This week we just can’t ignore the most dis­cussed new ger­man twit­ter user: It’s the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the ger­man par­ty SPD, Huber­tus Heil. He used twit­ter dur­ing his vis­it in the Unit­ed States, where he attend­ed the Oba­ma show in Den­ver. There are quite inter­est­ing neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive reac­tions to this new hob­by of Mr. Heil. You can find these reac­tions in twit­ter and in an arti­cle of the ger­man lifestyle mag­a­zine
Der Spiegel.

It’s a cor­rect esti­ma­tion to say that some­times you’ll be crit­i­cized imme­di­ate­ly if you do some­thing for get­ting pub­lic­i­ty. You can see the arti­cle in Der Spiegel quite easy­i­ly as that of kind of crit­i­cism. But not every crit­i­cism that comes up quick­ly is intrin­si­cal­ly wrong.

We don’t mind politi­cians doing things that nor­mal cit­i­zens do as well. We do mind if they’re just pre­tend­ing to do so. It’s one char­ac­ter­is­tic of the polit­i­cal strat­e­gy of Oba­ma, Heil’s idol and rea­son to come to Den­ver, to make clear he’s not that kind of fak­er. Believe it or not. In Amer­i­ca the media don’t believe that com­plete­ly and there­for they’re talk­ing about play­ing cards.

One thing that is crys­tal clear is that Heil’s show­ing up on twit­ter was planned as a part of his polit­i­cal actions. You can see that in one of the delet­ed tweets of his account:

Most irri­tat­ing this plan did not result in pre­sent­ing any own polit­i­cal idea. It also sounds like this whole action was­n’t his own idea. And though twit­ter is much about pre­tend­ing and the idea that there is no non­con­for­mi­ty of tweets, because these belong to the sub­jec­tive man­ner to describe real­i­ty, Heil is def­i­nite­ly a can­di­date for TMI to us.

This is so because Heil con­tin­u­ous­ly mix­es pri­vate, jour­nal­is­tic and polit­cal stuff in his tweets. It’s not clear if he wants to be on twit­ter as a pri­vate man, a politi­cian or a jour­nal­ist. Actu­al­ly there are enough jour­nal­ists and Heil’s pri­vate life does not attract many peo­ple.

In this week’s tweet this mix­ing is inher­ent:

Heil tells us that the mem­bers of the ger­man Bun­destag Rolf Mützenich and Niels Annen bought a skate­board and shoes dur­ing their vis­it and that they now can get back to work all togeth­er.

Is this a polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion or a pri­vate one? We do think it deals with pri­vate mat­ters of Mützenich and Annen. And for sure there will be jour­nal­ists to see this in a polit­i­cal con­text. Any­how, Heil does not make clear what rel­e­vance his tweets have and how they should be seen as.

Per­haps we should read Heil’s state­ments as the fol­low­ing tweet should be read, where he tells us how Oba­ma should call his wife:

Bull­shit. ^[1]

So final­ly it turns out that the twit­ter ques­tion to Mr. Heil has to be posed more exact­ly: “What the fuck are you doing?”

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[1] fol­low­ing Har­ry Frank­furt On bull­shit, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2005