Don’t Allow Human Solidarity to Be Lost

Forty years have passed since the end of World War II. Today, already the grandchildren of those who were too young to incur guilt at that time are growing up. In Europe we enjoy security, stability and prosperity to a degree never known before, and relations between our countries and the general conditions in our countries are well-ordered and peaceful.

Yet the shadows of remembrance still hang over us, the memory of moral failure deeply burned into our collective consciousness. In many European countries, not only in (Austria), there is a lively and emotional debate going on today under the concept of “coming to terms with the past.”

It is useless, some people think, to look back to that succession of terrible years or to make any attempt to come to moral and political judgments--we should close this chapter of history and turn to the future. But “coming to terms” implies a finality that one can hardly achieve in the scrutiny of one’s own history.

The lessons we can draw from these debates and the understanding we can gain for the solution of problems before us are vital. We must face the past squarely, we must accept our measure of guilt and responsibility. The urge to evade this moral challenge stems from the terrifying insight into the implications of what happened. The sobriety of the technicians of death formed a union with the highest degree of irrationalism and a contempt of humanity, which ultimately led to a complete breakdown of human solidarity.

The age in which we live is dominated by far more effective instruments of destruction. We also live in a world after Auschwitz, a name which is a reminder of the complete moral shipwreck of a modern society.

Women and men of the Resistance upheld the principle of hope, the hope that this moral shipwreck was not absolute, to give proof of human solidarity.

I want to build the bridge back to the present, to the future. What are the lessons that we should draw from this past? First, there are no achievements that cannot be called into question. There is moral consensus that does not have to be constantly renewed. We must not allow solidarity to be lost--not within our society and not in the interrelationship between our countries.

Just as there is no European country without minorities--religious as well as ethnic--that are in need of constant protection and our solidarity, so we also need solidarity at the international level, since it is clear that our security can only be collective security, that peace, freedom and justice are inseparable, that the poor of this world have a right to the solidarity of the rich.

Hence it cannot be our maxim to bury the past in order to be better able to work for the future. On the contrary, we shall only be able to work for this better future if we remember what happened to us in the past, and the guilt we incurred there. This is a debate and a recognition that we must not evade. We owe this debt not only to the victims of that war but also, on behalf of these victims, to future generations.

Remember the urgent appeal of writer Bertolt Brecht in his 1954 “Speech in Behalf of Peace”:

“Mankind’s memory of sorrow suffered is amazingly short. Yesterday’s rain doesn’t make us wet, many say. It is this insensitivity which we have to fight. Let us say again and again what has been said a thousand times, lest it be said one time too little! Let us repeat our warnings even if by now they are like ashes in our mouths!”