Jack Terry, one of the last survivors of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, has died. There are no voices reminding us that democracy cannot be taken for granted.
Jack Terry, a survivor of the Flossenbürg concentration camp and one of the last contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust, died last Sunday, even though he always rejected such attributions. The time of National Socialism is thus moving further and further into the historical distance. This triggers strange feelings in people who were born in the 1950s and 1960s and have recently been defamed as retarded with the term boomer.
In her youth there was something like a political and moral zero line, which was marked by a date: May 8, 1945. At that time, the Federal Republic was still a young, basically optimistic country, but over which the shadow of the outrageous crimes hung, committed by the parent generation. Almost all public debates, but also the discussions in the classroom, ultimately always had this one point of reference: the turning point in 1945.
Anyone who hears speeches by politicians from the 1970s or 1980s, such as Franz Josef Strauss, will only realize decades later how strongly the choice of words was still influenced by the Nazi era. War invalids hobbled through the streets on their wooden prostheses, and the veterans glorified their deeds at camaraderie meetings. In rural areas in particular, there was a great deal of silence about the past, although many perpetrators and victims were still alive, sometimes just a few houses apart. Who is going to blacken honorable citizens with the old stories?
The speechlessness was broken only late, when people like Jack Terry and Max Mannheimer plucked up courage and reported what had been done to them from the perspective of the victims. Her testimony was also linked to a call to defend the country’s democratic values.
In a few years the last witnesses will have died. But it is already apparent that the year 1945 as a historical reference point has almost completely lost its importance. Instead, the public tears itself apart in debates about identity and all sorts of small things. As a boomer, you can sometimes get scared because the voices of those who keep reminding you that German democracy is a great legacy are missing.