The Courage to Love

In Wiesbaden last week, kindly, silver-haired Theodor Heuss, President of the West German Republic, delivered a remarkable speech. It was the speech of a democrat and a Christian; it was also an item of evidence that, in the words of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (TIME, Dec. 5), much that is decent has survived in Germany. Said President Heuss:

"We must discuss the abominable injustice that has been meted out to the Jewish people. We must ask . . . are we, because we lived in Germany, also guilty of this diabolic injustice? . . . The phrase 'collective guilt' is an oversimplification. It is a distortion, in fact the kind of distortion that the Nazis tried to pound into us in regard to the Jews; for the Nazis taught that the fact of being a Jew was sufficient to prove guilt.

"But something like collective shame has grown and remained from those times. The worst thing that Hitler did to us--and he did much to us--was that he forced us into the shame of having to bear the name of German simultaneously with his henchmen. We dare not forget those things that people, for convenience's sake, like to forget. We dare not forget the Nurnberg laws, the Jewish star, the burning of synagogues, the deportation of Jews into foreign lands, misery and death. The gruesome thing about these events is not that they involved the fanaticism of the pogroms . . . The cold gruesomeness of national pedantry, that was the strange German contribution to these events . .

"We have to stop asking, is a man an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, or a Jew? We have to get back to a free evaluation of the individual. If I look around at my four or five best friends, I find that two or three of them are Jews . . . I am their friend because between us there exists the human relationship of love. We need the courage to love. Hate stems from a sluggishness of the heart; it is cheap and easy. Love is always a risk, but only a risk brings victory."

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