Jürgen Todenhöfer – all wars outlaw

I stand here. I can’t help it, «with these words Luther refused to revoke his teachings in front of the Worms Reichstag in 1521. “And nobody follows you, go alone” is the name of Jürgen Todenhöfer’s new book. An independent one that follows his conscience. An adventure also can encourage one of the others.

History of a life: Shortly before his 85th birthday in November this year, Todenhöfer probably found the time to review his experiences. Think about which twists were connected with it. As it shaped him that his younger brother committed suicide at 22, he considered how he could never forget the horrors of the bombing of the bombing in World War II, how he became a “truth searcher”. It wore him around the world: from the Middle East to Latin America and Asia. He was traveling in Cuba, Vietnam, China and the USA. And again and again he processes his experiences in stories, so rousing that you don’t want to put the book down. Not everyone, like him, would have gone on board a scrap tires as a very young man in Marseille to come to Algiers. The consequences of the French war against the FLN, the Algerian liberation front, were a shock for him. From then on, the commitment “against the injustices in the world” became the maxim of his life.

The author is frankly tells of himself, it is always about private things, such as a skiing accident in St. Moritz and the subsequent call from Helmut Kohl (until 1990 was Todenhöfer’s Member of the Bundestag of the CDU, he left at the age of 60). You can imagine that he was a bird of paradise for many journalists. But from the outset he was sure about his goals: “War and every form of racism to omit” and “to help to overcome the fatal division of Germany”.

The heart of the book is reports of his travels to crisis areas. Today’s readers may no longer be aware of the means by which NATO member Portugal was doing against the independence movement in Mozambique. Reading the book, one understands that even then a world order war took place. Wasn’t it problematic to get involved with a conversation with the dictator Pinochet? But the author wanted to do something for the release of political prisoners.

Again and again he had difficult decisions, he was also criticized. But what great experiences he had! If you suck everything: Indira Gandhi, Ramón Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev. On foot, he explored Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion there, then met in Moscow with Marshal Achromejew for lunch … Jürgen Todenhöfer shows: You can talk to everyone if you are safe, but also ready to listen.

After the attack of 9/11, he wrote a letter to George W. Bush with the request not to wage a war against Afghanistan, and he asked Mullah Omar, the head of state of the Islamic Emirats Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden. “Bush did not let himself be stopped.” He later understood that war plans against seven other states were about “clearing away former customer regimes of the Soviet Union”, as the Defense Minister Paul Wolfowitz announced long before 9/11.

Western war crimes in Afghanistan, in Iraq, defamation campaigns against everything Islamic, Libya War, the Syrian tragedy … up to the Gaza conflict, which has long stated, the Huthi rockets on Israel and the Palestine question-there are detailed analysis in the book. Todenhöfer was in Iran, Saudi Arabia, in the Congo. He never fell into simple good-evil schemes, with which the official German reporting is still flooded with us today with regard to the Ukraine conflict.

He researched in Kiev like in Moscow, researching what there is in the internal and external interests. He designs a negotiating solution and advocates the stop of all arms deliveries and sanctions directed against Russia. The strange situation that this war is now too expensive for an American president, but the Europeans want to continue it until the last Ukrainian and even risk a nuclear war with Russia is not yet the subject of the book.

Due to risky high loans, Germany should now become warming. Intellectual mobilization for a case that may never occur for God’s sake. It gets dangerous. Jürgen Todenhöfer’s motto gets a new explosiveness: “Live every day like a whole life!”

Jürgen Todenhöfer: And nobody follows, go alone. History of a life. Bertelsmann, 460 pages, born, 24 €.