Playing Doctor in Central Europe

The GuTTenberg Galaxy: a paradise for (false) academic titles?

In my Viennese teenage years (ca. 1980), every school principal – with a little help from his political friends – had realistic chances of getting the honorary title of Hofrat (“Court Councilor”) awarded shortly before retirement. This would work even though there had not been an imperial court for more than 60 years. However, titles of any kind served (and still serve) as the currency of social capital in Austria, even in republican times. Accordingly, one of my first bosses who had completed a lousy M.A. teaching degree in her distant past had to be adressed Frau Magister in the Kaffeehaus and at work; otherwise she would react with great indignance’.

Today this lady would probably be called “Frau Magistra” in a politically more correct way, using the Latin female ending. This is because we Austrians are more pedantic than the Germans when it comes to gender policies, although we are otherwise usually much more conservative. It´s up to Germans to laugh their heads off about our “Maggy” titles which are handed out in the Big North as well, but must not be used in public. And I have certainly never heard anyone being addressed as Herr Bachelor, not even in Vienna. Apparently that newfangled stuff does not go easily into waiters’ brains.

Similarly in the Czech Republic, long after Kafka’s doctorate (“JUDr”), I see titles thriving happily everywhere. And when I was still a teaching assistant in Budapest in the 1990s, one of my Austrian colleagues with the beautiful name of Karlheinz almost started a big academic career after he had fabricated himself a false PhD diploma on the basis of an examination form from the University of Klagenfurt. This came out only when he was to be appointed as Professor of German at the newly founded Catholic University of Budapest. There were also indications that he, in his former life as clergyman, had stolen icons from a church in Lienz, Eastern Tyrol, and sold them to an antiques dealer in Innsbruck.

The whole case of Karlheinz was probably very embarrassing for that famous Austrian foreign minister who had a few years earlier clipped the Iron Curtain with his Hungarian colleague; Karlheinz used to brag that he would enjoy the personal “protection” of the former. He then briefly taught at the Austrian High School in Bratislava, before police lost his trail. Criminal charges brought in by the University of Klagenfurt literally went nowhere. Rumor has it that Karlheinz nowadays sells “wellness products” somewhere in area of Tatabánya, Hungary, probably under the name of his wife – with or without an academic title, I was not able to find out.

Now you would probably say: well, life’s a picaresque novel, and stupid those who get caught. Thomas Mann’s masterly conman character Felix Krull would be great as a foreign minister, an academic and a bigamist, even without M.A. So why am I trying to sell you the boring old meritocratic morals while we live in a society based on vanity, simulacra images and fake facades – be they plastic boobs or fake PhDs? It’s not simply because our beloved German neighbors, with democratic understatement, would usually tend to omit titles and simply use “Herr X” or “Frau Y”, even for Dr Merkel. It´s rather the latest development in Germany, that a man with a plagiarized doctoral thesis might become Federal Chancellor one day – or at least Premier in the federal state of Bavaria.

This is “KT”, as his friends and fans like to call him, who at least has a proper aristocratic title to which he is entitled in Germany (but not in Austria because they were all abolished there in 1919): Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg. With his wet gelled hair looking as if he’d licked it and a well-kept blonde by his side (founder of an anti-child abuse charity), he has always been the darling of German tabloids – before it came out that at the time when he was a stressed-out rookie MP and a young father, he had taken quotation rules rather lightly while writing his doctoral thesis. Thus the popular conservative minister KT had to resign in spring 2011- and has been twiddling his thumbs in American exile ever since.

His patient sojourn abroad might also be taken as a sign of KT’s strongly developed practical intelligence, since the Public Prosecution Service of Bayreuth recently dropped the criminal charges against him; in exchange, he will donate € 20,000 to a Child Cancer charity. This does not come as a surprise in a banana republic, and neither in CSU-ruled Bavaria which, after the collapse of the GDR 20 years ago, is the only one-party state left on German soil.

Of course you could approach everything in a very different way, since KT through the unlawful appropriation of a doctorate has acquired certain social, professional, and financial benefits: which is exactly the definition of “serious fraud” in most European criminal codes. Anyway, similarly to the Guttenberg case, the EU commissioner and former conservative Austrian science (!) minister Johannes Hahn was also cleared of plagiarism charges, yet without paying; however, the expert commission also ruled that Hahn would not get a PhD for such a performance nowadays.

Tant pis, you might say again, there are much bigger crooks loose, such as the former Austrian finance minister Karl Heinz Grasser and the Italian ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi. So why would I be so humorless to bother about the little cosmetic problems in KT’s PhD? Why don´t I just put wet gel into my hair and applaud to the Bavarian Baron for his achievements?

It’s simply because I and many thousands of others have worked our asses off for long years to write an acceptable thesis, often at the end of a normal working day: instead of sleeping when we’re exhausted, at the expense of friendships and relationships, with little vacation and a lot of bad conscience (if at times a TV series or a pint would distract us from writing). Blame yourself, loser, you might say again now – but you’ll see what I mean soon enough when you have to deal with all the doctors, pharmacists, lawyers or economists who “only” copied their thesis from the Internet or – a bit more tastefully – from library sources.

And that´s why I think those fellows should not get away with this, even if personal charisma and political wet gel might lubricate their way: we should thus charge and shame KT and his likes.

(c) Ruthner & LIDOVÉ NOVINY, 2011

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