Bible verses adorn the dome of the Berlin City Palace. The Palace Foundation considers this unacceptable. They fear that people of other religions might feel oppressed by this Christian message. That is why they want to put up a separate plaque next to the dome.
The Berlin City Palace was rebuilt from 2013 and inaugurated in December 2020. The real palace had been almost completely bombed in 1945, finally blown up by the GDR rulers in 1950 and replaced by the Palace of the Republic (in GDR jargon “Palazzo Prozzo” or “Erich’s Lamp Shop”) from 1971.
Now, as has been the case for more than a century and a half, a biblical phrase also adorns the dome of the newly built palace. In 1844, the Prussian King Frederick William IV had chosen the word: “There is salvation in no other, (…) but in the name of Jesus, to the glory of God the Father. That in the name of Jesus all the knees of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bow” (Acts IV, 12 and Philippians II, 10).
But now this: The Palace Foundation considers these sentences to be an unreasonable “claim to dominance by Christianity” and wants to point this out with its own text panel. They fear that people of other religions might feel oppressed by this Christian message. That is why they want to put up a special plaque next to the cupola. It will read: “All institutions in the Humboldt Forum expressly distance themselves from Christianity’s claim to sole validity and dominance, which is expressed in the inscription.
Could there be any more self-denial? Could it be any more stupid and cowardly? The Humboldt Forum obviously doesn’t even know its own namesake. Otherwise it would have taken note of the following sentence and put the brakes on itself. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote in his “Letters to a Friend” on April 25, 1823: “Nowhere is this fatherly care of God for each individual’s happiness so truly expressed as in Christianity and the New Testament.”
Once again, the politically oh-so-correct, retroactive exorcists puff themselves up. That they don’t know “their” Humboldt would actually be enough. But the fact that they implicitly deny that the civil and human rights of the modern world are inconceivable without the Enlightenment and without Christianity (!) and Judaism does cast doubt on this institution. However, the clamour about the Bible sentences also suits the Humboldt Forum in other respects: It presents the Ethnological Museum as an apology for colonialism. Kowtow over kowtow to one’s own sin and vanity!
Well, how would you like it, you pseudo-Humboldtians? Perhaps a city palace with minarets and daily calls of the muezzin – as they are now allowed to resound on Fridays from up to 41 Cologne mosques? Will that satisfy you? Of course, Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with a claim to power.
Or do you have other role models? For example, the “culturally sensitive” renaming of kindergarten parades on St. Martin’s Day ( November 11) to “lantern parades”? Or the equally “culturally sensitive” renaming of Christmas markets to “light and star markets”? Or is a Bavarian tourism association a model for you? It had removed the crosses from the summits on brochures advertising a tour of the Alps in Arabic.
No, friends, what you are doing here is worshipping a hypocritical relativism, denying what makes up Germany, Europe and the entire West.
Those responsible for this must be held to account.