Celebrating the Liberation: Taking Responsibility
Foreword
Each year on 5 May, the Netherlands begins commemorating its liberation with a morning
event held in one of its twelve provinces. This event forms a bridge between the more
subdued character of the national commemoration of Remembrance Day the evening before
and the exuberance of Liberation Day. Each year on this occasion, a prominent public person
holds a lecture in which he or she reflects on freedom and human rights while responding to
the annual theme as formulated by the National Committee for 4 and 5 May. The theme for
2012 is ‘Pass Your Freedom On’.
The National Committee for 4 and 5 May considers it a tremendous honour that the brandnew German president, Joachim Gauck, accepted its invitation to give the Fifth of May
Lecture for 2012 – especially so soon after taking office. He will deliver his address in the
Grote Kerk in Breda in the presence of Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, and many hundreds
of invited guests.
Born in 1940, Joachim Gauck grew up on the east side of the Iron Curtain and worked for
many years as a pastor. In the final years of the DDR, he co-founded the anti-communist
opposition movement known as Neues Forum. During the 1990s, he was director of the
archives of the former Stasi, the secret service of the DDR, and as such he was entrusted with
researching the crimes committed by or on behalf of the DDR regime. On 18 March 2012 he
was appointed the eleventh president of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has been
writing for years and has published many works. A collection of his essays has been
published in the Netherlands as Laat je niet regeren door angst, maar door moed [Let
Courage, Not Fear, Be Your Guide].
Joachim Gauck
Celebrating the Liberation: Taking Responsibility
I stand before you today a grateful man, a man moved and truly elated by the fact that the
National Committee for 4 and 5 May has invited the German president to give a lecture here
in Breda. The year I was born, 1940, was the year the Netherlands fell victim to German
superpower politics and racism. As a German – and particularly in my own case – it was
hardly a foregone conclusion that I would be here with you today, let alone that I would be
asked to speak to you. With its invitation, the National Committee has shown a great deal of
trust in my country and in me. It is a gift that we shall not forget.
Inherent in my gratitude is also the joy in the fact that for dozens of years now our countries
have been working as partners – bound together by our mutual respect for human rights,
freedom and democracy.
I belong to a generation of Germans who have learned – for the most part in a painful way
– that the old saying ‘my country, right or wrong’ can no longer hold. We have learned that
one must make a distinction between a fatherland and an unjust regime, that resistance
fighters are not guilty of high treason or traitors to their country, that emigration need not be a
sign of cowardice and that desertion is not always wrong. We have learned that one cannot
and may not give one’s undivided loyalty to a government that tramples on people’s lives and
dignity. On the contrary, when faced with an unjust regime, we need to stand on the side of
those who – as the German president Theodor Heuss put it in 1954 – endeavour to deprive the
state of its murderous malice and to save the fatherland from destruction.
Precisely because we Germans have taken upon ourselves the burden and the blame of
history, we can honestly say – and this holds for me as well – that we celebrate, together with
everyone else, the liberation from the yoke of National Socialism; we celebrate along with
everyone who regained their independence and freedom in those days. And we also
sympathise with all those people in other parts of the world who are only just now discovering
or rediscovering freedom.
Germany and the Netherlands are not only partners in the European Union and NATO;
despite the suffering that Nazi Germany brought upon your country, among others, we have
both become part of the great project that has joined nations together into a unified whole
without regard to borders or traditions. We are part of a project in which the different peoples
are no longer incited to despise each other, but rather will be united in their mutual respect for
human rights. It is an affirmation of the freedom that the Dutch nation once created and that
now forms the basis for our community. We are more closely bound by this ‘yes’ to freedom
than by any of the treaties that bind us.
But we also feel connected in sadness here in Breda today as we commemorate the more than
one hundred thousand Dutch Jews who fell victim to the politics of extermination in Hitler’s
Germany. The Netherlands had initially been a place of refuge for many German Jews,
including Anne Frank and her parents. But then came the deportations. Three-quarters of the
Jews living in the Netherlands in those days were either murdered in concentration and
extermination camps or died of cruelty, starvation and disease.
I am thinking also of members of the resistance such as Max Kohnstamm, later a
champion of European unification, who had been interned in the prison of Haaren, not far
from here.
I am thinking of the Sinti and the Roma, whose fate was so movingly described by Zoni
Weisz in his speech last year before the German Bundestag.
