Editorial
There is no German collective guilt, but there is a collective responsibility that grows out of our history: Charlotte Knobloch will be 90 years old next week and is moving in a moving star-Conversation record. Gregor Peter Schmitz on the current one star.
During my history studies, I was very happy that Heinrich von Treitschke was no longer on the curriculum – or just as an example of how history is not seen at the moment. “Men make history”, the prehistorian Treitschke had given as a maxim, he pointed the way for the personality cult in German historiography. I don’t know if there is a Treitschke emulator in China right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. Because since this week at the latest, the sentence has been there: “One man makes history.”
President Xi Jinping has secured himself the power of a Mao, and his thirst for power is far from satisfied: he wants to become ruler for life. Xi is the strong man, but does that keep his country strong? History teaches that absolute power absolutely corrupts. If contradiction is punishable, if (digital) screening is absolute, then this always leads to absolutely wrong decisions, as can be seen, for example, in the farce of Chinese corona politics. Xi insists his country is stronger than ever, but who really wants to dream their “Chinese dream”? In Russia we have seen how lonely autocrats can become, and we painfully have to cut our cords off from Vladimir Putin. Our distancing from Xi’s China is also likely to be painful. Last year alone, German companies exported goods worth more than 100 billion euros there. But the question is whether we want to pay the bill now or later, because dependence on autocrats is always expensive.
No German collective guilt, but collective responsibility
Charlotte Knobloch will be 90 next week, she was born in Munich in 1932, she barely survived the Holocaust and stayed in Germany. She says: “Germany is my home.” What else is she supposed to say? And yet it is an outrageous sentence, as you can read in the moving conversation between my colleagues David Baum, Tilman Gerwien and Rafael Seligmann and Knobloch – long-time chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Because: how does one live (survive) in the country of the perpetrators, among people who had just shouted: “The Jews are our misfortune” (also a Treitschke sentence). One of Knobloch’s predecessors in the Central Council, Ignatz Bubis, once told stern at the end of his life that he had achieved almost nothing in terms of understanding between Jews and Germans. Knobloch does not say such a sentence. But we owe her for not even having to think him. Because there is no German collective guilt, but there is a collective responsibility that grows out of our history.
In a stern interview a few weeks ago, Silvana Koch-Überin revealed how sexual harassment by FDP party friends was the order of the day. The top liberal Wolfgang Kubicki has now remembered a meeting with Koch-mehrin in Brussels, of course he had hit on her at the time and only stopped when her husband joined. Koch-mehrin later said that she asked this because she suspected something like that. Kubicki insists that flirting among party friends should still be allowed – and you can guess how he is waiting for hooting approval. Anyone else wanna cheer? At the beginning of the Koch Mehrin revelations, the party said it was the old FDP, with which the current party no longer had anything to do. But Kubicki is not just the old FDP, he is one of the most influential liberals at the moment, he is the vice president of the Bundestag. Wouldn’t it be time for a word of power to the macho? Maybe from the party leader?
Source: Stern
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