Bidspirit auction | Ernst Wiechert – Address to

Ernst Wiechert – Address to German Youth – The German People’s Reckoning with Their Support for Nazism - Rede an die deutsche Jugend 1945 – Address to German Youth, by Ernst Wiechert. Zinnen-Verlag. From the “Politics and Culture” series, edited by Rudolf Schneider, dealing with the German people’s reckoning with their support for Nazism during the war years. Munich, 1945 – First Edition. Rare. A historic booklet presenting the address delivered by the German writer and playwright Ernst Wiechert in Munich in November 1945, shortly after the defeat of the Third Reich and the end of World War II, in which he expressed the German people’s reckoning with their support for Nazism. “Once we had a homeland called Germany. It was a country like any other country. People worked and laughed, loved and suffered, just as in every other country... There were hardships and conflicts, envy and resentment, but in the evening, here and there, a girl’s voice sang the song of the rising moon, and a violin rejoiced in the twilight... And now they saw. They saw a new cross, and upon its beams was inscribed not the old message: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden!’ but the new message: ‘Death to the Jews!’ And the one who raised the new cross above the multitude of nations was no longer the messenger of love, but the ‘Übermensch’ (Superman), who cast lots for the garments of the dead and now set out to enslave the world to the Germanic race. The ‘blond beast’ proclaimed by a madman, now preparing to leap into the boundless... And with the first barbed wire wound around the first camp, judgment was passed upon an entire people. Upon a people, most of whom had already recognized the evil, yet hid themselves in their cottages and palaces so as not to hear the screams. A people who covered their eyes with their hands so as not to see the stream of blood flowing slowly, slowly, yet ever broader and ever redder, across the soil of Germany. A people who had forgotten that in the new German Bible, written by the clumsy hand of a criminal, no quality appeared as often as the quality of ‘cruelty.’ And who now, in cowardice, turned his eyes away when he saw the tears of women and children flowing – a sea of tears such as had not been wept in a thousand years, and which was now being shed ‘for the greater glory of the Fatherland...’” (from the address).