11 February 2025
Helsinki, Finland
Ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you so much for honouring me with the Rogatchi Foundation Culture for Humanity Award 2025.
Making Jewish cultural heritage visible is very important to me – not only in my role as Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism but also as a founding member of the Diplomatic String Quartet.
And please understand that what I mean by heritage is not something dry and outdated that belongs to the past. I mean heritage that is kept alive across the generations, that is passed on from parents to children. It is vibrant and adaptable, and it belongs to the present.
The goal of the Nazis’ exterminationist antisemitism was to annihilate all of Jewish life. This antisemitism sought to destroy Jewish voices and lives, putting a permanent end to the transmission of Jewish cultural heritage from generation to generation.
It did not succeed in this mission. And yet, in an unprecedented betrayal of all civilised values, Jews were forced to experience unfathomable suffering. In places where Jewish life had flourished for hundreds of years, a wound that could not heal was left behind. Every life that was stolen is an incomparable loss and can never be brought back.
Celebrating Jewish music and culture and making them visible also cannot bring back those who were lost. It doesn’t make up for past injustice. And yet, every note that is played, every song that is sung is a small strike against injustice, against uncivilised barbarism. Whoever listens today to a piece by an artist who was ostracised by the Nazis, whoever feels moved by its soulful tones, is grappling with their own humanity – and the humanity of others.
At the same time, memory admonishes us to direct our attention to expressions of antisemitism in the arts and culture today.
Especially since October 7th, but not only since then, and in view of the open and brazen hatred against Jews that has been unleashed, the problems are unmistakable. More attention needs to be devoted to the question of how to fight anti-Jewish hatred – especially in the arts – that is dressed up in intellectual trappings.
Such arguments almost always follow the same pattern: Those who espouse them claim they don’t hate Jews, they’re just criticising Israel, and that they are speaking as or on behalf of the oppressed and dispossessed people of the Global South. In such thought patterns, the roles of victim and perpetrator are not determined by people’s actions, but rather are preordained. The proponents of such mental contortions also claim that every absurdity is protected as artistic freedom and freedom of opinion. I would counter this by stating clearly that hate is not an opinion and incitement is not art.
But does this mean that music, art and culture are primarily political? Especially today? Fortunately, they are not in fact. Music moves us because it is, as the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “the universal language of humankind”. And in this spirit, I thank you very much indeed for this award. But it is even more to thank you, dear Inna and you, dear Michael, in keeping Jewish culture alive and vibrant. And I wish you every continued success with this endeavour – we need you!
Thank you very much.
February 11, 2025
Helsinki