Opening of the Rosenburg travelling exhibition in Tel Aviv on 20 February 2023

Anfang 20. Februar 2023

Professor Blank,
Professor Danziger,
Professor Stauber,
Students,
Ladies and Gentlemen!

I.

One of the many renowned alumni of your university was the late Yosef Lapid, the former justice minister. In February 2005, the German President of the time, Horst Köhler, was invited to address the Knesset. Lapid said that welcoming the German head of state to the Israeli parliament was the ultimate proof that the National Socialists had not managed to defeat the Jewish people.

We Germans can only be eternally grateful for this – and eternally grateful that, alongside lasting historical guilt, we have also managed to forge bonds of deep and, I hope, enduring friendship between our two countries.
I am also immensely grateful that I, a German politician, have the opportunity to speak in Israel, in Tel Aviv. Perhaps this is now normal – but it CANNOT be taken for granted.

II.

I have just come from Yad Vashem, a place where I, as a German, feel deep shame. But is it also a place of which I am in awe: in awe of its testimony to how victims’ dignity endures although their lives were taken from them.

Exactly 90 years ago today, on 20 February 1933, the German historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote to his colleague Walter Goetz, “we must in truth brace ourselves for the most terrible things, and we cannot simply await them in silence”. He warned of the “impending abyss”.

Meinecke could not have imagined just how wide and deep that abyss would become or how terrible “the most terrible things” would be.

Today, we know very well. And Germans will never forget that it was Germans who commited the singular crimes of the Shoah and led the way into that abyss.

Remembering and confronting this time through days of remembrance, academic research and education work, and exhibitions and memorials has become an integral part of German political culture.

Many of you will be familiar with the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the vast of field of concrete slabs south of the Brandenburg Gate.
Stand on the periphery and you can see the site in its entirety. Your gaze can roam – and you could in fact count most of the nearly three thousand blocks.
But when you make your way in amongst them, you lose that overview. Fewer and fewer of the slabs are visible – until they surround you: nearly five metres high, towering over you; huge, and intimidating, and oppressive.

I have always understood this experience as a metaphor for engaging with history, and in particular with history’s darkest pages.
History does not become more contained, or easier to take in, the more you grapple with it. It becomes bigger, more daunting, more dangerously unfathomable; infinitely disturbing.
 
III.

Germany’s Federal Ministry of Justice confronted its own history with the Rosenburg Project. Ten years ago, my predecessor – the then Federal Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger – appointed an Independent Academic Commission to examine the Ministry’s history in the period from 1950 to 1973, when it was housed in the Rosenburg Villa in Bonn.
The Commission’s findings were published in 2016 in the study “The Rosenburg Files”. Since 2017, they have also been showcased in a travelling exhibition which, after a number of stops in Germany, Poland and the US, has now arrived in Israel.
Retracing the continuities of personnel between the National Socialist state and the fledgling Federal Ministry of Justice,
examining the Ministry’s handling of the crimes of National Socialism,
and yes, chronicling the general aftermath of National Socialism within our ministry:
these were the Commission’s tasks.

Its findings are disturbing:
of the 170 jurists in senior positions in the Ministry from 1949 to 1973, 90 had been members of the Nazi Party, and 34 had belonged to the SA.
Sixteen percent had been employed by the Reich Ministry of Justice itself.
In 1953, of the 968 posts in the Ministry and under its remit, 513 were held by civil servants who had been in the employ of the National Socialist state.

These figures leave no doubt: It was not just before 1945 that too many people looked the other way; the same thing happened after 1945 as well.

The first State Secretary at the Ministry, Walter Strauß, once said that his employees had brought a “wealth of experience” from their time at the National Socialist Justice Ministry to the work of the new Federal Ministry of Justice.

His words were not an expression of sympathy for the Nazi regime. Walter Strauß was himself of Jewish heritage. His parents were deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1942 and murdered there. Strauß himself only narrowly escaped with his life.

