Late Tuesday morning, almost three thousand kilometers from Berlin, the politician Robert Habeck transformed back into the young literary scholar. Almost a quarter of a century ago he did his doctorate on the “genre-theoretical justification of literary aesthetics” at the University of Hamburg, and he came back to this at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. “Taking silence to the limit and then transmitting the power of speaking to others” is what “great art can achieve,” said the German Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister when he visited the memorial for the Germans Grauen entered the early verses of the poet Paul Celan in the guest book.
Ralph Bollman
Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of business and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.
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Yad Vashem is a must for German politicians visiting Israel. The trip to the Middle East is also obligatory if a politician wants to prove his maturity for higher things. It was not the first time for Habeck. As party leader of the Greens, he had already visited Israel and the Palestinian territories two and a half years ago, shortly before Corona. “How does one become a world politician?” asked a newspaper at the time, only half ironically.