As a guarantor of basic political convictions, the rock singer Marius Müller-Westernhagen should be treated with caution when looking at his oeuvre.

But he coined an anthem without wanting to: "Freiheit", recorded in 1987, two years before the fall of the Wall, became a reunification hit.

"Freedom - is the only thing missing," he sang, and "Freedom - is the only thing that matters".

That was true and that counted in 1989, and it is true and counts today.

Up until February 24 of this year, many people in our country were perhaps not sufficiently aware how much freedom counts and how little it can be taken for granted, even though the fall of the Berlin Wall was only 33 years ago.

That should have changed with the war of annihilation that the Russian army is waging against Ukraine on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

whether it has changed

And what do we do?

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for feuilleton online and "media".

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The question under which the Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) posed its annual congress also testifies to the political and journalistic intuition that the bard Müller-Westernhagen had in a lucid moment: "What is freedom worth to us?" What the Ukrainians theirs freedom is worth, we see every day.

They fight and sacrifice their lives for it.

That's why, says Federal Economics Minister Christian Lindner, he feels a certain shame when we put the question to ourselves.

Ukrainians have chosen freedom and democracy and are paying the ultimate price for it.

And what do we do?

"We have to check every day what we can do," says Lindner, highlighting the misery: "We" check while the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition and they don't have enough of the heavy weapons,

with which they could expel the invaders from their country.

CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja says he has the impression that Germany, the federal government, is “not doing what needs to be done.

There is no clear line.” A whole country is fighting “bravely” for its survival, its freedom and also for ours.

"Never look away again" is the lesson from history, says BDZV President and Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner in his opening speech and identifies independent journalism as an indispensable guarantor of this very freedom and democracy, which are under threat worldwide.

Here, too, Lindner is on the same wavelength: In the Ukraine, freedom is being attacked with brute force, while here the threat to freedom is insidious, emanating from the supposedly precautionary state.