Die Zeit publishes a comment by Nobel Prize winning author Günter Grass on theme of "liberation". "I experienced May 8 in Marienbad, as a seventeen year old dummkopf who believed in the final victory right up to the end. So mine was not feeling of liberation, but of total defeat." The feeling of liberation only came slowly: "When the anniversary of the end of the war is celebrated in fine speeches as a day of liberation, this can only be retrospectively, especially as we Germans did little or nothing for our freedom."

But Grass, taking up the recent "critique of capitalism" launched by Social Democratic Party chairman Franz Müntefering, sees in today's economic context only the illusion of freedom. "What has become of the freedom given to us sixty years ago? Is it only to be calculated in stock market takings? The highest values enshrined in our constitution do not primarily serve our civil rights, but rather the market economy that likes to call itself 'free', with low prices to suit today's neo-liberal mindset. But the fudged, fetishistic term 'free market economy' conceals the anti-social behaviour of banks, industrial associations and stock market profiteers with difficulty."

[From SignandSight]