'Europe and the Middle East need Visions for the 21st Century' Speech by Roman Herzog, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, on receiving an honorary doctorate of Ben Gurion University Beer-Sheva, 16 November 1998

Mr President,

Mr Bravermann,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am most grateful to Ben Gurion University for this high honour. I accept it conscious of the commitment associated with the name of that far-sighted statesman Ben Gurion, who together with Konrad Adenauer laid the foundations for a completely new German-Israeli relationship. And I am particularly moved by the fact that you, President Weizman, are honouring this ceremony with your presence.

When I received the invitation to address you I asked myself: What can I say to you both personally and as the German President? What are young Israelis interested in as far as Germany is concerned? In what young Germans think about their country's past, for instance? Or about the significance of right-wing radicalism and xenophobia in Germany? Do you want to know how relations between Israel and Germany and between Israel and Europe are developing? Or are you interested in my view of the Middle East's future and what I wish for the young people of Israel? Or perhaps all of these questions together?

You, Mr President, in your memorable address to the German Bundestag in 1996, said that we must not only, through our memories, be a part of every day and every event in our past but also, through our hopes, prepare ourselves for every day of our future. This encourages me not to evade any of the questions I was pondering on the way here but to try and answer them as best I can.

I am trying to see Germany through the eyes of a young Israeli and immediately recognize two unmistakable facts which scare you and hurt me.

One is the Holocaust. It is such an overpowering element of Germany's image that you have to look very closely to find - and be able to accept - the signs of a new beginning.

During the Nazi era Germany violated its own civilization. It also mutilated itself intellectually and culturally by destroying the unique German-Jewish symbiosis.

I was particularly aware of this as I went up the stairs of the Leo Baeck House in New York in May of last year. There one sees a long row, indeed an entire gallery, of pictures of German-Jewish Nobel Prize winners. Between 1905 and 1933 there were ten of them, a quarter of all German Nobel Prize winners during that period. Hitler's regime also marked the decline of German science, not to mention art and culture.

The wickedness of the Holocaust cannot be made good by material restitution. Nonetheless, the Federal Republic of Germany has done its level best over decades to alleviate the terrible suffering. And even after 50 years it continues to do so. For as long as victims live, for as long as assets unlawfully denied them continue to be discovered, for as long as those who were forced to work for the Nazi regime struggle for recognition as victims, the search for solutions must go on, even if this proves inconvenient for some.

We want to ensure that the past is not forgotten. In 1996, therefore, I decreed that in future the 27th of January would mark the liberation of Auschwitz, that it would be our Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But memories also need places. Precisely now at a time when witnesses are growing short in number, we need places, many of them, for commemoration and warning. You have no doubt heard about the debate in Germany concerning a central monument. Let me say quite unequivocally that it is not a question of "whether" but of "how" we commemorate the victims. I hope the German Bundestag will soon decide and that we can agree on a kind of monument that will not only reflect the unspeakable iniquity of that crime but also serve as a warning for all future generations.

The second fact I discover when looking at Germany from your perspective is not that of our history but of our present. Like you I am saddened by television pictures of new right-wing radicalism. You will ask the same question as me: Have our endeavours during the fifty-year life of the Federal Republic of Germany been enough?

So who can be surprised when an opinion survey among young Israelis shows Germany to be the least popular of all countries? If that is the opinion held by young Israelis, I must ask myself how am I going to convince you of the whole truth of Germany as it is today. Perhaps by referring to a completely different, a second kind of reality which exists beyond those pictures and surveys and which I consider to deserve equal attention. It includes pictures totally different from the others. Who, for instance, could have imagined only recently that Israeli forces would take part in joint exercises with Germans? Or that photograph on the front page of Israeli newspapers showing a young Israeli girl embracing a German soldier?

The discrepancy between opinion poll and newspaper photograph confirms what we really all know to be true - that personal contact is a more reliable basis for assessment than all other sources of information about the collective identity of peoples and nations.

I therefore invite you, wherever possible, to try and obtain a personal impression. Today's Germany is not that of the thirties and forties, no more than it is that of the 19th century.

