End of October.
TV faces in the East of Germany. There they are again, the faces of the revolution films, only this time no laughter, without hatred, pale, men of today in long rows and more.
For the first time, those responsible standing before the people, speech and answer. Berlin, they always knew it in the East, the decision on Europe occurs not in Warsaw and not in Budapest, but here, therefore the annoyance at, the fear of, Berlin. And then the Stalinist lyricist once again there, whose poems on Stalin I had to learn as early as at school, even that now once again in the first row of Stalin’s opponents.
A man wins against the computer, which is 3000 moves ahead of its opponent, the chess world-champion from Russia. What compared to that is the news of the economic difficulties facing the West.
Those responsible before the people, one would have wished Nuremberg 1945 in this way, those responsible before the people, their own and in this way; the excuses, the fully public humiliations, minute’s silence of eternity, silence in the ruins of the mourning, for once without business. What is art without this justice? Every evening, every time, before these faces, the basic values of life, what has stability is the truth. Even that is our age, TV in every house with the question to us, where then were, and are, we?
Every evening, hundreds of thousands stand on the streets in Eastern post-war Germany, with candles in their hands, to show that they come with peaceful hands, yet come to claim their right and to indicate what it is about. It is about the shortcomings of the rulers there, only there? Where do ours stand? Germany only a question for Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and western Pomerania. Where are our marchers to show the rulers here what they want and what the people are? Where are our intellectuals, where the prize-winners in the name of Kleist, who came from Frankfurt to the Oder, where those who took their money in the name of Büchner, the one who was a revolutionary for human rights, and where those who were crowned in the name of Heine, who found no rest at night in his thoughts on Germany, where those who are celebrated in the name of Goethe, who connected Frankfurt am Main with Weimar forever? Even in East Germany I saw the people there, the people of authority, for example, with their privileges, little integrated with the people, and if so, then only when it cost nothing more for them to make speeches from sheets of paper, certified as unfree, “papering over”? Fear, the resistance fighters, even without risk of torture? If we fail today and do not fill the streets and squares to such an extent that the hands reach over and through the walls, we have not deserved better. There is no valid excuse that the other countries around us did not want it. The encouragements of their self-perception pile up daily, given to us from Moscow to New York, and from Paris to London, of the former enemies. It is up to us if we really mean human rights and freedom and fraternity and equality, highly celebrated in the Enlightenment nation. Everything would change and democracy be no farce of free elections but a positive act of will from a well-grounded history of Nature.
That is a revolution, and the still powerful officials point out that citizens have been calling on account of the disturbance of their night’s rest and that the traffic was obstructed. A revolution in Germany, counter-revolution as it is always described, counter-revolution in its lies, the people revolt, and nobody has been hanged, nobody placed against the wall, nobody executed, nobody guillotined, no shot in the neck for the enemies, not executed, not liquidated, in the name of the people or of a party. And if they only wanted to live like us, and if it was only a second and a moment of history that was favorable to us, so we can say in a quite special way, we were there, every evening, all of us, quite near and far at the same time, in the nightlight; technology makes that possible, even that.
And to accomplish one’s work no dead enemy is required any more. A camera suffices to convince millions the next evening, and the enemy is deader than dead.