Balliol College Chapel, Oxford, 7 November 2013
Service and Commemoration of Adam Von Trott
Message from members of Adam von Trott’s family
Read by John Wilbourn, Treasurer of the Adam von Trott Memorial Fund
Dear friends and supporters
My sister, Clarita Müller-Plantenberg, and I, Verena Onken von Trott, send greetings from our family and wish to participate in spirit, as we cannot be present in person today.
We feel admiration and gratitude towards the committeeof the Adam von Trott Memorial Fund, who organized this event, and we are sure our mother, Clarita von Trott, who died this year, would have felt the same.
Our father, Adam von Trott, was very fond of England and especially of Oxford. I imagine him as a young man in his early twenties, sitting in the place where you sit today, about 80 years ago between Oct.1931 and July 1933. He had already finished his law studies and PhD in Germany and was eager to learn from the British democracy and the labour movement. He was aware that fundamental socio-economic changes had to take place to build a new Europe with no more ‘fratricidal war’ and ‘fratricidal peace’, as if all Europeans belonged to one family.
As I was told, Oxford students at that timeshared this wish, and they built what my father believed to be a ‘European friendship’ - bridges between Britain and Germany –and this is continued by the initiative of today's seminar and the Adam von Trott Scholarship.
Later our father and his friends in the German conspiracy against Hitler's totalitarian regime thought there could be a combined European cooperation to prevent war and overthrow the Naziregime, perceiving the German resistance as a natural partner to European democracies. However their vision and mission at the time was only understood by a few who could feel and plan beyond nationalism, like Willem Visser't Hooft, the head of the World Council of Churches, Bishop George Bell and David Astor, who tried to help the German resistance.
We feel that the legacy of our father and his friends, their discussions, and the documents which they left behind, can still inspire us today, when considering the future of Europe. They reflected and planned for the rule of law, self-government, decentralisation, minority rights, and policies that set the framework for economic power and provide the space for free and responsible citizenship.These are values for which we still have to struggle.
We hope that the outcome of your seminar will also reach outsiders. May it help to overcome prejudices and increase understanding between Britain and Germany in Europe.