An essay on fear, labels, prejudice, the way we respond to those who are different, and the question of how we wish to live together as a society.

I was afraid of dogs.

Not slightly uneasy. Not cautiously suspicious.

Afraid.

And I had my reasons.

I had been attacked by dogs more than once. Almost as reliably as the bite marks came a sentence that will sound familiar to anyone who has gone through something similar: „Don’t worry. He won’t hurt you.“ When he did, the second classic usually followed: „I don’t understand it. He’s never done that before.“ It is remarkable how little comfort a sentence can offer when you have just been bitten.

Gradually, I stopped seeing dogs as individual animals. They merged into a single category. That category had a simple name: Danger.

Then Ronny came into our lives—a little Ratonero Bodeguero Andaluz from Spain. Today he sleeps under my duvet, pressed against my skin. Even on days when the temperature outside reaches forty degrees Celsius, he comes to cuddle first and only later looks for a cooler place on the floor. Water in his fur, however, remains a personal insult. Anyone who tries to cool him down with a garden hose is treated afterwards as though they have committed a serious betrayal of trust.

Ronny never argued with my fear of dogs. He never tried to prove me wrong. He simply made that fear unnecessary—not through arguments, but through trust. It took me many years to understand what had really happened: Ronny was never the exception. The box I had put every dog into was the problem.

Human beings cannot think without categories. Our minds are constantly sorting the world: children and adults, trees and houses, dogs and cats. Categories are not a flaw in human thinking; they are one of its essential tools. Without them, we could hardly make sense of the world around us. The problem begins when we mistake the tool for reality. Then a single characteristic suddenly seems sufficient to explain an entire human being—or at least convinces us that it does.

The German sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer brought many of the resulting forms of prejudice together under the term group-focused enmity: antisemitism, anti-Roma racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the devaluation of people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, or the unemployed. At first glance, these may appear to be very different phenomena. In reality, they all follow the same pattern: the person disappears, and the category takes their place. That has one undeniable advantage: you no longer have to get to know the person.

Years later, I visited the Buchenwald Memorial. There, I encountered the very same mechanism in its most radical form. The prisoners had not simply lost their names—they were meant to lose them. In their place came coloured triangles: yellow, red, pink, brown. A small piece of cloth was enough to turn a biography into a classification, a human being into a category. It is astonishing how little material is sometimes needed to make a person disappear.

Fascism did not begin in the concentration camps. By the time people arrived there, it had already been at work for years. It began much earlier—with the habit of sorting human beings. The neighbour was no longer a neighbour, the colleague was no longer a colleague. The person disappeared behind the label attached to them. Once we see only categories, we no longer have to see people. And that is where fascism becomes truly dangerous.

The Buchenwald Oath is therefore far more than a historical document. Many people read it as the final chapter of a crime. I read it as the beginning of a responsibility. It certainly demands that those responsible be brought before a court of law—not as a call for revenge, but as a call for justice. A society governed by law does not answer tyranny with arbitrariness. But the oath does not stop there. It speaks of peace, of friendship among nations, and it calls upon us to fight fascism together with its roots.

For me, that thought leads naturally to the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. I do not mean that the Buchenwald Oath alone gave birth to the Basic Law—history is never that simple. But I find it difficult to imagine the Basic Law taking the form it did without the experiences, the warnings, and the moral determination that found expression in Buchenwald. The Basic Law does not begin with the state, with borders, institutions, or political power. It begins with the individual. „Human dignity shall be inviolable“—those are its opening words. The very next paragraph declares the German people’s commitment to inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, of peace, and of justice in the world. There are no conditions attached, no footnote saying that dignity depends on nationality, religion, political opinion, usefulness, or good behaviour. Human rights are not granted; they are recognised.

Perhaps that is why I sometimes find our public debates so unsettling. Violations of ordinary laws are rightly prosecuted with determination, yet attacks on the very principles upon which those laws rest are sometimes dismissed as little more than tasteless opinions. A constitutional democracy cannot protect only its individual laws; it must also protect the values from which those laws arise.

