Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

180   SPEECHES | POLITICS AND SOCIETY Politics and Society Remembrance is a deeply personal process, a revisiting of ex- periences woven into one’s own life story. The survivors of Nazi concentration camps were – and still are – shaped and scarred by this experience. No survivor needs to make an effort to remember. The memory is burned into them – both figuratively and literally. A survivor, like Jack Terry, will instead ask himself how often he can recall and recount the story of the senseless deaths inflicted on his mother and sister without harming himself in the process. And Jack Terry knew what he was talking about when he shared these thoughts with Jörg Skriebeleit. As many of you know, he became a physician and psychoanalyst.When his memories threatened to consume him – when he was haunted by a flashback from the former roll call area in Flossenbürg, the recurring image of prisoners trying to wrest a piece of bread from a fellow dying inmate – he decided to pursue a second profession. He studied medicine and became a psychoanalyst. He wanted to try to understand – to understand how and why human beings degrade and torture their fellow human beings to the point of death. I believe this is precisely our responsibility. This is exactly how we must engage with the past.We must want to understand what happened. How much wiser would we be today if we had learned as much about Andrij Yushenko – the father of the later Ukrainian President Viktor Yushenko, who was imprisoned in Flossenbürg – as we have about Jack Terry? We must want to understand. And we must allow our understanding to guide our actions. It is difficult, because what happened confronts us with an un- comfortable truth about ourselves. It teaches us that human beings cannot be separated from the beast within. Nazi concentration camps were not run by a beast disguised   as a human. The beast lived within people. And it still lives   in all of us. Then as now, it remains a very human possibility. I believe this is what we must understand and what we must learn to live with. This understanding must guide us – both in our thoughts and even more in our actions. That is the responsibility we carry. It is only through this understanding that we can truly grasp Primo Levi’s warning:“It happened, and therefore it can happen again”. Engaging with the memories of survivors means seeking   to understand. And I believe there is more than one way to remember, more than one way to educate and to convey   these experiences. Under the guidance of Jörg Skriebeleit, the   Flossenbürg Memorial embodies a development that con- stantly presents us with new forms of remembrance and new avenues for cooperation. These partnerships – with the   University of Regensburg, the 7th Army Training Command of the U.S. Army, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Audi AG and the Arolsen Archives – are absolutely essential. The further the events of the past recede into history, the more urgently we depend on the foundations of sound historical knowledge, direct links to what happened, and new ways and methods of conveying it. After all, the events to be remembered are not ones we have experienced ourselves. The passing of each survivor makes the task of understanding more difficult – and our responsibility even greater.We cannot simply summon their memory. That will not help us. And the survivors of Nazi concentration and exter- mination camps cannot be expected to stand forever as cherubs guarding the gates of our democratic and lawful society. I do not say this because I view our responsibility as an unbear- able burden.We need not shy away from it. It was – and still   is – the condition imposed on our freedom, our liberation. Here in Flossenbürg, I see that the remembrance we seek has ultimately triumphed over all resistance, over the forces of forgetting. I believe it has prevailed because suppression and forgetting seek to enslave us, condemning us to repeat the same mistakes again and again.We can – and must – stand up boldly and confidently to those who consider forgetting to be the preferable option. Their motives are clear for everyone to see. The will to remember, the desire to understand, as con- scious and responsible human beings, is part of our freedom. We regained our freedom 77 years ago. The Allies liberated you, the survivors, from your tormentors. They freed Europe from the murderous Nazi dictatorship and enabled post-war West- ern societies to make use of that freedom. It is our duty   to protect our freedom. Freedom is the foundation of our thoughts and our actions. And when we see it not merely as the individual’s freedom from coercion and external domination, but as a freedom that all members of society can enjoy – regardless of origin, faith or sexual orientation – then this freedom, in all its diversity, becomes a cornerstone of our democracy.