Nightfall, Berlin

"Dass war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

"That was only a prelude; where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people."

Heinrich Heine, 1821[1]

September 2005: I am alone, walking around a huge, open-air urban museum, with darkness descending and cold setting in. Berlin has been re-built in the years after the wall, and I am visiting the city for the first time and expecting to find it cold and clinical, a city that has covered over the traces of its disturbed past. Instead, there are fissures and cracks everywhere; the job is only half-complete, and no one seems to mind. In the daytime, the reconstructed German parliament building looked imposing, a projection of the brash confidence of this reborn country. At night, in the eerie quiet of the almost deserted city centre, it looks faded and fragile. There is hardly anybody around.

August 1914: Kaiser Wilhelm stands on the balcony of the royal palace, announcing that Germany is now at war. The cheering crowd stretches all the way back to the Brandenburg Gate, over a kilometre away. The kaiser tells them: ‘Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur noch Deutsche!’ Only Germans… These words echo through the years that follow. The Germans have a mystical sense of their collective power, the result of many centuries of division and weakness. Leaders that have been able to unify them, have also achieved great victories against overwhelming odds: Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck. For the first time, the Great War unites the German and Austrian empires against a motley alliance of France, Russia and Britain. But now the story goes wrong. Four years of bloody sacrifice end in retreat, starvation and humiliating surrender. The search is on for a scapegoat to prove that collective German power was not really defeated, but betrayed by an enemy within.

January 2016: I teach my students that the German Jews were persecuted under the Third Reich for historical reasons, to do with Christian belief, legal discrimination and patterns of migration. But they were also simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In Germany, the Jews are concentrated in sufficient numbers to provide a credible scapegoat, but not enough to be able to organise collective resistance. I ask my classes to estimate the percentage of the German population that identified as Jewish in 1933. They always guess somewhere between 15 and 40%. The true figure is smaller than 1%.

May 1933: The revolution has begun, and the time has come to purify German culture, eliminating all ‘undesirable’ reminders of a corrupted past. In Berlin, the purification is led not by the Nazi high command, but by enthusiastic young students, who raid their university library and remove any examples they can find of ‘decadent’, ‘un-German’ literature. The books are thrown onto a huge bonfire in the open square outside, whilst a crowd of about 40,000 cheer and sing patriotic songs. Goebbels is present to give a brief speech: He tells the students – ‘you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed’. It is raining.


September 2005: It’s getting really dark now, and I am starting to get lost. I have walked through the Holocaust Memorial, and back up to the site of the old royal palace. The Bebelplatz, where the book burning took place, is a hundred yards away. On the other side of the bridge stand the city’s museums, huddled together in solidarity, wounds tightly bound. I sense a crowd gathering behind me. They would like to apologise, to explain, to undo, but are silenced by the vivid evidence of their own destructive power. What’s done is done. I turn around. There is no-one there.

November 1938: Kristallnacht – 'the night of broken glass'. All over Germany, synagogues are attacked and many are burnt to the ground. Jewish shops and property are ransacked, and some Jews are killed. In some cases, locals and police intervene to prevent violence. Some join in, encouraged by anti-Semitic propaganda, opportunism, or a combination of the two. The vast majority, however, are silent observers, either in the streets or from behind their living room curtains. Later, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, ascribes the violence to the ‘healthy instincts’ of the German people. However, the government is inundated with reports that the public are less supportive than expected, with some expressing anger at the extreme measures taken. Hitler bans further reporting of the events of Kristallnacht in the national press. The Jewish population are made to pay the costs of repairing the damage: a total of one billion Reichsmarks.

June 2015: When you peer inside the memorial at the Bebelplatz, squinting to see the rows of empty shelves, it is just possible that you catch a glimpse of your reflection on the glass panel below you. The architect has a subtle message here: we ourselves are no different from those who burned books and buildings, or stepped aside to allow the destruction of an entire race living in the heart of civilised Europe. But on a summer’s day in Berlin, the warning is easy to miss. The city shines with a new optimistic glow – it is ten years since my first visit, and in the intervening years Germany has grown in confidence and political clout. The city is still a museum, but the presentation is slick and more detached. Except at night, when the Berliners and the tourists clear out, and the ghosts are allowed to walk.

