Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

186   SPEECHES | POLITICS AND SOCIETY Politics and Society the population that Jews were not human beings, and that the only logical conclusion was to exterminate them – a conclu- sion that was ultimately drawn on an industrial scale. Today, we hear that Ukrainians are neo-Nazis and fascists who must be exterminated. The modus operandi is to strip people of their humanity and deprive them of their legitimacy – and all for the sake of justifying genocide. For those who survived the Shoah, the journey had led from ordinary citizen to a being stripped of all dignity. They lived on, marked by permanent scars. “Those who succumbed to torture can never feel at home in the world again. The humiliation of annihilation can never be erased. The […] shattered faith in humanity can never be restored. The realisation that others can be experienced as inhuman lingers as a suppressed terror”. (Jean Améry) This small group of survivors found no welcome. Their pres- ence only intensified the already overwhelming chaos of refu- gee movements. By the time the German Reich surrendered on 8 May 1945, around ten million non-Germans were living with- in the borders of its former territory – a heavy burden on the German conscience and an almost insurmountable challenge for the victorious powers.What was to be done with these unforeseen Jewish lives, with these living testaments to the complicity of the German people? They carried experiences the world had never known. Each carried a fragment of annihila- tion within. They had nothing and no one. Their lives had been shattered beyond repair. They were displaced in the land of their oppressors and a burden to the victors. Between 1933 and 1945, they had been completely abandoned, and even libera- tion failed to free them from the shackles of their solitude. No one wanted them; once again, the doors of a peaceful world seemed closed. “Eight months have passed since the day of liberation.We have long since lost the ecstatic feeling of that wondrous day […] We are the ashes, the slag, the residue of the furnaces of war.Who would care for ashes? Who would take a pile of waste? And so we remain beggars, withered and grey, draped in rags, dutifully gnawing at the bones of freedom. And the world – the orderly, comfortable world – basks in blissful peace and expects us to be grateful for these very bones”. These words appeared on 22 December 1945 in Undzer Sztyme, the journal of the Scherit Hapleita at the DP Camp Bergen-Belsen, British Zone. Socially uprooted and devoid of political rights, the survivors were dependent on aid organisations and sent along the winding road to helplessness. “We are still trapped in camps as if in a vacuum […] We are stateless, homeless. The morsels that Europe’s crematoria failed to digest are now lodged in the throat of international politics”, wrote Zalman Grinberg in   Dos freieWort (Feldafing, 1946). Growing up among these remnants, I was lulled to sleep by their daily weeping and the endless naming of the dead. They had hoped that the “world” would receive them with open arms after all they had endured. Eleven years after the end of the war, the last DP camp still stood – almost entirely hidden from the German public, not far from Munich. Meanwhile, Ger- man society was rising from the ruins – the economic miracle had begun to take shape. As a child and adolescent, I was constantly troubled by the same questions: Had no one helped the Jews? How had the world been able to stand by as the collective fate of the Jews unfolded? No “outcry of conscience”, like that of theWhite Rose activists – who, on the night of 3-4 February 1943, wrote slogans on the walls of the university and surrounding build- ings – had been able to prevent their contemporaries from committing such atrocities. The people of Munich read the next morning:“Down with Hitler – Freedom!”. The members of theWhite Rose repeated their courageous activism a few days later and paid with their lives for the leaflet campaign at the University of Munich on 18 February – the very day Goebbels shouted a frenzied “Yes” to total war at the Berlin Sportpalast. The Sportpalast: an emblematic site of dictatorial mass manip- ulation. How fortunate for later generations that these “points of light” (Karl Jaspers) of theWhite Rose shone in the darkness. Why didn’t the Allies bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz at the time? How many lives could have been saved! Once again, we are seeing how deeply ingrained forms of civilisation   can collapse overnight. In 1964, Hannah Arendt said in her famous interview with Günter Gaus:“This should never have happened. Something occurred here that we are all unable to come to terms with”. Now, before the eyes of the world, the tanks of annihilation are rolling through the streets of Ukraine. We are witnessing a nightmare of destruction and terror.   And once again, children ask: How can the peaceful “world” stand by and watch? Germany finds itself in a schizophrenic position: the wish to learn from history without being consumed by it. It was German parents and grandparents who, through Hitler’s war