It can be argued for a long time whether the crime scene actually reflects the reality in German police stations on Sunday evening. In any case, people who understand something about the matter claim that real commissioners would have been suspended from duty long ago if they investigated as unorthodox as their colleagues from ARD. Without a doubt, however, is reflected in the 1183 crime scene– Follows that have been broadcast on television since 1970, German history for the past 51 years, or more precisely: the image that screenwriters have made of it. Or, as the actor Udo Wachtveitl (alias Commissioner Franz Leitmayr) once put it: The crime scene is the “picture book of the republic”.
Picture books are not supposed to faithfully reproduce reality, they interpret it. It is inevitable that the prejudices of the scriptwriters also flow into this interpretation. Which brings us to the Economics Minister of Schleswig-Holstein, Bernd Buchholz (FDP). He recently spoke to the Kiel news on the subject crime scene. He actually liked the Kiel commissioner Klaus Borowski (Axel Milberg), he said. He was bothered by the way people in the north were portrayed (“equipped with a green flat cap and poor ability to speak”). And the entrepreneurs are usually shown as “greedy, greedy for profit masterminds”. “If things go well, you are the lewd kidnapping victim.”
The interjection made by the politician and manager Buchholz, who was head of the media company Gruner + Jahr from 2009 to 2012, is a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with the sociology of crime scene-To deal with perpetrators. Buchholz’s observation does not only apply in Kiel: If an entrepreneur appears in an episode, he is usually highly suspect and you can almost bet that he will be revealed as a perpetrator or at least as his helper. The phenomenon is even substantiated with numbers. Three years ago the comparison portal “Netzsieger” evaluated a total of 1000 episodes and asked: What was the job of the perpetrators? After that, entrepreneurs and managers were the group with the most murderers: 109 in number, which corresponded to a share of more than ten percent. Professional criminals only came second (100), followed by schoolchildren (54) and police officers (49).
“The underprivileged is often the better person,” said Udo Wachtveitl in the time. A friend recently asked him how many morally good characters there actually are crime scene give, who were rich. “Good question. I think there is a bit of 1968 kitsch in it. These people are now all in the relevant positions in the editorial offices. The hard-working foreigner among the three suspects must certainly not be the culprit”.
the crime sceneStatistics give an impression of how bad the image of the profession of entrepreneur is in parts of German society and especially among cultural workers. Actually, an astonishing phenomenon in a country that owes its prosperity to a large extent to medium-sized entrepreneurs and in which there is also a lively one Has developed in the start-up scene.
Profit actually quite simple: “growth” or “departure”
A measure of this distrust of entrepreneurs is the frequency with which the word “profit” appears in public. From the Latin profectus derived, profit actually means quite simply: “growth” or “departure”. In fact, today it is almost exclusively used as a pejorative for profit, correspondingly the “greed for profit” stands for “striving for profit” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/. “Let’s talk about greed” is the title of the House of History Baden-Württemberg a digital exhibition on the subject of high rents. The Environment and Development Forum calls for “human rights, environmental and climate protection before profit”. As if human rights, the environment and the climate were served if companies stopped making profits.
In this context, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci should also be mentioned. With subsidies from the German government, the two scientists founded a company to develop preparations for immunotherapy. In fact, they succeeded in developing the first vaccine against corona, an unprecedented pioneering achievement that was rewarded with a high pioneer profit. The price of the Biontech share rose by 200 percent in the course of this year. For some, however, this is not a success, but a scandal. In the appeal “Zero Covid”, which has so far been signed by over 100,000 people, it says: “Vaccines should be withdrawn from private profit making. They are the result of the creative collaboration of many people, they must belong to all of humanity”. Zero Covid and others accuse the pharmaceutical companies of not releasing the rights to their developments. They are therefore to blame for the low vaccination rates in poor countries. At Amnesty International it reads like this: “Wherever profit comes before human life, companies fail in their human rights responsibility”.
But how about the thought that human lives are saved precisely by the fact that entrepreneurs take the risk of developing a new vaccine. And that they couldn’t do that, would the profit as a reward for these risks be cut from the outset? Maybe someone can crime scene produce on this topic.
This is the last episode of Piper’s World in six years. Nikolaus Piper writes elsewhere in the SZ on fundamental questions of the economy.