On October 26, 2016, I had the great honor of being allowed to contribute a ceremonial address on the occasion of the re-establishing of the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft (General German Fraternity) to the “Symposium Deutschland” on the day ahead of our national day.
Significantly, today I would not have to revise nor withdraw any of my current assessments (e.g. social peace suffers) or predictions (e.g. Trump becomes president) at that time. Not a single word. If a condition/state is really dramatic and crass, then it is comparatively easy to predict logical consequences, which then usually are becoming true and real.
In fact, I had traveled to Jena without any manuscript neither I intend to speak for hours. But things turned out quite differently and Prof. Weede, who was going to speak after me plus the auditorium have encouraged/motivated me accordingly. Therefore, in the following weeks, I wrote down all the spoken words into a 19 pages manuscript.
Since then, this manuscript is published on the website of the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft and can be found here, too. However I recommend to first only having a look at “the headings”, which were my guide on site. That comes below.
The circle of contributors was illustrious, my co-speakers were Prof. Erich Weede (Political Science, University Bonn), Vera Lengsfeld (Journalist and CDU-MdB a. D.) and Prof. George Turner (Economic and Agrarian Law). Dr. Philip Plickert (economist, FAZ), moderated and my my contact to the fraternity was Stefan Dobner.
The full manuscript can be found here and the “short form” hereinafter and below.
Dr. Henning Zoz, August 2018
