The Coventry raid has stuck in the collective memory for a number of reasons. It was, as Frederick Taylor says, a “sinister novelty”, the first time in Britain’s war that a smallish city had been subjected to concentrated aerial attack. The results were spectacular. However its importance lies not so much in what happened as for what the raid revealed and what it initiated, as these two books in their different ways admirably demonstrate.

Coventry in 1940 was a complex place. Its medieval core was surrounded by motor industry factories modified to churn out war materiel. The buoyant job market had drawn in many outsiders and the place had a brash boomtown air with a 1,500-seat cinema and a host of pubs where relatively well-paid munitions workers could spend their spare cash.

It was a natural target for the Luftwaffe which, having failed to wipe Fighter Command from the skies in the summer, was now seeking to bomb Britain into submission. The high death rate would allow British propaganda to present the raid as aimed primarily at civilians and therefore an example of innate German beastliness, and that is certainly how it played in the American press.

The fact was that by either side’s rules of engagement the city’s war industries made it a legitimate target. But it was also true that the Luftwaffe hoped to kill large numbers of workers as well — easy enough to do given that many of the factories lay near the city centre, surrounded by residential streets. The Germans believed they were delivering a double blow that would hurt military production and crush civilian morale.

Both sides clung to the belief that air raids could fatally undermine the will of non-combatants to support the war effort. Publicly, the authorities declared that Britons could take anything Hitler could throw at them. Privately, they were not so sure. Considerable resources were devoted to discovering how ordinary people were reacting to events. The quasi-official Mass Observation organisation spent much of the Blitz rushing from city to city quizzing the inhabitants on their feelings. The results were treated with surprising reverence, given that the methodology amounted to little more than a journalistic vox pop.

It was the capital that suffered most at the beginning of the Blitz and Londoners had passed the guts test. But it was understood that the great size of the place lessened the physical and psychological impact of the Luftwaffe’s blows. Coventry had a population of around 240,000 and the intensity of the trauma was magnified accordingly so that as Tom Harrisson, a co-founder of Mass Observation put it, every bomb felt personal.

Both these books describe intimately what the city went through that night and chart precisely the experiences and reactions of all involved. It is a moving story and an uplifting one with numerous examples of  courage and decency and few of bad behaviour.

Once the bombers departed, the population counted the dead and surveyed the wreckage with dumb horror. Their morale had survived one battering. The great official worry was whether it could endure another. Mercifully, the Luftwaffe did not return on the following nights and spirits were raised by a visit from the King. Coventrians got back to work and the place was up and running again in remarkably short order. 

For the authorities this was a huge relief. There were other revelations that were not so welcome. The most important was the realisation that the RAF was incapable of defending British cities from night attacks.

Ultra and other sources had given reasonable warning of the raid. Evacuating Coventry, as Taylor explains in the process of demolishing the hoary old conspiracy theory that the intelligence was suppressed by Churchill to protect the Ultra secret, was simply not feasible. Instead, a plan codenamed “Cold Water” was in place to intercept and punish the attackers and mount counter-strikes against German targets. It failed miserably. The onboard radar with which some of the fighters were equipped was useless and the defenders were unable to locate the attackers even in the bright moonlight. Only one of the 500 attacking aircraft was shot down, and that by anti-aircraft fire. The RAF continental bombing operations also failed to do any worthwhile damage.

The debacle demonstrated the yawning gap between the claims the air force made for itself and its real abilities. Everything was the wrong way round. The German air force was designed to support ground operations, not to mount a strategic bombing campaign. The opposite was true of the RAF. Yet the Luftwaffe was much better at hitting Home Front targets than Bomber Command was.

The Luftwaffe used a system of radio navigation beams — Knickebein and X-Gerät — which guided them to their targets. The RAF at this stage was still often relying on dead reckoning. It was little wonder that British bombers frequently hit the wrong location or that much of their ordnance was dumped in open country.

In time these deficiencies would be rectified. But until navigation and bombing aids improved the RAF had to e seen to do something. In one way the example of Coventry made it easier for it to step down a path which it had already been considering but had held back from for fear of the propaganda consequences. Two weeks before the raid, the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, had directed that Bomber Command should select targets in populous areas. If the bombs didn’t hit the intended targets as they almost certainly wouldn’t, they could at least “affect the morale of the German people”. After Coventry, the light flashed green. A month later British bombers attacked the centre of Mannheim killing 34, all but one of them civilians.

Coventry made a great impression on the RAF top brass. They deduced, rightly, that concentrated bombing with a mixture of incendiaries and high explosives could produce devastating results. But they also concluded that the resulting death and destruction would have a catastrophic effect on German morale. It was a lazy assumption, based on an irrational belief that Britons could take it but Germans could not. It took a long time for its falsity to be demonstrated. By then Coventry had been avenged a thousand times over.

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In times of crisis we are enjoined to keep calm and carry on. But carrying on is the hardest thing to do when there is no correlation between the overriding abnormality and our concentrated preoccupation with very small things. What, in a word, is the point?

I am writing this paragraph in Germany, a land wary of abnormality, in a Ruhr town that has lost its coal, steel, and lately its car production. I am here for the 80th birthday concerts of an Israeli composer, Noam Sheriff, and the 50th anniversary of German-Israeli relations, itself a courageous act by two states to address past abnormality with civil discourse. The town of Bochum, pop. 365,000 and falling, is an unlikely place to celebrate anything. Depression clouds streets of discount shops and kebab houses.

The Ruhr University of Bochum is a showcase of 1960s concrete brutalism that makes London’s South Bank look positively Palladian; it is said to have the nation’s highest student suicide rate. The university concert hall is decked out in a vomitorium shade of Agent Orange crossed with Hare Krishna, and acoustics to match. Bochum, at first sight, has nothing to commend it.

Apart, that is, from a symphony orchestra of the highest quality, led by the Lucerne Festival concertmaster Raphael Christ and conducted for the past 20 years by Steven Sloane, formerly music director of Opera North, in Leeds. Identifying the orchestra as a source of pride, Bochum, nearly bankrupt, has grasped music as a means of salvation. Sloane, the orchestra’s executive director as well as its chief conductor, persuaded the town to let him build a new concert hall and then called on its citizens to help. Out of a budget of €35 million, half has been donated by individuals, in gifts from €5 upwards. 

The hall is being constructed around a mid-19th-century church, its deconsecrated nave offering a long corridor of light in ambient gloom. Every gifted euro cent, every inch of space, is being made to count. Teaching and rehearsal studios occupy the peripheral rooms. When it opens next summer, there will be music in the hall from morning to night, all year round. The contrast with Simon Rattle’s half-baked plan for a half-billion pound vanity hall in the City of London could hardly be more pronounced. As London looks to its bankers, Bochum looks to its bootstraps. No question which has a better understanding of the value of music in an age of uncertainty.

