By Ian Wood
I’m writing this in the foyer of the hotel my wife and I are staying at during a trip to the German capital to see our oldest daughter Rosalie, a graphic designer.
Rosalie gave up trying to sell her services to the busy European communications market three years ago and moved home from Manchester to Berlin. It is the best thing she ever did, she says.
Of course Brexit made the difference for Rosalie. It was a decisive moment on a national level, and a decisive moment for millions of British people. Of course it remains a disaster, and will remain so until Labour governments tire of putting up our taxes to cover the gap made by a four per cent drop in our national product. Excuse the bluntness, but this may have to wait until Wes Streeting takes over.
In every other way, though, Brexit has been a life-changing boon for our daughter. She knew she would have to go to Europe to sell her work, and chose Berlin because her friends from her universities in Maastricht and Glasgow gravitated to the city – in many ways the centre of European business. And she has found it to be the most beautiful, cheerful, prosperous, expensive, modern, efficient, bureaucratic, welcoming, and above all OPEN place to live.
Famously, Angela Merkel opened the nation’s doors to migrants during the crisis wave of immigrants arriving in the EU via Turkey. The country has literally accommodated millions of newcomers. Is the national capital cramped, suspicious, crowded, poor and desperate? Not at all. It must be acknowledged that finding a home if you’re someone without a German bank or credit history or ability in languages is difficult. But our daughter had the great advantage of having German friends she had known since meeting them at her Dutch university ten years ago and at design school. Rented flats tend to be passed from tenant to tenant, and landlords often seem to be bypassed.
And Rosalie reports something surprising. I was aware that neo-fascist parties were on the rise again in Germany, though they remain a minority interest. However, Rosalie says that xenophobic sentiment is never difficult to find. I suspect the wave of immigration has had little to do with that – Germans do not appreciate new residents who make no effort to learn the language. Indeed, German citizenship depends on facility in German. And it is easy to be suspicious of people who have nothing.
But the changes Rosalie cannot see are immense. I last came to Berlin thirty years ago when she was a baby. I drove from Hook of Holland with a friend all the nine hours to Berlin, passing the deserted lookout towers, the disused border posts, the remnants of fortifications of many kinds. We stayed in a hotel then that was in the old eastern part of the capital. There was nothing wrong with it, but it belonged to the past. There were drapes and furnishings that could have come straight from the 1940s, and possibly did. And it was easy to see the undemolished offices of Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, and to notice, beneath metal plates bearing the house number on the stone valances above front doors on Unter den Linden, the wingtips of the Nazi eagle beneath.
Today’s Berlin is a different city. It is almost a different city in a different continent. The dead weight of the east has been taken on board, dealt with, invested in, resolved, and reoriented. There is history here, tons of it, of course, and it cannot be ignored, and it is not ignored. You can go to the Stasi Museum. There are many holocaust memorials and observances. There is a huge and striking synagogue on Friedrichstrasse and there are pictures of Israeli hostages on the railings outside and daily observances by campaigners. But all of this incandescent history, at every turn, has been put into the past, where it belongs, and the future is being embraced.
The United Kingdom did not really put our own past, which of course featured Germany, into history in 1975, or in 1993. And then, of course, in 2016, we put our own present and indeed our foreseeable future into the past with a wretched and desperate fanfare. How long will it be before we are shoulder to shoulder once again with our European friends and neighbours? About as long, I fear, as it will take us to accommodate Germany into our own experience, and to deal with it, and reorient it, which we have never ever done.
Until we do, we will have the existence of east Germans fifty years ago. There are too many people in Britain who will settle for this, but there is a growing majority of people who won’t.
