Leadership Quote by Richard von Weizsaecker

For a German statesman born into the wreckage of the 20th century, “forgetting” isn’t a private coping strategy; it’s a political program with consequences. Richard von Weizsaecker is warning that amnesia turns history into a kind of slow punishment: exile not only from one’s past, but from moral belonging. The line pivots on a cold insight about denial. The harder a society tries to scrub away its crimes or humiliations, the longer it remains trapped by them, condemned to repeat the same evasions in public life: defensive myths, selective patriotism, brittle identity.

“Exile” is doing double duty. It evokes literal displacement after war and border shifts, but also the civic estrangement that follows when a nation cannot speak honestly about what it did and what was done in its name. Weizsaecker frames memory as the opposite of nostalgia. Remembrance here is not sentimental; it’s disciplinary. It demands the record, the names, the dates, the complicity. That’s why he pairs it with “redemption,” a word that carries theological weight in a secular setting. He’s not offering cheap forgiveness; he’s outlining the conditions under which forgiveness might become imaginable.

The subtext is the postwar German struggle over Vergangenheitsbewaltigung - coming to terms with the past - and Weizsaecker’s insistence that democratic legitimacy depends on it. Remembrance is positioned as an active civic practice: rituals, education, public speech, institutional accountability. The quote works because it turns memory into forward motion. It suggests the only way out is through.