Friday, August 6th, 2021
Also Wikipedia as a source
New allegations of plagiarism were raised against Laschet
The book is a few years old. But in the current election campaign, Armin Laschet catches up with his work “The Rising Republic”. After initial reports on missing sources, other passages in the text are questionable. The office of the Union Chancellor candidate reacts wait and see.
Against the book “The Rising Republic” by Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet there are again allegations of plagiarism according to “Spiegel”. The magazine reports that in addition to the already publicly known text adoptions without sufficient indication of the source, there are at least four other places in which Laschet adopted fragments from other authors without indicating the origin of these passages.
Laschet is said to have used the text of Salomon Korn, the former Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and two Wikipedia articles in the book, which was published in 2009. He is also said to have adopted a sentence by the then EU Interior Commissioner Franco Frattini without marking the sentence as a quote and without naming the source. In an interview with “Spiegel”, Laschet’s office referred to its own review of the book that had already been initiated a week ago.
“The excitement is completely unnecessary”
The Munich law professor and plagiarism expert Volker Rieble considers the risk to be low that politicians’ books such as that of Laschet or that of the Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock are misleading. Because the expectations of such publications are low from the outset, the authors cannot do any harm with them. “The excitement about these politicians’ books is completely superfluous,” Rieble told the magazine.
The first allegations of plagiarism in connection with Laschet were made public at the end of July by the author Karsten Weitzenegger, who was made aware of the alleged adoption of Weitzenegger’s text passages by the well-known plagiarism hunter Martin Heidingsfelder. Laschet then admitted errors and announced that he would arrange for an examination of the entire book.
Then the Viennese media scientist Stefan Weber found a longer passage in Laschet’s book that conspicuously coincides with a text by political scientist Hans Maier, as Weber wrote on his blog. Weber had previously accused Baerbock of several literal takeovers in her new book “Jetzt. How we renew our country”.
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