Uncertainty, anxiety, call it what you will: that age has been the lifespan of Noam Sheriff, a composer born into a land without music and a language that was being reinvented from scripture. Mother-tongue is the primary resource of every writer and musician; Sheriff is of a generation whose language is not maternal but sui generis. 

In the land of his birth there was no radio, few gramophones and scarce opportunity to hear music. That had to be invented from scratch, against a querulous, ever-intrusive backdrop. Politically, Arab-Jewish tensions led to wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and on through the course of the composer’s life. Creatively, he was pressured on the Right to reflect national symbols and on the Left to write music of social and educational utility. Stylistically, he was squeezed by the contrary demands of traditionalist and progressive forces. Existentially, he lived in a communitarian cell. There is no refuge in Israel from situational awareness. Bulletins blare hourly through open windows.

To maintain one’s head in perpetual crisis, when every 55 minutes brings bad news and ears are strained to catch the names of victims in the latest outrage, is an achievement for any creative person. Noam Sheriff has achieved eight decades as a composer in Israel, by common consent its most successful and influential musician.

Aside from writing music, Sheriff founded a symphony orchestra, conducted several others and taught, term after term, musicians in many genres, all of whom owe something to his hard-won skill of transcendence — his ability to surmount a state of crisis by the act of musical creation. The audience in Bochum understood that priority without my having to explain it.

They, and I, had gathered to hear a rare performance of Mechaye Hameitim — Reviver of the Dead — a synoptic musical history of the Jews in northern Europe, from ghetto to enlightenment, from Holocaust to exodus. The oratorio, for two soloists, choirs and orchestra, is a tour d’horizon of a dispersed culture, massively emotional and flirting dangerously with the perils of literalism, avoiding cliché here and there by the thinness of a ram’s horn.

What saves the work from its archival mass is Sheriff’s ability to transform well-worn materials into ethereal novelties, a process he effects in part by ingenious harmonies and instrumentation, and in part by means of a natural genius for making us hear things as if for the first time. The parallels that spring to mind are Britten’s folk-tune quotations in Peter Grimes and Bernstein’s in Chichester Psalms, where the melody strikes us not for what it is, but for what it might become.

The response of the Bochum audience was ecstatic. The effect on musicians was greater still. Boys in an angelic Dortmund choir burst their lungs in hallelujahs. A Japanese bassist played her solo as if it were the première of Mahler’s First Symphony. The collective effort was quite without restraint.

For an hour or so, the present world and its woes seemed altogether trivial. The experience of great art shows up the ephemerality of lesser things. A reminder of mortality, it serves as a corrective both to those in power and to those who strive for a better tomorrow. What’s the point? That’ll do.
 

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Over the next generation, Muslims in Europe are certain to multiply rapidly, due not only to migration but to higher birthrates. It is true that Muslim fertility is gradually falling in Western countries, but it has so far remained consistently well above that of non-Muslims. Another factor of growing importance is conversion. A Pew report estimates that Muslims will number “more than 10 per cent” of Europe’s population by 2050, but in France, Germany and England the figure is bound to be much higher. The Islamisation of Europe is no longer a far-Right fantasy, but a real possibility. As the migration crisis unfolds, it becomes more likely by the day.

How will Europe in general, and Germany in particular, react to this crisis in the short and longer run? Douglas Murray examines some of the implications elsewhere in this month’s issue. Perhaps we should consider what happened in recent history when war and other upheavals provoked large-scale migration. In the 1990s, for instance, millions were displaced during the civil wars in former Yugoslavia; half a million sought refuge in Germany.

This influx was small compared to population movements from East to West Germany: some 3.8 million before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, and more than two million in the 25 years after the Wall fell. But all other migrations are dwarfed by the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern and Central Europe immediately after the Second World War. Some 12 million Germans were deported from Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere to Germany. According to Sir Ian Kershaw, in his new book To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (Allen Lane, £30), their welcome was “anything but warm”. In 1949, about 60 per cent of the host population and 96 per cent of the immigrants said that relations were bad. To this day, they have rejected the term “refugees” (Flüchtlinge), preferring “expellees” (Vertriebene). Yet these disparate masses, over a fifth of the then West German population, were eventually integrated. Another 1.4 million ethnic Germans were absorbed between 1950 and the 1980s. In 1988 a new resettlement programme brought three million more ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and Romania. Up to 200,000 former Soviet Jews also moved to Germany.

The background to these migrations was Germany’s ageing and, without immigration, shrinking population. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a rising population meant that emigration was the norm. War and Holocaust left Germany more ethnically homogenous than ever before. Even today, many Germans are in denial about the fact that theirs has long been an “immigration country” (Einwanderungsland). The need for workers to sustain the thriving economy has driven policy on immigration, although only in the last two decades has it been made easier for non-Germans to acquire citizenship. Most new citizens were German-speaking, making integration easier. The new wave of Muslim immigrants may not be accepted so readily: polls suggest that about half of all Germans are sceptical of Angela Merkel’s open door to refugees. In Britain, a clear majority disagrees even with David Cameron’s more limited gesture. Successful integration is built upon common ground. If Muslim migrants are prepared to adopt Western values, their religious and cultural identity will be accepted by host nations. If migrants refuse to adjust to the West, identity will become a battleground.

An underlying factor in the German insistence that all EU member states must accept compulsory quotas for refugees is the need to atone for the Nazi past. In a celebrated radio talk of 1956, the historian Hermann Heimpel coined the ponderous term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “coming to terms with history”. “Only thus will we finally be free, even those of us who will never be dispensed of guilt for the past and its mistakes.” Heimpel, like most of his compatriots, had supported Hitler. He was seeking an elusive absolution that time has not granted even to later generations. Their response to the present influx reflects the fact that the Germans were responsible for Europe’s worst-ever refugee crisis: in 1945, some 50 million people were left homeless. This time, they want to do the right thing by embracing the millions fleeing from the horrors of Syria and beyond.

The problem is not so easily soluble, however — certainly not by bullying unwilling hosts to take in reluctant guests. Syria’s catastrophe, ignored by most of the Muslim world, is hardly Europe’s fault. Not all the new arrivals accept Western civilisation. Should European Jews, for example, once again face anti-Semitism, this time from Islamists? Should Saudi Arabia be funding 200 new mosques in Germany? By sowing the seeds of social conflict at home, the Germans with their good intentions may be paving the road to a new European hell.

The post The Great Migration appeared first on Standpoint.

The most gifted German conductor for half a century is a hero in his own country and a shadow abroad. He has no artistic relationships beyond the German-speaking Heimatland and he is very seldom seen in London, Paris or New York. If Christian Thielemann is an important conductor, and he certainly is, the world ought to be hammering at his door. It isn’t. And therein lies a tale.

