Oh, by the way...

Reul fumes

Edgy guy: Herbert Reul

(Bild: GEORGES GOBET)

In the latest edition of his column "Oh, by the way...", "Krone Vorarlberg" author Harald Petermichl looks at a letter from Herbert Reul. The good man is the Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and has not only attracted positive attention in the past. A few days ago, however...

It is nothing new that Herbert Reul, Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia, is an edgy contemporary with whom you should only argue if you have good arguments on his side. Nor is it news that the tireless campaigner against daylight saving time is able to polarize people. Five years ago, the queer.de portal awarded him the "Homo-Gurke" ("gay cucumber") award because he had expressed himself - shall we say - clumsily in a tweet on Christopher Street Day, while in the same year he described it as "inexplicable" how voters could come up with the idea that Markus Söder would be a good candidate for chancellor, because "hot air and a policy that relies on staging" would not get the CDU anywhere either.

As Minister of the Interior, he is responsible for security in Germany's most populous federal state with almost 18 million inhabitants between Selfkant-Isenbruch in the west and Stahle in the east, and since 2018 at the latest, when he called for tougher action against "problem fans" after serious clashes in Dortmund between the police and Hertha idiots from the capital, he has been taking a closer look at what is happening in and around the stadiums. So it's no wonder that he was quite annoyed by what so-called fans of Cologne's Effzeh recently did at the second division derby against Fortuna from Düsseldorf. A monumental banner showed a man with the FC logo on his tie holding a large knife to the neck of Fortuna, the goddess of luck.

The poster of the kick-off.

(Bild: SID)

Insanely original when you consider that the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, was the victim of a knife attack in 2015. In an angry letter to FC managing director Christian Keller, Reul noted that "a motif that portrays knife violence as part of fan rivalry" is "absolutely out of place in itself" in this day and age, while Keller seriously believes that this is "simply the rivalry between two active fan scenes". It could well be that the matter will have repercussions, but not immediately, as the annual state of emergency, also known as carnival, has been in force in the cathedral city since Thursday and will continue until Tuesday. Incidentally, a ban on knives has been in force since 11.11. As DFB President Bernd Neuendorf and Hans-Joachim Watzke from the DFL have also received the letter, it will be interesting to see how the case will develop after Ash Wednesday, when, as we all know, everything is over.