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[1] The quotation appears next to the installation by Micha Ullman, below. Heine was a German Jew, writing about the destruction during the Spanish Inquisition. His  works were amongst those burned in Berlin on 10 May 1933.

Micha Ullman's memorial to the book burning in the Bebelplatz.
 

A Part of the Main? Britain's Relationship with Europe

'No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main’

John Donne, Meditation XVII

Nobody delivers the rhetoric of ‘our island story’ better than David Cameron. Its heroes are many and varied: the signatories of the Magna Carta; William Shakespeare and John Milton, whose writings contributed to a rejuvenation of native identity and culture; Admiral Nelson, Winston Churchill, and all those captains of industry that forged the industrial revolution. All this achieved by a small island nation, and all because we ploughed an independent furrow, above petty European squabbles. However, as a new year dawns, the Prime Minister is sparing no effort to secure the concessions from his European counterparts that will enable him to campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union in 2016. Why is Cameron, an avowed patriot but otherwise a politician with few discernible ideological principles, going to such lengths to secure a deal that will keep Britain in the EU?

There are a couple of different explanations available. For those who wish to leave, Cameron’s approach looks treacherous; like so many generations of politicians before him, he appears to have been ‘bought’ by Brussels, and is now desperately attempting to deceive the British people into voting to remain in the EU, against their better judgement. Polls certainly show significant hostility in Britain to certain aspects of the European project, especially unrestricted migration and perceived interference with our national laws and customs. Nevertheless, I think our attitudes to Europe are more complex. The majority of people seem to (grudgingly) accept that British interests demand close economic and political ties with our near neighbours. From this perspective, David Cameron can be seen as providing a useful public service: the illusion of renegotiation will provide reassurance on the issues that people are concerned about, providing them with an excuse to be able to vote with their heads rather than their hearts.

So why do we need the excuse? The answer is that we are still in love with a Sinatra-like sense of our own exceptionalism. The story goes back a long way: 950 years ago this month, the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, was crowned: his doomed but heroic defence against the Norman invasion ten months later is still a source of inspiration for nationalists. Since then, other moments of defiant resistance have joined the historical narrative that celebrates England’s independence and self-reliance. If the narrative could be summed it an image, it would surely be that of Elizabeth I’s Armada portrait of 1588. As the battle rages around her, the queen sits confidently and defiantly alone, vindicated by the victory of the English fleet over the Spanish invaders, her finger pointing towards colonial ambitions to the New World.

The Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, c.1588.
George Gower. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK.

We are not the only country that is in love with our own national myth (ask the French about liberté, egalité, fraternité), but a closer look suggests that, while art and literature may celebrate the iconography of isolationism and separatism, in reality we have never allowed ourselves to become detached or excluded from continental diplomacy. Even before the Norman Conquest, British rulers were vitally connected with the power struggles of mainland Europe. Harold Godwinson was half-Danish, and spent part of his life in rebellion against his half-Norman predecessor on the English throne, Edward the Confessor. Over the centuries, not much has changed. Far from being a moment of national vindication and triumph, the defeat of the Armada was in reality a short-lived success. Elizabeth I spent the next decade fighting an unglamorous and unheralded military campaign to prop up her Dutch and French allies in order to slowly wear down the Spanish forces. Another potent anniversary this year will be that of the Battle of the Somme, begun primarily to save the French army from annihilation at Verdun. Our island story is paradoxically European, and, while the British have traditionally celebrated our independence, we have tended to make foreign policy decisions that bind us to, rather than detach us from, mainland Europe.

Of course, all this may change in 2016. Expect a good deal of anguished wrestling between head and heart in the run-up to the referendum, and fluctuating opinion polls as a result. And expect the British people to decide, once again, that while Europe may be a problem, she is our problem too.