Berlin, Germany
March 8, 1999
http://www.dradio.de/dlr/sendungen/glocke/index.html
The Liberty Bell
The Liberty Bell in construction
Sundays * 12:00
" I believe in the sacredness and dignity of the individual. I
believe
that all men derive the right to freedom equally from God. I pledge to
resist
aggression and tyranny wherever they appear on earth. "
Sunday after Sunday, exactly at 12 noon, the Liberty Oath can be heard
together
with the sounding of the Schoeneberg Council Building's Liberty Bell over
Deutschland
Radio Berlin. For the RIAS listeners, this tradition goes back to October
24,
1950. On that day, on the Day of United Nations, the Liberty Bell was
dedicated
in a solemn ceremony, and since then they have been listening in daily at
6
p.m.
and also every Sunday at noon to the Berlin broadcaster's program, which
is
introduced
with the above cited quote.
Until his death on August 10, 1961, Walter Franck, one of the renowned
character
actors of the Berlin Schiller Theater, spoke the words of the text to the
chiming
of the bell. After that the voice of Wilhelm Borcherts, another well-known
actor
at the Schiller Theater, was heard every Sunday until October 1993. In
October
1993, we heard the voice of Thomas Hollaender, first in the RIAS Berlin
program,
and since January 1994, on the Berlin program of the then newly founded
DeutschlandRadio.
At the beginning of this long radio tradition stood Lucius D. Clay,
the
former
American military governor of Germany. After the end of the Berlin
blockade
(April
26, 1948 to July 29, 1949) and the decisive air lift which he coordinated,
he
initiated the "Crusade for the Freedom of the Committee for a Free
Europe"
for the financing of the bell. The bell, cast in England, went on a
journey
through
26 states in the USA. On that journey, the donors, 17 million Americans,
signed
the "Liberty Oath." Today the list of signers is still kept in
the tower
of the Schoeneberg council building. In composing the text for the Liberty
Oath,
the "Free Europe Committee" made use of concepts from the
American Declaration
of Independence of 1776, which addresses the belief that all people were
given
certain rights by their Creator which included "life, liberty and the
pursuit
of happiness." In the formulation of their text, however, the "
Free
Europe Committee" included a self-imposed obligation from the right
of
the
people to do away with a form of government which "proves itself
detrimental
to these goals and to take a stand against tyranny and attacks on
freedom."
The Berlin Liberty Bell is a copy of the famous Philadelphia Liberty
Bell.
That bell has been hanging since 1753 in the local State House, and in
1776
its
ringing announced American independence. The Berlin Bell contains an
inscription
which is different from its model:
"That this world under God shall have a new birth of freedom." -
"Möge
diese Welt mit Gottes Hilfe eine Wiedergeburt der Freiheit erleben.
"
- Words which relate the meaning spoken by Abraham Lincoln in his speech
on
the
Gettysburg battlefield in 1863 at the turning point of the American Civil
War,
which was waged, not least of all, for the abolition of slavery.
Liberty Oath and the Liberty Bell: a symbol of liberty that has any
amount
of history behind it, not just radio history, and which brings back
memories:
the memory that after the Second World War it was the Americans who helped
in
the founding of the "Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor" /
"Radio
broadcast in the American Sector" (RIAS) to again make liberal
journalism
and free information possible. And when we recall that the Berlin Liberty
Bell
rang in German unity on October 3, 1990, then the circle is complete in
the
programming
mission of Deutschland Radio to promote "solidarity in a united
Germany"
in keeping thoughts of liberty alive.
Martin Baumgaertel
|