Of Thielemann’s gift there has never been a doubt. Anyone who saw him conduct Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth this summer, in the theatre or on video, will have heard in the opening chord exactly how the ending would be shaped four and a half hours later. That instinctual command of Wagner’s structure, his musical language and his inner secret are enough to appear no more than once or twice in a generation.

A musician who knew Thielemann in 1970s West Berlin confirmed to me that his mastery of a score was already evident at 14 years old. His middle-class parents had perfect pitch and his mother noted “seems to be musical” when the boy was just a year old. His teenaged talent, my informant said, was not accompanied by social grace or unusual intelligence, but these things can develop over time.

At 19, Thielemann was taken under the wing of Herbert von Karajan. He rose swiftly through German foothills, was general music director in Nuremberg at 28 and by 1997 was in charge of West Berlin’s Deutsche Oper. Signed up by the New York conductors’ Svengali Ronald Wilford, he seemed to be on the threshold of international celebrity, when things started to go off-piste.

When Thielemann was in London to conduct the UK stage premiere of Hans Pfitzner’s 1917 opera Palestrina, I noted “a certain stiffness in the air” around the Royal Opera House. Some musicians were calling him Hitler, bridling at his abruptness, allied to an unblinking faith in the German genius. His interpretative reverence exposed Pfitzner’s expressive limitations. The work died.

Back in Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, whom Thielemann had assisted at Bayreuth, threatened to sue for slander over alleged remarks about “a Jewish mess”. Thielemann denied using the J-word and the fuss blew over, though not without residue. Thielemann was the only maestro of his generation to promote German musical supremacy over European consensus. He became linked with the political Right. Lately, he has appeared to express support for the anti-immigrant Pegida movement. I say “appeared” since Thielemann’s remarks are couched in ambiguity and equivocation, a technique long favoured by the German far-Right.

Musically, his tastes are ultra-conservative and supremely German. He conducts Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner with the deepest conviction. He shows no interest in contemporary culture.

His work history is turbulent. He quit Deutsche Oper in a huff in 2004 and the Munich Philharmonic in 2011. An administrator says he expects obedience and shares no credit. Another says he is a prisoner of his gods, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Karajan. Advised that he needed a website, Thielemann dismissed the suggestion. “Karajan never had a website,” he declared.

Passed over by the Berlin Philharmonic when they elected a chief conductor this year, Thielemann was compensated with the flimsy title of music director at Bayreuth, his spiritual home. Now 56, he has no known personal relationships and travels everywhere with his mother. A former long-term associate describes him as “the unhappiest man on earth”. So where, you are wondering, is the praise?

A new book, My Life with Wagner, (Weidenfeld, £25) has Thielemann’s name on it. He did not write it himself but approved a distillation of a summer’s Bayreuth conversations with a Wagnerite journalist, Christine Lemke-Matwey. Conductors do not write books to share bathroom-mirror truths, rather to impress us with their moral profundity. Barenboim, Boulez and Furtwängler are among the worst examples. Thielemann, by contrast, is revealing in unexpected and thought-provoking ways, not just about his inner self (which is not terribly interesting) but about a particular form of German amorality that seeks redemption in the objective contemplation of monstrous behaviour. Try this:

Wagner goes to the limits. His music dramas are full of murder and violence, incest, revenge, betrayal, obscenity, sexual subservience, none of them admirable things. Yet we go home after them feeling stronger. By projecting our fears on Wotan and his companions, we learn how life is played out.

Some strands of that thought are too horrendous to pursue to a logical conclusion. At face value, Thielemann is saying that art exists to stop us setting free the beasts in ourselves. We would all love to rape our sisters and burn the house down but, since Wagner does it for us, we don’t have to.

The conductor’s job is to bring the work close to perfection or the world will come to an end, just as Wagner said it would. Here’s Thielemann, again:

Sometimes I have nightmares. I dream that artistic quality is out of tune. I dream that art and music are destroying themselves because the quality has gone wrong. Because far too much that is trivial, empty, superficial and indifferent is rife, and is tolerated. And because none of us can find genuinely creative time to spare any more, either for ourselves or for such great work as Richard Wagner’s.

The world is a terrible place, says Thielemann. Since we can do nothing to improve human conduct, let us observe it from a safe theatrical distance and derive what comfort we can from our personal detachment and innocence. The greatest sin — nightmare — would be to neglect or distort great art, the only thing that might redeem us. Accept that the word is evil. Make good art.

This is not an original thought. Wagner wrote much the same in his long-winded essays. But, taken in a 21st-century context and with the benefit of Holocaust hindsight, it drives a deep shaft into an area of the German psyche where cultural achievement atones for past guilt. Karajan, a master of denial, applied music as a balm of oblivion. Thielemann, his apostle, preaches that art pardons all. Like many maestros, he conveys more than he knows. For this candour, let him be praised.

The post The Meister From Germany appeared first on Standpoint.

The obituaries were respectful, of course: Speer had always enjoyed a good press. But did he deserve it? Or was his reputation for integrity a shameless fabrication? Journalists, academics and clergymen were complicit in Speer’s construction of an image — the senior Nazi who was innocent of the Holocaust but who admitted his guilt anyway — that was convenient for millions of his countrymen, because it enabled them to be economical with the truth about what exactly they too had known or done. Speer: Hitler’s Architect (Yale, £20), a new biography by Martin Kitchen, paints an unsparing portrait of this “hollow man”.

Speer has always been seen as the most decent, or at any rate the least vicious, of Hitler’s courtiers. He presented himself as an apolitical technocrat, young enough to be “seduced” by Hitler. The Führer took a fancy to the young architect who could turn his megalomaniac dreams into reality. Speer finally turned against Hitler and sabotaged the latter’s “Nero Order”, which would have left nothing but scorched earth to the conquerors of the Reich. In an influential postwar report, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith endorsed this self-image: Speer had engineered a miracle as Hitler’s armaments minister, enabling Germany to fight on for years despite Allied bombing. Most historians have echoed this orthodoxy, but Kitchen demolishes it, showing that Speer cooked the books to make his achievement look better.

Above all, Speer was an artist. Educated Germans did not want to believe that such a cultured man — friend of the pianist Wilhelm Kempff and patron of sculptors such as Georg Kolbe — could have been tainted by the regime he served. Surely this cool, elegant, handsome professor was no gangster, let alone a war criminal? Kitchen shows that he was both. Speer owed his career as an architect entirely to the Nazis: lacking originality, he plagiarised Weimar design, from Max Reinhardt’s theatre to the Bauhaus, to create spectacles for the party. His “cathedral of light” at the 1936 Nuremberg rally was really Leni Riefenstahl’s idea and he was eager to flatter Hitler by promising to turn Berlin into “Germania”, a neoclassical monstrosity on an inhuman scale. As Inspector General of Buildings, he soon became rich by creaming off a 2 per cent commission on public building projects.

