Justice should be done, even if the world ends in the process.

That's what a dictum says from old Europe, handed down as the motto of Emperor Ferdinand I, the brother and successor of Charles V. The motto was formulated in a spiritual environment in which the powerful could still believe that they could save the otherworldly through wrong actions enrage the lord of the world and thus accelerate the end of the world that is due sooner or later anyway according to the advice of this lord.

However, one can assume that the doomsday scenario of the sentence was understood in the sixteenth century mainly as the most drastic rhetorical affirmation of the moral-philosophical idea that what is just must be done without fear of unpleasant consequences.

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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Since the twentieth century it has been technologically possible for a single human act, without the intervention of divine wrath, to bring about the end of the world in which humans can live.

On the evening of March 28, 2022, the sentence of the absolute priority of justice over the continued existence of the world was put into the room at the workplace of one of the most powerful people on earth.

What the world must do now

Mariana Sadovska, a singer and composer from the Ukraine who was born in Lemberg in 1972 and has lived in Cologne since 2002, did not present the motto as a quotation, but formulated it in her own words in front of Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz as the quintessence of her conviction of what the world must do now to help their country.

Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth had invited to a reading by writers in the series "Culture in the Chancellery".

Sadovska's performance was added to the program at short notice;

she should recite a poem from her homeland and say something about it beforehand.

Instead of talking about the poem, she talked about the war.

She accused NATO of letting the fear of nuclear retaliation prevent it from establishing a no-fly zone.

She did not describe the fears as unfounded;

On the contrary, she shares it herself: "Of course we are very afraid that everything will escalate and there will be a nuclear war and the whole world will perish." However, that was not the end of the weighing process for her.

"But we can't let a criminal like Putin get away with it just because he's threatening to use the atomic bomb." deflected from the ethical conclusion she was suggesting to us.

It's not blackmail

"If the world ends because we are helping Ukraine," she said from the lectern where the host had spoken a few minutes earlier, "then that's how it's supposed to be!" Because of the audience, who gathered at Corona intervals on the steps of the magnificent stairwell, she was shocked because Sadovska said unmoved what her appeal was leading to.

We allow ourselves to be blackmailed by Putin: that was their accusation against us.

The fear is justified, but it is unworthy that we let it determine us and make ourselves a victim.

When ambassadors of Ukraine, official or unofficial, now use all means of rhetorical exaggeration to demand that Germany do more, many Germans see it as moral blackmail.

Sadovska's speech cannot be classified in this way.

Blackmail is an unlawful threat of a delicate evil.

Nobody is wronged when they are presented with the maxim of their own actions and the question of whether they really want to follow them.

Mariana Sadovska did not receive an answer from the Chancellery.

That would have been inappropriate, too, unless someone wanted to agree with her.

For the time being, we'll have to live with the fact that Sadovska and her compatriots are talking to our consciences.

And we have to endure that she did not appeal to our sympathy with a word, but made demands of justice, that is, spoke in our own interest.