Politics & Power Quote by Horst Koehler

Koehler’s line is engineered to do two difficult things at once: puncture national self-satisfaction and make gratitude feel like a civic duty rather than a sentimental aside. Spoken by a German head of state, it carries the weight of postwar memory politics: Germany’s democracy is not framed as an inevitable “return” to normalcy, but as a hard-won condition underwritten by others’ blood, above all Americans. That specificity matters. It’s not abstract internationalism; it’s a deliberate naming of the security architecture and moral ledger that shaped the Federal Republic after 1945.

The intent is corrective. “We were reminded” signals that forgetting is the default in peacetime, especially for a prosperous country that can mistake stability for self-authorship. The phrase “other peoples” widens the frame beyond bilateral gratitude, but “in particular the United States” anchors it in realpolitik: Marshall aid, NATO’s umbrella, Berlin’s frontline status, and the long American presence that made German freedom plausible during the Cold War.

Subtext: liberty comes with obligations. If your freedom was defended by allies, you don’t get to treat alliances as optional, or history as background decoration. Koehler is also quietly disciplining a familiar German reflex: to center national suffering or redemption narratives while skating past the uncomfortable fact that liberation was, in part, imposed from outside after catastrophe from within.

The final sentence is short, almost liturgical: “That we should never forget.” It’s memory as policy. In an era of rising historical fatigue and resurgent nationalism, the admonition doubles as a warning: a democracy that forgets its dependencies is a democracy that starts bargaining with them.