In an honorable house, as ZDF certainly wants to be – and with good reason – you can easily eat Viennese, Lyon and Brunswick people without being seen as cannibals. And if, during Lent, it’s not about the sausage, it wouldn’t be dishonorable if one or the other said a Berliner, an American, even a Cameroonian. But what you should no longer put into your mouth – and not only on ZDF, with good reasons – is the Mohrenkopf.
The ZDF has of course escaped the fact that there are many different kinds of Mohrenkopfs, in addition to the negligent Mohrenkopf also the subtle ones. Before ZDF, all Mohrenkopfs are the same. For example, the public broadcaster had the text of Udo Jürgens’ hit song “Aber Bitte mit Sahne” rewritten in the “Giovanni Zarella Show”, as has been the subject of heated debate for a week now.
In the version that Zarella sang together with six ladies and Roland Kaiser, the original verse “You blow and snort, almost nothing goes in. Only a Mohrenkopf at most, because there must be order” replaces the M* word suspected of being “racist” with the “chocolate kiss”.
ZDF said it was a “one-time adjustment” in agreement with the children of Udo Jürgens and the heirs of the copywriter Eckart Hachfeld. The new arrangement of the song already reveals musically that the sensibility of the younger generation is different. By replacing the strings of the intro with a squeaky keyboard register, the operetta allusion originally hidden in it is lost.
That’s as cheap as it is stupid. Because it depends on the cultural arrogance of the cake buffet classics gathered “every day at quarter past three”. The “Mohrenkopf”, which here “must go” for the sake of “order”, already stands in Hachfeld and Jürgens for the sugar-coated racism of that quartet of female bourgeois who are fattening themselves up like deix and which they satirically expose.
As early as 1975, Jürgens had impaled a “widow” in “An Honorable House” singing “who prevented a black man from moving in here”. ZDF probably used an artificial intelligence on “But please with cream” whose intelligence was not sufficient to recognize art – that’s what this stroke of genius is all about. The Mohrenkopf stands here with good reasons critical of racism. But philistines will always remain bourgeois, unfree, hostile to art and dangerous, whether racist or woke: “You are all ashamed of us, because this is an honorable house.”