I am thinking – and not in the last place – of the hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens
who were deported to Germany as forced labourers; of so many who suffered famine or
endured forced evacuation and the loss of their native region; but also of all those – especially
in what was then the Dutch Indies – for whom the war had not yet ended on 5 May and for
whom the suffering and death would continue.
As we commemorate the end of the war today, 67 years later, we should not only recall
the outrages and crimes such as the bombardment of Rotterdam; we should also remember the
acts of disobedience, sabotage and resistance by both soldiers and civilians.
Here in Breda you commemorate the Polish general Stanisław Maczek, who managed to
liberate your city without any loss of life among the civilian population. That liberation could
well be a symbol of the liberation of every country in Europe that had been oppressed by
Hitler and also for Germany itself. General Maczek had fought against the occupiers ever
since the very beginning of the war – first in Poland and later in France; in 1944 he took part
in the invasion of Normandy. The city of Breda made this war hero an honorary freeman and
gave him a worthy final resting place in the war cemetery.
Our memory looks for examples like him that can serve as guides for our own lives. Those
include people such as Bernard IJzerdraat, who took the initiative to establish a resistance
group immediately following the German bombardment of Rotterdam, being the first to do so
in the Netherlands. After a show trial in Scheveningen, he was executed by firing squad,
together with 17 others, including three communists who had organised the 1941 February
Strike.
I must confess: before this trip I had never heard of this general strike, which spread
throughout the whole of North Holland. With incredulous astonishment and deep admiration,
I read of how businesses remained closed, how dockworkers and factory workers laid down
their tools and how students played truant, all in response to the (illegal) Dutch Communist
Party’s call for a strike in protest against the initial deportation of 400 Jews from the
Netherlands to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
I was struck by how deeply the latter information touched me. Once again, I realised how
such examples can be important in two ways. Naturally they are important for the peoples to
which the various resistance fighters belonged. But they are also important as examples for
other peoples and for other generations who face other challenges and other crisis situations.
For in times of war and persecution, we learn just what humans are capable of – in terms of
evil, but also in terms of good.
I would like to call to mind the publisher Emanuel Querido, who set up a publishing
company in Amsterdam for persecuted writers in exile from Germany. Before the Gestapo
confiscated his property in 1940, he had managed to publish 110 books in the German
language. Later, while Querido and his wife were in hiding, he was betrayed, and both were
murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp.
I would like to call to mind Corrie ten Boom, who with her family members hid Jewish
families in her home for a year and a half. She, too, was betrayed by a collaborator and
brought to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After the war, Corrie ten Boom dedicated
herself to helping victims of the National-Socialist terror and to reconciling former enemies in
the war.
We praise these individuals because it was anything but normal for them to not simply
resign themselves to the inevitable, let alone to commit such acts of resistance. We praise
them because they offer us a glimpse of a truth that we are not always aware of – and that we
often prefer not to be aware of. We always have a choice. Our range of choices may be
limited in times of war and terror, but even in those circumstances – as history shows – people
can save the humanum, human dignity.
In that connection I would also like to call to mind Hans Keilson, a German-born Jew who
found refuge in the Netherlands in 1936 and joined the Dutch resistance after 1940. Although
he was at great risk himself – his parents were murdered in Auschwitz – he dedicated himself
to Jewish children who had gone into hiding with Dutch families. Drawing from his
knowledge of medicine and psychoanalysis, Keilson knew that the suffering of the persecuted
does not end when the actual persecution ceases. After the war, too, Keilson dedicated his life,
both as a person and as a therapist, to those who had been traumatised, and in particular to
Jewish children. He passed away in Hilversum exactly one year ago, at over 100 years of age.
But attitudes are rarely as unambiguous as those of the avowed opponents of a
dictatorship. Nor are opinions and actions by any means undivided in every family. Harry
Mulisch once formulated the shocking sentence: ‘I am the Second World War.’ With that
image, he sketched the fact that his parents were both victim and perpetrator. His mother was
Jewish, while his father managed ‘Aryanised’ assets at a bank. It was thanks to his father’s
position that Harry Mulisch and his mother survived; but it was that same position that led to
his father’s being punished as a collaborator once the war had ended.
The symbol of 4 and 5 May in the Netherlands is a burning torch, the flame of which has the
contours of a dove. Last night that flame was lit in Wageningen so that it could be brought to
various places throughout the entire country, including here in Breda.
