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“They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” said Talleyrand of the Bourbons after they’d returned to power in 1815 and continued as blithely as before the Revolution. But what might he make of Angela Merkel if he were alive today? At the weekend, the German Chancellor said that the EU (and thereby Germany) would be “losing something” with Britain’s departure; but although this shows she has learned something, she still appears also to have forgotten rather a lot.
Frau Merkel knows that, as Sir Humphrey Appleby explained to his minister, Jim Hacker (Yes, Minister), one of the reasons the Germans went into the EU was “to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race”. And, indeed, in September 2015, as the refugee crisis mounted, Merkel was in full redemptive mode, urging Victor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, to comply with the Geneva Conventions.
Last year, too, she quoted the Geneva Conventions at President Trump in a telephone call about his immigration ban. But has Merkel drawn the right conclusions from her country’s dark past? What Trump said in reply is not known, but Orban spoke plainly: “There should be no moral imperialism”.
What’s so puzzling about German kriegsschuld (war guilt) is that it often seems to lack any sense of obligation to those who paid the heavy price of delivering Germany from their Nazi evil and then, again at much cost, shielding them from its consequences. Notably any obligation to Britain. One of the most remarkable episodes in that 51-year story (from the outbreak of war in 1939 to the reunification of Germany in 1990) was the “Berlin Air Lift”, or as the Germans themselves have it, the Luftbrücken(air bridges), whose 70th anniversary it is this year.
At the end of the Second World War, US, British, and Soviet military forces divided Germany into three zones of occupation as agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 (Stalin conceded to France’s having a zone too, though their forces were few, but it would have to be drawn from the US and British zones). Berlin, though far inside the Soviet-controlled eastern Germany, was also divided into four occupation zones. As the wartime alliance began to turn sour, however, Stalin tried to subvert the Allied zones of Berlin in the hope of absorbing them into Soviet-controlled eastern Germany.
The two and a half million Berliners across the four occupation zones faced deep privations. Allied bombing had reduced the city to rubble, shelter and warmth were scarce, the black market dominated daily life, and starvation loomed. (Rations in some parts of Germany fell to as little as 900 calories per day.)
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