At the time it did not seem surprising to me. I cannot remember if he observed my face in the rear-view mirror during the ride, if he searched for traces of despondency. All I remember is that I sat motionless, staring out of the window. Unable to concentrate on the landscapes flying by, internal or external. First in the direction of Kassel. Then down from the Autobahn and along the familiar poplar alley, from there right towards the roundabout. How naïve must I have been in order to believe we could go this way on this day.As if nothing had happened. How well-meaning must the taxi driver have been to still be willing to do me this favor. We turned into Seedammweg – and everything came to a halt behind cordons. We were stuck.
From this moment on my memories are fragmented. A metaphor – and yet true. Only shreds remain. I got out. Did I give the driver some sort of explanation? Did I tell him: I just want to have a look what's going on here? I can't remember. There were inspections everywhere, police, onlookers, officials from the Federal Criminal Police Office. Bustle and helplessness characterized the tumult before and in the intersection. A long traffic jam had developed, but no one honked, no one complained. I strolled into Seedammweg unhindered. Did anyone ask for my ID? Did anyone want to know what I was doing there? Presumably. But for that, too, I no longer have any proof in my internal archive of images.
Suddenly I had an unencumbered view of the whole scene, down the street and up again, up the hill, on which the school is situated. Why did I do it to myself? Why did I have to see it? What I had expected, I cannot say. I stood at the beginning of the street and looked at the car. The car. The blown-up, charred Mercedes, in which hours before my godfather had died in the back seat. Hit in the femoral artery, the arteria femoralis, and bled to death, by a bomb constructed as a hollow charge mine.
The car was standing askew on the street. Unnaturally, like a twisted joint that sticks out from the body. I still remember how it briefly came to my mind: "But Jacob always cut across the tracks." (the first sentence of a novel by Uwe Johnson) Then these words too flew by, and everything drained away from me. As if instinctively, room had to be made, so that the reality of this event could enter.
How long does it take to comprehend that a friend was murdered? How long does it take to comprehend that there was no farewell? That you neglected to say what he was supposed to know? That they, the murderers, burdened you, the relative of the victim with guilt?
When I returned to my senses I was sitting in a fire truck. I think I was holding a cup in my hand. Or a mug. Somebody talked to me insistently. Soothingly. I do not think that I understood the words. How I got to the truck from the street, I do not know. What happened before, I cannot say. Did I stumble? Fall? Did somebody lift me up? Carry me?
There was a rupture. Exactly at that moment, on that November 30, 1989, there on Seedammweg, between the ugly parking garage and the absurd Taunus Thermal Bath, in which my consciousness understood that what was true, was true: unknown assassins had murdered Alfred Herrhausen. This moment of comprehension is missing. How should anyone understand that and remain intact. Thus my consciousness went blank.Decoupled the experience before comprehending the incomprehensible from the experience afterwards. In the middle only a breakpoint of unconsciousness. Since then, there has been only a Before and a Thereafter.
Afterwards I tried to say something. Across the cup in my hand to the friendly orderliesor firemen. Something or other. It couldn't have been much. I wanted to get to Ellerhöhweg. They were waiting for me there. If anyone could take me there. Past the cordons and obstructions. I think I gave them my passport so that they could ask someone over the radio to verify who I was in some computer.
I no longer thought of my taxi driver. He must have stood in front of the intersection all this time, on the sidewalk. How long ago might that have been? How long had I stared at this car? How long had I disappeared?But when the police officer finally took me up the hill in a police car, the old leather bag was in the trunk. He must have given it to the officers. Probably wordlessly. As if self-evidently.
I never paid him. And it was a long distance. From Frankfurt Airport to the crime scene in Bad Homburg. What might he have been thinking, when I simply got out and disappeared? How long might he have waited? Whenever I think of this day I remember him and that I need to find him.
Once I tried. Years later. I called the taxi dispatch office just in order to realize that this kind of thing no longer exists: taxi dispatch offices. Everything is decentralized and isolated, and one can search for a person only within one company, but not beyond it. In this taxi company at least no driver was to be found who had been cheated out of his pay that day.
That was eighteen years ago. I never spoke about it. Nor did I write. Even though I became a journalist. Time and again there were opportunities and requests to tell this story. Sometimes friendly, curious ones. Mostly manipulative ones. An ideal case, actually. An aggrieved party herself.With access to all involved. Only strangely enough there was no access. Not to the story as an experience in my own life. Not in such a way that I would have wished to pass it on to others. This is what I have in common with the terrorists.
