Final respects to Hermann Scheer

Berlin, 1 November 2010 

Some 500 friends, political companions, fellow activists and guests came together in Berlin on Monday at the atrium of the "Museum für Kommunikation" in remembrance of the late Hermann Scheer.

"Hermann was an extraordinary politician who has brought together technology and ecology, economic policy and industrial policy" said Bärbel Dieckmann, chair of the German development agency "Welthungerhilfe" and former mayor of the city of Bonn in her speech. The world had lost in him its most important champion of renewable energy.

Ms Dieckmann spoke in place of Erhard Eppler who had to cancel his participation on short notice because of illness. Quoting directly from Mr Eppler's notes she also said:  "Hermann was a man of courage - of such great courage that he was hardly aware himself of his own courage." Mr Eppler's text ended with the sentence: "We have lost a man who will not even be forgotten by those who would like to forget him."

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, head of the SPD parliamentary group, Hermann Scheer had been a member of for thirty years, called Scheer an "intelligent firebrand", who was one of the first to realize that energy policies have a peace policy dimension to them as well. The social democrat Scheer had always understood his political action on a global scale.

Addresses at the memorial service were delivered also by the members of the EUROSOLAR executive committee and of the WCRE committee of chairpersons Wolfgang Palz, Michael Eckhart, Preben Maegaard and Mechtild Rothe as well as by the publicists Franz Alt and Mathias Greffrath and Peter Becker, publisher of the "Zeitschrift für Neues Energierecht" (journal for new energy). Counting among the many politicians - men and women alike - who attended were Wolfgang Thierse, Petra Pau, Andrea Nahles, Ralf Stegner, Joachim Poß, Ulrich Kelber, Andrea Ypsilanti, Renate Künast, Jürgen Trittin, Gesine Lötzsch, Gregor Gysi and Simone Peters.

At the end of the ceremony Irm Pontenagel said: "EUROSOLAR will live on. As will the World Council for Renewable Energy. Then we will launch a Hermann Scheer Foundation because this name exemplifies his life's work." All people who wanted to honour Hermann Scheer should make the title of his book
"Der Energethische Imperativ" their motto.

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