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Hedwig Richter
Photo:
Fabian Hammerl
Hungary, Poland, the USA: the fact that democracy is a fragile thing is one of today's concerns.
Even the German angry citizen shows that security, integrity and freedom of speech do not automatically lead to the serenity of the electorate.
The pictures from last weekend, on which esotericists and vaguely dissatisfied people demonstrated with organized "Reichsbürgern" and Nazis in Berlin, alarmed a great deal.
A historian like Hedwig Richter comes with her theses at the right time.
The crisis, she says in her recently published book "Democracy. A German Affair", is part of this form of government;
it is a necessary accompaniment to the attempt to reconcile three different goals: equality, freedom and justice.
Conflicts of interest and contradictions were part of it.
"All men are created equal", it was already said in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. But until all adults, regardless of race and gender, property and religion, were actually equal before the ballot box and the law, revolutions, reforms and protest movements were needed .
Richter emphasizes that they usually took place on a national basis, but were often inspired by the transnational zeitgeist - from the marches of the suffragettes at the beginning of the 20th century to the recent demonstrations of the "Black Lives Matter" movement in the USA.
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