The Auschwitz Survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was awarded the German national prize. In her speech she talks about the old and the new anti-Semitism, the poisonous effect of hatred and hope.
“Is there an antidote?”, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch asks in the face of widespread anti-Semitism. “I don’t think so”, she says in her acceptance speech for the German national prize on Tuesday in Berlin has received. The award is awarded annually by the German national Foundation. Thus, it recognizes individuals and institutions that make the objectives of the Foundation deserves. The focus is on the “idea of the German Nation and the determination of our national identity in a United Europe”. So it is in the establishment of the call from the year 1993.
These guiding principles, reminds Old-Federal President Horst Köhler at the beginning of the ceremony, should be left “neither extreme political forces are still opponents of the European Integration”. With his reminder, Köhler cited the 26-year-old founding Manifesto, the have a “depressing news”. The guests in the French friedrichstadtkirche Church on Gendarmenmarkt is clear what is meant: the shift to the right in Europe.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: “We will report what happened”
In Germany it manifested itself again on Sunday with the success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the state elections in Brandenburg and Saxony. The leading heads of the party have a right-wing extremist past, and call for a turnaround in the German politics of memory. A development that Anita Lasker-Wallfisch long for impossible kept.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (R) in conversation with the Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier (M.) and former Federal President Horst Köhler
Together with her rescued sister, Renate, she had been convinced she would change the world. “We will report what has happened, and that will be the end of anti-Semitism.” So naive we are when we are young, says the 94-Year-old about their hopes in front of 74 years. The cellist from the so-called girls ‘ orchestra in Auschwitz, speaks of the old and the new anti-Semitism. He’ll go back to the Greek-Roman antiquity and flourish in a “intolerant, misanthropic, xenophobic society in which we live, unfortunately, today”.
“Tireless Streiterin in the fight against anti-Semitism”
At the time you have left Germany with the oath to never set their feet on German soil. Fortunately, everything went different. You know how futile hatred is, “to be poisoned in the end itself”. Therefore, living in England, Anita Lasker-wallfisch returns since the 1980s, but again and again to Germany and told, particularly in schools, the story of your life. For this commitment, the German national Foundation, pays tribute to Survivors of the Holocaust. A “tireless, strong Streiterin in the fight against anti-Semitism and enmity”.
Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier: “to speak of Who can measure what it means to be a Survivor?”
The laudation of the President of the Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier holds. He searches for answers to the questions: “to speak of Who can measure what it means to be a Survivor? How ever, you can talk about what they have Experienced, if the language that you have learned, knows no words?” Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was born in 1925 in Breslau. As the daughter of a German-Jewish family in German-his-name-is, “to love the music of Bach and Beethoven”.So it has expressed the cellist once – Steinmeier takes up these words. And he continues: “We abused music and as a clock for parades or for sentimental edification of murderers.”
Federal President of Germany, Steinmeier is reminiscent of the Auschwitz-processes
The Silence of the perpetrators and accomplices, the displacement of guilt and the Failure of mourning in Germany would have let the “loneliness of the Survivors” to be a truly existential load. That it had managed to break the hush in Germany, “that we owe to people like you,” said the Federal President. It had taken a “painfully long time”, until they had been heard. Until the Auschwitz trials in the mid-1960s, an end to the silence had been initiated in the German society.
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Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: “anti-Semitism is a seemingly incurable Virus”
In January 2018, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch held a commemoration in the German Bundestag, the Central speech on the Holocaust. As it is now honoured with the German national prize, she says: “The word Jew has become a dirty word.” The new, modern anti-Semitism “is, unfortunately, still the same old”. You do not feel completely safe in the world, someone had to debt it – as she describes the age-old scapegoat pattern. The victims then as now: “Jews”. Hardly you came to this bitter realization about the lips, is Anita Lasker-Wallfisch the view to the front.
At the end of bliss sounds “” by Dmitri Shostakovich
A few days ago, your two letters were flown “into the house”. They come from students who have visited the concentration camp memorials in Bergen-Belsen and Mittelbau-Dora. “Intelligent, touching letters, free of all prejudices, quite simply, human.” After her speech, the Trio plays “NeuKlang” Dmitri Shostakovich’s “lullaby” from the cycle “From Jewish folk poetry”. It is the third of five short pieces, the sound during the ceremony. “Song of complaint” means the first – the last two “warning” and “bliss”.
The musical framework is an acoustic mirror image of the Jewish history, whose grausamstes survived Chapter Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. While you and your sister came up with the life thereof, were murdered, the parents of the Nazis. Nevertheless, it has retained the winner of the German national price to their Confidence: “You should not give up hope”.