Last updated: September 2007
Arrest of German academic ‘farcical’

Academics from around the world have branded the arrest of a fellow academic as ‘farcical’, amid international protests to authorities over his detention.

Andrej Holm, a specialist in urban gentrification at Humboldt University in Berlin, was arrested last month on suspicion of assisting a militant group suspected of carrying out more than 25 arson attacks in Berlin since 2001.

The federal prosecutor’s office arrested Mr Holm on August 1 under anti-terrorism laws, citing the repeated use of words such as ‘gentrification’ and ‘inequality’ in his academic writings, terms similar to those used by the urban activist organisation militante gruppe (mg). The prosecutor’s report states that the frequency of the overlap between words used by Mr Holm and the group was ‘striking, and not to be explained through a coincidence’.

The report also cites the fact that on two occasions he had met three men who were arrested on suspicion of involvement in an arson attack in the eastern state of Brandenburg on July 31 and who are accused of belonging to the mg. The prosecutor’s office said it added to the ‘conspiratorial circumstances’ that he did not take his mobile phone to the meetings, and that because he and another academic had access to a library they were ‘intellectually in a position to compile the sophisticated texts of the group’.

Academics from Europe, the United States and Canada have written letters of protest against his arrest. In one letter, signed by more than 100 academics, the federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, was urged to release Mr Holm from prison. “We strongly object to the notion of intellectual complicity adopted by the federal prosecutor’s office in its investigation...Such arguments allow any piece of academic writing to be potentially incriminating,” the academics wrote.

Richard Sennett, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, and Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at Columbia University, wrote: “The police may have solid knowledge they are withholding, but their public statements belong in the realm of farce…This action in a liberal democracy seems more to fall into Guantánamo mode than genuine counterespionage.”

by Jonathan Kennedy