(1.)
On May 8, 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker held a speech in the Bundestag in which he referred to May 8, 1945 as Germany’s “day of liberation.” Many parliamentarians were absent that day. Representatives from the CSU stayed home because they fretted about the term “liberation,” while some Greens travelled to Auschwitz to remember German history. The speech was composed by the president’s advisors over the course of multiple months. The result was a text that, in trying to make politicians of all persuasions happy, can only fall short by today’s standards.
Even so, Weizsäcker’s speech is considered the official starting point of Germany’s “memory culture.” Since then, memory culture has become a part of German identity, has been praised the world over, and now, according to popular opinion, is in crisis. There is no consensus, however, on the causes of this crisis. The polarized atmosphere puts us in a situation similar to the epoch before Weizsäcker’s speech, which was also characterized by irreconcilable positions and polemics.
How Germany should commemorate May 8, 1945 had always been contested. Only with Weizsäcker’s speech did a consensus begin to form – one that overcame fractures between generations and political parties, and even expanded to include those who had chosen not attend on May 8, 1985. But whatever consensus had been achieved no longer exists today. A caucus of today’s Bundestag holds positions that were quite common before Weizsäcker’s speech, especially among the ranks of the CDU/CSU, but that since then became shunned as antediluvian. Eighty years after the end of the war, we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. The antediluvians have not only survived, but in such numbers that they will soon be able to organize their own revisionist commemorations of May 8, just as they put on their own book fairs, political gatherings, and conferences on the ethnic cleansing of Germany. The Bundestag has ceased being a conducive venue for speeches about May 8, 1945.
Expecting a speech from forty years ago to reveal something about the present would be too much to ask. In 1985, forty years had passed since the war’s end, and this year, another forty years will have passed since then. Weizsäcker spent an important portion of his speech reflecting on the four decades to come, and unabashedly appropriated the Hebrew Bible to spin a Christian narrative of national redemption. The Federal President summoned Moses, who saw the coming of the Promised Land of Germany’s restored sovereignty and unification. Could it happen in just forty years? He cites the Book of Judges in reminding listeners that political lessons—the political theology in Palestine during the period of the Judges, the experience of the generations who had lived through the war in Germany—are often forgotten within forty years.
It’s unlikely that Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s speech this May 8 won’t serve up a contemporary riff on the theme of forty years plus forty years. I am writing this text ahead of the speech. There is no point in trying to guess exactly what the current president will say, and it wouldn’t be possible even if I wanted to. I am interested in alternative forms of speech, memory, and politics. And even if these alternatives have yet to materialize and do not materialize this year, the possibilities they pose might originate neither from 1985 nor from 1945 and perhaps not even from today’s concerns.
(2.)
The May 8, 1985 speech begins: