More than 100 prominent German writers and artists have signed an open letter refusing to appear on one of the country’s top culture programmes on public television after it announced a new host accused of sexism and racism in his writing.
Broadcaster ARD said in late December it had picked author Thilo Mischke, 43, to co-moderate its flagship arts show , ttt – Titel, Thesen, Temperamente (Titles, Theses, Temperaments), after veteran host Max Moor stepped aside.
The choice immediately prompted criticism when a feminist podcast by journalists Annika Brockschmidt and Rebekka Endler spotlighted what they called misogyny, racism, ableism and homophobia in books Mischke had published over the years as well as in a series of recent comments.
In his 2010 book, Around the World In 80 Women, the first-person narrator tries to seduce the titular number of women across the globe and details his conquests using broad ethnic stereotypes. His 2013 book, The Love of Your Life Doesn’t Need Big Breasts, has also come in for fresh scrutiny. Mischke partially distanced himself in 2021 from what he wrote, in a move the authors of the open letter now call “insufficient”.
On his own podcast in 2019, Mischke said that “male sexuality is perhaps based on rape”, calling the act something “primally male”, Brockschmidt and Endler reported.
In the open letter, high-profile members of the German-language arts scene including bestselling authors Saša Stanišic, Margarete Stokowski and Anne Rabe, actor Julius Feldmeier of Netflix’s Kleo and Austrian photographer Stefan Draschan said they were “appalled” by the hiring of Mischke and would boycott ttt until it dropped him.
“We want enthusiastic hosts who are interested in culture for cultural TV, those who are sensitive and empathetic and able to respond to the current discourse and up to addressing the complexity of contemporary cultural debates,” they wrote.
Brockschmidt told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung she had no intention of trying to have Mischke “cancelled” but rather was asking “whether he is the suitable host for a public culture format dealing with important issues of the zeitgeist”.
First aired in December 1967, ttt is a weekly show with interviews and features about the latest cultural output in the German-speaking world and beyond. Moor began hosting the show in 2007 and from 2021 had Siham El-Maimouni as a co-host. She is to continue in a tandem with Mischke from February.
Responding to the initial outrage in December, ttt released a statement on Instagram that said, “We are listening,” and insisted the programme was committed to “decisively confronting issues such as sexism and toxic masculinity”. It said it was “reviewing the accusations” against Mischke and asked for “time” to do so thoroughly.
ARD said Mischke was “intensively and self-critically grappling with the accusations of presenting a sexist view of women and using racist language in places”.
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Commercial broadcaster ProSieben, which has run a series of reports by Mischke, said after the open letter in a post on X that it had valued his work. “What a wild hunt against @ThiloMischke. We value him because he delivered unbelievably important and good reportages which have won him many awards. Judging him only by his book from back then is a very self-righteous approach that says a lot about the people who are doing just that.”
Mischke won a prestigious German television prize in 2023 for a report about the Taliban in Afghanistan and earlier made an acclaimed documentary about Germans fighting for the Islamic State group.
Journalist and author Hasnain Kazim noted that Mischke had also done groundbreaking work uncovering far-right networks in Germany and on X called it “wrong” to “reduce him” to a “stupid book he published 15 years ago”.
Gerrit Bartels, culture editor of Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, said that beyond the accusations, Mischke being chosen by a public broadcaster despite his lack of a profile covering the arts showed the “lax, subordinate” role of culture in Germany at a time of drastic budget cuts.
