German police raid the home of renowned media critic and WELT columnist Norbert Bolz for an ironic tweet, in latest case of insane speech repression to hit the Federal Republic

Thousands of ordinary Germans have suffered similar intimidation, but today's raid is the first we know of to target a mainstream media figure.

This man is Norbert Bolz. Until his retirement in 2018 he was a professor of Media Science at Berlin Technical University. He has written numerous books, appeared on German television and he is a regular columnist at WELT.

On 20 January 2024, Bolz posted this tweet:

In it, he makes light of one of the routine idiocies propounded by the leftist newspaper taz. In this case, taz had just published (and tweeted) the headline “Germany is awakening!” in response to a petition to strip the AfD politician Björn Höcke of his right to run for office and a renewed wave of demands to ban Höcke’s party. The problem is that the phrase “Germany is awakening” – “Deutschland erwacht” – is basically identical to a notorious Nazi slogan, specifically, an SA lyric.¹ This would be why taz almost immediately revised their headline to something innocuous. Before they could do that, however, Bolz noticed their screwup and wrote that “Deutschland awaken!” was “a good translation of ‘woke,’” in this way drawing attention to their mistake and turning their words against them.

That happened on 20 January 2024. This morning, police investigating this nearly two year-old tweet raided Bolz’s Berlin home to seize evidence. They had with them a search warrant approved by the Tiergarten District Court. According to NiUS, investigators had earlier asked Bolz to surrender his devices voluntarily, but he refused. The search warrant lists the large number of replies, retweets and likes that Bolz’s post received as a criminally aggravating factor. Before departing, a police officer advised Bolz “to be more careful in future.”

Bolz stands under suspicion of having violated Section 86a of the German Criminal Code, which forbids the “Use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations” – even though his obviously ironic, critical tweet does not actually violate this statute. It goes without saying that nobody at taz has been accused of any crime, although they are the ones whom Bolz merely called out for using the forbidden phrase in the first place.

Apollo News has discovered that the criminal investigation into Bolz was triggered by a report from the internet hate speech portal “Hessen gegen Hetze” (“Hesse Against Hate Speech”). We have met this organisation before; they are the same operation that sent prosecutors after the economist Thomas Vierhaus for the crime of calling a state media journalist a “nincompoop.” Like the other cry-to-teacher NGOs who constitute Germany’s censorship industrial complex, this one works with a division of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) that is supposed to review speech crime reports and forward those with legal merit to responsible prosecutors. This means that multiple authorities signed off on the insane investigation in this case – not only the Berlin prosecutor and the Tiergarten court, but also the BKA.

I’m tempted to write that this ridiculous case merely continues a disturbing trend, whereby the German censorship industrial complex conducts massive internet searches of Nazi keywords in order to generate as many criminal investigations as possible. This would explain the uptick in openly moronic and contextually oblivious speech prosecutions we’ve seen in the past year. Here, however, it’s equally possible that somebody at Hesse gegen Hetze or elsewhere deliberately targeted Bolz for some reason. This might explain why nobody reported Bolz’s original tweet until 27 November 2024 – nearly a year after he posted it.

1. I disavow this and all other National Socialist slogans and symbols.