A few years ago, the Attorney General of the State of Brandenburg, Prof Dr Erardo Rautenberg, who died far too young, campaigned for the issue of a stamp commemorating the lawyer and human rights advocate Dr Fritz Bauer. The lawyer’s request was initially met with rejection. However, last year – Erardo Rautenberg was still aware of this – his request was heard and the Fritz Bauer stamp will be on sale from 2 November 2019.
It is said that the circulation of the stamp, worth 2.70 euros for large letters, is high, which makes up for the fact that it is not an 80 cent stamp, which more people would probably pick up.
In any case, the clarity of the stamp, created by Cologne designer Detlef Behr, is more than successful. The portrait by Munich photographer Stefan Moses (1928-2018), who took several portrait photographs of Fritz Bauer in his office in the Frankfurt General Prosecutor’s Office, contributes to this. These are probably the best-known images of the important lawyer, who receives a state honour for his efforts through the stamp, which he was not granted throughout his life.
However, Dr Fritz Bauer can hardly have longed for such an honour at the time. After all, he had to live with and constantly fight against the fact that his endeavours for historical truth and legal prosecution of Nazi crimes bounced off the unwillingness of a judiciary that was by no means denazified and a political system that was vying for votes at the highest level and wanted to leave the past behind as quickly as possible.
This makes the quote by Fritz Bauer chosen for the stamp all the more fitting: „Nothing belongs to the past, everything is still present and can become the future again“.
Especially in the current situation, where the „unease“ (Aleida Assmann) and the question marks surrounding the much-cited success story of the German national culture of remembrance are growing, this quote is well chosen. It illustrates the concern of the lawyer Fritz Bauer not to be satisfied with merely remembering the crimes of the Nazis and the countless victims, but to be constantly vigilant and fighters for the preservation of our democracy.
Fritz Bauer was a resistance fighter and survivor who made the „fight for human rights“ (the title of his only autobiographical essay) his own because of enough bitter experiences. As a social democrat, the Nazis immediately threw him into a concentration camp in 1933 and persecuted him on the basis of their racist „legislation“, which Bauer later described as the right and duty of every German to fight against. „You should have said no“, was his conclusion and the message he gave not only to his contemporaries.
Fifty years after his unresolved death, the concerns of the lawyer and philanthropist are just as great a challenge as they were when he wrote them into our history books. Nothing belongs to the past…
