2024-11-06 23:15 • 459 words

This day should have been a pretty ordinary wednesday. The most exiting part should have been the slightly premature, yet happy little St. Martin's fest organized by the kindergarten of our youngest child. Alas, it was no ordinary day at all.

The citizens of the USA have elected a fascist as their president. I am not surprised by the outcome, but disgusted and nervous about the consequences nonetheless, as I have no doubts that this will have consequence of severest nature.

What a timing for my own country's government to collapse over the smallest faction of the coalition, the neoliberals, losing their political senses over a prognosis of not being part of the next parliament.

I've taken out two slim volumes from my shelves today. One is a very timely book, it was originally published at the beginning of the first term of office of said fascist, by historian Tymothy Snyder: On tyranny - Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. The first lesson is "Do not obey in advance", which I really had wished that the chancellor of Germany had taken, instead of sending servile congratulations before even the electoral college majority was certain. The final lesson, "Be as courageous as you can.", lead me to take out a yellowed anthology, a book I've inherited from my father, with texts from Erich Kästner. It contains an essay that impressed me deeply when I read it the first time, with the title "Schwierigkeiten, ein Held zu sein" (On the difficulty of being a hero), in which Kästner recounts the book burnings organized by the Nazis in the early months of their murderous regime. The number of authors whose books were burned are in the hundreds and of those authors Kästner was the only one who witnessed the obscene spectacle with his own eyes. He concludes this essay with the following (translation by me)

What I had done was by no means heroic. I was simply disgusted. I stayed passive. [..] While watching the burning pyre I haven't yelled back. I have not threatened them with my fists. I had merely clenched them in my pockets. Why do I tell you that? Why do I confess? The reason is that when you speak of the past, you always also speak about the future. Nobody among us, nobody at all can answer the question of personal courage before they had to face a situation that actually requires showing it. Nobody knows, whether they are made out of the material from which the decisive moment in history forms heros. No people, and no elite may rest and do nothing, just hoping for the best, that in a case of emergency, in the most serious of scenarios, there will be enough heros at hand.