But there was a much darker side to Speer’s role, both as Hitler’s architect and as minister of armaments. It was he who evicted and expropriated the Jews of Berlin — an audacious crime that had no basis in law and which made thousands of Jewish families homeless — and he who engineered their deportation — of which he later disclaimed all knowledge. It was he who, working closely with Himmler’s SS, played a key role in the creation of the Nazi concentration camp system, initially to provide stone for his building projects, later to make arms. The building of crematoria at Auschwitz  was “Professor Speer’s Special Programme”. Not only did Speer know what lay in store for the Jews in the camps: he was one of the key individuals who made the genocide possible. His own anti-Semitic outbursts may have been less crude than other leading Nazis, but his empire employed millions of slave labourers, thousands of whom were deliberately worked to death. Speer lied about almost every aspect of his role in the Third Reich. But the biggest lie was that he had tried to prevent its worst excesses. Speer had been closer to Hitler, and had more opportunities to stop him, than anybody else. He never even tried. Kitchen argues that he remained loyal to the end because he hoped to succeed Hitler.

The debate about Speer began at his Nuremberg trial, was reignited after his release from prison in 1965 and the publication of his memoirs and Spandau diaries, and has continued since his death. One biographer, Gitta Sereny, interviewed him at great length, but never penetrated his carapace of vanity. Sereny, Kitchen mordantly observes, “spent twelve years of research and took 747 pages to come to the conclusion that Speer had rediscovered the ‘intrinsic morality’ he had in his youth. This was a singularly modest return for all the effort.”

Yet there is no great mystery about Speer. Like his Führer, he was a mediocrity who became a megalomaniac. As Kitchen says, he saw himself as Faust, but more closely resembled the cynical demon Mephistopheles. If Padre Pietro Lavini was God’s Builder, Speer was the Devil’s. 

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Black Earth is the sequel to Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was translated into 35 languages between 2010 and 2014. In Bloodlands, Snyder drew attention to the prevalence of mass murders of civilians by Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in Eastern Europe from 1933 to 1945. It was in this territory that most Jewish victims were killed.

In Black Earth, the author now sets out to help us understand why the Holocaust happened, “a subject that is crying out for explanation”, he said in his 2013 Girard lecture at Stanford University.

His thesis is simple and, for those unfamiliar with recent German-language publications, surprising. Summarily rejecting what he has called the “standard” reasons, he argues that the Holocaust had two causes: Hitler’s “ecological panic” (the fear that German housewives would not have enough food to feed their families in comfort) and the breakdown of sovereign states in Eastern Europe. He asserts that “[t]he German murder of five and a half million Jews, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, and about a million civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations all took place in stateless zones”.

This interpretation leads Snyder to issue his main “warning” for the future. We are in an age of global warming. The resulting desertification of some areas and the flooding of others lead to a risk of failed states. The result may well be another catastrophic struggle to control bread-producing lands such as the fertile expanses of Ukraine. It is in this context that Snyder has been engaged in such active pro-Ukrainian advocacy while it has been under attack from Russia.

Apart from Snyder’s disputable views about present-day European politics, something considered later in this essay, his historical approach is open to criticism on a series of grounds.

First of all, he is too imperious in sweeping aside alternative theses about why the Holocaust occurred. In Black Earth, he ignores some of the main rival interpretations to such an extent that it is necessary to listen to his views on them given briefly in presentations and lectures available on YouTube (for example, at Stanford on March 13, 2013 and at the London School of Economics on March 12, 2014). In his Stanford lecture, he asserted that the Jewish Holocaust is

an event whose explanations as yet have not attained the kind of . . . penetration one would need. After all, if one were to recite the standard reasons that we give for the Holocaust, none of them really can withstand much more than a moment or two of scrutiny.

If it was because of the way that the Germans are, then one would also have to accept that the Germans are not just good at being National Socialists, they were also very good at being Communists and probably the best in the world at being capitalists.

So, an explanation from German nature or from German history even tends to fall apart very quickly.

Snyder proceeds to the ridiculous conclusion from the facts he cites repeatedly that only 3 per cent of the Jews murdered under Hitler were German and that most killings took place outside German soil:

[T]he idea that this was a breakdown in German civilisation . . . and yet most of the Holocaust didn’t happen in Germany; most German Jews survived; most of the perpetrators were not German; the first Jews who were killed had never been touched by German power until the moment they were killed. And so a story that involves things that happened in Germany certainly can be no more than an introduction.

This ignores the fact that many German Jews survived only because they were pressured to emigrate (in numbers far greater than Snyder states) in the opening years of Nazi rule; it ignores the fact that the proportion of German Jews among Holocaust victims was obviously low because the Holocaust embraced almost all of Europe whereas a small proportion of European Jewry lived in Germany; and it ignores the fact that the non-German killers of Jews were normally acting under German command. Germany’s core involvement in the Holocaust derived not from the number of its Jews who perished compared with the number of Polish Jews but from its status as the main perpetrator. That Snyder should deliberately ignore all this in his rhetoric is perverse. Using the same logic, the United States’ role in its military operation against Saddam Hussein deserves “no more than an introduction” because it took place in Iraq and the Normans were only peripherally involved in 1066 in the Battle of Hastings because Hastings is not in Normandy.

The function, if not the intention, of Snyder’s dismissal of any need to inquire into the factors which may have led German citizens into acquiescence with Hitler is to provide the country with an historical free ride.

Snyder is then dismissive of anti-Semitism as a cause of the Shoah:

[W]e fall back then to the anti-Semitism among the people among whom the Jews lived and to be sure there was a great deal of anti-Semitism among the peoples among whom the Jews lived in Eastern Europe. Jews lived for five hundred years in Eastern Europe. This was the demographic homeland of the Jewish people for five hundred years . . . and they lived among a great deal of anti-Judaic and modern anti-     Semitic feeling. However, there’s so much of it that to explain . . . there’s so much of it. It’s so ubiquitous that it can’t really be the explanation. You see, to explain the Holocaust by the presence of local anti-Semitism is like explaining a hurricane by the presence of air.

This reduces what surely should be the core issue of Holocaust explanation to a slick debating point. It also ignores the importance of examining anti-Semitism as a motivation of the German architects of the Holocaust rather than “local” anti-Semitism (presumably among Baltic, Polish and Ukrainian and other populations).

Second, Snyder devotes an undue amount of space, including an entire chapter, to pre-war contacts between Poland’s anti-Semitic government and Zionist Revisionist Jews, the precursors to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel. Poland was willing to train and arm Zionist hardliners so that they could expel the British from Palestine by acts of terrorism, create a Jewish state and enable millions of Polish Jews to emigrate there from Poland. Though this is an interesting and already much recorded episode, it is open to question why Snyder gives it such prominence in a book that sets out to explain the Holocaust. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, some members of the Irgun (later the main Jewish terrorist organisation in Palestine under Menachem Begin) received clandestine training in Poland, but the numbers were small. Crucially, the alliance of convenience between the Irgun and the Polish authorities had few effects and had no significant influence on the Shoah. Certainly, it was not a cause of it.