I started smoking that day. From one moment to the next. Camel. Unfiltered. One package a day. The first few weeks sometimes several. We drank a lot in those days. Swallowed aspirin. I soaked handkerchiefs in blood. One after another. I have no tendency towards nosebleeds. It was simply flowing out.Not tears, but blood. With alcohol and cigarettes we afflicted our physicality, as if we could wound ourselves this way. We ate well. Very well. And laugh we did. Heartily. Unrestrainedly. Desperately.
In the evening of the first day the body guards sat in the kitchen. If I am not all wrong, the same ones from the morning. They had not been recalled. They were on duty.As if there was still anyone to guard. There they were sitting now, around the little wooden table. Speechless.Mortified.Helpless in all their muscle-bound size. Professional emotional counseling they did not get that day. Maybe nobody had thought of them. Of the self-reproaches that would now hollow them out.Of the shock waves of the images to which they were exposed. Why had they survived? And not he whom they were supposed to protect? Thus, Traudl Herrhausen took care of them. Listened to them. Poured out schnapps and coffee. Comforted those who were alive instead of her husband.
In the late afternoon, the Red Army Faction had called. Or not quite. It was not a group that called. It was not even a human being. It was a faceless, accent-free male voice that did not want to talk to anyone, but just make proclamations.There were several of us in the kitchen. I do not remember exactly who was on the phone first and then called me over so that I could listen in. We held the receiver somewhat askew.It took one minute, I think.
"Commando Wolfgang Beer," "Herrhausen, the most powerful man in Europe," it was the usual ideological clichés. In the passage on which I listened in, the merger between Daimler-Benz and MBB, which had just been mediated by Deutsche Bank, was not mentioned by the voice. I still remember how that irritated me. Within their own logic the union of the car company and the armaments manufacturer had to be the symbol for what the RAF called "the military-industrial complex." I was thinking of it because Alfred Herrhausen and I had quarreled about it terribly, when the merger had been accomplished. Why were they not referring to it? Instead, they were now explicitly referring to Alfred Herrhausen as the person who had made proposals for the solution of the debt crisis of the Third world.
I cannot say that it would have calmed me, if my friend had been executed by politically rational murderers, but this paradoxical "explanation"perturbed me. Should the left-wing radical perpetrators murder, of all people, a banker who was ready to forgo capital and profit, in order to release the developing countries from the circle of dependence? Or had Alfred Herrhausen simply become an enemy, because he subverted the familiar concept of an enemy.Was the proposal for a solution of the debt crisis in the Third World a threat? Not to the Third World, but to their own ideology? Is this what Deutsche Bank had in common with the terrorists?
A strange idea that is: not only to murder someone, but to also call the family of the victim the same day. All that was missing was for them to wish us "a nice day." Presumably the perpetrators in their phantasmagorical world believed the call would never be answered by us, the aggrieved party.Presumably, they believed their call claiming responsibility would land immediatelyin the headphones of the officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office who were listening in. Presumably, they believed police were operating the telephone on Ellerhöhweg. Truth be told, even without the conspiracy theories and phantasms of the perpetrators, I had the same ideas.
When the message was cut off, we all looked at each other. We had to inform the police. I asked where the officers had left the note with their phone numbers in the morning. Their cards. anything. I could not imagine that nobody had thought of it. But there was nothing. So I called the police. 110. And I said, "Hello, my name is Carolin Emcke. I am calling from the Herrhausen house. The RAF just called here … could you put me through to someone?" Funny. Really funny.
It got even better. When I was finally connected with someone, I reported what had happened and asked whether there was a trap and trace device with which the caller could be identified.Nothing. Even though between the attack in the morning and the call in the afternoon at least eight hours had passed. The next day, an officer came with something that to a layperson looked like a classical old tape recorder, and what for the pro was a classical, old tape recorder. He put it on the countertop in the kitchen, underneath the wall-mounted telephone, connected it and said, "If somebody calls, press these two buttons here for recording: 'play and rec.'." He pronounced "rec" with a hard, stubborn r: "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrec." "Press 'play and rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrec." Great.
We were a community. We slept on mattresses on the floor, distributed over various beds, the most diverse generations and types. At a large table we ate, debated and organized, drank, cried and laughed together. An open house. Free and vulnerable even now that violence could have shut us down.Nobody cared what set us apart from each other in life, in our previous, other lives, somewhere out there. Nobody reproached me. Nobody held me, the leftist, young intellectual, responsible. Nobody crossed this line, to which anger could easily have driven one. Injustice sprouts all too often as a poisonous blossom of pain. But nobody allowed that to happen during those days and weeks. We looked more like a commune of students than the social circleof the spokesman of the board of Deutsche Bank, the way we were sticking together in our pain.
