HENRY A. KISSINGER

APR 13 1979

Dear Berndt:

I want to thank you again for the honor
of the Carl Schurz Award and for a very
gracious ceremony. Of course, I would
be pleased to have the transcript of
my remarks included in the memorial
publication. I think it would be best
to begin it after my introductory remarks.
I have also made a few minor editorial
changes.

His Excellency
Berndt von Staden
The Ambassador of the
Federal Republic of Germany
4645 Reservoir Road, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20007

Mr. Ambassador, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Before I came up here somebody said to me: remember
there are no chairs and we all have to stand. Of course,
I would like to tell you I don't mind if you kneel.
There are many former members of the State Department who
served under me who will remember our staff meetings.

Then the Ambassador suggested that on the Program I was
inscribed for remarks which for those of you not familiar
with German formality means that I am not to give a
speech, but to confine myself to ten to fifteen minutes.
How Berndt could think that this was possible for somebody
raised on the German language is not absolutely clear to
me, because in my book for example the first verb appears
in the third chapter. I thought, of course, it was very
appropriate for me to speak on this occasion. There are
not many men about whom you can speak who broke into a
jail, which Carl Schurz did to rescue his professor which
shows, I must say, the decline of the academic profession.
If I could ever have been so fortunate as to find any of
my professors in jail I would have stayed in Switzerland,
and Berndt has already pointed out that a man who started
his military career without previous experience - as far
as I can tell, as a brigadier general and was immediately
promoted to major general - would not be a man of mean
consequence. It was said of Carl Schurz that if it were not
for the inconvenience of our constitution he might have
been President of the United States, and when the Ambassador
so tactfully speculated on my political ambition he resorted
to understatement. I use every opportunity to call
attention to a great statesman in the House of Congress,
in the House of Representatives who has introduced a
constitutional amendment to take care of us German-born.

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That amendment has so far achieved three votes in five
years, and so I am looking forward to a long life until
I can benefit from it, but I wish you would all keep that
in mind and focus your attention on that rather than
on the senatorial offices which have been mentioned.
Another thing in reading up on Carl Schurz: it said that
he spoke English without an accent. In Texas they also
think I speak English without an accent, they think that
what I do is a Harvard accent.

But I am honored to have this opportunity to speak about
a man who made such a great contribution to the United
States, and about the many individuals of German origin
who have come to this country bringing their values in
the industry and their dedication to develop here and
to contribute to the freedom and to the progress of the
United States.

Carl Schurz represented a very important tradition in
Germany. In the past century certain images have grown up
about Germany as a result of conflict in two wars, these
are certainly onesided if one regards the sweep of German
history. Germany, located in the center of the European
Continent with very few natural frontiers, open to
influences from the West and the East, and developing
a kind of extraordinary individualism in its political
forms, has in many respects been the barometer of
European politics and the center for many of the fundamental
strains of European values. It was not after all until late
in the 19th century that Germany achieved national unity.
Until then it was divided in literally dozens of
principalities, each with its own special character.
There was, therefore, always in Germany a streak of
universality to relate these many different political
trends to each other, and a streak of provincialism to
give expression to these various political forms. Germany

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has been in it when it was united and attempted to
achieve security by its own efforts. It turned out that
a country located in the center of the continent with
so many neighbors, if it attempted to protect itself
against all of its neighbors simultaneously, was bound
to become too strong for each of its neighbors, and
therefore in a way produced the very thing that it
feared most, the hostile coalition. But it is also
true that when Germany was not united that it tempted
invasions from many neighboring countries. So it can be
said that over the centuries Germany has been sometimes
too weak and sometimes too strong for the peace of Europe.
And yet through the centuries, Germany has participated
and frequently originated many of the political and
philosophical currents of our times. The streak or the
strain of German liberalism which Carl Schurz represented
stood for human dignity and individual freedom and
democratic systems in the forefront of European movements
of similar persuasion. Indeed, before the advent of
Bismarck, if anyone had made a prediction about what was
likely to happen in Germany, it would have been that with
some upheavals Germany would experience the evolution to
its liberal democratic national forms that had been
characteristic in most of the other West European countries.
I stress all of this because when Germany had to re-
constitute a body politic in 1945 it did not have to start
from the beginning; quite the contrary, there was an
authentic national tradition through the centuries that
had stood for the democratic institutions that the new
German Republic was forming at the end of the second
world war and on the ruins of the calamity that had befallen
Germany and all of Europe.

And a tribute must be paid to all those Germans who
maintained these values throughout all the decades when
they were not always dominant, but were never totally

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suppressed. And it is these values which provide hope
today in the relationship between the Federal Republic
and the United States. For Americans it is not always
easy to understand the sensitivity of countries had
a very narrow margin of survival, and therefore also the
peculiar complexity of a nation that now has to share its
territory with another state imposed from the outside,
that is close to the major centers of military power that
can threaten. So Germany inevitably is peculiarly sensitive
both to the challenge of security and to the problem of
peace. Germany knows from its experience that the problem
of peace is one that can only be meaningful if it is
related to certain values, and that if these values are
threatened then the quest for peace can become a blackmail
in the hands of the most ruthless. And precisely because
in Germany today a new political construction was started
only 30 years ago, to be sure based on longer traditions.
As always and as throughout history there is found to be
a peculiar sensitivity to the currents of thought that
exist elsewhere and especially among those that have to
give physical, political, and moral support. It is
important for us to demonstrate our steadiness just as
it is important for Germany to demonstrate its confidence.
We face the problem of all liberal societies of how much
unity we must have and how much diversity we can stand.
And all of our societies now face the problem of fundamental
reassessments about the nature of security in an age of
cataclysm weapons, of the nature of peace in a period of
revolutionary turmoil, of the meaning of progress when all
of the economic or many of the economic assumptions on which
economic progress used to be based are now becoming somewhat
more problematical, when technological progress produces
not employment, but unemployment, and above all how to
relate the individual to the huge bureaucracies that
characterize the modern state, and how to prevent his
alienation from taking the form of a blind refuge in a

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blind faith of which the events in Guyana were such a
horrible example. All of this is a challenge to society's
faith on the principle of human dignity on both sides of
the Atlantic. None of these are problems that can be
dealt with by any of our societies alone, and so those
who came across the Atlantic in previous centuries
carrying their message of freedom, have enobled our
country here, and similarly now we in the United States
have an obligation to demonstrate our friendship, our
steadiness, and our understanding to those in Germany
who are now practicing the values that in a previous
century they had to flee to America to carry out.

Thank you very much.