Gregor Peter Schmitz on the new star: “The USA, the best friend for Germany”

Editorial

I have a big sister, not a big brother. Perhaps this circumstance explains a certain impartiality when talking about “big brother”. For me, this is linked to a longing and a hope: Big brother will fix it.

When we discussed our cover photo for this week in the editorial office, however, other associations came up: that of “Big Brother”, who monitors us, looks down on us, maybe sometimes patronizes us or drags us along. America has earned this ambivalent assessment over the years, as a difficult neighbor in Central and South America, as an (all) power in the Cold War, as a warlord who was often culture-blind – and also in relation to Germany, which was in the ruins of the Second World War generously shook hands, but later showed that espionage even works among friends. With Donald Trump, any hope that big US brother wouldn’t be a big bully disappeared.

Joe Biden: A New Era for Friendship

Joe Biden, current US President, is not a bully. Of course, he is not a romantic either. Biden knows states have interests rather than friends. But when he promotes peace and freedom in Kiev, it becomes clear that similar values ​​do not connect us with China. And certainly not with the warmonger in the Kremlin. America is not a perfect friend, any more than 80-year-old Biden is a perfect president. But the country remains the best friend we Germans have in the world. If Chancellor Olaf Scholz says this one sentence during his visit to Washington on Friday, his visit there will already be a success.

Some of you were annoyed that I dismissed Alice Schwarzer and Sahra Wagenknecht’s “Manifesto for Peace” so briefly last week. Without sound, the video of the two women might be funny, I wrote, and there’s nothing more to say. It was not my intention to wipe the longing for peace off the table.

We must always think about peace, incidentally also about delivering peace solutions, not just about delivering arms. I still don’t think that Schwarzer and Wagenknecht are serious about their contribution to peace – for that they would have to make it absolutely clear who the aggressor is and who the victim. Without (moral) clarity on these issues there can be no clarity for any kind of compromise.

Hitler diaries in the star: A review

It is always cheap to write about the mistakes of one’s predecessors. But the decision of that time star-Macher, in 1983, to publish excerpts from the approximately 60 notebooks that were to go down in history as the “Hitler Diaries” was certainly a historical blunder – not only because they were forged by Konrad Kujau, but also because they could also be transported appeared that Hitler knew nothing of the worst Nazi crimes. Was that an expression of targeted Holocaust denial, as media reports suggested last week, and an attempt by right-wing extremists to reinterpret the history of the Third Reich?

We absolutely want to know for ourselves, there will be a scientific review on behalf of Bertelsmann at the renowned Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, which is currently already studying the history of the star from its inception until the departure of founder Henri Nannen in 1983. The results will be publicly documented – of course also in the star.