Chancellor Schroeder has obtained a court ban against a novel that involves a shopkeeper assassinating a chancellor. The titular and dying charater in Reinhard Liebermann’s The End of the Chancellor: Shooting in Self-Defence apparently bore close resemblance to Schroeder.

By contrast, here in the States, Stephen Coonts’ Under Seige had no problems including an explicit assassination attempt on President Bush I (with the truly terrifying result of Dan Quayle taking over the nation). And in Loren Singer’s novel, The Parallax View, there was a presidential assassination (unlike the A-1 Alan Pakula movie, which took a few liberties with the text).