Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

204   SPEECHES | INSTITUTIONS Institutions ©Flossenbürg Memorial / T. Dashuber Have we failed? Looking back at German remembrance culture through the lens of the Flossenbürg Memorial (Abridged version for print) Political days of remembrance In 2025, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of liber- ation from National Socialist terror.We will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.We will commemorate the liberation of the concentration camps – starting on 27 January, when the Red Army reached Auschwitz, and ending on 8 May 1945, the day of Nazi Germany’s un- conditional surrender. The spring of 2025 will be filled with commemoration ceremonies and other rituals. And yet there is reason to fear that “Never again!” – repeated and recycled in a seemingly endless loop of well-intentioned phrases and public declarations – is wearing thin despite all efforts to give it new meaning. “Do we know what we mean when we say ‘Never again’?”, asked Rachel Salamander in March 2022 – a few days after Russia had launched its war of aggression against Ukraine – during the opening of the Centre for Commemora- tive Culture at the University of Regensburg. 1 These questions are sure to resurface by May 2025 – along with others: How much remembrance and warning does a society need? How much remembrance can it bear? When does remembrance become counterproductive? Is there such a thing as too much remembrance? And as the global political situation grows increasingly tense and the Nazi era recedes deeper into the past, even more fundamental questions will arise: Has German remembrance culture failed? Has all our work and commit- ment been for nothing? Have we failed? These reflections are nothing new. As early as the 1980s, critical thinkers and scholars questioned the purpose and political meaning of days of remembrance. Their criticism was directed less at the rudimentary forms of remembrance that were emerging in relation to the crimes of Nazi Germany, and more at their near absence from (West) German discourse and Prof. Jörg Skriebeleit Director of the Flossenbürg Memorial Conference of the Bavarian Academy   of Sciences and Humanities  Lecture: “From History Book to Museum”  Munich, 28 June 2024 practices of remembrance. In 1985, Tübingen philosopher Ernst Bloch noted that days of remembrance rarely fell at the right time. 2 And, around the same time, historian Lutz Niethammer stated that political holidays in the Federal Republic had been a complete failure. 3 In the 40 years since, global and national   political coordinates have shifted dramatically. Societal discourses have evolved, political blocs and systems have collapsed, countries have unified or gained independence, and global crises have intensified. To gain a better understanding of the commemorative year 2025 – and perhaps to approach it with greater calm and opti- mism – it is worth looking back to the 1980s and the decades before and after. On the eve of 1985, politicians in Bonn, then the capital of the Federal Republic, were still debating whether 8 May 1945 should be commemorated at all – and if so, how? They raised fundamental questions as to whether this date was worthy of “celebration”. A silent form of remembrance was recommended, particularly in the midst of a renewed height in ColdWar tension, which had led to an “arms race” between the socialist Warsaw Pact states and the NATO allies.What followed was a speech delivered by Federal President Richard vonWeizsäcker on 8 May 1985. Its clarity and force eclipsed anything that had been expressed by the leaders of the Federal Republic in the previous forty years. VonWeizsäcker’s address is still regarded as an epochal mo- ment – a decisive turning point – because it acknowledged German guilt with unequivocal precision and framed 8 May, beyond doubt, as a “day of liberation”, not a day of “defeat”, “unconditional surrender” or “collapse”. “8 May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhuman system of National Socialist tyranny”, vonWeizsäcker said. 4 From today’s perspective, this sentence may seem so obvious –   so banal – that one could be forgiven for overlooking the magnitude of the shift it represented. But if we want to un- derstand where we stand today, we need to make the effort