Germany’s Academic and Political Plagiarism Epidemic

Today I watched (and thoroughly enjoyed) the German movie “Der Minister”. It is a wonderful satire of the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal.

As it turns out, this clever satire is itself a work of plagiarism. Several great lines seem to be taken from TV series such as the iconic British “Yes Minister” series – more specifically:  “It used to be said there were two kinds of chairs to go with two kinds of Minister: one sort folds up instantly; the other sort goes round and round in circles.”

The screenwriter Dorothee Schon justified it by stating that content was taken from the media collage surrounding Guttenberg. An interesting legal argument indeed!

To refresh your memory, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was a charismatic German politician who served as the Minister of Defense under Angela Merkel. Guttenberg received his doctorate from the University of Bayreuth (founded in 1975 and located in Bavaria, Germany) in the year 2007. After it was found that he had plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation, the university revoked is doctorate. Once he was caught, Guttenberg left German politics all together in 2011. He reinvented himself in the US.

Being an academic is a big deal in Germany. It helps with getting well-paid jobs and has substantial social standing. According to a  survey conducted by the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”  18.5 % of MPs in the German Bundestag carry doctor or professor titles. It is obviously a big plus for becoming a Minister! According to law professor Prof. Dr.Volker Rieble of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germans suffer from “title arousal.” He points out that people in other countries are not as vain about their titles. (Israel is a good example – most people in middle and higher management have two academic degrees and seldom mention them). This obsession with academic titles obviously sparks the tendency to take short cuts to obtain the prized Dr. title.

As it turned out, the Guttenberg affair was not an isolated incident (as I originally thought). Following the Guttenberg debacle, several other German politicians were also caught in the act, including Prof. Dr. AnnetteSchavan who (ironically) served as the Minister of Education. Way back in 1980, she wrote a dissertation of a whopping 351 pages that had been gathering dust in the archives of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf until an anonymous blogger (SchavanPlag on WordPress) published a long list of sections that were ripped off other works. The University of Düsseldorf promptly stripped her of her Dr. title. She subsequently resigned her post in February 2013.

The German website “VroniPlag” is a living nightmare for German politicians that got their academic degree in a questionable way. The website states that: “VroniPlag Wiki is a scientific project without any political or commercial interests”. They obviously do a lot of due diligence.  Cave Doctor (Latin for: Dr. be aware)!

Other disgraced German politicians include:

• Silvana Koch-Mehrin, former vice president of the European Parliament and member of the German Free Democratic Party, was stripped of her doctorate in 2011 by the University of Heidelberg;
• Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, was stripped of his Ph. D. by the University of Bonn in 2011;
• Florian Graf, another German politician, lost his Ph. D. once he confessed that he had lifted parts of other works without permission for his dissertation.

Will this be the end of it? Lean back and wait!

By the way, Angie aka Angela Merkel is officially Dr. Merkel since she holds a doctorate from the University of Leipzig.

About Plagiarism

In Roman times the author Marcus Valerius Martialis (40–102 BCE and) realized that it was bad for his business to be copied by others without being given credit.

He launched a campaign to denounce what he considered to be literary thieves. He coined the phrase plagiārius (kidnapper, someone who ensnares children or slaves in a plaga or net). Since copyright law did not exist yet, and there was also no other legal recourse open to him, he came up with a clever idea.

Being known for his acid stylus, he put his writing skills to good use. He wrote several verses aimed at copycats.

One that survived is a wonderful quip about Fidentinus, whom he perceived at being a plagiarist.

“Fame has it that you, Fidentinus, recite my books to the crowd as if none other than your own. If you’re willing that they be called mine, I’ll send you the poems for free.
If you want them to be called yours, buy this one, so that they won’t be mine.”

Nowadays, plagiarism is a criminal offense that will also ostracize an author. Some famous examples include:

• Alex Haley settled a 1977 lawsuit with Harold Courlander that cited approximately 80 passages in Haley's novel Roots (1976) as having been plagiarized from Courlander's novel The African (1967)
  

• Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life is reported to contain plagiarized passages from at least five other novels. All editions of the book were subsequently withdrawn, her publishing deal with Little, Brown and Co. was rescinded, and a film deal with Dreamworks SKG was canceled.

• Paul Crouch, the televangelist founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, was sued in 2000 by novelist Sylvia Fleener. She claimed that Crouch's novel The Omega Code was plagiarized from her unpublished manuscript, The Omega Syndrome. Crouch and Fleener's attorneys reached an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum.
  
  
• In 2007 at the age of 12, Marie-Pier Côté, a Canadian, published a novel titled Laura l'immortelle.The author later admitted that she plagiarized a Highlander fan fiction, rewrote it, and presented it as an original work.

• In December 2011, Naomi Ragen was convicted of using parts of Sarah Shapiro's 1990 book “Growing with My Children: A Jewish Mother’s Diary” in her book "Sotah," which appeared in 1992. In addition to levying damages, as well as court costs and lawyer's fees, the court ordered Ragen to remove the plagiarized passages in future printings of the book.