At first she struggled for weeks with criticism for having spruced up her résumé. Now the green candidate for Chancellor Annalena Baerbock has to defend herself against the accusation that she copied several passages from the Internet for her recently published book “Now. How we renew our country”. An Austrian plagiarism hunter made these allegations on Tuesday and claimed that the green top candidate had violated copyright law.
The Greens, who do not want to be accused of further misconduct after weeks of debates on credibility, shot back sharply on Tuesday. “This is an attempt at character assassination. We firmly reject the allegation of copyright infringement,” said a party spokesman. The blogger had earlier spread “false claims” about Baerbock’s degree. He is now trying again to “viciously damage their reputation”. The media attorney Christian Schertz, who was brought in by the Greens, affirmed that he could “not begin to recognize a copyright infringement”.
The passages of text that are being argued about and which are first the Focus reported, were published on the Internet platform “plagiatsgutachten.com”. The Austrian plagiarism hunter and media scientist Stefan Weber, who had already attacked Baerbock’s seriousness in several articles, complained about a dozen passages in her book. For example, Baerbock pointed out that the US Department of Defense had identified climate change as a threat to national security. Her book states: “Viewing climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ that can exacerbate raw material and social conflicts has since become a cornerstone of the Pentagon’s strategy.”
However, the comments did not come from Annalena Baerbock, according to blogger Stefan Weber, but from the American political scientist Michael T. Klare. He wrote it in 2019 under the title “Warmonger Climate Change” in the magazine International politics. As evidence, Weber puts an identical sentence on the web, which is supposed to come from Klare. In the Greens headquarters it was said on Tuesday that Baerbock’s book was not a doctoral thesis, but a political book. That is why she dispensed with footnotes and sources, but at the end of the work emphasized in a note of thanks that ideas from others had also flowed into the book.
“Don’t make a bang out of every fart”
On the website plagiatsgutachten.com there are other passages that are said to have been copied verbatim from the Internet. The sentence “Climate change affects the entire value chain of companies (…)”, for example, should be taken from the blog “Climate Change – Challenge Accepted“. Facts about the eastward enlargement of the EU and a list of the countries that joined in 2004 have been copied by the Federal Agency for Civic Education and taken over unchanged mirror a passage over wooden skyscrapers is said to have been taken over word for word. A passage about a cyclone should be taken from the Daily mirror another from Wikipedia or from the Green election platform.
Media lawyer Schertz held against it on Tuesday. The controversial passages from Baerbock’s book are the reproduction of “generally known facts and political views”. The allegation of copyright infringement is unfounded. Just as news is not subject to copyright protection, this also applies to historical facts or generally known findings in connection with ecology and the environment. These are so-called public domain. “It is apparently another attempt at a campaign to the detriment of Ms. Baerbock.” The CDU MEP Dennis Radtke called the allegations on Twitter “grotesque”, you don’t have to “make a bang out of every fart”. Others, on the other hand, criticized the lack of care and lack of references in social networks.