Hanover – The director of the Hanover State Opera has been the victim of an antisemitic insult. Laura Berman (64) was verbally abused in an email because the sender was apparently concerned about the quality of the opera house’s program.
Among other things, the woman wrote that Hitler was much “too humane towards people of this kind”. She also said that Jews were “disgusting, sick and inhuman rabble” and that they had to be disposed of as “hazardous human waste”.
Berman then filed a complaint. On Thursday, the case is now to be heard in court; the charge is “inflammatory insult.” This criminal offense was only included in the Criminal Code in 2021 and is intended in particular to punish hate speech against individuals that is not expressed in public.
Paragraph 192a of the Criminal Code states: “Anyone who publishes content that is likely to attack the human dignity of others by targeting a group determined by their national, racial, religious or ethnic origin, their world view, their disability or their sexual orientation or insults, maliciously scorns or slanders an individual because of his or her membership in one of these groups, allows another person belonging to one of the aforementioned groups to get to another person who belongs to one of the aforementioned groups without being asked to do so by this person, is punishable by imprisonment for up to two years or punished with a fine.”
The public prosecutor’s office accuses the alleged sender M. of using the contact form of the Lower Saxony State Theater in Hanover to have degraded Berman’s honor due to her Jewishness and attacked her human dignity. The district court announced on its website that the defendant had lodged an objection to the penalty order initially issued against her .
In Hanover, Berman experienced great solidarity after the incident became known. Born in 1959 in Boston, USA, the dramaturge has been working in Germany for several decades. She has worked at concert halls in Freiburg, Münster, Cologne, Darmstadt, Bregenz and Basel, among others.
She has been director of the Hanover State Opera since 2019. In June, it was announced that Berman would be leaving office early in two years.
