Autor/Autorin
For today’s 19th New Year’s reception of the Friedensplenum Bochum at Langendreer station, the director of the Fritz Bauer Forum, Dr Irmtrud Wojak (photo), was asked to explain one of Fritz Bauer’s thoughts on the importance of „small resistance in everyday life“ against the backdrop of current political developments. Here is the text of her speech:
>>>I am very pleased to have been invited by the Peace Plenum Bochum to speak here today and to pick up on a sentence by the lawyer and Auschwitz prosecutor Dr Fritz Bauer. It shows that the Fritz Bauer Forum has arrived in the social movement, in the broad democratic political spectrum of Bochum.
We are grateful for the interest and support that we have experienced in Bochum over the past year. The fact that we, as a forum in development that wants to continue to grow, are able to actively participate in the fight for democracy and human rights is due in particular to private, civic commitment, which is certainly not a matter of course on this scale. We are therefore all the more pleased that our Fritz Bauer Library, which was completed in August, has been able to host numerous events with Bochum-based cooperation partners and artists, to which we have welcomed guests from Germany and abroad. And of course we hope to find further supporters in Bochum and beyond, on whom such a project is always dependent.
Today – many thanks to the Friedensplenum for this suggestion – we will be focussing on Fritz Bauer’s sentence:
„The great resistance on the evil days of barbaric injustice presupposes struggle against the small injustice in everyday life.“
In view of the oppressive, not to say frightening, political trend towards justice in Germany and many countries around the world, in view of the increasing tendency to call for an authoritarian ruler or a legislator promising salvation in the difficult and threatening global situation, Fritz Bauer’s sentence has current significance.
On the one hand, it reminds us that the National Socialist regime of injustice was not overthrown from within by a German resistance movement. On the other hand, it appeals to the present and our actions. According to the jurist, if we do not practise resistance to small-scale injustice in our everyday lives early enough, we could find ourselves facing the days of great, barbaric injustice again, similarly unprepared, as we have already experienced in Germany since 1933.
Bauer spoke from personal experience. He had witnessed the emergence and rapid growth of the Nazi movement, saw the first rallies and riot marches as a student in Munich. The murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the Hitler Putsch and a judiciary that was blind to the right wing strengthened his political commitment against the right. He experienced how the media, in particular the Hugenberg Group as a stirrup holder, gave the Nazis a lot of space and almost cheered them on with their reporting. In doing so, they contributed to radicalisation just as much as the so-called bourgeois centre with the parties who thought they had to sharpen their slogans on the right-wing fringe. They did this with the naive and irresponsible argument that it was necessary to prevent left-wing coalitions and thereby take the wind out of the Nazis‘ sails. In fact, this only made them even more vocal by making the Nazi movement acceptable. Who doesn’t think of Thuringia 1930 and Thuringia 2020? Or Saxony in 2024, where a speaker from the far right gave a speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day and the day the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated? Last but not least, a FAZ newspaper that relativises critical research by its journalist colleagues and writes on the day before Holocaust Memorial Day: „How the ‚Correvtiv‘ report helps the AfD … The party is growing and growing“. The firewall has long since been torn down.
Fritz Bauer’s concern after 1945 was that we should not squander the opportunity that our democracy represents. He had returned to Germany, he said in 1949, in order to convey something of the opposition and the spirit of resistance of the Weimar Republic to the younger generation; he did not want to be a mere lip service to democracy.
Bauer’s oft-repeated and varied request for resistance and disobedience – mind you, when human rights are violated and the state makes itself the advocate of injustice – was the plea of an advocate of human rights for the best form of government. For democracy, in which the people exercise the power of rule and which is characterised by the validity of human rights and equality before the law.