When I entered the service of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, I took an oath to uphold and defend the Basic Law. The Deutsche Bundesbahn of that time no longer exists, and neither does my employment with it. But I have never received a letter informing me that my responsibility towards the Constitution expired along with my contract. An oath of office is not a ceremonial ornament to be displayed on special occasions; it is a personal commitment—not merely to an employer, not merely during working hours, but to the principles upon which a free society rests.

That is why, in my mind, three texts belong inseparably together: the Buchenwald Oath, the Basic Law, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first grows out of the experience of fascism and turns memory into a responsibility. The second places human dignity at the foundation of the state. The third carries that same principle beyond every national border. It does not speak of the German person, or the European person, or the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the atheist, the rich, the poor, or the educated. It speaks simply of the human being.

That final thought has stayed with me for years. Roots are invisible. No one trips over a root that has already been pulled from the ground; we stumble over the ones that remain hidden. Perhaps that is one of the greatest misunderstandings of our time. We speak passionately about the fruit: violence, hatred, insults, extremism. All of these matter. But remarkably little is said about the soil from which they grow. Violence is not the root—violence is already the harvest. The roots are much less conspicuous. They have names such as labelling, stereotyping, and dehumanisation. They begin the moment a human being is reduced to a single characteristic—and that characteristic slowly replaces the whole person. The Jew. The foreigner. The unemployed. The homosexual. The disabled person. The refugee. The rich. The poor. Use those words often enough in place of a person’s name, and eventually no one notices that the person has disappeared. Everything is neatly organised. Every box has its label. Only the people are gone.

Years later, I attended a lecture by Helga Krämer-Schäfer. She spoke about labelling, attribution, and the way societies deal with those who are considered different. I still remember my first reaction: I assumed it was one of those distinctly academic expressions that sound impressive inside a lecture theatre but rarely survive the journey into everyday life. Today I think it was one of the most precise ideas I encountered during my studies—not because it is complicated, but quite the opposite: because it changes the question. It does not ask, „Why do people hate?“ It asks: What happens in our thinking before hatred becomes possible? What are we doing when we put a label on someone? What happens when we assign characteristics to a person? And how does a society respond to people who fall outside its own idea of what is normal?

Suddenly, the discussion is no longer about individual groups—it is about a mechanism. That still appeals to me today. Mechanisms have one decisive advantage: once you understand them, you begin to recognise them everywhere—not only in fascism, not only in history, but in your own thinking. That is considerably less comfortable. As long as I keep pointing at others, both my hands remain free. The moment I begin examining the boxes in my own mind, I need at least one of them.

Benjamin Ortmeyer carried that thought one step further. He rarely spoke in moral categories; instead, he showed processes. His question was not simply who had become guilty, but how scholars, teachers, and university lecturers could gradually become part of a system that regarded itself as perfectly rational. That may be the most disturbing insight of all. Fascism was not sustained by thugs alone—it was explained, justified, researched, taught. It found its way into academic terminology, university catalogues, curricula, and examination regulations. Universities were not merely observing events; in many cases, they helped shape them.

That is precisely why Ortmeyer’s work continues to impress me. He does not ask how monsters behave; he asks how educated people come to accept the inhuman as reasonable. That is a far more uncomfortable question—and probably the more important one. His book Myth and Pathos Instead of Logos and Ethos is, in my view, one of the most important works on the history of German educational thought—not because it offers simple answers, but because it refuses to ask simple questions. Ortmeyer examines Eduard Spranger, Herman Nohl, Erich Weniger, and Peter Petersen—not obscure figures on the margins of an academic discipline, but some of its most influential voices. They educated generations of teachers. That alone is unsettling. Suddenly, the question is no longer, „Were there National Socialists at German universities?“ Of course there were. The real question is different: How did those entrusted with shaping education conduct themselves? That changes everything. The focus shifts away from individual perpetrators towards an entire discipline: its lectures, its seminars, its textbooks, its examinations, and, ultimately, the image of the human being it chose to convey. That is far more disturbing than imagining a handful of fanatics. Science is trusted. Teachers are trusted. Professors are trusted. And trust always carries responsibility. Not every academic theory is dangerous, but every academic discipline should ask itself, from time to time, what kind of humanity it ultimately serves.

