The police headquarters in Upper Franconia recently issued a report about heavy rain and full closure. A town in Lower Franconia was also mentioned, to which there are countless references in Upper Franconia: Schweinfurt offers work, people are connected via the A70, they have a common, evangelical history – in other words, a very close neighborhood. Why did the presidium, in an otherwise top orthographic message, disfigure the city as “Schweinfurth”?
It hurts, but it has to be: maybe someone has read too much SZ. Unfortunately, this newspaper has been using the name of the industrial city for decades, in articles, placemarks, even in headlines. Most recently a week ago. If you look in the archive, you have to put on a calming tea at the latest after three dozen times “Schweinfurth”.
Why is that? Hard to say. Of course, there is also the fatal Kelheim/Kehlheim complex, but it runs through all the media, there it is southern german no avant-garde. The thing “Schweinfurth” but? At least since the former mayor Gudrun Grieser let it be known by telephone many years ago that she was just speechless, many SZ rounds have vowed: never-never-again! With manageable success. And if it’s not happening in Bavaria, then it’s in the feuilleton, panorama, Munich departments.
When and how did this creep in? A trace can be reconstructed in the archive. Even before the year 2000 there were isolated mistakes. But the lapse became an epidemic shortly afterwards: A handball player was actually called “Schweinfurth”, so soon all ball sports clubs in the industrial city, too, about the sports section the happy news made its way into the paper: Franconian city now with a new h.
Eyes get used to it, synapses harden. The brain is ticking: not again, just not again – but as we know, it can’t either not think of the pink elephant. And that’s how it goes.
They know the process in the Home Ministry in Nuremberg. Ever since someone with a resounding public success accidentally defaced the language, the embers can’t be let out. Until 2018 Horst Seehofer, after all the proud founding father of the house, gave himself up to the contagious disease. At the federal press conference, he also spoke of the “home museum”.