This is what is the most violent about the violence of terror: the speechlessness in which the relatives of the victims are left behind. I do not know whether the perpetrators ever considered what it means to "disappear." Not from the authority of the state, not from punishment, not from jail. But from communication, from the duty to explain themselves.
Hardly anyone who has not fallen victim to this mute violence can understand what this means: to be alone with this silence, in which questions fade away without an echo. To be alone with this anger that has no addressee. Not to be able to raise an objection,even if it is too late to claim at least a justification which would make sense in the logic of the opponent.
For unlike some uninvolved commentators, unlike some afflicted relatives of victims of terrorist violence I do not simply consider the assassins criminals. Not because the act as such, from a legal point of view, is not criminal, not because the preparation of the murders does not demand criminal energy, but because from the perspective of the perpetrators it is an intentional, purposefulmove, which is directed not at a private person but at a representative. Of course: politically, this is a chimera, emotionally a projection, aesthetically a simplification, and morally … morally it is patently wrong.
But from the perspective of the victims the perspective of the perpetrators can play a role. For me it played a role from the beginning. There were strangers, and they deliberated.They believed they had a right to extinguish this life. They believed in reasons for their crime. Why else would they have made this call to the house of the relatives?
Until today this is what I demand: a conversation in which the reasons are explained to me and in which the perpetrators deliver themselves upto objections and critique.Until today, this is what I find unforgivable: the silence. Whoever claims to kill out of political motives, whoever embeds his own actions in a more complex political vision, whoever understands murder as resistance, whoever establishes a merely instrumental relationship with violence, must also publically explain the perpetrated murder, must deliver himself upto a public, controversial discourse. Of what else should the political character of murder consist?
For the confession of such a deed, punishment threatens. Certainly. But this too, the readiness to accept the punishment of the community to which one belongs for one's own conviction, for the act of resistance, is an attribute of the political.
Why am I so convinced of it? I wrote my master's thesis on the right to resist.That was years after the murder. I had droppedmy studies in London and moved to Frankfurt. At the Institute of Philosophy in Frankfurt, hardly anyone knew that this was not only a theoretical debate.
I only discussed authors who legitimize resistance and civil disobedience. That I had sworn to myself in the first week. Alfred Herrhausen had not yet even been buried. That the murderers would never succeed at turning me into a different person. That I did not want to grant them the triumph of embittering me politically, that I had to remain open intellectually – out of hatred towards the silent perpetrators.
It creates a very peculiar space around itself, this silence, and in this space we are locked up: perpetrator and victim at the same time. The silence consolidates like a layer of ice. Frozen inside it, time passes without us. We remain behind at the moment of the assassination. We cannot detach ourselves from it. Can neither forget nor digest it. The event that determined the lives of both, the perpetrators and the relatives of the victims, like no other, binds us together: because we cannot comprehend what has no story that could be told. We cannot tell the story, because we do not know it. The others do not want to tell it, because then we would recognize them. Thus we remain without knowledge and without an opposite.At the mercy of the silence of the others. And one's own imagination.
How was the decision made to kill Alfred Herrhausen? How does something like that go? Does one take a vote? Do they all sit in a circle and then nod approvingly? Do they raise hands? Did anyone protest? Is anyone allowed to do so in this collective? Were there alternative candidates for murder? What spoke for Alfred Herrhausen? Really only his function? The geography of Bad Homburg? For how long did they spy on him? How immense must the motivational strength to kill be, if it can be maintained throughout all the logistic and technical details of preparation?
What does a person think of while preparing TNT for a bomb? Of the careful movements that are needed to do everything cleanly and precisely? Of a briefencounter with a woman acquaintance a few months ago? Of a familiar song that is on the radio at the same time? Of the glass façade of the towers of Deutsche Bank? Of the longed-for supper? And when the bomb was wrapped in a parcel and the parcel lodged on the carrier of the bicycle, what went through their heads?Anticipation of the great event? Worry about technical glitches? Fear of being caught?
