Germans are rejecting the Pirate Party

As the Pirate Party in Germany seems to be taking off in local elections (reaching 13 percent of support in a recent national poll), some German artists are increasingly voicing their frustration with a political group that they say doesn’t represent their interests, according to an article published Friday in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

After having been founded in Sweden in 2006, the political philosophy has since spread worldwide. It's had the most success thus far in Germany, although adoption in the United States has been much slower.

The magazine concluded that the Pirate Party "is the first left-wing party to have a considerable number of intellectuals not for, but against it."

The tempest in a torrent seems to have begun about a month ago, after Sven Regener, a Berlin-based musician and author, lamented the Pirates’ politics on Bavarian public radio. Others have stepped up to agree with his sentiment, including "film director Doris Dörrie, publisher Carl Hanser Verlag's literary director and author Michael Krüger and author Julia Franck."

Take the case of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, an award-winning 82-year-old essayist, poet and author, who has been at the forefront of many German political movements in recent decades.

"Political? No, politically there's nothing there," he "growled over the telephone," in his interview with Der Spiegel. "And certainly nothing revolutionary. It's actually surprisingly bourgeois. Like our grandparents, who were happy when they could get something for free."

Enzenberger, though, wasn’t done. "I wonder why they don't go the bakery and say that they'd rather not pay," he added. "Why does it have to be against us, the authors?"

Of course, Pirates would argue that they’re not against paying for stuff—and that paying for bread, a non-digital good, is very different than paying for an MP3. In fact, Peter Sunde, founder of The Pirate Bay, also created Flattr, a startup that makes it easier for people to financially support websites they like.

As an adjoining interview in the same magazine reveals, there seems to be a great disconnect between the established media and music culture, and the young digerati.

"We derive our demands from the technical realities of the Net," said Christopher Lauer, a Pirate member of the Berlin state parliament. "For us they are like laws of nature. That's why you and many other people often have difficulty understanding us."