Daily Inspiration Quote by Otto Schily

The language is all velvet rope and civic boosterism, but the intent is hard-edged: legitimacy. Schily isn’t just celebrating a hosting bid; he’s laundering Berlin’s image through sport, turning “responsibility” into a moral credential and “honored” into a pre-emptive defense against scrutiny. That word choice matters coming from a German interior minister-turned-statesman figure: he’s speaking in the register of governance, where every “welcome” is also an exercise in control, logistics, and reputation management.

“Berlin is a wonderful city that is developing at a tremendous rate” is the quiet thesis. It’s not about athletes; it’s about a city still narrating its post-Wall transformation to the world and to itself. The subtext is that Berlin’s volatility (political, economic, cultural) is being reframed as momentum. “Developing” smuggles in a promise of modernity without naming the messiness: construction, displacement, security apparatus, the perennial question of who the new Berlin is actually for.

The sentence is engineered like a bid document: big nouns (“responsibility,” “decision”) paired with soft adjectives (“great,” “fascinating”). It fuses two audiences. Internationally, it pitches Berlin as safe, cosmopolitan, future-facing. Domestically, it sells the event as a national milestone: proof that Germany can host “the world’s best” without the historical footnotes dominating the frame.

Even the climax, “welcome the world’s best athletes,” is a proxy for welcoming the world’s attention. The event becomes a camera, and Schily is aligning Berlin’s story with a global script of progress.