Tuesday marks the 77th anniversary of the assassination attempt by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg on Adolf Hitler, the commemoration ceremony will take place in the Berlin-Plötzensee memorial. Federal Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD), who is giving the address this time, wants to highlight a young woman who was killed there by the Nazis in August 1943.
SZ: Mr. Heil, you want to tell the story of a largely unknown resistance fighter, Liane Berkowitz. How did you come across them?
Hubertus Heil: I read about you in a publication by the Foundation on July 20, 1944. Most of the time, only icons are reported, like Sophie Scholl. Which is also appropriate. But here we have a young woman of 19 who was active in the “Red Orchestra” resistance group. In 1942 she stuck notes along the streets of Berlin-Charlottenburg that read: “Permanent exhibition – The Nazi paradise – War – Hunger – Lies – Gestapo – how much longer?” She was pregnant when she was arrested, which is why even the Reich Court Martial recommended Hitler to pardon her. But he refused. She was still allowed to give birth to her daughter. The girl was then murdered shortly after the mother. I think this woman deserves a monument.
Who can be reached with commemorative events?
That’s a big question. I was born in 1972, I still know firsthand stories from survivors. My children will no longer have this chance. So we have to find new approaches. Not easy, but possible. Many immigrant families know the horror of a dictatorship from their own experience, like Liane Berkowitz back then. They know what to flee from persecution is and how much it means to resist. These are experiences that also provide access to the history of our country.
Most of the time, however, those who are open-minded about the topic will listen, and less those who urgently need a knowledge of history.
You will not reach convinced neo-Nazis. But you can make a lot of people think. That also works. In addition, there are enough current occasions to talk about the resistance against the Nazi rule. If you only think of the so-called hygiene demos and the weird equations there. People who criticize the Corona policy put themselves in line with July 20. And at the same time, they have no problem marching side by side with neo-Nazis. One has to deal with this instrumentalization of the resistance in order to strengthen democracy.
Now it is not just hygiene demonstrators who deal with the Nazi experience. The other day the DFB President compared his vice with the blood judge Roland Freisler. Why is the Nazi club being pulled out all the time in Germany?
Many let themselves be carried away. One should be very careful with this, especially among Democrats. One shouldn’t bother with Nazi comparisons. This trivializes crime. It is important to think about the different political and religious views the resistance fighters had – and that they put them aside in order to find something in common. Why am I telling this? Because in a democracy it should never be the case that people are personally degraded and irreconcilable towards one another. How to reorganize industry, how to hold a society together – even more arguments are needed about this than before in order to come to good solutions. In any case, more than about whether someone put a footnote in the book or not. But with all arguments one must never make the totalitarian claim to be in possession of the absolute truth. And you should never deny other people that they also have a conviction. The point is to make plausible assumptions based on knowledge and your own convictions, but to preserve the remaining doubts. At least I’ve had very good experiences with that.
But if you accuse your CDU colleague Peter Altmaier of a “current lie”, it is head on.
I would never call him a liar. But there are lifelong lies in energy policy that have to be named. I’m talking about the matter, not the person.
Will Ms. Baerbock be attacked harder than she would be if she were Mr. Baerbock?
With some sexist statements on the net, you get this impression, yes. Ms. Merkel had similar experiences at the beginning. But you have to distinguish that from the discussion about mistakes that she has made. Men and women have to be treated equally if they are striving for a high office in the state.
Laschet and Söder were also allowed to read things about themselves that they certainly could have done without.
If we only have character rather than factual debates, that harms democracy. Then we are at least on the way to American standards.
Have you found it difficult to form a coalition with the Union over the years?
Yeah yeah We were able to do a lot to ensure that Germany got through the Corona crisis safely. And then, regardless of that, we enforced the basic pension. Not in the form we would like it to be, but it was a good compromise. I don’t just want to be right on paper. Karl Popper recommended “pragmatic action for moral purposes”. It’s tough when you have a coalition partner who doesn’t really want to develop anything …
… but which also has its moral purpose.
Yes sure. But they’re just conservatives. You have to use the leeway you have with them. But that’s how it is in a parliamentary democracy.
Will it be good for the search for compromises, that is to say for democracy, if at least three parties are always required to form a coalition in future?
At least it is a reality that you have to deal with, unless you want to have conditions like in other rugged democracies …
… Belgium, Israel or Italy …
… in which a government either does not come into being for a long time or regularly breaks up. It always depends on one thing: whether you are willing to negotiate. A few years ago I could not have imagined that I would be finalizing an immigration law with Horst Seehofer. Or the supply chain law with Gerd Müller, also a minister from the CSU. Both compromise solutions, but both great progress.
Many suspect broken words when a party does not implement a project exactly as it is in the election manifesto.
Franz Müntefering, our former chairman, once chose an ambiguous formulation and said that it was unfair to judge a party by its election platform. From this many have come to the conclusion: You can see it again, they’ll do what they want after the election anyway. The art is to write election programs in such a way that they can also be implemented. You can’t announce tax cuts in the CDU election manifesto, and then Mr. Laschet says in the interview that it wasn’t meant to be.
Do you actually read the responses to your tweets on Twitter?
Not all. It is important that you don’t just stay in the comfort zone of your own people. But Twitter isn’t really a tool for dialogue. Sometimes it’s like the toilet wall used to be: you smear something on it and then you’re gone. But nothing is gone on Twitter, the world is fast. There you can draw attention to topics or sharpen something. But if I took every comment there to heart, I would be an unhappy person. And I don’t intend to.
Isn’t the election campaign actually much gentler than it used to be? The CSU politician Richard Jaeger, who was important after the war, put Hitler and Brandt in a row because the names were originally different in both families. Franz Josef Strauss compared leftists with rats and blowflies. Only one Twitter troll writes something like this today, but no democratic politician about the other.
Yes, I can think of other things as well. Herbert Wehner twisted the name Todenhöfer to testicle killer, he called the CDU member Wohlrabe the evil crow. Sometimes it was funny too. Wehner said half of the members of the Bundestag are whistles. Whereupon the President of the Bundestag said that it was unparliamentary and that he should take it back. To Wehner: I’ll take it back. Half of the members of the Bundestag are – no pipes.
Where did this sound come from?
Everything has its phase. In the early Federal Republic of Germany, irreconcilability had to be overcome first. People came from exile, like Willy Brandt, or from the concentration camp, like Kurt Schumacher, and had to do with people who were partly in the NSDAP. They really were mortal enemies. Maybe it was the art of repression, at least a huge integration achievement at the time.
They also yelled at each other.
This was also due to the fact that some were coined in the 1920s. Microphones were rare at large gatherings, so their rhetoric was very loud. You always have to see that in the context of time. We have to see our time. The arrival of the AfD in parliaments leads to the lower instincts being awakened in the discourse. They make soundbites from speeches, but in such a way that the content is twisted – only with the purpose of demeaning someone. You value the instruments of democracy, but not its values. We must always insist on these values.