THE COURAGE OF THE UNFINISHED

SPEECH BY MAYOR MICHAEL LUDWIG ON THE OCCASION OF BRUNO KREISKY'S BIRTHDAY

In Kreisky's thinking and will - as he himself put it - „the courage to leave things unfinished“ played a major role. This had nothing to do with hesitation or half-heartedness. On the contrary, the courage to leave things unfinished meant that ideologies and social structures were not a self-contained, final system for him and certainly not the final stage of history. It was a commitment to the new, to gradual reform, a commitment to the verifiability of political decisions in the sense of Karl Popper. And it was a demarcation against dogmatic or even totalitarian positions.
Every political and social system is unfinished and must remain unfinished. Because what people do can also be changed for the better by people. The freedom to do so must not be taken away from them.