I'll probably never forget two days in my life.
Both were connected to a terribly sad event.
The first time was when I learned of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It was in the center of town, in the middle of roaring traffic, when a friend, who had just left his newspaper building, told me.
I was petrified at the time, had to stop, and could hardly catch my breath for a few minutes.
And then I noticed something very strange.
The other people on the street around me seemed to feel something similar to me.
They, too, had suddenly heard the bad news, and complete strangers were talking to each other, and many were crying.
That's what I thought a year ago when I was having lunch with friends near my newspaper office in Saas-Fee and suddenly the waiter came to our table and told me that John F. Kennedy had been shot. We threw the money on the edge of the table, dragged the cry back down the street to our office, and with us came a feeling that I can only describe as one of complete incomprehension. We simply couldn't comprehend that suddenly the man who had meant so much to all of us was no longer with us. We couldn't imagine that this voice of youth and hope in America had suddenly fallen silent. The pain gripped our hearts. We sat there, staring at the wall, because it suddenly dawned on us that it hadn't been some bad dream. It had become a gruesome reality. They all witnessed what happened later. The anxious waiting on the television screen, the news, the brief official announcements, and then the tragic images of the dead president's return to Washington, which were at the airport in Dallas and the scene at the airport in Washington.
And the faces of the people who were there, Jacqueline Kennedy and Lündin B. Johnson,
and all those who had been with him and who had now suddenly been called to a difficult, a difficult new task.
When we think back today, a year later, on those days, which are still very close to us, we often have a very strange feeling.
Gradually, the image of John F. Kennedy, whom we enjoyed as a path, as a time,
as a friend of our own ideas for the well-being of the country and for the progress of the country, gradually recedes into a distance, as development demands, as is natural in human life.
Distance arises, and in this distance we often recognize the nature and value of a person more clearly than when we are in their immediate presence.
And we recognize two things.
We recognize that here a youth and a hope were cut short in the midst of their blossoming and growth.
And in this I realize that I have often seen in churchyards those broken pillars that stood over the graves of young men, young people, and indicated that beneath them lay an unpolluted life, unpolluted.
That is actually the strongest impression one has in the memory of Kennedy: what would have become of him, how would he have fulfilled himself, what would he have accomplished.
But alas, these are all questions that will remain forever unanswered.
Unanswered and yet, to a certain extent, answered by the fact that other people
took up the pan that was in his hands, that other people tried
to continue the work he had begun.
Yes, something very strange is actually happening. Sometimes we find ourselves wondering whether John F. Kennedy himself would have been able to get his work, his wishes, and the laws he proposed passed, and how his successor achieved it.
Certainly, Lyndon B. Johnson is a world apart from Kennedy.
There have rarely been two people so different in their personalities, in their outlook, in their temperament.
But one thing was present in Johnson, in this man who, after all, had grown up under a rose-colored robe,
who himself had never forgotten an Armour-Farmaison, the times of the Depression, and who always had a sense of solidarity with those who had been disadvantaged by fate, by social advancement, by social advancement.
This does not mean, as we all know, that Johnson is a great, practical politician, a realist, but one who has not forgotten his heart, the heart of his youth, or let's say in an old class, in an ingring, in an old classic word, the dreams of his youth. Kennedy was also a realist, but at the same time, as his historian Arthur Schlesinger
Junio Nurlich once said, he was also an idealist, and an idealist without illusions.
That's a very strange mixture, but if you look at Kennedy and his
If you remember his speeches and his sayings and his thoughts, then you will also remember that this man was very, very connected to the earth and yet, at heart, was an idealistic person who wanted a better world and a better Samarica.
That's how we see Kennedy today, and that's how we see the fulfillment of his legacy today.
That will take a long time.
In our country, things don't happen so quickly.
We are a country that is inclined toward evolutionary concepts, that shies away from revolutionary things, and in which the lead and re-lead for measures and innovations must first be played out before these innovations are truly and truly born.
I believe that we will remember Kennedy for a long time to come.
I believe that the impact of his short presidency will last longer than can actually be assumed given the three years of his administration that have passed so quickly. And I believe that over time, Kennedy will go down in the history of presidents of the United States as a great president.
And a verse, a poem, comes to mind that you all probably know, and it comes from Old Man von Tane, and you learned it in school.
I don't know it per se, I don't know the beginning by heart.