Through Ortmeyer I eventually encountered Heinz-Joachim Heydorn—not in person, but through his writing. He formulated a sentence that has stayed with me ever since: Education stands in opposition to domination. Today, I regard it as one of the most important statements in modern educational philosophy. Education is never merely the accumulation of knowledge—that is training. Education begins where knowledge gives rise to judgement. And that is precisely what makes it inconvenient. A person who has learned to think independently is much harder to use. They ask questions, they disagree, they examine the reasons they are given, they do not accept authority simply because it speaks loudly or happens to possess an impressive title. Domination prefers something else: predictability, people who function rather than people who question. That is the contradiction Heydorn describes. Education does not make domination impossible, but it makes blind obedience much more difficult—and sometimes that alone is enough to become a problem for every authoritarian order.

During my years at university, I often heard that education should prepare people for the labour market. I never liked that expression—not because work is unimportant, but because it reduces education to its economic usefulness, as though its highest purpose were to fit people smoothly into an existing machine. Machines need cogs; democracies need citizens. The difference is profound. A democracy depends on people who continue asking questions—not on people who stop asking them. That is why Socrates was so dangerous to every authoritarian regime: he commanded no army, he founded no political party, he held no public office. He asked questions. Apparently, that can be enough.

Michael Brumlik entered my life in a different way. His lectures had acquired an almost legendary reputation—unfortunately, partly because they were so crowded that I never managed to find a seat. Sometimes we come to know a person not through meeting them, but through the echo they leave behind. Brumlik brought together educational philosophy and the history of the Holocaust. His question was not simply how memory could be preserved, but what memory is supposed to accomplish. There is a difference. Memory, by itself, changes nothing. It can even become comfortable: we visit a memorial, lay a wreath, deliver a speech, and then return home with the reassuring feeling that we have done our duty. Brumlik was interested in something more demanding: How does memory become responsibility? How does history become part of the present? How does our knowledge of Auschwitz become a standard by which we judge the way we treat one another today? These are questions that refuse a final answer. That is precisely why they remain alive.

Looking back, I am struck less by the differences between these people than by the place where their thoughts meet. Helga Krämer-Schäfer asked what happens when we attach labels and assign characteristics to others. Benjamin Ortmeyer examined the responsibility of scholarship and educational thought under fascism. Heinz-Joachim Heydorn explored the tension between education and domination. Michael Brumlik connected remembrance with human rights education. At first glance, these appear to be different subjects. To me, they never were. They all revolve around the same question: How can a society continue to see a human being as a human being—and not merely as a label?

Peter Himmelmann and Wolfgang Lange carried that question into democracy itself. They distinguished between democracy as a political system and democracy as a human capacity. I still consider that distinction one of the most important insights of democratic education. A country may hold elections, pass laws, and have a parliament—none of that, by itself, creates democrats. Democracy is more than a constitutional structure; it is a way of living together. It reveals itself not only on election day, but on an ordinary Monday morning: at work, in a club, around the family table, in a classroom. It is there that we discover whether people have learned to listen, whether they can live with disagreement, whether they protect minorities, whether they can accept majority decisions without believing that majorities automatically possess the truth. Democracy does not depend upon everyone thinking alike; it depends upon people remaining able to live together despite thinking differently, without denying one another’s dignity.

That is why I regret that Himmelmann’s and Lange’s work is known mainly within universities—not because it is difficult to understand, but quite the opposite: because it deserves a much wider audience. A bus driver needs democratic awareness no less than a professor. A nurse no less than a lawyer. An electrician no less than a political scientist. Perhaps even more so. Because democracy is rarely decided inside lecture theatres; it is decided wherever people meet.

During my own training as a member of an intervention team, I eventually encountered Christa Kaletsch. I have rarely met anyone whose attention remained so consistently focused on the individual—not on ideologies, not on political parties, not even, at first, on the perpetrators, but on those who had become the targets. That perspective left a lasting impression on me. Public debate spends a great deal of time asking questions about perpetrators: Why did they do it? Which ideology do they follow? How radical are they? These are necessary questions, but they have a blind spot. While we analyse the perpetrator, the victim is often left standing alone—not only with their fear, but also with a much quieter question: Who is still standing beside me?