And was there a single moment in which questioning reflection was allowed to happen?Did doubts arise in anyone? Regarding the object of their hatred? Regarding hatred itself? Was there a single moment during which somebody became uncertain? Just a shadow of doubt, transient, but clear enough, in order to make one afraid of one's own fear. In an unguarded moment. Perhaps while buying the bicycle that was parkedby the lantern on Seedammweg. It could have hit a child on his way to school. Or a pensioner fond of swimming, who does laps at the Taunus Thermal Bath every morning. Does it actually play a role, whom one kills with an explosive charge of 20 kilos?
Does one first decide to become a murderer? And then on the victim? It must be that way. Because there cannot be a victim without the prior decision to kill. But if it is a foregone conclusion that you will kill and the target is chosen only afterwards – how can one justify the murder through the choice of victim?
Alfred had a new hip joint. Titanium, if I am not all wrong. For years, he had slightly dragged his leg behind in pain. The surgeon in chargehad been shocked when he saw the x-rays for the first time, not comprehending how a person could have tormented himself for so long. When he finally had the operation, even the convalescence was supposed to proceed as inconspicuously as possible. I had visited him, some place South of Hamburg - I do not remember the name of the clinic – when he, impatient like a little child, wanted the surgery to be forgotten already. We went out to eat, familiar as ever.
We had known each other for over a decade. I had no "real" godfather. My baptism had taken place only one day before my confirmation. Thus, no prolonged accompaniment by godparents was possible. Alfred Herrhausen had always been the one among my parents' friends who was closest to me, who wished to be close to me, too. Across all the years and differences. That's what the two of us called a godfather. At the time, Alfred taught me how to drink schnapps. We were both born in the Ruhr district. He in Essen. I in Mülheim. He raised his glass. "You don't see it," he unsuccessfully sniffed the booze, "you don't smell it," he hit the glass with the invisible drink against the bare table top, listening to the popping noise,"but you hear it." This was all but ten months ago. Not a long life for a hip joint.
Did they notice that when they spied him out? That their victim still had this slightly syncopated gait? That the body was slipping outside its axisa bit? That he was trying to overcome it? They must have noticed it when they traced the habits, the procedures, the timing on an ordinary day. Whoever plans the death of another person must deal with his life.
And as they lay in lookout, day in and day out, probably irregularly, so as not to attract attention, they must have observed a human being, someone whose dog did not care about his suits and jumped up on him excitedly, a passionate cyclist,whose daughter went to school in the morning, a school that was so close to the later place of assassination that the detonation would be audible in the classrooms, someone with a really loving family,a slightly limping person. Did they not realize that one only in theory kills a representative, but in practice, an individual? Did they think about this?
It creates a peculiar space around itself, this silence, in which we are locked up: perpetrators and victims together. The silence consolidates like a layer of ice. Frozen in it, time passes without us.
How do they manage? Those of them who still live in freedom, undetected? Those among them who sit in jail, possibly convicted for another deed, not for the murder of my friend? How can they bear it, this silence? How can they live on? As who? How can they be who they are, if they cannot talk about their own story? How can they become somebody else, if they do not talk about their story?
We are creatures of language. We understand ourselves only in conversation with others. In speaking, we develop our idea of ourselves. Of our background we learn through the stories, the remembered ones, the invented ones, of our elders; of ourselves we learn through the reactions of others.
As such creatures of language, who comprehend themselves through dialogue with and through others, we are dependent on the ability to embed our experiences in a story. However meandering the courses of our lives may be, we seek to be able to putits course in a narrative. In tellingwe recapitulate both the intentional as well as the unintentional movements. Only then do we appreciate what we find.We make sense of the coincidences, give meaning to accidents and definite contours to ourselves. It is in conversation with others that the continuity of our narrative identity must prove itself. In which it is reconfirmed and questioned. Only through the approval or rejection by our counterparts do our idiosyncrasies and otherness, and hence our individuality, show.
How should they succeed? They cannot communicate their lives, not to others, and therefore also not to themselves. Because their lives have a silent disruption that they cannot weave into their narratives. They would have to be able to explain how they got there – beyond the stereotypesof the "system and of the "state," but rather by saying "I."
Nobody wants to grant them that: not the accomplices, because for that they would have to break out of the collectiveand become a subject, an individual again. Not the opposing party, because it wants to deny them any subjectivity, any humanity. The alleged sympathizers do not understand that they continue to enclose them in the ice of the experience that has remained uncomprehended because it has remained untold. The alleged representatives do not understand that the perpetrators cannot simply regret what they have not understood as their own first.
I do not want regret. I want them to tell me their story. With everything that may be painful in it for me. I would have to bear it. But only then will the murder of my friend become imaginable. Only then will my imagination be able to stop torturing me. I need their story. Because it is mine, too.
