Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung
Speech by Federal Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel on 16 February 2019 at the 55th Munich Security Conference
Presidents,
Esteemed colleagues,
Esteemed colleagues from the parliaments,
Mr Ischinger,
Ladies and gentlemen,
And, of course, allow me also to welcome the Minister-President of the Free State of Bavaria. I believe that
Munich is an excellent city to host this conference. Bavaria’s strength is on display in a very special way
here. We have other beautiful cities in Germany, but Munich is taking centre-stage today.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are marking the 250thanniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth in 2019.
Alexander von Humboldt lived on the threshold of industrialisation. He was a scholar and traveller who was
driven by the urge to understand and see the world as a whole, a passion that yielded a great deal of
success. His motto, as his Mexican travel diary from the year 1803 reveals, was “everything is interaction”.
About 200 years later, in 2000, after researching the hole in the ozone layer and its chemical interactions,
Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen concluded that we were embarking upon a new geochronological age. The Ice Age and
the interglacial period are over, and we have now entered the Anthropocene. In 2016, this definition was
subsequently adopted by the International Geological Congress. This means that we are living in an age in
which humankind’s traces penetrate so deeply into the Earth that future generations will regard it as an
entire age created by humans. These are traces of nuclear tests, population growth, climate change,
exploitation of raw materials, and of microplastics in the oceans. And these are but a few examples of the
things that we are doing today.