Kaletsch’s answer was as simple as it was profound: Allies. I have always liked that word. It sounds different from helpers, different from rescuers, different from heroes. An ally does not stand above another person; an ally stands beside them. Churches can be allies, trade unions, associations, schools, universities, neighbourhoods, groups of friends, democratic initiatives—in other words, civil society. Not because everyone agrees about everything, but because they agree about one thing: human dignity is not a matter to be voted on.

I still believe this is one of the strongest ideas democratic education has produced. Civil courage does not begin with extraordinary bravery; it begins with the certainty of not standing alone. People who believe they are alone are more likely to remain silent. People who know that others share their values are more likely to find their voice. Perhaps the most important task of democratic education is not to make people braver, but to help them recognise their allies.

Imagine someone being insulted on a railway platform, or in a classroom, or in a football stadium. The first question is not, „Why is the aggressor behaving like this?“ The more important question is, „Who steps across and stands beside the person being attacked?“ That is the moment when we discover whether human rights remain words printed on paper—or become part of everyday life.

At some point I realised that all these ideas belonged together. For years I had never regarded them as separate subjects: the Buchenwald Oath, the Basic Law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Helga Krämer-Schäfer’s reflections on labelling and attribution, Benjamin Ortmeyer’s questions about the responsibility of scholarship, Heydorn’s insistence that education stands in opposition to domination, Brumlik’s conviction that remembrance must become responsibility, Himmelmann’s and Lange’s understanding of democratic awareness, Kaletsch’s allies. They never formed a collection of unrelated ideas; they were different answers to the same question: How does a human being remain a human being?

The Buchenwald Oath answers that question from the experience of those who survived: Never again must a human being be treated this way. The Basic Law answers it through constitutional principle: Human dignity shall be inviolable. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights answers it without recognising borders: not the German human being, not the European human being, not the Christian, not the Muslim, not the Jew, not the believer, not the atheist—simply the human being. Education answers the same question differently: How do we help people to live this truth instead of merely knowing it?

I often have the impression that political debates spend an astonishing amount of time discussing the fruit: violence, extremism, radicalisation, crime. All of these are important. But anyone who looks only at the fruit will never understand the tree. The roots lie deeper. They do not begin with a raised fist; they begin with a box, with the moment a neighbour becomes „the foreigner,“ a colleague becomes „the lesbian,“ a co-worker becomes „the disabled one.“ A human being becomes a label. Everything else disappears almost without anyone noticing. Remarkable, really: the most complex living being we know suddenly fits into a single word. An astonishing simplification. And like almost every astonishingly simple explanation, it is dangerous.

The real purpose of education is not to memorise facts, nor is it to provide ready-made answers. Its purpose is to recognise bad answers before they become dangerous. A box is a bad answer. A prejudice is a bad answer. A label is a bad answer. Education begins the moment we find the courage to exchange those easy answers for reality. Reality is much harder. People rarely fit neatly into boxes. They are contradictory, unexpected, sometimes difficult. In other words, they are human.

People sometimes ask me why I spend so much time thinking about human rights, or democracy, or education, or fascism. My answer has gradually become very simple: because I believe these are not really different subjects at all. They are different names for the same task—not allowing the human being to disappear. Not behind a religion, not behind a nationality, not behind a political conviction, not behind a gender, not behind a disability, not behind a profession, not behind any other label—but seeing them as a person. That sounds almost self-evident. History suggests otherwise.

And then I would rather end with an image than with another explanation. Ronny still sleeps beneath my duvet. Sometimes, while he is asleep, he stretches out one paw, as though he simply wants to make sure that someone is still there. That is the difference: I no longer see a dog. I see Ronny. If we could learn to meet other people in the same way I now meet this little dog, our boxes would lose much of their power—not because categories disappear, for they never will, but because the person once again becomes more important than the label.

That is where the struggle against the roots of fascism truly begins. Not in noise. Not in slogans. But in a quiet decision:

I see you.

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