Justice & Law Quote by Johannes Rau

A century ago becomes a moral lever in Johannes Rau's hands: not nostalgia, but a claim about what a modern Germany owes to the people who make its culture. By invoking Richard Strauss as someone "already been quoted and already been heard today", Rau plants the audience inside an ongoing performance of national identity. Strauss isn't a museum piece; he's proof of use. That little meta-aside also flatters the room and tightens Rau's credibility: we are literally hearing the inheritance he is defending.

The phrase "foundation stone" does heavy political work. It frames artists' collective rights not as a special-interest grab, but as infrastructure - as essential as roads or constitutions. And "joint assertion of their rights and interests" quietly translates a potentially contentious topic (copyright, collecting societies, labor organization) into the language of civic dignity. Rau is careful: he doesn't say "profit" or "control". He says "rights", a word that fits postwar German democratic self-understanding.

Context matters: Rau, a Social Democrat and consensus builder, often spoke in the key of reconciliation between economic modernity and social protection. Here, "pioneering work ahead of them in Germany" signals that organizing creators was once politically risky and institutionally novel. Subtext: if it took courage then to build protections, it takes vigilance now to keep them - especially amid technological change, market concentration, and the perennial temptation to treat culture as decoration rather than labor. The intent is to sanctify cultural policy as nation-building, not patronage.