Third, Snyder returns yet again in Black Earth to a theme he has explored several times before: namely that the Holocaust was about much more than Auschwitz and that millions of Jews were shot rather than gassed. To some degree, he is justified in pointing out that Auschwitz is far better known than other major killing sites. But he greatly exaggerates the novelty of this observation. As Sir Richard Evans rightly states in a highly critical review of Bloodlands, republished in his recent collection of essays The Third Reich in History and Memory (Little Brown, £20), “We know about the events Snyder describes already, despite his repeated assertions that we don’t.”

Snyder’s chapter in Black Earth on “The Auschwitz Paradox” propagates the view that “while Auschwitz has been remembered, the rest has been largely forgotten”. This remark certainly does not apply to many previous works, including classics such as Sir Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy or to Christopher Browning’s and Daniel Goldhagen’s differing and much-discussed interpretations of the mass shootings of Jews in the Baltics in Ordinary Men and Hitler’s Willing Executioners.  Fourth, the book gives only scant credit to historians such as Christian Gerlach, who have already explored much of the territory covered now by Snyder.

Fifth, Black Earth includes chapters which string together moving stories about rescuers of Jews — “The Grey Saviours” and “The Righteous Few”. These are written in a compelling style and they are informative about the tangle of good and evil acts in extreme circumstances. But they seem to be appendages added to create human interest with little relevance to Snyder’s professed explanatory task.

Sixth, this brings us to one of Snyder’s two explanations of the Holocaust, namely that the mass murder of Jews was facilitated by Hitler’s creation of “stateless zones”. It is the only point calling for review. Snyder’s other explanation, Hitler’s “ecological panic” and the danger of another holocaust caused by global warming, wanders too far from an analysis of the mass murder of European Jewry to require discussion here. The author’s concluding chapter about global warming even strays into a critique of United States policy in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Following Hannah Arendt, Snyder stresses the protection offered by citizenship and a passport even in circumstances where the authorities of the issuing countries were in no position to offer direct protection. For example, the Nazis did not venture to murder Jewish Americans who became their prisoners of war. Anti-Semitic allies of Hitler such as Ion Antonescu in Romania protected their Jewish citizens from deportation by the Nazis provided they lived in the country’s undisputed territory. By contrast, Antonescu indulged in the mass murder of Jews living in territories such as Bessarabia and Bukovina (“stateless zones”) which had been lost to the Soviet Union and had then been retaken following the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. In German-occupied France, Jewish refugees from other countries were at far greater danger than Jews who were French citizens. While Hungary remained allied to Germany and refused until 1944 to permit Hitler to deport its Jewish citizens, Jews living in Hungary’s extended territories without Hungarian citizenship were deported in their thousands in 1941 to Nazi-occupied Galicia where they were murdered by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen at Kamenets-Podolsk.

Snyder is undoubtedly correct in pointing to the travails of statelessness, especially in dangerous times. He is realistic as well in stressing that the chaos of war made it far easier to commit mass murder. Jews were in the gravest danger in areas such as the Baltic countries, which were occupied in short succession by the Soviet Union (following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939) and then by Nazi Germany in June 1941.

It is a pity that he takes this valid and important observation too far, thereby falling prey to vagueness, inconsistency and error.

Vagueness results from the different meanings he gives to the concept of “stateless zone”. The core meaning of such a zone is a territory in which sovereignty has been lost and in addition where the apparatus of government and the rule of law have disintegrated. A territory may or may not become a “stateless zone” following occupation by a foreign power. It depends on what happens to its machinery of government and law. Following its defeat in 1940, France suffered occupation but did not become a zone of lawlessness. The analytical problem is that the criteria of statehood and statelessness become unclear. States may have varying degrees of statehood. Thus, in explaining why a higher percentage of Jews were murdered in occupied Holland than in occupied France, Snyder is forced to explain that the Netherlands “were, for several reasons, the closest approximation to statelessness in Western Europe”. The SS, he explains, had greater dominance in the Netherlands. The problem is that Snyder’s reasoning risks becoming circular and thus loses much of its explanatory force. If the degree of statelessness depends on that of Nazi dominance, why not merely conclude that the Nazis killed Jews most easily where they enjoyed the greatest dominance — true but banal?

There are further difficulties. It is not accurate to assert that German murders of Jews all took place in stateless zones. German Jews who failed to emigrate or to hide were liquidated; Germany certainly was not a stateless zone as defined by Snyder at the time it murdered its remaining Jews. That most of them were deported to the East before being killed there hardly affects the issue. In Hungary, the government of Admiral Horthy agreed in March to June 1944 to deport nearly a half million of its Jewish citizens, most of whom were then gassed at Auschwitz. Though under pressure from its senior ally in Berlin, Hungary was not a stateless zone at that time.

Snyder’s analysis also fails to accommodate mass murders by governments of their own citizens, which do not occur in “stateless zones”. Stalin’s starvation of kulaks in the 1930s, the deaths by starvation and violence during Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in China from the late 1950s, the Indonesian regime’s murders of Communists in the 1960s, Pol Pot’s killings in Cambodia as well as all too recent numerous events in Africa are examples.

His finding that the breakdown of nation states was a prime causal factor of the Holocaust leads him to conclude that nation states are indispensable. This, of course, is inconsistent with his avid support for the European Union. The essence of its “European Project” is to weaken the role of nation states. Indeed, when interviewed in Bratislava in June 2015, he accused Russia under the “tyrannical” Putin of wishing to destroy the EU by turning it “into a big mass of nation states”.

Seventh and finally, Snyder’s concept of the character and role of historical explanation is questionable. This is especially the case with application to the Holocaust. He argues (again in his Stanford lecture) that historical explanation “can only work if its arguments apply both to the past and to the present . . . if it brings an event of the past into our own present understanding . . . in the sense that it enlightens our present and may give us a hint about what’s going to happen in the future”.

The danger of this doctrine of “explanation” is that it lends itself to making the Holocaust a tool of contemporary politics with different persons and groups twisting it or invoking it for what will inevitably be unsuitable or even trivial purposes. This danger applies to political uses of memory in many contexts, including Israeli as well as European discourse.

Given Snyder’s self-confessed approach, it becomes relevant to look to his own political attachments and statements as public intellectual for a key to understanding the probable impulse behind Black Earth.

