A Statesman Must Protect Every Life
Dear Mr. Merz, if you cannot find the right words, I offer you these — with no strings attached.
Dear Mr. Merz,
Like you, I come from Germany’s Sauerland region. The Sauerland band Zoff’s greatest hit was simply called “Sauerland.” And an old phrase still echoes there today: “Sauerland is Powerland.” I hope you know both.
You are the Federal Chancellor. So you do not lack political power. Yet I do not see that political power being translated into strength within society. Perhaps you are directing your strength at a society that has very little strength left.
There are reasons for this. We live in a time when many things are changing at once. People are expected to understand new technologies, reorganize their work, navigate digital government services, absorb one crisis after another, and continue functioning as if all of this were no more than a minor software update.
We have much to learn and much to rethink. We could use digitization to make life easier and more humane. But even this transformation requires energy at first — and that is precisely what many people no longer have.
Politics still tends to answer with more speed: growth, performance, competitiveness — higher, faster, further. But an exhausted society does not become stronger when it is pushed harder. It merely becomes quieter, angrier, or sicker.
I have set my remaining power against this exhaustion and, with Creativita, built an infrastructure that I believe to be meaningful: a space where people can learn, find orientation, meet one another, and reconnect with their own strength.
Everyone may judge for themselves whether it serves that purpose. But it exists.
My power to continue carrying this infrastructure alone has come to an end. I say this not as a complaint, but as a fact.
And I wonder when your power will come to an end. Or whether it ended long ago and you simply keep going like the familiar Duracell Bunny because the political program knows only one direction: higher, faster, further.
Perhaps your office demands exactly this performance from you. But I do not wish you even greater stamina. I wish you the courage to interrupt the program.
A society does not need a chancellor who keeps running further ahead of it. It needs politics that gives people room to breathe, space to learn, and time to renew itself.
Perhaps that would be the strongest form of political power: not more pressure, but the conditions in which society’s strength can grow again.
Higher, faster, further is not the way.
The way forward is contentment.
If a Million Friends of Life Spoke
Imagine that one million people were already connected through Creativita. Guests of life becoming friends of life. Imagine many of them meeting in a video call and asking one question:
What would we say today to those who decide over war and peace?
We would not agree on everything. We would come from different countries, carry different stories within us, and have different answers. But on one thing we would agree:
No political goal, no nation, no religion, no border, and no wounded pride is worth more than a human life.
From that conversation, one simple expectation of every statesman and stateswoman would emerge:
Protect life. Not only the lives of those who elected you. Not only life within your own borders. Not only the lives of your allies. Protect every life your decisions can touch.
The Duty of a Statesman
What is the best way to protect life?
By not waging wars.
That sentence is not naive. It only sounds naive because we have grown used to treating war as an almost ordinary instrument of politics.
Nor does it mean that a person or a country under attack may not defend itself. The aggressor and the attacked do not bear the same responsibility. Surrender is not automatically peace. But defense, too, must remain bound to humanity. And every door to serious negotiations must remain open.
The highest form of political skill is not managing wars as effectively as possible. It is preventing them, ending them as quickly as possible, and creating conditions in which people do not reach for weapons again.
War begins long before the first shot is fired. It begins when one human being no longer sees another as human. When fear turns into hatred. When humiliation calls for revenge. When power becomes more important than compassion. When words turn people into enemies, numbers, or “necessary casualties.”
And yet, this inner origin does not mean that everyone bears equal responsibility. A child in an air-raid shelter is not responsible for the bomb. A family fleeing its home is not responsible for a ruler’s strategy. The work of creating peace within ourselves must never be misused to blur political culpability.
Orders are usually signed in secure rooms. People die elsewhere.
Mr. Merz, you cannot order the presidents and governments of this world to make peace. But as Germany’s Federal Chancellor, you can make your voice heard on behalf of life.
And if you cannot find the right words, I offer you the following ones. Freely and with no strings attached. You may use them, change them, or reject them. But perhaps they will reach the human being within those who still decide over the lives of others.
If You Cannot Find the Words
To the Leaders of Hamas and Other Armed Palestinian Groups
We see the suffering, the denial of rights, and the despair of many Palestinians. We see their longing for freedom, security, a homeland, and dignity. That longing is human and legitimate.
But no legitimate aspiration becomes more just through the murder, abduction, or deliberate endangerment of civilians. Terror does not liberate a people. It plants new suffering in the same soil where far too many graves already lie.
When you claim to act for your people, ask yourselves: Does a decision truly serve the people — or does it serve the survival of your own power, your own ideology, and your own hatred?
A child in Gaza does not need a story of martyrdom. That child needs water, food, education, protection, and a future. An Israeli child should not have to fear rockets, abduction, or murder. That child needs exactly the same things.
Stop turning human life into a tool for a political message. The pain of your people does not give you permission to inflict the same pain on others. Courage is not shown by allowing yet another young person to die. Courage is shown by ending a cycle that may sustain your own power while your people pay for it with their lives.
To the Israeli Government
We see the fear felt by many people in Israel. We know that acts of terror, murders, and abductions have left deep wounds. No state should have to accept attacks on its people.
