The day after October 7, when I saw the Brandenburg Gate illuminated with the colors of the Israeli flag, I experienced a feeling that is difficult to explain rationally. It was as if that image had awakened another image, one that belonged to a Germany of more than eighty years ago, when the same monument stood beneath banners bearing the swastika.
I do not ask anyone to believe in reincarnation, metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. These belong to the realm of philosophy, religion, and personal experience, not historical proof. Yet I cannot deny that, whenever I write in German for a German-speaking audience, I often feel an inexplicable familiarity with that country and with that period of its history. It is as though fragments of a memory surfaced from somewhere beyond my own biography.
Perhaps they are nothing more than the product of imagination. Perhaps they are symbols created by the unconscious. Or perhaps they belong to what many Eastern traditions call the continuity of the soul through successive lives.
This idea is not foreign to German intellectual history. Hermann Hesse devoted much of his work to Indian philosophy, Buddhism, and the spiritual search that transcends a single earthly existence. The fascination with the East, with ancient traditions, and with questions about the destiny of the soul has always had a presence in European culture.
Even within National Socialist Germany there were figures, such as Heinrich Himmler, who cultivated highly unorthodox beliefs and developed ideas connected to ancient symbols and historical figures. These beliefs, which were often distorted and placed at the service of a destructive ideology, nevertheless demonstrate how powerful the human search for origins, identity, and transcendence can be.
Within my own reflections, two names often emerge: Ernst Kölle and Albert von Berrer. I cannot demonstrate that they have anything to do with me. They may simply represent symbols through which my mind tries to understand history. But if they continue to "speak" to me, their message is not about war, revenge, or nostalgia for the Third Reich.
Their message concerns Germany itself.
For decades, Germany has carried the enormous moral burden of the crimes committed under National Socialism. That responsibility cannot and should not be forgotten. Historical memory is an essential safeguard against repeating the darkest chapters of the past. Yet memory should not become a permanent sentence imposed on an entire nation, preventing it from moving forward.
Since 1945, humanity has witnessed many other wars, genocides, persecutions, and humanitarian tragedies. History did not end with the fall of Berlin. The challenge of our time is to preserve historical responsibility without reducing the identity of a people to the crimes of a single regime.
Sometimes contemporary Germany appears to search for its moral and political identity through very strong symbolic gestures. These gestures may be interpreted in different ways, but they reveal a country still seeking the right balance between remembrance, responsibility, and the confidence to look toward the future.
Aristotle taught that virtue lies in the mean, avoiding excess in either direction. This ancient lesson remains surprisingly relevant today.
If those impressions are more than imagination—if they truly represent echoes of lives lived before—then they cannot exist merely to awaken memories. Memory, by itself, serves no purpose unless it becomes wisdom.
Their meaning, as I understand it, is not to reopen the wounds of history or to seek revenge for the past, but to encourage Germany to rediscover the best of its own tradition: its culture, its philosophy, its scientific spirit, its sense of discipline and responsibility, and its capacity to contribute to European civilization.
A Germany that is strong without being aggressive, conscious of its history without being imprisoned by it, and capable of inspiring Europe not through domination but through example.
Europe does not need a Germany trapped by its past, nor a Germany that forgets it. It needs a Germany capable of leading with confidence, responsibility, and moderation together with the other European nations.
The European Union remains one of the greatest political experiments in history. It can become a true reality only if it becomes not merely a union of institutions and financial interests, but a genuine community of peoples.
An Europe capable of cooperating with all its allies while preserving its own political, cultural, and strategic autonomy. An Europe that is not built only by elites and economic mechanisms, but by citizens who recognize themselves in a common destiny.
If there is indeed a mission entrusted to each generation—or, for those who believe in reincarnation, to each soul returning to the world—it is not to revive the conflicts of the past, but to transform memory into wisdom and history into a foundation for a more balanced, peaceful, and human future.