It's something about a captain, and it begins with the swallow flying over Lake Irri, but it ends, and I still know the end, and I would like to close this short speech with the final words of the poem.
It says about the captain who sails his ship through.
Here rests John Menard, in Quarl and Burn, he held the helm firmly in his hand.
He saved us, he wears the crown, he died for us, our love his reward.
I believe this love will be, in the future and in history, the reward of Kennedy's life, of his service on this earth.
For hearers. Manfred Georg died a week ago.
Editor-in-chief of the German-language weekly magazine Aufbau, published in New York.
The cultural section with its contributions, the merits of this worthy journalist,
who, expelled from Germany in 1933, found a new calling in the United States,
the journalistic task of building a bridge between his old and his new homeland.
Manfred Georg turned 72.
Hans Wallenberg wrote an obituary in Die Welt last Tuesday.
There is something almost unbelievable about Manfred Georg's farewell.
Despite his serious illness, he was a boy among boys until his last day.
He was more than that. He remained younger than many who consider themselves young.
He embraced all new trends without abandoning what had become.
Georg is one of those increasingly rare journalists who are polyhistorically educated, artistically inclined, sensitive, and responsibly devoted to the German language,
who have practiced their profession with passionate affection and devotion.
Until recently, he was one of the most brilliant connoisseurs of German theater,
and when he visited Berlin and the rest of Germany, as he did about a year ago,
he spent evening after evening in a group at some German theater,
where something interesting was on show.
Manfred Georg reported on these experiences in the New Yorker Aufbau.
When thousands of German-speaking New Yorkers enthusiastically welcomed the guest performances of the Berlin and Hamburg theaters Barlok and Gründgins, it was MG who had duly prepared them. Persecuted by the hatred of National Socialism, the native Berliner had traveled via Paris and Prague to New York,
where, initially deprived of all the rich prospects his talent legitimately offered,
in Waco, so to speak, in an Anglo-Saxon environment,
he created the most significant journalistic venture of Jewish-German forced immigration.
The Aufbau (Reconstruction).
In 1938, when Manfred Georg began this work, the Aufbau was a club newsletter,
without any significance.
Within a few years, Manfred Georg transformed the paper,
presumably wisely exploiting the influx of Jewish-German immigrants,
into an intellectual center of all immigration on five continents.
Nothing speaks more strongly for this undertaking,
whose success no one originally believed possible, than the fact that the Aufbau became a melting pot of cultural Germany outside of Germany's borders,
a melting pot for Christians and Jews alike.
The energy with which Manfred Georg, defying the sometimes highly contradictory currents within immigration, fulfilled the task he had set himself,
and continued to pursue it until his last day, borders on the miraculous.
At a time when a German Aspora was scattered across the globe,
he knew how to somehow hold them all together and orient them.
After the end of the Second World War, Manfred Friedgeorge,
faced himself with a dual task:
to inform the readers of Aufbau about the
First, to clarify the extent
of the atrocities committed in the name of Germany
and, second, to seek ways to erase the hatred of National Socialism.
For this was more than is generally expected of a weekly newspaper.
Manfred Georg did not shy away from this task
and even if it no longer seems insurmountable today,
the merit of this journalist cannot be overestimated.
Between Berlin and New York, Manfred Georg, as a reading of Aufbau shows,
remained loyal to the other Germany.
And in his belief in this other Germany, he happily and regularly
reported and wrote from the United States for his German readers in many German newspapers until the end.
Once after the war,
it was in 1951,
Manfred Georg returned to Germany for a lecture tour.
He was received by Theodor Häuss and visited Berlin.
The city where he was born, studied, and worked as a journalist until 1933.
At a young age, he became editor-in-chief at the Ulstein and Mosse publishing houses.
He wrote as a correspondent for the Fossische Zeitung and edited the 8,000th edition of the Abendblatt from 1922 to 1928.
Here he made a name for himself as a theater critic.
In 1951, he saw Berlin again.
I haven't been to this city for 18 years, he wrote at the time.
Not 18 years, the smorgasbord of persecution, adventures, battles, work, and re-work.
One has traveled many roads in the world,
but no path is as turbulent as this journey through Berlin, which, after 18 years, suddenly became reality.
Decades are thrown into disarray, he continued.
And imagination constantly pushes new glimpses of the past before the gaze of one who travels backward through his own life.