Yet self-defense loses its human meaning when the lives of countless innocent people are reduced to figures in a calculation. Suffering endured does not create a right to inflict limitless suffering on others.
A Palestinian child is not Hamas. An Israeli family is not the Israeli government. Anyone who erases these distinctions extends the war into the next generation.
Get Louisan Delphin (Annette Jäger)’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You possess enormous military power. That is precisely why you carry an enormous responsibility. The true measure of power is not its capacity to destroy, but its capacity for restraint.
Before every decision, ask yourselves: Will it truly protect Israeli lives in the long term? Or will it create new despair, new radicalization, and more people who believe they have nothing left to lose?
Security built on the ruins of another people’s dignity will remain fragile. A lasting peace requires security and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians. Not one after the other. Not according to political sympathy. At the same time.
To Vladimir Putin
Mr. Putin, you cannot rename this war as peace simply by calling it something else.
Russia invaded Ukraine. Responsibility for that cannot be shifted onto history, NATO, the West, or supposed necessities. Political explanations may describe a wider context. They do not erase responsibility for a decision.
Every new order eventually reaches a real human body: a soldier bleeding to death; a mother waiting; a child who will never see his father again; a family whose home disappears.
You are not sitting in the trench into which your decisions send young people. You do not sleep in every basement over which drones are flying. But responsibility travels with every order, all the way from your desk to that place.
True greatness is not measured by how many people fear you. It lies in having the power to leave a destructive path — and the courage to do so.
We speak to the human being within you because we refuse to believe that any human being is nothing more than the worst decision he has made. But that humanity must show itself now: End the attack. Withdraw your troops. Open a path toward peace that is not built on submission.
More deaths will not make any wrong right. They will only lengthen the list of those before whom you will one day have to answer — politically, historically, and before your own conscience.
To Donald Trump
Mr. Trump, few people possess as much political, economic, and military influence as you do. That is why your words carry weight. A single sentence from you can calm or inflame, open or close a door, strengthen negotiations or turn the next show of force into a spectacle.
Peace, however, is not a personal victory and it is not a brand. It does not belong to the man who announces it. It belongs to the people who can live without fear afterward.
Do not measure peace by headlines, photographs, or the size of a deal. Measure it by the number of people who are still alive the next morning. By children returning to school. By families able to return home. By adversaries who can speak to one another without denying each other’s dignity.
A swift agreement can be valuable. But an agreement that merely sweeps the roots of violence under the carpet is often no more than a pause with a press photo.
Do not use your power to humiliate people and declare winners. Use it to stop the killing, enable credible negotiations, and apply international law consistently — not according to friendship or advantage.
Anyone who wishes to be a peacemaker must protect lives on all sides — even when doing so is politically inconvenient and no one applauds.
To Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Mr. Zelenskyy, your country was attacked. We will not pretend that defense is the same as aggression. We will not ask an invaded country to confuse surrender with peace.
We also see that you must make decisions under pressure most of us can barely imagine. Behind you stand people who want to protect their freedom, their families, and their homes.
And still, we ask this of you: Guard what is human even in the midst of defending your country. Every soldier is more than a military resource. Every fallen soldier had a name, a story, and people who loved them. The courage of a people must not become an inexhaustible raw material for war.
Keep every door open to a just and durable peace. Not to submission that invites the next attack. Not to a false peace that rewards the aggressor. But to every serious possibility of saving lives, protecting sovereignty, and ending the killing.
Even a defender must keep asking: What goal are we pursuing? Which actions remain consistent with our humanity? And how will we recognize the moment when a political solution protects more lives than another military step?
We are not asking you to surrender your country. We are asking you, in every decision, to place people before the image of victory.
To Everyone Who Makes Decisions About War and Peace
Responsibility is not distributed equally. But no one with power is exempt from it.
So we ask all of you one simple question:
Would you make the same decision if your own body were the one in the front-line trench? If it were your child who disappeared in the night? If your home, your street, and your family were the first to pay the price of your strategy?
If the answer is no, then you cannot responsibly make that decision for others.
We are not asking you to become weak. We are asking you to discover a greater strength:
The strength not to confuse a wounded ego with a national interest.
The strength to see the adversary as a human being again.
The strength to admit a mistake.
The strength not to mistake negotiations for defeat.
The strength to break the cycle.
War begins within human beings — in fear, humiliation, greed, revenge, and the need to be right. That is where it must also be stopped, before an abyss within becomes a graveyard outside.
We are guests of life. None of us owns this life. No president. No government. No army. No movement.
But we can become friends of life.
Today would be a good day to begin.
A Note from the Author
My name is Annette Jäger. I live here and now.
It does not matter to me whether my texts are read or not. I have already published many texts that went unread.
I also know that the Bible might contain very different texts — and many more voices — if the people living after the Crucifixion had possessed the tools and possibilities for recording, publishing, and sharing that are available to us today.
If we fail to use these possibilities as a chance to make life better, my texts will still remain online. And anyone who has read them will no longer be able to say, “I did not know.”
Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening. And thank you for supporting my work — because, rather inconveniently, I still have to earn a living too.
I love my life. And I am healthy and grateful.