They on the other hand, of that I am certain, also need mine. Including the objections. Otherwise they can neither comprehend this murder in their own story nor their lives afterwards. In jail. Or in the uncertain freedom of him who was not caught and who for the rest of his life has to wrestle with his fear and with the awareness of being unable to talk about his life. This, it seems to me, is the greatest punishment that could have been meted out to them. This must be worse than life behind closed gates.
The love of music several of us, strangely enough, seem to have in common. "Of us"…? The love of music. Once we listened to music together, Alfred Herrhausen, Traudl and I. Silently. We sat on the floor, if I am not all wrong. At least I. It was a winter evening. Their daughter was already asleep, exhausted from a major snowball fight we had had in front of the house. At the time, I did not really know how to deal with children. A snowball fight seemed like a good program to me, even if this child was unpleasantly good at it. All day, Alfred and I had tramped through the snow, while the others were skiing. At that time, he already was not able to ski, because of his hip. Throughout the evening, we had talked ourselves awake. Strangely enough, I remember that we had pancake soup for supper. And now we only wanted to be quiet and listen to music. Schubert. Chamber music.
As a farewell present the next day I got the record. A really heavy vinyl record that was. I kept it for years. Even when I already had not had a record player in a long time and only the CD collection moved along from apartment to apartment. The record was still wandering along. At some point I could not bear to see it anymore and threw it out. Just like that. Memory was no longer dependent on the record. I did not regret it. It was Schubert's Death and the Maiden.
They must talk. Each one for himself. Not for the others. As an individual. Just like I do not and cannot write here in the name of the others. Each one of us has his own way of mourning. His own anger. His own nightmares. We all live differently with this rupture.And what I feel and write may perturb and irritate others. Not only the relatives of the victim, but also my circle of friends and acquaintances, in which many do not know about this part of my biography. But this is my history with the crime and the silence. I have kept silent about it for eighteen years, and thus I had to appropriate it firstin order to be able to describe it. Had to describe it first in order to be able to appropriate it.
They should be able to go home. Wherever that may be for them. But they must tell this story. They should be allowed to go. To be free. Released from prison. But they must talk first. Please. Certainly: for a state under the rule of law it is a requirement that they be convicted. And that the sentence is served. But for me? Whether they are locked in a cell for ten or fifteen years? Or twenty? Twenty seems as inappropriate as ten. In any case, the punishment is out of proportion with the loss.
I therefore never felt a need to see the murderers of my friend convicted, to know that they were in jail, never yearned for revenge. Revenge is onlyredirected pain. A shifting of grief.Not turned inward towards an absence, but outward, towards a substitute for the absence. There is nothing to disdainabout revenge, as Jan Philipp Reemtsma rightfully writes. But revenge affords no comfort. It is an emotional race that can only be lost. At the finish,the undiminished pain awaits you.
I have often wondered what their days look like over there, in a cell. How it smells there. What kind of noises they hear. At night. What they might be able to read. Whether they read the same things as I. Whether it is hot or cool in the summer behind prison walls. Whether the concrete walls are coarse or smooth. Do they have to convince themselves that their deeds were worthy, because otherwise it would be entirely unbearable, this locked-away life? Or do they allow themselves doubts in their quietude, now that it is too late? Actually, it is never too late for doubts.
Maybe this is what remains the hardest for me to understand. How they could be so certain. So certain to be doing the right thing. So certain that they dareda deed that is irreversible. That cannot be corrected. How could they be so certain? I am constantly in doubt. And worried to hurt others through my errors: in love, in my engagement with others,in all regards, in work, in writing, in my search for the right word, the right gesture, the right touch. It is what I have always found the hardest about writing: to have the feeling to be allowed to judge. Perhaps this is why I am so slow. Not only in writing. But already in observing. Do I feel more certain in my judgment because of it? Not really.
It is correct that a state under the rule of law is oriented solely by the law. And not by the needs of the relatives of the victims. In the constitutional answers to the crimes our feelings cannot and must not play any role. The FederalPresident may visit the relatives with the best of intentions or the Bild-Zeitung runits malicious campaigns with the worst of intentions. The one remains as wrong as the other. For the cases that have been solved, for the perpetrators who were convicted, the designated judicial and psychological authorities must decide. Whoever can be released according to this, must be able to leave unchecked.Into a new life. And we should grant them that it exists – a new life. And if the new life draws a lesson from the old one, like in the cases of Susanne Albrecht or Silke Maier-Witt, I would be glad if my children could learn from these people, I would be glad if my community could profit from these experiences.
