More than 100 prominent German writers and artists have signed an open letter refusing to appear on one of Germany’s top culture programmes on public television after the broadcaster announced a new host who has been accused of sexism and racism in his writing.
ARD said in late December it had picked the author Thilo Mischke, 43, to co-present its flagship culture show, ttt – Titel, Thesen, Temperamente (Titles, Theses, Temperaments), after the programme’s veteran host Max Moor stepped aside.
The choice immediately prompted criticism when a feminist podcast hosted by the journalists Annika Brockschmidt and Rebekka Endler highlighted what they called misogyny, racism, ableism and homophobia in Mishke’s books 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 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 distanced himself in 2021 from some of 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 the bestselling authors Saša Stanišic, Margarete Stokowski and Anne Rabe, the actor Julius Feldmeier of Netflix’s Kleo and the Austrian photographer Stefan Draschan said they were “appalled” by the hiring of Mischke and would boycott ttt until it dropped him.
They wrote: “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.”
Brockschmidt told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung she had no intention of trying to have Mischke “cancelled” but was asking “whether he is a 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 Siham El-Maimouni has been a co-host. She is to continue in tandem with Mischke from February.
Responding to the initial outrage, ttt released a statement in December on Instagram, which said, “We are listening”, adding that 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”.
The commercial broadcaster ProSieben, which has run a series of reports by Mischke, said in a post on X after the publication of the open letter that it valued his work. “What a wild hunt against @ThiloMischke. We value him because he has delivered unbelievably important reportages that have won 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.
The journalist and author Hasnain Kazim said Mischke had also done groundbreaking work uncovering far-right networks in Germany and on X said it was wrong to reduce him to a “stupid book he published 15 years ago”.
Gerrit Bartels, the culture editor of Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, said that beyond the accusations, for a public broadcaster to choose Mischke to cover the arts despite his lack of an arts profile showed the “lax, subordinate” role of culture in Germany at a time of drastic budget cuts.
