Forgotten and erased from our memory?

Today, on 17 June 2025, I remember a holiday that was celebrated in Germany during my childhood. On the morning of 17 June, an enormous protest broke out across the former GDR that would later go down in German history books as the 17 June Uprising. At the start of the early morning shift, the workers of large companies in particular went on strike and marched together in demonstrations. In the days leading up to the uprising, most protesters were not yet aware of the national dimension of the protests. In fact, according to recent research, strikes, rallies or acts of violence against state officials or institutions took place in the former GDR in well over 500 locations. The popular uprising of 17 June was crushed by the Communist Party, working in close collaboration with the occupying troops of the USSR.

There is something unreal about holidays. They come and go, and are then forgotten forever. The holiday of 17 June no longer exists. Other dates, however, are never included in the register of public holidays: for example, Saturday 26 April 1986, the day on which reactor unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant blew up and contaminated half of Europe in the following week. Or Friday 11 March 2011, when the Japanese Nuclear Water Reactor in Fukushima was destroyed by a tsunami and collapsed. To this day, there is still a 30-kilometre exclusion zone around both cities. Many thousands of people lost their homes. Shouldn’t we at least give a thought every year to the uninhabitable ruins that we human beings leave behind on Earth?

In Mozambique, they celebrate 25 September as Independence Day, marking the date when the country broke free from the former fascist colonial power, Portugal. And, in Portugal itself, 25 April is celebrated as the day of the Carnation Revolution, marking the beginning of democracy. But wait a minute. Are we really celebrating the beginning of democracy on 25 April – or are we rather celebrating the end of the dictatorship that lasted for 48 years? Let’s not forget this long period of oppression that dominated the lives of the Portuguese for two generations and turned them into silent collaborators of the dictatorship… And one more thing, let me ask you this. Has there ever been anything like a reappraisal of fascism in Portugal? Were the victims rehabilitated? Were the perpetrators punished? What happened to the henchmen of the PIDE secret police? Or was a blanket laid immediately over the entire 48 years and the children who asked about earlier events were told afterwards that there was nothing more to ask? Well, what does our democracy live from? From questions and answers? From open conversations, from the fact that children sometimes ask agonising questions in class that have to be answered by competent contemporary witnesses. Democracy thrives on open discussion. Or?