“In view of the current situation, we have updated a number of places and added some new chapters. And – this was very important to us – we did not have to black out or omit any parts,” said Gruber in a statement from Plassen Verlag, which took over the title from Piper Verlag .
There was a dispute over a passage about the book blogger Roma Maria Mukherjee. In a post on Platform Gruber called Mukherjee a guardian of virtue in a chapter of her book and noted: A woman of that name would have more likely placed her in tantric Shakren gymnastics or a vegan primal scream seminar, but not in knitting in the textile hobby scene.
Accusations of racism and threats
Mukherjee said at the time that this was racist, defamatory and offensive. Her full name was mentioned and she then received threats, including murder. The blogger filed a lawsuit, but failed before the Hamburg Higher Regional Court. The Munich-based Piper Verlag responded in early 2024 with a new edition in which Mukherjee’s name was blacked out. This was all a burden for the blogger. “The price was high, financially and physically,” she told the German Press Agency. Despite the defeat in court, she is glad that she did not accept the attacks. “You can’t win every fight, but you should definitely fight it.” This also gives others courage to defend themselves.
In the new edition published by Plassen Verlag, Gruber and her co-author Andreas Hock write in the foreword that Mukherjee did not understand that it was satire. “That’s why the lady didn’t laugh at herself. Instead, she created a huge stir and put pressure on our publisher at the time with her community.” The accusation of racism is inaccurate. “The fact that the blogger has a migrant background was, on the one hand, not clear and, on the other hand, as irrelevant as anything. It simply played no role at all in the humorous treatment of her statement in our chapter.”
Changes in the new edition
The black bars above Mukherjee’s name have now disappeared. A paragraph that was deleted by Piper Verlag is also included again. In it, the authors speculated that the blogger could possibly be called “Maria Müller” and only call herself something else because it sounded “a lot like ‘Bund Deutscher Mädel’.”
In addition, the first two chapters have been revised. In the first version, Gruber took aim at German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, but now she attacks wokeness or trans people. And Hock thinks about migration and knife attacks instead of out-of-touch politicians in Berlin.
Gruber perceived the changes initiated by Piper Verlag as censorship. She has now moved her work to Plassen Verlag, which offers books by Alice Weidel, Donald J. Trump, Daniela Katzenberger and Mathias Döpfner, among others.