Kaiserreich Republik, the dawning night of Hitlerism, of turnips.
In New York, everything seemed so chronologically ordered, thinking back on it.
Here, in this city, layered by the world's fists, everything swirls around in confusion.
The great events of life sink before the consciousness of the worker and fade into small details.
A lamppost, a house, the number of an electric telephone become essential,
the great names, the great encounters are too numerous to mention or even think about.
And the clarification of the shop windows is written.
Columbia House, Gestapo, last attempt on Josti's terrace to persuade the magnificent Karl von Osjetski to flee.
The worker's boot, the shame of incitement, everything passes you by and you barely have the strength to grasp it.
Manfred Georgel wrote these impressions in the new newspaper in 1951.
Two years later, on his 60th birthday, Theodor Haus wrote to him.
I believe that fate has presented them as journalists with one of the most difficult tasks imaginable.
When, on the one hand, they strove to create an organ of inner connection, of communication, of guidance, of comfort, of instruction for those tormented, persecuted, spiritually and, God knows, often enough in material distress.
But at the same time, they had to sense how, despite their shared fate, the emotional complex of these people was, and probably still is, infinitely different.
In recent years, I have met readers of Aufbau who spoke of it with great gratitude and joy, but it would be dishonest to conceal the fact that people who were dissatisfied with Aufbau also spoke.
That wasn't surprising to me.
As a journalist, I know it would be a somewhat dubious thing to always tell all of your subscribers what they expected.
The profile of the display would suffer as a result.
But their task wasn't a question of gaining and retaining readers; rather, they were faced with a historical responsibility.
On the one hand, to help people with their individual needs, and on the other, to ensure that the scattered individuals don't lose their sense of community.
This sense of community was tragically divided, because it meant both Jewish community and the ominous connection to a lost German destiny.
I don't want to dwell on the problems they faced or the problems they faced, but rather simply express this to them.
How strongly I, as a German publicist, who has indeed been through many different things, can empathize with the adventure of the enterprise.
The adventure of the enterprise, as Theodor Häussante put it, began in 1938.
The Aufbau, then a small, insignificant newsletter with a circulation of 2,000 to 3,000, had existed for three years.
Under the leadership of Manfred George, it reached a height of 30,000.
And when the newspaper celebrated its 30th anniversary in April of last year, the A
The Maximum Auditorium of Hunter College in New York, with over 2,000 guests, provided the festive setting for this anniversary.
Guests included the German and Austrian ambassadors, the Israeli Consul General, and Mayor Wagner.
President Johnson, who sent a greeting to the CS, said: "Aufbau is a pioneer of liberal ideas and has enriched our country's traditions in an outstanding way for three decades."
"I am convinced," said President Johnson, that the newspaper will continue to offer its readers constructive debate, comprehensive enlightenment, and responsible news interpretation.
And here is the voice of Editor-in-Chief Manfred George.
"Daufe Boa," as many of you know, originally served as a fighting paper against Nazism and, at the same time, as a central resource for the countless refugees who were flooded to the United States by the Hitler catastrophe.
At that time, he also tried to find and seek out the scattered children in all parts of the world, to reunite their families, to secure and restore human life and human dignity.
It was our task to safeguard and restore human dignity.
We will continue to serve the goals that were once envisioned by us, and the highest goal of these is the service of peace in the world, peace through understanding, peace through human relationships, and peace under the peace principle,
as it is seen in the Jewish world, on which much of the politics and essence of the reconstruction work is based.
Manfred George in April of last year, whether he considered that day, on which his newspaper and his work were so festively celebrated, the culmination of his successes,
we don't know, and it's not important, because he was actually successful from the very first day he entered the Ulstein publishing house, fresh from his doctorate, to begin his career.
``` Incidentally, on that day, almost 50 years ago, Manfred George was the only one who had to introduce himself as a newcomer to the editorial team.
With him came another newcomer, Egon Jameson, who now works as a journalist in London and who still remembers that day quite well.
We may have come yesterday as geeks, but it's been almost 50 years since both of us, Manfred Georg and I, reported to the breadmaster Paul at the same time on the same morning in the lobby of the second fabric department,
at Kochstrasse 23, at the publishing house Ulstein and Co. "I'm the new Berliner Morgenspost editorial intern," said the young man in front of me, and I repeated it proudly, as did I.
