In 1997 Jan Ullrich won the Tour de France. He is still the only German to have done so. In 2003 his duel with Lance Armstrong drew more than nine million viewers on ARD. Then the doping cases came. On 18 July 2007 a positive test of the German rider Patrik Sinkewitz became known. That same day ARD and ZDF stopped their live coverage of the Tour. ZDF’s editor-in-chief Nikolaus Brender said: Wir wollen einen sauberen Sport. We want a clean sport. After 2011 both public broadcasters dropped the race altogether. ARD only announced its return in January 2015. In November 2023 Ullrich admitted it outright for the first time: Ich habe gedopt. I doped.
The Colonel at Kunduz
On 4 September 2009 a German colonel, Georg Klein, ordered an airstrike near Kunduz in Afghanistan. Up to 142 people were killed or injured, among them civilians. The exact number of dead was never established. In April 2010 the Federal Prosecutor General ended the investigation against Klein and a sergeant. The prosecutor did not judge the result. He judged what Klein knew when he gave the order. Der Beschuldigte Klein durfte davon ausgehen, dass keine Zivilisten vor Ort waren. The accused Klein was entitled to assume that no civilians were present. The decision states the rule: Auch bei der nach Völkerrecht zu treffenden Prüfung ist die Perspektive des Angreifenden zur Tatzeit zugrunde zu legen. Under international law too, the test takes the attacker’s perspective at the time of the act.
The Archive That Fell
On 3 March 2009 the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne collapsed into the pit of a new subway station. Two young residents died. A court-appointed expert found the cause in a defect, a Fehlstelle, in an underground concrete wall. In 2005 workers had left a block of rock in the excavation. According to the indictment, they dug on anstatt das Hindernis zu melden, instead of reporting the obstacle. The criminal courts then examined each person’s duty of care one by one. Two construction managers were acquitted in 2018. The court found breaches of their duty of care but held that these had not caused the collapse. A senior site manager received one year on probation in 2019. The judge said the eindeutige Warnsignale, clear warning signs, in a construction record should have led him to check more closely. The Federal Court of Justice overturned the judgments in 2021. In 2024 the court provisionally closed the cases against the four remaining defendants, against payments of money. In 2020 the construction consortium agreed to pay the city 600 million euros. At the time, it still disputed the cause.
Kant’s Jewel
In 1785 Immanuel Kant published the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In its first section he writes that the good will is good not through what it brings about or achieves, sondern allein durch das Wollen, but only through its willing. Kant imagines a good will that achieves nothing despite its greatest effort. Then, he writes, so würde er wie ein Juwel doch für sich selbst glänzen, it would still shine like a jewel by its own light, as something that has its full worth in itself. Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add to this worth nor take anything from it.
Ehrlich’s Four Gs
Paul Ehrlich, Nobel laureate in medicine, searched systematically for a drug against syphilis. His team made hundreds of compounds and tested them one after another. His assistant Sahachiro Hata tested them methodically on infected mice. Compound number 606 worked. It was introduced in 1910 as Salvarsan. Ehrlich liked to say that success in research needs four Gs: Geld, Geduld, Geschick und Glück. Money, patience, skill and luck.
The Easter Rest That Never Happened
In March 2021, during the pandemic, Chancellor Angela Merkel and the state premiers agreed overnight on an Osterruhe, extra days of rest over Easter. On 24 March 2021, Merkel withdrew it. She explained that the idea hatte ihre guten Gründe, war aber in der Kürze der Zeit nicht gut genug umsetzbar, had good reasons, but could not be carried out well enough in the short time available. The open questions concerned pay for the lost working days and the situation of shops and businesses. They could not be answered in time. She added: Dennoch war die Idee der sogenannten Osterruhe ein Fehler. (Nevertheless, the idea of the so-called Easter rest was a mistake.)
The duty of care
Sorgfaltspflicht. The duty of care. In German liability law, what is examined is whether the required care was exercised in the process — not only what happened as a result.
A person who followed the proper procedure and still caused harm stands differently from one who caused no harm but skipped the procedure.
The process carries legal weight in its own right.