Against the Coward’s Patriotism
Joko Winterscheidt and Klaas Heufer-Umlauf—the German comedy duo who built their late-night show Circus Halligalli on irreverence and a flair for testing limits—published an open letter in 2015 that did something their usual material didn’t: it had actual stakes.
The letter was addressed to the nationalists flooding social media with anti-refugee hatred. Germany was in the middle of the 2015 refugee crisis, and Facebook had become a reliable sewer of coordinated harassment, running alongside the kind of coded "I’m not a Nazi, but…" rhetoric that insists on its own reasonableness while advocating for the opposite. Joko and Klaas went directly at them.
They called them what they were: not brave truth-tellers, not contrarians, not patriots—just the weakest link in a democracy, people who confused racism with free speech, who memorized a few cherry-picked statistics to paper over stupidity, who identified with William Wallace while screaming at people fleeing war. They noted, accurately and with exhausted precision, that Facebook would sooner ban a nipple than remove a post celebrating a drowning refugee.
The letter didn’t pretend to be a solution. It explicitly acknowledged it would change nobody. We know that neither arguments, decency, nor basic humanity will stop you from posting the things you post.
The point wasn’t conversion—it was clarity. They wanted to go on record about what kind of audience they refused to perform for. No TV ratings, no shitstorm, could ever be as bad as getting applause from people who cheer when a refugee boat carrying 800 people sinks in the Mediterranean. Refugees welcome.
What strikes me now is how rare it still is—not the sentiment, which costs nothing, but the specificity. They weren’t making a general statement about kindness. They were talking to an identifiable group of people watching their show and telling them, in detail, what they thought of them, and inviting them to unfollow. That’s the part that actually matters. Everybody’s against hate speech in the abstract. It’s different when you’re willing to lose viewers over it.
The hashtag was #MundAufMachen—open your mouth, speak up. It still holds.