During the years of registering the editorial staff of the Berliner Morgenspost and the Allgemeinezeitung, and the Bezettamitter, nothing had been more human than a stranger.
But he had obviously never experienced anything like this before. Editorial intern, what's that all about? What is that? And then there were two of them, him and me.
It was a completely new experiment at the Ulsteinswakten at the time, and we were the two of us the first guinea pigs.
An experiment with young volunteers, in fact. Until now, you had to be a mature man and, as I said, have missed a calling to become a journalist.
Now they wanted to try it with young people like us. I had just come from the Genasium, and Fried Georg had just gotten his doctorate.
Messenger Paul suggested we go to the personnel office one floor down. From there, because they had no idea what to do with us, they sent us to the anteroom of the publisher, Dr. Franz Ulstein.
From there, they escorted us to the anteroom of the editor-in-chief, Kune from the Berliner Morgenspost, and no one there knew either.
I hadn't imagined that they had been waiting for me in that gigantic house, but this ignorance of my existence, and even ours, shattered all my ambitious hopes of ever being able to assert myself in that gigantic palace, surrounded by all the established circles.
My fellow sufferer next to me felt the end of my angelic patience and introduced himself to me. Fried Georg said, "He didn't mention my name."
Then this Fried Georg said a sentence I've never forgotten. And probably never will. Fried Georg said, "That's very fitting."
He didn't say it ironically, not accusingly. No, he meant it the way he said it. He explains at the end of the year, an old, stupid face.
Until now, no one in the entire house knew that we were both hired, that they had dared to try this experiment. Now they know. Does he know how long we would have had to sit in this gigantic building for anyone to have noticed that the administration was still employing volunteers?
Yes, yes, believe me, it's a very good coincidence. We won't be forgotten anytime soon.
One pushed us into a room where five serious men, wordlessly sitting at my desk, wrote and wrote.
and cut out pieces of paper and glued them.
After a quarter of an hour of clearing, my colleague Zarkaft went to bed, one of whom looked at us.
My colleague waited for the sentence, how long do you actually have to stand around here before you're allowed to sit down?
There was no room left for a chair, someone grumbled in displeasure, and there's always room on the floor like that.
Manfried explained, we're not messengers, we're the new editorial interns.
They looked at the gentleman straight at the slackers and the slackers, who were aroused by this revelation.
All four shook their gray heads in the daytime, not with us in the political editorial office.
There's no playground there, they said, we're definitely standing, wrong.
That's a good thing, said Manfred Gorg.
The quartet pulled an even more miserable face than before.
May I, Manfred Jörg, take this opportunity, gentlemen, to introduce us both as new additions to the editorial staff?
Manfred called our names three times each, very clearly, very slowly, as if reading a new government program.
One of them stood up and said, "Dr. Gorg, may I please," and she directed us two rooms to the right, to the proper authority, the local editorial office of the Berliner Morgenspost.
And then they finally knew what we were both for, apart from Koren?
Over time, it became clear how revolutionary Manfred Satz had been—that's a good thing.
A Jäder, whom we had visited on our initial march, remembered us and the optimistic Five Words against which no one could choose.
That's a good thing; that was a sentence to which a chronic naysayer, a resentful rejecter, could have no answer.
A few years ago, after the war, I met Manfred again in Frankfurt. On one of his trips through the new Germany, about its problems and the world's duty to listen to them, he wrote so many clever articles for his paper and for other American newspapers.
He wanted to continue on to Heidelberg that day. That was a good coincidence, as always, and where he could take his car over the Bergstrasse to the Nekker.
No, no, friend Manfred declined. You yourself once told me that a reporter is only as good as he gets along without a car. Manfred, as usual, took the train, and with journalistic sacrifice and passion, in the worst class.
There, he would teach his reporter, the most wonderful human reportages would fly from the mouths of his fellow travelers. Manfred Georg called me immediately in Frankfurt.
My neighbor on the wooden bench in the train, he says, was Albert Schweizer. I'm doing a wonderful interview in our overcrowded compartment. Yes, it was a good coincidence.
This first sentence of our lifelong friendship was also the last sentence I heard from him. Egon Jameson spoke about Manfred Georg, who died in New York a week ago. We would like to conclude the first part of our cultural forum with his contribution, which recalls Manfred Georg's younger and perhaps carefree years.
I am one of those who of the ...
