In an honorable house, as ZDF certainly wants to be – and with good reasons – you can easily eat Viennese, Lyon and Brunswick without being considered man-eaters. And if, during Lent, it is not about the sausage, it would not be dishonorable if one or the other a Berliner, an American, even a Cameroonian went over the lips. But what you should no longer say – and not only at ZDF, with good reasons – is the Mohrenkopf.

The ZDF, of course, has missed the fact that there are many Moor's heads, in addition to the negligent Mohrenkopf also the cryptic ones. Before ZDF, all Mohrenköpfe are the same. For example, the public broadcaster has had the lyrics of Udo Jürgens' hit "Aber bitte mit Sahne" rewritten in the "Giovanni Zarella Show", as has been hotly debated for a week now.

In the version, which Zarella sang together with six ladies and Roland Kaiser, the original verse "Sie puffen und prusten, almost nichts geht mehr rein. Only a Moor's head at most, because order must be" replaces the suspected "racist" M* word with the "chocolate kiss".

It was, informed the ZDF on request, a "one-time adjustment" in agreement with the children of Udo Jürgens and the heirs of the lyricist Eckart Hachfeld. Already musically, the new arrangement of the song reveals that the sensitivity of the young generation is different. By replacing the strings of the intro with a squawking keyboard register, the operetta allusion originally hidden in it is lost.

This is as cheap as it is stupid. Because it depends on the cultural conceit of the cake buffet classics gathered "daily at quarter past three". For Hachfeld and Jürgens, the "Mohrenkopf", which "has to go" for the sake of "order", already stands for the icing-glazed racism of that Deix-like quartet of female philistines who are satirically exposed by them.

As early as 1975, Jürgens had speared a "widow" singing in "Ein ehrenwert Haus", "who prevented a black man from moving in here". ZDF probably used an artificial intelligence on "But please with cream", whose intelligence was not sufficient to recognize art – that is what this stroke of genius is about. The Moor's head stands here with good reasons critical of racism. But philistines always remain philistines, unfree, hostile to art and dangerous, whether racist or woke: "They are all ashamed of us, because this is an honorable house."