Following doctoral research at Oxford supervised by the Euro-confederalist Timothy Garton Ash, Snyder has become closely linked with a number of pro-EU, anti-Russian bodies. He wrote a book with the terminally ill Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Judt and is married to another anti-Zionist Jewish scholar, Marci Shore. For the past decade, he has led a project at the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) to create a united European history. The institute is funded by the Austrian and Polish governments as well as by George Soros. The stated aim of the institute’s history project is to create what it calls a “synthesis that embraces various points of view”. This must include the input of the Baltic states admitted to the EU a decade ago. According to the IWM: “The new member states generally bring to the EU a common interest in comparative totalitarianism, born out of their experience of especially brutal German occupation practices during World War II, and then of four decades of communist rule thereafter. An experience that is unknown to the West European members of the European Union.”

As Snyder said in a lecture on May 15,  2014 to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, “Europe itself becomes the way we think about the past.”

Unfortunately, this project involves giving weight to the strongly anti-Semitic cultures within some of these newly admitted EU members. I was constantly confronted with this (alongside much personal kindness) when I spent time in the Baltics advising two of their governments on anti-corruption policy on behalf of the EU as part of their preparation for admission as members. The attempt of Snyder’s project to “produce a new sort of history of Europe that addresses subjective problems indirectly, by way of a synthesis” smacks of social engineering rather than free and plural academic pursuit. It asks us to integrate unacceptable aspects of Eastern European culture into our own historical understanding.

In a June 2015 statement in Slovakia, Snyder declared that “[t]he EU is essentially the best way of life ever offered in the history of the West.” In a strongly anti-Russian speech at the European Parliament, he called for a “European model of coming to terms with the past”. The problem he faces is that at least part of this “model” oozes with anti-Semitism and with stated or implied Nazi-Soviet parity of horror.

Apart from his main position at Yale, he is a visiting professor at the College d’Europe’s Warsaw branch at Natolin, an EU institution. After Sir Martin Gilbert and other leading Holocaust scholars resigned in protest from the Lithuanian government’s historical commission in protest against Lithuania’s outrageous actions in pursuing the head of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust commemoration centre, as a possible war criminal, Snyder was one of those who agreed to join. Following controversial diplomatic activity, Yad Vashem itself agreed to rejoin the commission. Snyder accepted a place on the commission after the Lithuanian government sponsored and passed a resolution of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe — the Vilnius Declaration of 2009 — “equating,” as reported by the BBC, “the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in starting World War II”.

Snyder has repeatedly excoriated Russia for aggression against Ukraine, contrasting German virtue with Russian vice. Urging CDU/CSU Bundestag deputies on June 10 to take a more robust line in support of Ukraine, he assured them that Germany’s actions to take responsibility after the Holocaust have been “exemplary” and that Germany is “better than everyone else in carrying out historical discussions”. On June 20, he attended the high-level annual Global Security Conference in Slovakia where he urged an enlargement of the EU to include Ukraine. Reverting to his concern in Black Earth about land, and chillingly oblivious of the throwback to Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum, he suggested that Ukraine has a lot to offer the EU because “it has quality agricultural land which the EU doesn’t have so much of”.

The strength of Snyder’s praise for present-day Germany and his harsh criticism of Russia must add to the suspicion that an objective of Bloodlands, Black Earth and of Snyder’s essays in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere is to shift some Holocaust blame from Hitler to Stalin. In his review of Bloodlands, Evans wrote that Snyder’s account constituted “a narrative that homogenises the history of mass murder by equating Hitler’s policies with those of Stalin”.

Speaking in 2012 at the US Embassy in Lithuania, Snyder insisted that those who suggested he had made such an equivalence either had not read his book or were “animated by bad faith”. His account of the struggles in Poland and the Baltic states between the Nazi and Communist superpowers focused on the interaction between them and the effects of such interaction on local attitudes to their Jewish populations. This, he argued, was different from a comparison between the relative evils of the two regimes. Moreover, though he had not set out to make a comparison, the findings of his book showed that Hitler was worse than Stalin both in the numbers he murdered and in his genocidal intent.

Whatever conclusion is drawn about the purpose and impact of Snyder’s work, it is impossible to ignore the background of his controversial activities in the field of public diplomacy in Central and Eastern Europe.

Snyder has been welcomed by Central and Eastern European governments, which have been promoting highly undesirable initiatives within the EU formally to establish “impartiality” between Nazi and Soviet “totalitarianism” (the term “totalitarianism” itself being a throwback to Cold War thinking). In practice, such an approach has come to involve an almost complete emphasis on Communist misdeeds. In Vilnius, the Museum of Genocide Victims consisted until recently of exhibits devoted to Communist victims alone despite the fact that the building had served as the Gestapo headquarters. Finally, a single basement “Holocaust room” was set up in token response to heavy international pressure.

The dogma of “double genocide” — Nazi/Communist equivalence — was declared in the Prague Declaration of 2008 signed by Vaclav Havel among others and promoted by the Czech government. In 2009, the European Parliament endorsed the same doctrine in a resolution on “European conscience and totalitarianism”. This called for the establishment of a Platform of European Memory and Conscience specialising in the subject of totalitarian history and for the proclamation of August 23 as a Europe-wide day of remembrance of victims of “all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes”. In adding that they were to be remembered “with impartiality”, the resolution clearly hinted that Jewish victims of the Holocaust had unjustifiably claimed favourable historical treatment. The Platform for European Conscience and Memory was duly set up in 2011 in Prague with partial EU funding. In 2012, an initiative of German and Polish politicians led to the creation by the Platform of a legal group to draw up proposals for an international institution of justice devoted to “crimes committed by the Communist dictatorships”. These are merely a few of the initiatives by official European bodies to shift the focus of historical attention to terror under the Communist regimes which governed much of the European continent until 1989-90.

In the UK too, there have been official attempts ahead of David Cameron’s negotiations leading to the forthcoming referendum on British membership of the EU to influence historical perceptions. When the regius professor of history at Cambridge, Christopher Clark, who had written sympathetically about Germany’s role in the events leading to the First World War, was knighted in June 2015, his honour was awarded not on academic grounds but as part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s list for his contribution to Anglo-German relations.

On June 26, 2015, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh paid a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Duke’s mother had been declared a “righteous gentile” by Yad Vashem for her role in hiding Jews in Greece during the German occupation. The dignified and carefully arranged event came right after the Queen’s speech at a state dinner in Berlin in which she went out of her way to put the visit into context. It had been preceded by another royal visit to Dresden (thus implying matching British guilt for bombing the city in 1945). The visit to Belsen would “underline the complete reconciliation between our countries. Germany has reconciled with all her neighbours. I pay tribute to the work of the German statesmen since the Second World War who reinvented Germany and helped to rebuild Europe.”

There have been brave attempts by British political figures such as Dr Denis MacShane to protest against the “double genocide” movement. In Vilnius, several foreign ambassadors, led by the British ambassador, complained to the Lithuanian President in 2010 about “spurious attempts . . . to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania. Which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent in either their intention or result.”

