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On the Topic of July 20 | |
|---|---|
| Author | Ulrike Meinhof |
| Publisher | konkret |
| First published | 1964 |
| Type | Article |
On July 20 we all agreed to agree. The nuclear arms protesters agreed with the arms racers, the inspector general of the Bundeswehr agreed with the simple soldier, the unions agreed with the government, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine agrees with us. The events of July 20 were so enormous and their outcome so tragic that no one can capitalize on them or use the celebration of the day for the petty quarrels of daily politics. And so the anniversary of July 20 has become a day of concord. As a certain yellow press would have it, on this day we all somehow feel better, and more earnest—there is a touch of vanitas in the air, and the minikini discussions fade out as we sip our Mampe cocktails.
This concord is both true and false. And the reason lies in the background to the events of July 20, 1944. The officers who finally took action that day in the name of the German resistance to Hitler, and whose act became more visible and splendid than everything that Communists, Social Democrats, unionists, Christians, and students ever managed to accomplish, those officers did something that no other members of a ruling class had ever done before in the name of the entire German people. Those arch-conservative politicians, aristocrats, and officers tried to carry out what had been the objective of the Left: they tried to destroy National Socialism, end the war, and re-establish the rule of law. This complete agreement—between the interests of a small class of powerful men and all the classes of the German people—this is what the East usually refuses to acknowledge in its evaluation of July 20, 1944; but this is what unites all those in the West who ceremoniously celebrate the day.
But as far as we are concerned today—the nuclear arms protesters on the one side and the arms racers on the other, the inspector general of the military and the simple soldier, the unionist and the federal government—the concord is completely fake. Discord is the order of the day, not sentimentality. And discord has its root in the hypocritical discourse about conscientious objection: when the events of July 20 are presented as having been perpetrated by conscientious objectors, the way Trettner, Lübke, von Hassel, and the federal government present them; when people retreat to this last bastion of unverifiable motivation and simply seek excuses for those who were not part of the group, for those who did not act or rebel. But it did not require a sensitive conscience or tender feelings to become a political assassin when faced with the murders of millions of Jews, a criminal war, and the horrors of the NSREGIME. The crimes of National Socialism drove the men and women of July 20, 1944 into the resistance. The crimes that live on today in the Nazi judges that have still not been dismissed, in the person of (Karl Friedrich) Vialon, for example, the state secretary for development aid, who was the head of the finance section in Riga under the NS Reichskommisar for the East and thus responsible for the administration and sale of Jewish property, and whose resignation the socialist and liberal students of Berlin demanded on the twentieth anniversary of July 20. The people who so easily talk about “conscience” did not listen to their own consciences when they gave this man his job; and they do not listen to their own consciences when they renew the attacks on Communists and accuse non-Communists of being fellow travellers, when they plan the renewed suppression of basic rights, or when they want nuclear weapons in Germany. Nuclear arms for an army that does not even have the discipline to act on the principles of moral leadership, and whose commanders and sub-commanders cannot even lead forced marches in a reasonable manner during peace time—can we expect that anyone who hounds a recruit to death in 30 degree temperatures will use nuclear arms in a measured, humane, and responsible way? This is when the talk about conscience turns into silence.
It is high time for us to realize that the gas chambers of Auschwitz have advanced to technical perfection in the shape of the nuclear bomb, and that the game being played with the nuclear bomb with an eye to the Germans in the GDR, the Poles east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, the Czechs in Sudetenland, and the Russians in the Baltic States is a criminal game of Hitleristic dimension. It is high time for us to realize that the struggles against injustice and violence waged by the men and women of July 20 are not yet over. Surely the worst does not have to happen for us to oppose government policy. And the comeback of someone like Franz Josef Strauss is not the moment for a political assassination either. Still, the differences that defined people on July 20, 1944 are as intact as ever.