Are Germans going too far to protect their own image?

Written by Stefan Rosinski, Carta, August 20th 2010.
Translated by Ulrike Anderson. See the original article in German
Article also translated in:

No Photo! - Vinnie Bezoomny / Flickr (cc)

“Personal rights” are increasingly being defended as positive property, as a copyright of one’s public self. The new maxim is: don’t let yourself or your property be photographed! That’s why streets can’t be photographed either. The public, it seems, should remain hidden from the public.

As I whipped out my camera around 8:00 PM that night and aimed my lens at the three security guards in the main entrance of the Paul Löbe House, I triggered not my shutter speed, but instead, moderate alarm among those Bundestag management employees threatened with being photographed.

The peaceful, evening-sun-lit, gently smiling scenario of the group synchronously engrossed in brick-thick paperbacks, reading themselves into another world next to the x-ray machines, instantly becomes a multi-headed dragon that jumps at me with its protrusions flaming red. I was not allowed to take pictures here, had I ever heard of something called “personal rights”

I have to admit this was a new one to me. It wasn’t a ban of photographing security measures, but rather a person reading in public who did not want to be photographed. And it was (from what I could glean from the conversation) not because he was doing something secret, illicit or immoral, but because he had to “protect his persona.”

The co-worker was not very articulate, but he had carefully read his daily rag: he didn’t have to let anyone photograph his front yard, nor did he have to submit to being photographed by someone. Yes, the maxim was: don’t let yourself or your property be photographed!

That sounds like what Kant called a “categorical imperative” – as a strict mandate that “an action is to be objectively necessary of itself without reference to any purpose.” That is very different from the “hypothetical imperative” as a command that “would be a good means.”

In fact, it cannot be explained, in either the middle-class feature pages or at the regular’s table (and certainly not through Federal Ministry of the Interior communiqués), what purpose a photography ban should serve in this Agora, other than him – with a mysterious reference to “personal rights.”

It gives pause to the persistent insistence on a reservation of proprietary rights, which Kant would have disqualified as “metaphysical.” Since personal rights can only refer to civil rights, they can only be – following the Königsberger philosopher – rational ideas. It should be: personal rights are just as difficult to substantially define as civil rights. We can, at most, expect that there is “freedom,” since the free will necessary for moral action is otherwise inconceivable.

Free, Kant writes in his “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” (one – this much advertising should be allowed – of the greatest works ever written in the German language!), would be a will that can function independently of reasons determined by strangers. But where personal rights are chiselled as a catalogue of shalls and shants, like the commandment slabs of Mount Sinai, it has more to do with the police than the freedoms of a reasonable individual.

A Google Street View car at the CeBIT exhibition. Image: Woozie2010 (cc)

With the discussion surrounding Google Street View and a copyright of the individual, to the extent to which they are publicly active, Kant’s concept of free will has turned into exactly the opposite of what was meant: instead of protecting personal rights as the right to “think freely” (i.e. not having to submit to any purpose as a means), the persona is defended as positive property. But it’s not even about “persona,” but rather the famous question of the property it’s hiding behind, which actually let’s all personality disappear because it can never be defined as a property belonging to it.

An ideology primarily represented by the party that sees itself as particularly “liberal” in reference to proprietary rights.

In this respect, it has nothing to do with a categorical imperative that the security guard threw at my head with Prussian anger, but rather with the certain knowledge of a common sense-formulated hypothetical self-command not to let himself be photographed, because otherwise he would run the risk of losing himself as his own property. But the “personal rights” he addressed can’t be a “right” to be a persona (which I of course do not begrudge him in the least), but rather just to become a persona. But unfortunately, that has a lot to do with an educational system that today more than ever is less interested in reflecting on the subtle difference between “erudite” and “enlightened,” i.e. free thinking, souls.

Not being able to photograph a street because people are active on it who define themselves as their own property, protect this property, or only grant use thereof upon purchase, this verdict springs from the same applied logic as the black burkas that first and foremost take away the cloaked wearer’s right to be a public person. Yes, even to be a “person” – whose abstracted status from family and clan produces a sameness with other, equally abstracted “persons”.

The difference between private and public was already constituent for the Attican democracy, and the facade of a house was equally private as hanging out in the town square (reading perhaps from the cynic’s doctrine) – but it was always: show your face! What played out behind the facades was nobody’s business other than those affected.

It may be that what goes on behind the glass facade of the Bundestag complex for all to see is nobody’s business; it’s what everyone sees – but what may not be photograph by anyone. If nothing else, through the fickleness of the Federal Government in regards to this question, the idea that a strict photography ban is the command of the hour has seeped into German minds as into a blank space.

The public sphere, it seems, should be hidden from the public. You have to ask yourself: what are we Germans so ashamed of? Our property?