The UK and the West have ample reason to be alarmed about the state of politics within Putin’s Russia and indeed about the serious turn of events in Ukraine, where there can be no reasonable doubt that the separatist forces are Russian or Russian-backed. The quest for reconciliation with Germany is justified, though in my view not yet nearly as complete as many wish to believe if only because of Germany’s refusal to accept that slave labour imposed by the Nazis was illegal. At the same time, Britain has good reason to avoid entanglement with the dark forces at work within several countries in Central and Eastern Europe where implied or overt anti-Semitic statements are becoming all too common. The government ought also to take care to avoid adjusting history to fit diplomatic needs.

In a utopian enthusiasm for a constantly widening European Union which will replace nation-states, too many of its intellectual advocates have identified Russia as the common enemy in face of which they can press for ever closer union. Certainly, much that has been going on under Putin deserves serious alarm. At the same time, the European Union expansionism explicitly favoured by Snyder and others has provided too great an incentive to reinterpret and skew the study of 20th-century historical tragedies. “History wars” are part of a process which is leading us back to the days of the Cold War and to an unpredictable conflict between a dangerous Russia and an expansive European Union influenced by Central and Eastern European member countries seeking vengeance for their sufferings as Soviet satellites.

Any attempt to “explain” the Holocaust which is motivated by the desire to justify this new Cold War risks becoming poor history and ill-considered politics.

The post Hitler’s ‘Ecological Panic’ Didn’t Cause The Holocaust appeared first on Standpoint.

Days after the UK general election, we were once more on the edge of our seats watching the doors of a Lutheran church on the outskirts of Berlin, awaiting the nailing of a proclamation. It was a Monday morning, May 11, and 123 permanent players of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra were being counted into the building and relieved of their mobile phones. It was a 99.6 per cent turnout; only one eligible voter missing. At 10am, the doors were locked.

What happened inside over the next eleven and a half hours may never be fully recounted since the Berliners are a circumspect breed, but when the doors were finally unlocked late that night, the musicians trooped out into uncharted territory, unsure of their future direction.

Until then, it had been a day of frayed nerves. In past elections, the players’ debate was tightly focused and a result was reached soon after lunch. The result was faxed around the world in mid-afternoon and appeared on the following day’s front pages. On both occasions, the vote went against the odds.

In 1990, the New York agent Ronald Wilford nearly fell off his chair on being told that his diffident client Claudio Abbado had defeated the bristling frontrunner, Lorin Maazel. In 1999, I was sent a brace of champagne by an EMI boss after telling him that Simon Rattle had pipped Daniel Barenboim to the post. In the days of record prosperity, chance used to be a fine thing.

But in 2015 the world is online and impatient for news. Journalists hopped from foot to foot outside the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, complaining that there were no loos. An announcement was scheduled for 2pm, as usual. That deadline passed. A bulletin was promised for 5:30.

Der Spiegel flashed a joke page online, declaring victory for the German candidate, Christian Thielemann, 56. It went viral. So did a fake tweet in favour of the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons, 36, purporting to come from the horn player Sarah Willis and unsuspectingly reposted by Gramophone magazine. Both rumours were refuted by orchestra officials, awaiting a puff of white smoke from within the pristine chapel.

By teatime, there had been six ballots with no majority outcome. Thielemann’s supporters, mostly German players of the older generation, had been unable to win enough votes from younger, more globally-minded musicians who were fighting for Nelsons. Thielemann’s detractors argued that he was too right-wing for cosmopolitan Berlin; his supporters responded that Nelsons, though gifted, was an unknown commodity, newly installed at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and possibly not available in time for Rattle’s departure, in mid-2018. Both sides were at such partisan fever pitch that the possibility of a compromise candidate — Leipzig’s Riccardo Chailly — was barely considered.

Afternoon turned to evening. At five minutes to eight a final vote was called and a result was confidently expected outside. Whispers emerged that Nelsons was close enough for a majority to clinch it, only for the Thielemann faction to threaten a backlash. As light faded, the musicians trooped out of the church, divided and disheartened. The election result — a no-result — was completely without precedent, an outcome as rare as a tied score in a five-day cricket match.

Confusion reigned. For an hour or so it seemed the musicians might sleep on it and reconvene for a final ballot next morning. But there was no room in the schedule. At nine on Tuesday morning they were due to start rehearsing three concerts with the Estonian Paavo Järvi. The earliest free date for a new election was in December.

Apologists swung into action. Peter Riegelbauer, the players’ co-chairman, said there was plenty of time to reach a consensus. Haggard and tieless, he maintained that the mood of the discussion had been “very constructive, cooperative and friendly”. The aftershocks did not confirm that assessment.

One insider said that Rattle had done well to preside as long as he did over a pack of strong wills pulling in multiple directions. His successor would face insurrection unless he was elected by a clear and large majority, which appears presently unobtainable.

That leaves the Berlin Philharmonic in the worst of all possible worlds. No conductor of quality will want to work with a divided orchestra. Several — Dudamel, Nézet-Séguin, Barenboim, Jansons — ostentatiously withdrew in the election run-up. By December, Nelsons might declare himself unavailable.

The orchestra cannot function without a music director. It needs a face on the masthead to obtain the world tours and cinema audiences that are the bedrock of its claim to be the premier performing ensemble on earth. There is no talk — yet — of forming a coalition between Thielemann and Nelsons, putting the German in charge of core repertoire and the home audience and the Latvian on the banners as ambassador to the future and the rest of the world. Stranger things have happened, but dividing the job would blur the brand and Thielemann is an aloof character who does not like to share.

The other option would be for the Thielemann opposition to crumble and accept the inevitable. If that were the case, it would lead to profound changes in the orchestra — a Thielemann trusty as the new general manager and the departure of several player opponents. Thielemann would not bring peace to Berlin, let alone prosperity.

All of these elements conspired to make the Berlin Philharmonic election, unfinished like some of the best symphonies, a compelling spectacle for watchers at the church door and beyond. One of the world’s major brands failed at these hustings to secure its future and will fumble in the months ahead to maintain self-assurance.

That’s why elections are such fun. The powerful can be humbled and the rest of us receive assurance of the glorious unpredictability of any event that involves two or more members of the human race.

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In a world where art, politics, and cultural heritage meet, Germans had been desperately looking to find someone to guide them through the challenges as well as the misery and despair of positioning German art in a global perspective, while also answering the eternal question of what “German” really ought to represent.

The site where the new international centre of culture is supposed to rise from the sandy grounds of Berlin is named after the Humboldt brothers, Wilhelm and Alexander: 19th-century polymaths prominent among the intellectual founders of the modern museum. MacGregor can be trusted to honour this tradition and to refresh it for our age, at least judging by his track record of organising hugely successful exhibitions that are elegantly highbrow, maintaining an intellectual standpoint while opening it to a wider audience.

