He would rather accept the loss of power than give up his politics: memories of encounters with Mikhail Gorbachev – in the Kremlin, on the collective farm and in the Munich Hofbräuhaus.
“I’ll hold your hand tight,” it says at the end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s last letter, which I received from him in December 2020. After a memorial service on October 3, 2020 in the Ottobeuren Basilica, I sent him my speech. In it I recalled Mikhail Gorbachev’s great role: “During this period, Gorbachev trusted Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt more than Erich Honecker. He refused to direct the tanks out of the barracks and attack the candle-bearing demonstrators. He He would rather accept the loss of power than give up his policy of perestroika and glasnost. In this way he becomes a hero in history and a Christian brother who rightly received the Peace Prize of the city of Augsburg together with the evangelical pastor Führer.”