Dhe adjective “probat” is a vocabulary of educational language. You can still hear his Latin origins. There is the same word there, “probatus”, which only had the ending cut off when it was adopted into German. Probat means tried and tested, effective, excellent, was naturalized as early as the sixteenth century and still sounds foreign or perhaps better: chosen, if not exotic, then at least elitist. The evaluation that utters the word refers to formal verification procedures that must have taken place in order for something to be classified as an appropriate or inappropriate remedy. Or the word is used in a somewhat freer sense, but then one has to be all the more certain that one is asserting a certainty of the kind established in formal proceedings.
Means are said to be appropriate or inappropriate, not ends. The field of ideas that is invoked is the medical, or more specifically pharmaceutical. It is about active ingredients that, depending on the knowledge of the condition requiring treatment, but also depending on the dosage, can trigger good or bad, categorized as poison or medicine.
An official aura
When Alice Weidel, the party leader and leader of the AfD parliamentary group, now put the word in her mouth on Sandra Maischberger’s talk show, this choice of words was astounding. It was about the three members of the AfD state parliament who were on their way to Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine to act as so-called observers in the so-called referendums announced by Russia. They had already arrived in Russia and then aborted their mission. Weidel welcomed this literal about-face on the part of her party friends and justified it by saying that she “considers this suggestion of gaining an objective impression” as “not appropriate”.
A clear condemnation of the private diplomatic enterprise of her colleagues was required, which Weidel by no means wanted to remain guilty of. During “Maischberger” she discussed with Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the FDP defense politician from Düsseldorf, who, as always, was highly concentrated and precisely intervened, and Weidel could not afford to try to assert untenable terrain. One might think that the noble but also paperless word “probat” is not suitable for the decisive condemnation of an adventurous expedition of party friends who are not members of the Bundestag faction and therefore did not have to be treated by Weidel as colleagues in the narrower sense. But the clinical sound of the word, which deviates from the everyday language of leading politicians, proved to be effective in the dispute with the chair of the Defense Committee in the Bundestag.
An official aura surrounds “probat”: the change of lexical register could be perceived as a rhetorical increase. When viewed soberly, the business trip destination was clearly the wrong choice, as a check using all the rules of political art had shown. In internal party communication with fellow officials and members in front of the television, however, the explicit denial of approval for the travel plan by Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and his two wing comrades could have been received quite differently. Not as a defense, but as an impersonal and therefore gentle form of rebuke. There are forms of severity that are gentle. A weighing process took place, and when examining the relationship between means and ends, the federal chairwoman came to a different conclusion than the regional politicians.
denigration of idealism
The true point, however, lies in the fact that a suggestion aimed at an objective assessment of the conditions in the war zone failed a test that used the terminology of an objective world view. Tillschneider and his allies are the supernationalists in the nationalist party. It is open to question whether Weidel’s distancing from these far-right exponents of right-wing party ideology should be judged dishonest; Strack-Zimmermann accused Weidel of the alliance she had made with Björn Höcke. In any case, to demonstrate the implicit logic of her own nationalism, Weidel found the opportunity to make an example of the front-line tourists.