Berlin's decision to pull Idomeneo as "self-censorship out of fear". But self-censorship can also flow from a well-intentioned notion of multi-cultural harmony, on the lines of "you respect my taboo and I'll respect yours" - what I've described in this column as the tyranny of the group veto. And there are misguided attempts by democratic governments and parliaments to ensure domestic peace and inter-communal harmony by legislating to curb free expression. The British government's original proposal for a law on incitement to religious hatred was a case in point.

The threats also come from the most diverse quarters. It would be absurd to pretend that Islamist extremists are not among the current leaders in intimidation, at least in relation to Europe and America. After all, Christians, Buddhists and, indeed, Poseidonites did not - so far as we know - threaten violent retaliation because the severed heads of their all-holiest were displayed on a Berlin opera stage. But my opening case-list shows that it's not just jihadists who want to squeeze the oxygen pipe of free expression.

Even as I write, news reaches me of a good friend, Tony Judt, a historian of modern Europe and outspoken critic of recent Israeli policy, finding a venue in New York suddenly withdrawn after telephone calls to the host institution, which happened to be the Polish consulate. (He proposed to talk about "the Israel lobby and US foreign policy".) According to the Polish consul, those telephone calls came from "a couple of Jewish groups", including the Anti-Defamation League and "representatives of American diplomacy and intelligentsia". Such phone calls are, of course, not comparable with death threats. But this is all part of a many-fronted, incremental erosion of free expression, even in the classic lands of the free, such as the United States, France and Britain.

What is to be done? First, we need to wake up to the seriousness of the danger. I repeat: this is one of the greatest challenges to freedom in our time. We need a debate about what the law should and should not allow to be said or written. Even Mill did not suggest that everyone should be allowed to say anything, anytime and anywhere. We also need a debate about what it's prudent and wise to say in a globalised world where people of different cultures live so close together, like roommates separated only by thin curtains. There is a frontier of prudence and wisdom which lies beyond the one that should be enforced by law.

I believe, for example, that Redeker's article in Le Figaro was an intemperate and unwise one, with its claim that Islam (not just Islamism, or jihadism, but Islam tout court) is today's equivalent of Soviet-style world communism - yesterday Moscow, today Mecca - and his denunciation of Muhammad as a "pitiless warlord, pillager, massacrer of Jews and polygamist". But once the fanatiques sans frontières respond by proposing to kill him, then we must stand in total solidarity with the threatened writer - in the spirit of Voltaire.

Never mind that Voltaire probably never said exactly what is so often attributed to him: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." That famous quotation seems to have originated in an early 20th-century paraphrase. But this was indeed the spirit of Voltaire.

The order of phrases is vital. Too many recent responses in such cases - from the Rushdie affair onward - have had this backhanded syntax: "Of course I defend his/her freedom of expression, but..." The Voltaire principle gets it the right way round: first the dissent, but then the unconditional solidarity. Now we are all called upon to play our part. The future of freedom depends on words prevailing over knives.

Trailer Galleria

Here's a little unrelated-European potpourri of trailers for movies I am juiced and jazzed about.


The Last King of Scotland



Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan



The Black Dahlia



Death of a President



Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny'



Pan's Labyrinth



The U.S. vs. John Lennon
(Even though it's mentioned in the trailer, I really hope that the Bush allegory isn't hammered into the audience too hard.)



Casino Royale



The Science of Sleep



Jesus Camp



The Prestige


And last but not least, I am so psyched for...

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles




And check out this website. It might be my favorite site on the web.

Final Editing Project: Ein Schlitzohr Named Kristoffer

Here is my final editing project... a portrait of my host mother Kirsten's son Kristoffer. It's a little messed up cause I had to compress it to put it online (as in some of the audio got cut off and the picture got squished). But enjoy, nonetheless.



P.S. Ein Schlitzohr is a German word for something that looks harmless but is actually very dangerous. Or something like that.