This Is Peace

So there I sat for a long time, wondering what more could be said about peace that had not already been said and or written a thousand times before. My dear colleague Sabine Winterfeld recently showed me just this in her impressive literary chanson evening „Selig sind die Friedfertigen“ and made it clear to me once more: nothing has not yet been said.

And so she spoke and sang, in an intense and accomplished manner, alongside critical and moving texts of her own, works by Emmy Ball Hennigs, Else Laske Schüler, Hermann Hesse and Erich Mühsam.

Words which, had they ever been understood, could never have led to the present-day warmongering of our political elite mob and its vassals; true words of peace and freedom from people who knew what they were talking about.

History repeats itself, and thinking that way we could just as well drop this business of words about peace, since experience has taught us that they achieve nothing and prevent nothing anyway. But thank God we are not all utterly oblivious to history!

My mother’s urgent „never again,“ for instance, spoken from deep in her heart, I always took in, profoundly moved, and integrated into my life as a mantra.

My mother was ashamed of this all her life. It went so far that she wanted to deny her/our German identity by telling wild stories, passed down by one of her aunts, about an Armenian wanderer who was supposedly our namesake and great-grandfather; that was how she explained our being „not German,“ as she kept insisting, and our dark skin and eyes.

I grew up, so to speak, in the belief that I had Armenian blood, and perhaps that also explains my very early commitment to peace, against racism and especially against genocides. My mother enlightened me about this land of perpetrators and bystanders, and at the same time she showed me, without knowing it, how much she too, as an innocent child – born in 1933 – became a victim.

And so I feel her trauma within me again and again, and that is why I am and want to remain a pacifist, in the truest sense of the word:

I want to make, do and enact peace, „pax facere,“ together with those who refuse to be divided, refuse to be instrumentalized, those who know how peace is done.

At #FRIEDLICHZUSAMMEN there are some of those, and many beautiful words have already been published. There is a very beautiful and lyrical spoken-word piece by Cem-Ali Gültekin; Jens Fischer Rodrian speaks and presents his wonderful new peace song „Frieden“; Tina Maria Aigner explains how peace within oneself reflects onto others, and Sandra Seelig draws our attention, among other things, to peace in nature.

And then there are the impressive words of Oliver Elias, who recently made public for the first time on TikTok that he is Anne Frank’s second cousin.

I do not yet know Oliver Elias personally, but to speak out as a German Jew, in this country, with horror against the killing in Gaza, and to make clear that criticizing the Israeli government has nothing to do with antisemitism – and all of this despite his biography and his family’s trauma – deserves, in my eyes, the very highest respect!

Lastly, for the sake of honesty, I must add something, because

• when I see the images from Palestine of murdered and mutilated children, women and men,
• when I hear every day that 1.8 million people are being starved and that an intended, horrific genocide is undoubtedly taking place here,
• when, yet again yesterday, human rights activists – this time on the aid ship Conscience, lying off Malta – are attacked with drones by Israel,
• when for months doctors, nurses, journalists and many others have been prevented from helping and reporting, and are even being killed in great numbers,
• when all of this takes place unpunished and openly before the eyes of the international community,

then I become ambivalent about my pacifism. Then it seethes within me, my rage grows ever greater, my despair ever deeper – then I am at a loss and admit that I ask myself whether „peaceful“ can still be the right solution here.

Now my jihad begins, my inner struggle, and „my ethical and religious duty to self-restraint“ is severely challenged.

Mein Frieden: