German minister in hot water over 'negro' comment

The Twitter hashtag "#Neger" (negro) remained a top trending topic in Germany on Tuesday afternoon, following Monday's night's broadcast of the "Hart aber Fair" (Hard but Fair) talk show, in which Bavarian Interior Minister Jochen Herrmann made the comment.

"Roberto Blanco was always a wonderful Negro, who most Germans thought was wonderful," Herrmann interjected around halfway through the show. He also added that perennial German football champions Bayern Munich had many players "with black skin" and the fans of Bayern Munich liked this.

Just moments earlier, Herrmann had been asked to respond to a vox pop played on the show, in which a man with a heavy Bavarian accent had said that he wanted "no negroes" in his state.

"I think this is just nonsense," Herrmann said.

On Twitter, though, this comment appeared to have been ignored.

The first tweets to comment on Herrmann's statement about the Tunisia-born pop singer Blanco were published within minutes and continued right through Tuesday morning and into the afternoon. The majority of users poured scorn on the state interior minister, who belongs to the Christian Social Union, generally regarded as to the political right of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats.

On Monday morning Herrmann was back on the airwaves, this time on public broadcaster ZDF, which had invited him to come on breakfast television to speak about the growing wave of refugees finding their way to his state and the rest of Germany, as well as the opening of a "Balkans-Center" in the Bavarian town of Manching. The new refugee center is designed to quickly process the applications of people from the Western Balkans, who have almost no chance of being granted asylum in Germany.

Asked about his choice of words the previous evening, Herrmann said the word negro was not usually part of his vocabulary.

"I absolutely never use the word negro otherwise," he said. "I only used it because of a direct reaction to this offending expression," he said, referring to the vox pop aired on the show.

'No offense taken'

Roberto Blanco, the singer Herrmann had referenced on Monday evening, also came to Herrmann's defense.

"I don't feel insulted by Interior Minister Herrmann," the now 78-year-old Blanco, whose career peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, told "Focus Online". "I can't imagine that it was meant badly. But it would have been smarter if he had not used the word 'negro' but opted for 'colored' instead."

pfd/msh (dpa, AFP, epd)