From the very beginning, the fire of freedom had been a decisive element for the peaceful
unification of Europe. At the conference of the European Movement in May 1948, your
fellow countryman Hendrik Brugmans said that Europe is the philosophy of the nonconformists, the place of those ‘who are constantly in conflict with each other, where no
certainty is accepted as truth, unless it is constantly rediscovered. […] The flag of Europe will
one day be the flag of freedom everywhere.’ But freedom needs to be gained and regained,
each time again.
In that respect, the city of Breda is an excellent place for commemoration. The so-called
‘Compromise of Breda’, in which noblemen declared their opposition to the Inquisition in the
year 1566, marked the beginning of the Dutch rebellion against Spanish rule. Later, the socalled League of the Beggars (Geuzen) demonstrated to their European neighbours which
forces the love of freedom can stir within us.
We see that before freedom can become a reality at the level of society, it must win the
hearts and minds of solitary individuals and small groups. An idea that everyone will
eventually rally round, is initially brought forth by a few. Before there is a free society, there
are free individuals; before there are free states, there are free cities.
The 17th-century United Provinces of the Netherlands shaped our concept of a freedomloving, federalist and tolerant republic. Its citizens were allies, not subjects. It was there that
freethinkers such as Spinoza and Descartes could develop their ideas and that various
different faiths could thrive. It was there that Hugo de Groot – who died in my birthplace,
Rostock, while on his way back home from Sweden – could formulate the idea of the mare
liberum, the freedom of the seas, which forms the basis for modern international maritime
law.
What Immanuel Kant referred to as the ‘step forward to maturity’ is one that the Dutch
managed to take very early on in Europe. That was one of the things that helped encourage
the Germans in the 19th century to join the freedom movement, which was beginning to gain
popularity at the time. And although the revolution of 1848–1849 failed in the German lands,
the ideas continued to live on. Various shrines of freedom such as Hambach Castle in the
Palatinate and St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt bear witness to that even today.
In our joint project, Europe, it is no longer an internal affair of the individual states when
countries curtail freedoms and fail to respect the constitutional rights of their citizens. We can
be proud that the citizens of practically every European state can call upon the European
Court of Human Rights to scrutinise potential infringements of their individual constitutional
and human rights. We can be proud that charges can be brought against genocide, crimes
against humanity, war crimes and crimes against peace at the International Criminal Court in
The Hague. Perpetrators should not be able to hope for impunity for their crimes. The road is
long and difficult, but our goal is clear: not the rule of force but rather the rule of law must
prevail around the world.
The Germans and the Dutch are well aware – not least due to their joint military efforts in
Afghanistan and Kosovo – just how long that road is and which kind of sacrifices it can entail.
But still, if violations of individual human rights are now condemned and in many cases
prosecuted all over the world, and if people are helped along the way towards more
autonomy, more respect and more self-respect, that in itself is a valuable thing.
It is on days like this one that we become aware of just how much – following a long
struggle – freedom and the constitutional state have become the prevailing pillars of the
European social order. There are large portions of the world where people can only dream of
having the rights and freedoms that we enjoy. In recent years, the longing for freedom and
human rights has broken through in northern Africa and in the Middle East. These movements
show us that freedom and human rights are not merely inventions of the imperialistic West.
Human rights are universal: their language is understood everywhere – whether in Asia or
in Europe, in the Americas or in Africa. All over the world, people are waking up and
demanding their rights, even if they have yet to take to the streets in their thousands and chant
as they did back then in East Germany: ‘We are the people!’
But while other peoples are becoming inspired by the spirit of freedom, many Europeans do
not yet fully appreciate the blessing of freedom. They mistakenly see freedom as the absence
of rules, as the promise of a hedonistic lifestyle, as political or ethical arbitrariness or as a call
to forego participation in society. Their concept of freedom lacks those elements that spur so
many young people in particular to take to the streets in protest: responsibility and reliability,
but also a sense of community and solidarity.
We see not only that freedom must always be gained and regained each time, but it also
constantly needs to be shaped and reshaped. Every generation faces the challenge of filling in
the idea of freedom – which at its best must be seen as responsibility – once again for itself
and its own circumstances.
Sixty-seven years ago today we could only have experienced our current situation as
paradisiacal. For three generations now, the Dutch and the Germans have shared their values
and worked hard to promote those in Europe and in the rest of the world. We can be proud
that our countries have been part of the unified Europe from the very start and that we are
valued in many parts of the world as being honest and reliable. Together, we benefit from the
freedom, the peace and the prosperity that go along with a stronger European and
international cooperation. I hope that this unique success will give us the strength to tackle the
current challenges, too, and to work towards the future.