Copyright: Goethe-Institut/Archives
11 June 2013
The Voice“I truly prefer to sit at my desk and travel far-away zones and lands through books,” confessed Walter Jens in the Berliner Zeitung on his 80th birthday. In earlier years, though, Jens travelled to far-away places himself – to Italy, for example, or Greece, one time to the United States. On many of these occasions the rhetorician, philosopher and writer travelled on the invitation of the Goethe-Institut (as here in Glasgow in 1969). This was particularly appropriate because in the young republic that had not yet found itself Jens, both a dedicated and polemical democrat, stood for an image of Germany that the cultural institute always sought to convey. And as “Germany’s voice” he trusted in that which was always foremost for the Goethe-Institut: the power of words. Walter Jens passed away this Sunday. A nation has lost its voice.