The great majority of young Germans are no different from youngsters elsewhere. Depending on their taste and inclination, they will listen to the Spice Girls, Mozart, too, just as they do in Israel. They surf the transcultural Internet. A phenomenon like the Love Parade attracts a million techno fans to Berlin every year. I am told you have the same thing here. At the last European Song Contest, which Israel won, the freakiest of freak performers was a German. That too is Germany, but quite different from the one conveyed by news pictures. Like it or not, that is part of normal life in Germany today.

And another part of today's Germany is that the Jewish communities are growing again. In Berlin there are Jewish bars which are also frequented by non Jews. There is also Yiddish theatre, which is popular not just because it is Jewish but because it is good.

How do young Germans see the past? They are confronted with a broad range of material on the Holocaust at school, in the media, and through contacts with young people from other countries. They ask searching questions, of themselves, their parents, but above all their grandparents, for they are really the generation who owe them an explanation.

I myself am answering such questions nearly every day. I was eleven years old when the war ended. We knew that concentration camps existed. Most of the people I asked at that time thought they were "terrible" labour camps. At least that is what they said. But it seems none of them were really able to conceive of what really happened there. That they found out only later through the Americans.

But in April 1945, just before the war ended, I saw several thousand inmates of a concentration camp being force-marched through our town. Where to we didn't know. But that was one of the most lasting impressions of my life, a traumatic experience and yet one of the explanations for my present political convictions.

Many people in Germany have had similar experiences, but for those younger than me it is again totally different. The question young people ask themselves concerns their generation's responsibility. We cannot reject the legacy of history. From our memory of the past grows our responsibility for the future.

Naturally, young people know that the Holocaust is unprecedented in the history of the human race, that history does not repeat itself. But they also know that new dangers must not necessarily wear the mask of the past.

From the history of the dictatorships of this century, and also from the failure of many people of their grandparents' generation, they draw the very realistic conclusion that we should not wait for totalitarianism to take control before doing something to stop it. We have to try and stamp it out as soon as it raises its ugly head.

If education is at all capable of producing a result in this respect then this has largely been achieved by the deliberate strategy of civic education in West German schools since 1945. Though not to perfection, constitutional democracy and the rule of law are today more deeply rooted in the Federal Republic of Germany than ever before. Defence of human rights as well as tolerance are widespread and spontaneous, especially when those rights are challenged through the occasional flare-up of xenophobia and violence.

There is a new political culture in the Federal Republic. The German constitution has drawn conclusions from the past. It is antitotalitarian, outward-looking and tolerant. It has served as a model for the creation of new democracies, in Eastern Europe and South Africa, for instance.

Naturally, even the Germany of today is not an ideal state. There is considerable unemployment, and we have not yet completed the reunification process, psychologically or economically. The right-wing radicalism I mentioned earlier is, thank goodness, only a marginal phenomenon which can perhaps mainly be explained by the large number of unemployed young people and the unresolved problems of reunification. But the recent general election has proved that there is no serious danger from the right. The electorate reduced the right-wing radical parties to insignificance.

But does the fact that Germany is today one of the established Western democracies also imply that the relationship between Germany and Israel can be described as normal? Hardly. Although Germany's relations with Israel are closer and more trusting than those with most other countries outside Europe, they will always be influenced by the uniqueness of what happened in the past.

But they are also influenced by what lies ahead. If their density is a barometer for the future, then the signs really are good. Particularly closely woven is the network of human contacts. Meanwhile there are more than 80 town twinnings. Every year 2000 Israelis and 4500 Germans participate in youth exchange programmes. The number of participants since the early seventies now exceeds two million. And these contacts take place at all levels of society, also without government involvement.

The best example is the Centre for German Studies founded with the help of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation which we are inaugurating today. It also proves that the commitment of the German political foundations to the task of fostering reconciliation and understanding between Germany and Israel cannot be rated highly enough.

But apart from this, Germany is Israel's most important trading partner after the United States. Scientific cooperation, too, is close. There is hardly a German scientific institution that does not have a partnership agreement with Israel. Again, only the United States is ahead of Germany when it comes to promoting scientific cooperation with your country. In 1997 alone, 130 scholarships were awarded to Israelis wishing to study in Germany, and 290 vice versa.

