There it was again, the debate about how it all happened.

"People want to know who got them into trouble," exclaimed Sabine Adler, the longstanding Eastern Europe correspondent for Deutschlandfunk.

The soup metaphor in “Maybrit Illner” was the long overdue tongue-lashing into the hearty, in order to expose the always pleasant, adaptable, slightly high-flown gibberish of SPD chairman Lars Klingbeil.

Christian Geyer Hindemith

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Klingbeil initially aimed for the broad social consensus in order to justify his party's historical willingness to become dependent on Russia for energy.

He also admitted "mistakes" that "everybody" had made and asked Norbert Röttgen, the Union's foreign policy officer, not to "always" talk about the SPD in every second sentence, which was "banal". be.

But Sabine Adler insisted on naming "horse and rider", on a systemic and personal clarification of the Russia-heavy, Russia-blind party history and handed back the accusation of banality to Klingbeil.

She held – as one could understand her – that Klingbeil was de facto sabotaging such an enlightenment, albeit cloaked in rhetoric of guilt.

In recent years, Röttgen has been “the great exception” who warned audibly about German dependencies on Russia in the energy deals.

Contrary to what Klingbeil accused him of, he himself did not deny the fatal role of the Union parties in their government responsibility when he warned of the specific need for clarification for the SPD.

A concept of responsibility that has degenerated into an empty formula

In fact, Klingbeil had little more to say in this regard than that a "new Ostpolitik" was needed that cooperated more closely with the Eastern European states, with Poland and the Baltic States, and came across as less fixated on Russia.

For Sabine Adler, the sheer implicitness of such statements was a provocation that could not be mitigated by Klingbeil's reference to having previously commented on his party's history of mistakes.

In any case, the talk of the "new Ostpolitik" is now back to the party's old hat.

In May, for example, Klingbeil had already tried to use this rhetorical leap into the future to distract from the question of the past, to make it appear less urgent.

At the time, he also pointed out that there had been “a consensus in the Federal Republic for decades that conflicts could be defused through dialogue.

We won't let that be badmouthed, even if I'm currently experiencing that this basic understanding is now being questioned by some."

Wanting to evade responsibility with such rhetorical clichés, at least to generalize them into the vague, without wanting to acknowledge and name one’s own ideological attachments with sufficient clarity, is the opposite of the horse and rider enlightenment demanded by Sabine Adler, like she herself in her book “Ukraine and Us.

Germany's failures and the lessons for the future".

A concept of responsibility that does not ask: Who is responsible for what?, but always wants to be understood universally, degenerates into an empty formula.

Emptied of its content, it tends to be used as a key concept in a strategy of justification aimed at withdrawing oneself from the context of responsibility, if not making it invisible.

Referring to the SPD, Lars Klingbeil encouraged this impression in “Maybrit Illner” rather than counteracting it.

Former ambassador in Moscow: "Putin is not crazy"

The concept of rationality was also clarified in the program, insofar as it was divested of its suggestive corrective function.

It became clear that rationality is not an argumentative sure-fire success.

The simple indication of the former ambassador in Moscow, Rüdiger von Fritsch, that there is not one rationality, but many, demystified political reasonableness as a regulative idea.

That is why assessments that portray Putin as an irrationalist or as a lunatic are beside the point and are not suitable categories for political analysis.

"Putin is not crazy," declared von Fritsch in reference to the Russian president's nuclear threats.

"He's not irrational.

He acts according to a different rationality.

And in that he is very rational.”

Part of this rationality is to threaten when you are weak, but at the same time to subject this threat to "multiple considerations", for example with regard to the Chinese and Indian leadership, which have clearly signaled to Putin that they are breaking such an "ultimate taboo in international politics". “ don't wish.

In this sense, Carlo Masala, Professor of International Politics at the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich, considers it irrational to assume that the risk of nuclear weapons being used has increased after Putin's recent speech, in which the Russian President assured that he don't bluff.

In fact, the suspicion of bluffing is rhetorically strengthened rather than invalidated with every denial.

With that, Masala also agreed with the majority finding in the round, formulated most clearly by Norbert Röttgen: As an option, Putin's weakness is always preferable to his strength.