Human-animal studies academics dogged by German hoaxers
Source: The Guardian
Human-animal studies academics dogged by German hoaxers
Editors of Dresden-based journal apologise after being fooled
by fake PhD student’s paper on role of alsatians in totalitarianism
Philip Oltermann in Berlin
Tuesday 1 March 2016 17.51 GMT
The findings unearthed in Christiane Schulte’s journal article were a revelation. The first fatality at the Berlin Wall, it showed, had not been human but a police dog called Rex. And a new law forcing East German border guards to keep their canine enforcers on a lead helped prevent a third world war.
Most shockingly, the 26-year-old PhD student revealed that the alsatians that patrolled the Berlin Wall were direct descendants of those deployed by the Nazis in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, thus maintaining a “tradition of violence”.
In Schulte’s own words, the academic paper she published in a peer-reviewed German journal in December “revealed the prime importance of human-animal studies for contemporary research into totalitarianism”.
But two months after publishing these revelations, the editors of the Dresden-based publication Totalitarianism and Democracy have had to admit that they have fallen victim to an elaborate academic hoax.
In a statement published this week, the editorial team at the Hannah-Arendt Institute for Research into Totalitarianism said they had been “systematically deceived, ie through a faked CV and an apparently academic argumentation, which sought to convince the reader with detailed explanations, extensive footnotes and false archival references”. Christiane Schulte did not exist, and nor did the alsatians with totalitarian tendencies.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/01/human-animal-studies-academics-dogged-by-german-hoaxers
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