"This will help us next year with the World Cup. I can imagine a lot of visitors from abroad will be here and asking what happened between 1933 and 1945. A lot of that will come up. I think this will make an important contribution to those discussions"
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Schily is doing something politically shrewd: he’s tying Germany’s biggest upcoming PR moment to its hardest historical homework. The World Cup, in his framing, isn’t just sport-as-soft-power; it’s a global open house where the guests will wander into the basement. By naming 1933 to 1945 with bureaucratic plainness, he avoids melodrama while still pointing directly at the Nazi era. The restraint is the point. It signals a state that wants to appear calm, competent, and unafraid of scrutiny.
The intent reads as preemptive reputation management, but not the cheap kind. He anticipates the predictable conversation foreigners bring to Germany - the “so what happened?” question that’s half curiosity, half moral audit - and argues for infrastructure that can hold it. “This” (likely a memorial, exhibition, or education initiative) becomes a diplomatic tool: not to deflect, but to channel the encounter into something legible, organized, and publicly endorsed. He’s betting that transparency, staged well, is stabilizing.
The subtext is that historical memory has an audience. Germany’s past is not only a domestic ethical obligation; it’s an international relationship issue, especially when the country is performing itself on television. Schily also slips in a subtle claim about modern German identity: we are the kind of nation that prepares to answer, in public, on the record. The World Cup becomes a stress test of that identity, and the “important contribution” is less about facts than about credibility.
The intent reads as preemptive reputation management, but not the cheap kind. He anticipates the predictable conversation foreigners bring to Germany - the “so what happened?” question that’s half curiosity, half moral audit - and argues for infrastructure that can hold it. “This” (likely a memorial, exhibition, or education initiative) becomes a diplomatic tool: not to deflect, but to channel the encounter into something legible, organized, and publicly endorsed. He’s betting that transparency, staged well, is stabilizing.
The subtext is that historical memory has an audience. Germany’s past is not only a domestic ethical obligation; it’s an international relationship issue, especially when the country is performing itself on television. Schily also slips in a subtle claim about modern German identity: we are the kind of nation that prepares to answer, in public, on the record. The World Cup becomes a stress test of that identity, and the “important contribution” is less about facts than about credibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
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