We are keenly interested in each other's literature, music and art. In a word, our relations as seen in practice have reached such a high level that the opinion polls at least require a major adjustment.

Ladies and gentlemen, Germany is part of Europe. Reunification has not altered that. Indeed, it marked the beginning of Europe's eastern enlargement. Common European policies are increasingly prevailing over national ones. The path of European integration, the amazing metamorphoses Europe has experienced in its more recent post-war history, are no doubt informative to the Israeli observer as well, for the Europe of today - like Israel - was born of visions.

The process of European Union, but especially the watershed of 1989, has impressively demonstrated how even the most incredible visions can become reality. In the eyes of contemporaries a miracle has happened of a kind which Ben Gurion would undoubtedly have wanted for the Middle East: Who would have believed at the end of the Second World War that the friendship between two supposedly arch enemies, Germany and France, would form the core of a united Europe? Who would have believed that Poland and Germany would one day become the best of neighbours?

And yet all this became possible - first in the visions of a few, but then tangibly through the realization that cooperation and reconciliation were the only way to end the centuries-old European tradition of mutual hostility. Patient confidence-building has removed the burdens of history and ultimately raised the Iron Curtain, the most dangerous boundary the world has known.

European unification is no esoteric intellectual game. Any feelings of self-contentment evaporated at the latest when the Wall came down. Since then every politician has come to realize that in a rapidly changing world Europe has to assume responsibility for its neighbours if it wants to safeguard its newly won stability.

This applies especially to the Middle East. A Europe intimately linked with the history of Judaism which has found its own unity after centuries of strife, which through the Helsinki process has developed its own peace strategy and which was one of the sponsors of the Oslo process: such a Europe has to assume responsibility.

The security and future of the Middle East cannot be a task for the United States alone. We would be failing as neighbours if we were not in a position to provide neighbourly assistance. It is time for Europe itself to make an effort for the peace process and offer the Middle East a partnership for security.

There is plenty of substance to build on, especially where European strategies have proved the most successful:

- Europe is experienced in promoting economic development and combating social problems. It can put that experience to good use in the Middle East. Development for prosperity is also development for peace.

- Secondly, Europe has tested democracy as a peace strategy in its own post-war history. Democracies do not war against one another. Kant had already predicted this at a time when only three republics were in existence: Switzerland, the United States and France. Today, two centuries later, that prediction is one of the best empirical arguments of political theory. Democracies negotiate. Only fundamentalists of every colour prefer chaos and the use of force. Hence the building of civil, democratically constituted societies is, in the long run, the most dependable guarantee of security for all countries, including the Middle East.

- Thirdly, Europe must actively extend the reach of education and training. Only those who have attended school and received vocational training know how to articulate their own legitimate interests and use their political and economic opportunities in a democratic society. Education is a strategy for democracy and democracy is a strategy for peace.

Certainly, it is the parties involved who have to bring themselves to agree on a security pact in the Middle East. The Wye agreement points the way. But for the task of giving substance to such a pact, giving it the backing of prosperity and intercultural dialogue, Europe is both economically and intellectually the Middle East's natural partner.

In a region which is the original home of prophets and visions, allow me too to look into the future. Despite all the scepticism I say: visions do become reality! After all, Israel itself is the result of a vision. Who would have believed a hundred years ago that Theodor Herzl's ideas would prevail?

I realize, of course, that visions can also be destroyed by those who oppose them. I am also conscious of the appalling acts of terrorism, the sole purpose of which is to torpedo the peace process, and I can picture the political manoeuvring which is always possible to circumvent something that is really inevitable. But none of this is enough to shake my conviction that reason will ultimately prevail.

After the famous American Dream and the European Dream the time is now ripe for the Middle East Dream: peace and freedom, prosperity and security, democracy and the exercise of human rights throughout the Middle East.

I appeal to you young people in particular. Who, if not the young, can overcome traditional reflexes? Who, if not the young, can cross frontiers? And who, if not the young, can build bridges?

All this has already been expressed in two quotes from Theodor Herzl and Ben Gurion which have become a kind of Magna Carta for your country. You, the youth of this country, only have to put them into practice: "The visionaries are the true realists." And "if you want then it doesn't have to stay a pipe-dream."

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