On March 3, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his twenty-minute inauguration speech as the new President of the United States with these words: “First, let me reaffirm my firm belief that the only thing we need fear is fear itself.”

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Roosevelt's dictum became world famous.

It would be a misunderstanding to interpret it as an expression of a reality-denying repression of the dangers.

Roosevelt was aware of the dire state of the world.

It was scary.

After the stock market crash, the United States was in a severe economic crisis.

Unemployment, loss of prosperity - and nowhere a way out.

The world situation beyond America was no better: Hitler had just come to power in Germany.

And in the Soviet Union, the dictator Josef Stalin announced economic successes of the socialist planned economy, which also deeply impressed many Western intellectuals.

It was uncertain whether liberal democracy and the market economy would still be able to deal with the crisis.

Possibly the future belonged to autocratic competition:

Hard road to freedom from fear

In this situation, at the beginning of his government program, Roosevelt does not mention his economic tour de force to save the economy, the "New Deal".

He also does not lecture on democracy, separation of powers and liberal values.

Rather, he goes into the field of psychology, talks about the strong feeling of fear, which he admittedly removes any merely subjective mood.

Roosevelt himself personally represented the call to resist fear.

After a privileged childhood, he contracted polio, a disease that disabled him in 1921, at the age of 39, and confined him to a wheelchair.

This did not detract from his courage in life.

If you want, you can think of the German politician Wolfgang Schäuble to understand

Free people should not be afraid of fear, as the sociologist Heinz Bude writes in his essay on the "Society of Fear" based on Roosevelt: People who are afraid pay a price, the surrender of their self-determination.

"Those who are driven by fear avoid the unpleasant, deny the real and miss the possible," says Bude.

Certainly, fear is a phylogenetic survival mechanism that alerts us to real dangers.

But the fear of fear makes people dependent on seducers, caregivers, and gamblers.

Therefore, as Roosevelt must be understood, the first task of state policy is to take away the fears of the citizens.

It is important to see the connection between fear and freedom.

For Roosevelt, freedom from fear was one of the four basic freedoms that he declared in the middle of the war to be inalienable.

People have the right to freedom of opinion and belief, and they should be free from poverty and fear.

That sounded utopian at the time.

In 1948 these four freedoms were included in the preamble to the UN Convention on Human Rights.

For Thomas Mann, Roosevelt was a hero and a symbol of the “final victory” of democracy at a time when it was most endangered.