Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

POLITICS AND SOCIETY | SPEECHES   187 of annihilation, plunged the world into the greatest catastro- phe it had ever known. For the generations that followed, pacifism was the logical conclusion. Some say: never again war, for anyone or anything. Others refuse any policy of appease- ment in the shadow of Auschwitz; for them, weapons are what secure peace.Whoever values humanity must defend it. Who, then, is the “better German” in a republic where the long arm of the past, guided as if by invisible hands, holds one in a moral stranglehold? Against the dreaded spectre of militarism stands the undeniable perspective of the victims. Despite all justified doubts, it must remain the final authority. “Liberation” primarily means the liberation of the victims. It presupposes the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, the victory over the Nazi system of terror and its enforcers. The defeat for the Germans – their catastrophe – was self-inflicted. After their liberation, the majority of Holocaust survivors managed to reclaim their place in ordinary life and to present themselves as fully functioning to the outside world.What an extraordinary achievement. Yet the crying, to borrow a line from Else Lasker’s poem, lingered on in the world:“There is a crying in the world”.