As any cultural transplant will know, an outsider’s perspective is often more interesting and relevant than that of the insider. Having just lost an Olympic bid to Hamburg, and still unable to open its long-planned international airport, Berlin will be thrilled to welcome this deus ex machina from London, while Germany will be lucky to have him to shake up its zeitgeist a bit.

This spring, all one can see is a building site in the area by the River Spree where the Humboldt Forum will be built. The new building will stand on the site of the old Hohenzollern Stadtschloss, demolished to make room for the Palace of the Republic, the GDR’s parliament. The latter, too, was demolished in 2008, despite a campaign to keep this brutalist building with tan-coloured windows open as a monument or even an art space. Indeed, the hedonistic post-Berlin Wall period saw quite a few exhibitions and parties there.

So Berliners feel rather emotional about this site of mixed heritage that combines Prussian elements with those of the Enlightenment and the sense of a happy ending to at least one chapter of 20th-century German history. The area is now part of a carefully reconstructed historical centre, with the grand Unter den Linden boulevard on one side, and the museum island just around the corner. It is almost the geographic middle of the city and the reminder of a more self-assured pre-Nazi Berlin. The city today is never just beautiful, as Paris or certain parts of London can be.

The planned building itself is not without controversy. Designed to be a mixture of the old and the new, three of its facades, as well as the courtyard, will be direct reconstructions of the old royal palace, while the rest of the building will have a modern design. This composition invited a good amount of ridicule at the time — it was subject to a vote in parliament in 2007 and sparked a huge debate. Some newspapers objected to rebuilding the royal palace and hosting a heterogeneous collection of “world cultures”, which they saw as a clichéd pastiche of the Enlightenment spirit. Nonetheless, the plan has gone ahead and most Germans are now reconciled to the notion of a building that should symbolise the cosmopolitanism of Berlin at its best.

In theory, the Humboldt Forum is a spectacular idea. But it will take the right intellectual architect to pull it off. If he gets it wrong, the whole thing may look like an expensive exercise in PR. We will have to trust MacGregor to use his experience at the National Gallery and the British Museum to avoid that trap and get down to the detail of creating a world-class cultural institution. After all, the Humboldts — who investigated everything under the sun, from remote continents to exotic languages — believed in the importance of precise observation of detail and understanding the world as a whole. Not for nothing did Alexander von Humboldt entitle his last and greatest work simply Kosmos.

It is quite a twist of fate that this chunk of German intellectual history now seems so appealing, and that this area of Berlin feels relevant again. The Humboldt Forum may serve as the manifestation of the fact that, after the horrors of the past, for 21st-century Germans cosmopolitanism is de rigueur. I for one will be happy to see my home town rendered less provincial in this manner — even if it takes a Brit with German sensibilities to make it happen.

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“Dead Flowers”, 2010, by Peter Schmersal

Now 62, Schmersal comes from post-industrial Wuppertal but after German unification he moved to Berlin, where he has a studio in Prenzlauer Berg. The Man in a Brandenburg landscape evokes the sandy plains of the region surrounding the German capital. Legs planted firmly on the ground and hands in pockets, this almost life-size figure seems to represent the more confident Germany of the new century. But Schmersal is also fond of smaller, more delicate homages to favourite painters of the past such as Goya or Ingres. His first major London exhibition at Flowers East, in the bleak but bohemian district of Shoreditch, also includes landscapes, nudes and self-portraits, and runs until April 4.

“After Ingres”, 2013, by Peter Schmersal

“Cherry Blossom”, 2013, by Peter Schmersal

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Last month saw the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. I have studied how the Second World War plays a role in today’s memorial culture. But not much can prepare you for the real thing and the twisted ways in which some aspects of history seem forgotten from one moment to the next.

It was only last autumn that I first visited Dresden, on a spontaneous trip with a friend, the city being just a two-hour drive east. I was struck by the city’s beauty, its Florentine charm and slightly shabby grandeur, a pleasing change from the grey, spread-out architectural mess that Berlin now is for the most part.

It is striking how little of the bombing and the ensuing firestorm is visible today—this part of the city’s past seemed oddly eradicated, at least for the visitor to the recently renovated city centre, despite the fact that more than 25,000 civilians were killed  there, many of whom burnt to death. Dresden’s atmosphere seemed prosperous and welcoming, just as  the local accent is a soft and warm one.

Then, only weeks later, it all shifted, seemingly like a bolt from the blue. Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) began to march through Dresden’s baroque and rococo streets. The movement had been founded only in October by a fortysomething man (who would later pose as Hitler and then resign as leader) and quickly attracted thousands of supporters, peaking at 25,000 at one point in early January.

 Exactly what their agenda was never quite materialised: anti-immigrant, with more hidden, xenophobic and sometimes openly racist undertones, it seemed to straddle a peculiar line between a minority of far-right racists and middle-class citizens concerned about the sudden influx of refugees and the rise of Islamism.

The mainstream quickly raised its concerns about the movement. Chancellor Angela Merkel accused its leaders of promoting hatred, the Council of Jews in Germany called the movement dangerous, the floodlights of Cologne Cathedral were switched off in protest against a Pegida march, the biggest German newspaper, the tabloid Bild, launched a petition. In short, the country was uncharacteristically swift in reacting with strong public opposition.

Just where did Pegida come from? Germany, as is often quoted, is now the world’s second most popular destination for immigrants, and Germans have long been praised for their open-mindedness. Had this come to an end? If so, why? Is it a bout of German angst—in this case a return of the vague fear of being overwhelmed by immigrants that the country experienced in the mid-1990s, or, worse, a return to the sinister times of the early 1930s? Is it a right-wing movement putting its finger on hitherto neglected issues or just an eruption of prejudiced idiocy from a bunch of frustrated East Germans?

Commentators were at a loss to explain it, although  I should add that Pegida claimed that a cartel of politicians and media figures is misleading the public over the true state of the country.

This is precisely the unique feature—and danger—of Pegida: it seemed to thrive on some wavering, dark discontent far more sinister than the loud extremist messages that were screamed at its weekly gatherings. Opinion polls show this ambivalent stance: a survey conducted last December by the magazine Der Spiegel showed that 65 per cent of respondents felt that the government did not respond adequately to their concerns about asylum policy and immigration, while 34 per cent observed an increasing Islamisation of Germany. But a different survey suggested that 67 per cent considered the danger of Islamisation exaggerated.

Germany, it seems, just hasn’t found a way to digest the idea of immigration. It seems unlikely that Dresden’s famous opera house and castle will soon be “Islamised”; the fear is an entirely irrational one—and one that feels a bit complacent, too. The country thrived on its giddy, post-unity and happily nationalistic self for too long; now it is time to adopt a stance towards immigration that even Pegida supporters can understand.

History shows how a twisted ideology can quickly turn into a political force. Even if this seems unlikely to happen in today’s Germany, the anniversary of the bombings of Dresden highlights that it did once—and not that long ago.

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