This is a suicide note.

A farewell letter to the country in which I live.

I'm getting out of this country.

A country whose government gives a standing ovation to the cries for help of people who are plunged into the horrors of a war of annihilation, while every day, every hour, every minute new rockets, projectiles, grenades, bombs children and old, sick and fleeing, students * inside and doctors, meet convoys with medicines and food, which are financed by German money.

Cynical is a sharp word.

But any other would be less accurate.

I am getting out of this country because my influence on its politics is small.

A spineless politics.

Who governs a rich country but is unwilling to give up any of that wealth, even though that wealth has also been amassed in greedy cronies with a business partner whose repressive totalitarian tendencies would have been seen years ago, the warnings of its Eastern European and Baltic neighbors long before could have heard years ago.

I'm getting out of a country whose government can't bring itself to stop funding a war criminal.

I don't want to be an accomplice anymore.

I do not wish to be complicit in this genocide being committed against Ukraine.

I no longer want to pay Russian bombers.

I grew up afraid of the atomic bomb, all my life I live aware of the horrors of World War II that emanated from our soil.

I don't want to live to the end of my life knowing that I helped finance another war.

I have not seen the collapse of a socialist dictatorship to watch a dictator trained and educated by Soviet intelligence once again terrorize Europe.

I do not understand (and I no longer support) the hesitation of this country's government, a hesitation that began even before Putin's invasion and has changed little since, this paltry postponement of decisions that are more urgent than any other Decisions of the last decades, this procrastination that makes me despair

this clinging to economic arguments at the cost of human lives.

I don't think we can afford that.

War is already affecting us more than temporary energy shortages will.

“Have you considered emigration?” Max Frisch once asked in one of his now famous questionnaires.

"Yes," I would answer him today.

"But it's no use.

I grew up here, I have a German passport.

I'm already involved in all of this.” One day I will be held partly responsible when people ask why this war in 21st century Europe was possible, why it was so terrible, why it took so many lives.

And why, when we knew what was going on, when we were better informed about it than at any time in history, why did we continue to leave this war criminal's gas tap open.

Why we cared more about our own well-being than that of those whose bravery we gave a standing ovation as they stood under the bombs.

All I can do is

"Rávik, ceased Germans".

Antje Rávik Strubel

is a writer.

She won the German Book Prize last year for her novel “Blaue Frau”.