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How seriously can you, how seriously should you take the coup process in Turkey?
Isn't the coming to terms with the events of July 2016 being instrumentalized by the increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan?
Can the judiciary in his country still be trusted, which has been so largely cleared of independent figures and made a tool of government policy?
Certainly: In all these circumstances it is difficult from the outside to judge with absolute certainty whether those 20 people sentenced to life imprisonment were really rightly sentenced.
But one thing is also certain: we have to take the process of coming to terms with the coup seriously - and what this trauma means for Turkey.
We have to take it more seriously than before.
Turkey's attempts to become a democracy have too often failed due to military coups.
The officers sometimes argued that they only intervened to deter elected politicians from betraying democracy.
But even if there were occasional reasons for this presentation, the military never achieved or allowed a real democracy with their means of coercion.
They secured at least additional democratic rights and influence, which Erdogan only took away at the beginning of his term in office.
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The fact that he continues to successfully refer to the coup to justify his policy shows that this historical experience has a binding effect in deeply divided Turkey that can hardly be compared with any other collective memory of Turkish modernity - the experience that one cannot defend democracy with undemocratic means.
We should pay attention to this experience.
We Germans in particular.
It goes without saying that this argument can also be used against the president himself, who is removing more and more elements of democracy with reference to the alleged will of the people. But those who use this objection must also take it seriously - and with it the Turkish trauma of 2016.