But the unresolved crimes remain. A society that wishes to understand this historical epoch without being troubledby it for decades, should consider whether there are, perhaps, other instruments, beyond punishment and the more or less arbitrarily granted clemency, to deal with the crimes in such a way that we really survive them.
In any event, no enlightenmentis to be expected from the Federal Prosecutor's Office. Whoever is interested only in revenge and atonement will not learn the truth. Perhaps the security authorities should simply admit that they long ago stopped work on certain cases. The crimes may not come under the statute of limitations. And because of that, they perhaps cannot declare it publicly. But do they really believe that we believe them that they are still applying themselves to a solution? That a unit is still poring over dusty documents and an officer goes to his desk every day, searching for new leads?
Then why should we maintain this image of active antagonism,of continued investigations in the case of"unresolved cases of the RAF?" For whom? Do they think we feel safer if they continue to present themselves as an investigating, undiminishedly tough judiciary?
"Force is dominion, but also loneliness",writes Emmanuel Lévinas. The security authorities may persevere in this hardening. They may cling to this fixated attitude consisting of violence and counter-violence, because for them, this is what makes it an attitude.Because it makes them feel superior to an adversary who instills fear, even though he gave up long ago. But whom are they serving in doing so? Force is dominion, but also loneliness.We should step out of this lonely position and talk to each other.
We should recognize that there cannot be a different solution. Waiting for new investigations is illusory. And so is waiting for sudden confessions. The permanent agitation of the tabloid press against those who are no longer able to defend themselves is just as unworthy as glorifying homages by the sympathizers.They are both populist and banal.
The perpetrators must be set free. But they have to talk. If a "Forum for Clarification"is needed, we should establish it. Amnesty for an end to the silence. Freedom for clarification.The perpetrators arecalled uponto step out of their hiding places, out of their silence, and to deliver themselves up. Not to an indictment, but to their own story. Whoever clarifies will not be punished. Only thus can we be delivered from the uncertainty and only thus can they be delivered from lies. And only thus we set each other free.
A "Freedom for Clarification" forum serves our communication with ourselves. Because in an open debate like this, societal values and longings are negotiated. That is more than what is tradition. More than what is written. Our values and longings determine and explain who we are. And this "We" is changeable. Open. Flexible. Because it is being shaken. Is touched. Expands or contracts. Because we become more. Different. And because we have to come to an understanding again and again. And have to filter out who we have become, and why. Who we are is decided by who we want to be. How we want to be, how we want to live, from what sources we draw our convictions, towards what horizon we wish to orient ourselves.
Who we want to be is manifested not least in how we treat those who cannot or do not wish to belong. Who we want to be also manifests itself in how we deal with those who question us. Only through those who contest us can we learn how sure we are of ourselves. Not by stiffeningand hardening. But by allowing ourselves to be challenged, by exposing ourselves to criticism, by communicating our values and longings, by tracing their development, by asking if we are doing justice to them. It is getting time.
The murder of Alfred Herrhausen lies eighteen years back. Each one of us probably misses something else: I miss his ability to rejoice. And his wonderful "well" at the end of a sentence. I had never understood what it was supposed to mean: "well." It ended a thought and at the same time seemed to open up something. It was a "That's it", but it also invited an answer, a speaking on. Perhaps this is what he would have said in response to a demand to end the silence. I do not know. "Well."
The murder of Alfred Herrhausen lies eighteen years back. People are called adults when they have survived this time span. I was too young at the time to know the unavailable, what cannot be controlled or possessed. Too old to be able to deny it. The perpetrators are too old today to still believe in the logic of treason. Too young to continue living their lives in a lie.
The Federal Republic is old enough to be able to be self-critical. Too young to be unable to break open the incrustations of the past. No one has to fear that the state is demonstrating weakness or disintegrating if it gives up on its right to revenge.
The German Autumn lies 30 years back. The social self-assuredness, which did not exist at the time, could be demonstrated today also opposite those who challenge it: through generosity. Through an offer for communication. For clarification. This way the crimes would not be forgiven. The deeds would not be belittled. But the ice could begin to melt.
And perhaps, perhaps then my taxi driver would learn about this story. Perhaps he would want to talk to me about that day, more than eighteen years ago. When I abandoned him, up on Seedammweg, where the car was standing askew.
Published in ZEIT MAGAZINE LEBEN, September 2008
Translation: Barbara A. Schmutzler and Marisa Elana James