His reference to a “wealth of experience” arises from a perception of jurists as mere technicians of the law, engineers operating on an apolitical and purely functional level, who can be detached from the ends served by their actions – however inhuman those ends may be.
But it also illustrates the tragedy of the German citizen of Jewish descent, Walter Strauß, who wanted to continue living in his native country but knew that to do so meant living among the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities.

IV.

Dissecting the past is not something we do for its own sake. Our goal in examining our Ministry’s history was to see what lessons could be learnt for the present.

The perversion of justice in the Nazi period shows: Jurists cannot be regarded simply as technicians of the law, whose task is to mould any given political idea into statutes and then enforce them.
The science of law has a normative function, and so its task includes defending normative minimum standards of humanity.
Among the consequences of the Rosenburg Project is an amendment to section 5a of the German Judiciary Act.

Subsection 2 sentence 3 now reads:
“the teaching of the compulsory subjects also includes a critical analysis of the injustices of the National Socialist regime and of the Communist dictatorship”.

Our goal is to equip students to recognise the creeping path to injustice – the emergence of structures and the gradual shift in mentality that holds these structures in place.

Recognising all this requires an alert and discerning spirit. It is our hope that such a spirit can be cultivated through university studies.

V.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once wrote that the only thing to be learned from the history of nations is that nations learn nothing from history. Personally, I take a more optimistic view: learning from history continues to be our duty; and it is a duty that is by no means impossible to fulfil. My country is certainly making every effort to ensure that we never again become a country of perpetrators, and that we remain a country of freedom, law and democracy.

We are now four days away from the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
A dictator is bringing war and death to millions of people. The free world has already learned that dictators cannot be stopped by appeasement.

Learning from history means recognising that a dictator will always view appeasement as an invitation to continue down a violent path. We, the free world, cannot allow this to happen! The principles of freedom and security must prevail – which is why the international community stands by Ukraine’s side! And it is why Germany stands by Ukraine’s side!

Learning from history means recognising that, in a democracy, each and every individual is part of the State; but we must also recognise that the democratically legitimised majority cannot do anything it wants. Today, we Germans have a strong constitution, the Basic Law, which imposes limits on the power of the majority.

Learning from history means recognising that fundamental rights are, by their very nature, minority rights, and that the majority clearly cannot be allowed to have the last word.
It is therefore the Federal Constitutional Court that has the last word on the meaning of fundamental rights in Germany.

Learning from history means recognising that democracies can abolish themselves of their own accord if limits are not imposed on the majority. Our German Basic Law therefore contains a system of checks and balances, including a strong, independent judiciary that can stop any government action that violates the constitution and thus breaks the law.
Learning from history means recognising that broad majorities are needed in order to change the rules of democratic competition and the interaction between constitutional bodies. In Germany, amendments to the Basic Law require a two-thirds majority in the Federal Parliament (the Bundestag) and the Federal Council (the Bundesrat). This is generally only possible if large sections of the opposition are also largely convinced that the amendment is necessary.

Learning from history means always maintaining a free and open exchange – weighing up arguments, being open to criticism and opposition, and being prepared to change course.
Making proposals, putting them to democratic debate and then modifying and improving them is not a sign of weakness – it is a sign of strength and wisdom!
This is what distinguishes our liberal democracies from all the authoritarian systems of the past, present and future, which always succumb to rigidity.

Unlike Hegel, I believe that we can learn from history. How else is the world supposed to believe us when we say that Germany is now seriously and permanently committed to freedom, democracy and justice? We have learned from the abyss that marks our own history. But we have also learned from the history of other nations:

We have learned democracy from our French friends; our friends in the United Kingdom often serve as role models for the parliamentary system; and we have learned that all state authority must abide by the constitution, with a supreme court providing the necessary checks, from our friends in the US and from the legendary Marbury versus Madison decision of the US Supreme Court.

Learning from friends is not a weakness. It is a strength.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us learn from history!
And let us always strive to find new ways of doing so – like this exhibition.

Once again, I would like to thank all those involved, especially the Buchmann Faculty of Law and the David J. Light Law Library for the use of their facilities. I hope the exhibition is well attended!

Thank you very much!
Todá rabá!