Enduring freedom, and truth too – on the death of the liberal publicist Richard Herzinger

The number of liberal sharp thinkers and clear-spoken speakers in Germany is small and has never been legion. The journalist Richard Herzinger was one of them. He wrote for various newspapers such as "Die Zeit" and "Die Welt," occasionally for "Weltwoche," and most recently regularly for the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung." He also had a column in "Perlentaucher" and the blog "Hold these truths ." The last entry, from September 24, in English, reads: "Most leftists follow the Russian narrative. But Marx knew better." Herzinger has now died in Berlin at the age of 69.

Richard Herzinger was not one to be deterred by the "new confusion" (Habermas) that spread after the epochal change of 1989. He trusted the whispers about an "end of history" (Fukuyama) just as little as he trusted the theory of the convergence of political poles in the "third way" (Anthony Giddens). As a Germanist, trained in the dialectic of the anti-dogmatic Marxist Heiner Müller ("Masks of the Life Revolution," 1992), he possessed a keen sense for toxic ideological confluences.

In the 1990s, this affected old right-wing tendencies that were now fashionable and re-dressed in left-wing garb. What united them was their hatred of capitalism and "America," of the technological liquefaction of life, and of liberal modernity. Moreover, in the bloodily disintegrating Yugoslavia, the new nationalism was raising its head, and in the mullahs' Iran, Islamism was rising. Together with Hannes Stein, Herzinger wrote the polemic "End-Time Prophets or the Anti-Western Offensive: Fundamentalism, Anti-Americanism, and the New Right" in 1995. It has lost little of its analytical power.

Herzinger was aware of the fragility of open society and liberal democracy, especially since these are designed as fair-weather constructs based on an ideally indefinite, domination-free discourse and eternal prosperity. He preferred to operate as a loner outside of the fashionable opinion bubbles and loved to think unconventionally. His aggressive commitment to a West that was ideologically robust and militarily steadfast was a provocation for the left-wing right-wing milieu.

Herzinger described the inability to tolerate freedom and the temptation of populism, which tends toward totalitarianism, in 1997 in "The Tyranny of Common Sense: A Commitment to a Selfish Society." In 2001, he praised Germany as a "republic without a center," whose lack of a "core identity" was not a shortcoming but a testament to its modernity.

Herzinger was an early and insightful observer of the relevance and significance of political developments in Eastern Central Europe. He followed with both heart and soul how Ukraine, first in the Orange Revolution of 2004/2005 and then in the Euromaidan of 2013/2014, broke free from the curse of its Soviet legacy and embarked on a path to Europe. This ultimately prompted Putin to bet on the military, both ideologically in the name of his Great Russian imperialism and tangibly in the protection of his dictatorship. While many in Germany continued to gloss over the situation after the surprise conquest of Crimea, Herzinger was an early, relentless critic of the Kremlin and one of Kyiv's most consistent supporters. "Europe stands and falls with Ukraine's independence!" was the title of one essay.

Richard Herzinger was both a watchman and a guardian, a visionary and a pioneer. As a keen analyst, a brilliant writer, and a sharp polemicist, he carried "a razor blade in his head" (Hannes Stein). With reason and passion, but also with verve and wit, he advocated for freedom and democracy, as well as against authoritarianism and extremism from both the right and the left. Most recently, he was driven by Donald Trump's attempts to hijack American democracy and the anti-Semitism that had become widely acceptable in the amalgam of political extremism and Islamism.

Richard Herzinger understood the importance of the political center, but he also knew the corrosive effects of political half-heartedness and rampant statism, of premature reconciliation and politically correct feel-good culture. His authority was not the zeitgeist, but truth. And around truth, as is well known, a cold wind blows around freedom, which must be intellectually and emotionally endured.