Some of you may already be able to guess what I’m getting at. In 2019, we presented our interactive Fritz Bauer Library project with its stories of resistance and survival to the public for the first time in Bochum – with great support and at the invitation of the Bochum Alliance Against the Right. These include a number of stories from Bochum that tell of the perilous resistance against the Nazi regime. Documenting and retelling them helps to remember the Nazi crimes and, above all, the courageous opponents of Nazi rule and the failed denazification: Lore Agens and Else Hirsch, Klaus Kunold and Franz Vogt.
However, our concern – like the survivors‘ appeal „Never again!“ and Fritz Bauer’s call to fight against small injustices in everyday life – goes beyond this. In concrete terms: we remember the crimes of the past and the Nazi perpetrators, the resistance of the victims and survivors of the Nazi regime. In order to strengthen empathy and compassion and to better understand the causes of violence and terror and to be able to recognise them more quickly in the future.
However, we also take „Never again!“ at its word by building on the courageous actions of history, i.e. by giving more space to civil disobedience, opposition and resistance today. We don’t just see the survivors as „the victims of that time“, to whom we more or less dutifully show sympathy and empathy, but we want to share their situation through our actions. To put it even more pointedly – coming back to Fritz Bauer:
What we owe the survivors is, after all, not a higher morality of any kind. We owe the survivors of then and now the everyday struggle, which in the days of barbaric injustice is self-defence or emergency aid, and which – according to Bauer – „need not only begin when the seed of injustice is established.“ He noted:
„The Federal Republic is not an unjust state. But injustice exists here and elsewhere, and human dignity and rights are always and everywhere in danger of being abridged in the name of reasons of state. The right to resist escalates with growing state injustice. That is why the idea of resistance is not outdated at any time and in any state, even if it is limited in everyday life to the judicial struggle for justice, to criticism and opposition, to demonstrations, to the channels of free consciousness and will formation laid down in the Basic Law and in other norms.
The Fritz Bauer Forum in Bochum, which will be completed this year and opened in 2025 with various events, is based on Fritz Bauer’s concept of resistance. That resistance is and always has been a fight for human rights, and that it is difficult to find another definition.
It is also not being built in Bochum by chance, but has a history in the association „Remembering for the Future“ with the invitation of Holocaust survivors from Bochum and Wattenscheid, in the history of solidarity with Chile and the fight against impunity for the crimes of civil and military dictatorships in Latin America, in the support of the „Bochum Alliance against the Right“ and the Bochum Peace Plenum. Recently, there has also been increased cooperation with initiatives and other organisations, with Amnesty International and the Bochum alliance „Solidarity and Remembrance“, and this week with the IPPNW, which has also launched a new project in 2023: „To Survive is to resist “ – stories of survivors of nuclear weapons missions and tests.
There are just as many current examples of the „fight against small injustices in everyday life“ as there are of the great resistance on the evil days of barbaric injustice. It distinguishes the extent of the dangers or risks that people take and the consequences they (have to) endure, be it as refugees on the Mediterranean and in the fight for the right to asylum, in the fight against racism and anti-Semitism, in the fight for freedom of the press and freedom of expression, for the right to land and water, in the fight for climate justice and more social justice. What is as important today as it was then is not that there are not enough voices of resistance, but rather that they exist. And above all, that we collect these stories of resistance and survival and continue to tell them.
At the Fritz Bauer Forum, we do this in a variety of ways in podcasts, films, books, workshops and also in research for our interactive Fritz Bauer Library with its stories of resistance and survival from all over the world: Starting with Carola Rackete and Horst and Brigit Lohmeyer in Germany, Naji Al Alli in Lebanon, Nujeen Mustafa from Syria, Lucinda Evans in South Africa, Wilfredo Estanislao Saavedra Marreos in Colombia, Scott Warren in the USA, Joshua Wong in Hong Kong, etc. and so on.
We see it as our task to ensure that these current voices of resistance are heard, that their efforts become more visible and that they can thus strengthen each other. We would like to invite everyone to join us today: Let us take up the appeal „Remembering is resistance“. So that the Holocaust survivors‘ memory of the lack of resistance back then is not repeated.<<<