Thursday, December 11, 2014

Ralph Giordano is dead: Our country loses a passionate Democrat – STAR

D he writer and militant journalist Ralph Giordano is dead. He died Wednesday at the age of 91 years in a Cologne hospital, his family and his Kiepenheuer & amp; Malevich confirmed. Giordano, who had narrowly escaped the son of a Jewish Holocaust, was considered one of the most prolific fighter against anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism. Most recently, he was mainly referring to a fundamentalist Islam position.

“With Ralph Giordano our country loses a vociferous and militant Enlightenment, a dedicated writer and a passionate Democrats,” said President Joachim Gauck , Giordano was a staunch opponent of all forms of anti-Semitism. He had “reminds us all of the responsibility that comes from the past for the future.”



“Daily horror of the Nazi dictatorship”

Giordano was on March 20, 1923 born in Hamburg. He had the Italian name of his father, who was of Sicilian descent. As a teenager, he was interrogated three times by the Gestapo, tortured and imprisoned. Given the threat of deportation of the mother, his parents, he and his two brothers hid in early 1945 in a cellar full of rats. “I wake up one day to another and think:” Giordano, you really live “,” he told even as an old man. The fight against right was his life’s theme. “All books come from the depths of my biography.”

In all, he wrote 23 books, many of which were bestsellers. His most famous work was later filmed novel “The Bertini,” in which he tells the story of a Jewish family during the Nazi period. With this book he has “millions of people out haunting and aware of what was the Nazi dictatorship for Jews in Germany for a daily Horror” was said Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas (SPD). Culture Minister Monika Grütters (CDU) said: “. His cautionary and valiant voice is Germany sorely missed”

criticism of construction of the central mosque

Other successful titles were “The to be second or guilt of the load, a German “and” If Hitler had won the war. ” A lot of attention his autobiography “Memoirs of a survivors can”. Giordano also made numerous television documentaries for WDR – since 1972 he lived in Cologne

There he developed in the last years of his life to a sharp critic of the construction of the central mosque.. The violence of his attacks brought him much criticism. He said: “I have punctured something that has long been superseded by the policy.” He criticized an “inflation of mosques” and a “Muslim parallel society”

struggle for democracy

The investigative journalist Gunter Wallraff -. The in Cologne, close to Mosque lives – said: “Even if he Islam appeared in his criticism of perhaps sometimes overdone, and absolutely, it takes one voice of his life experience, if other false sense of tolerance – nothing is sometimes different than ignorance or cowardice – ducking. “

We saw something similar probably Giordano himself, who regretted some too sharp formulation in retrospect, but at other times missed the passionate commitment to the liberal order. At a ceremony on his 90th birthday, he said last year: “Whether Christian or Muslim, left or right, creditors or atheist, who damaged democracy that findeth to do it with me, This is my political testament..”

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