Neuhardenberg Speech with Navid Kermani
Navid Kermani is one of the great intellectuals of our times. The author, reporter, essayist, journalist and orientalist was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2015. Kermani is an acclaimed observer of the social and political upheavals in this country and beyond. Time and again, he tries to galvanise people into action with his contentious speeches. When he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on 5 October 2026, he said about Germany: 'It is a state that has learned from history – it did not do so immediately, nor entirely, but still in such a way that over the decades, it has increasingly become part of the Federal Republic's identity to do everything humanly possible to ensure that crimes such as those committed from German soil between 1933 and 1945 never happen again.' In view of the current debates and election results, Navid Kermani says this, 'very worried', but also 'in order to motivate': '...in the near future, there will no longer be any Holocaust survivors. It will then be us who are charged with ... passing the remembrance on to the following generations.'
