This, I think, best summed up my dad’s attitude to his native Germany and, to some extent, my own. Written by a now long-forgotten Right-wing German-Jewish thinker named Hans Joachim Schoeps, whom my father knew and idolised in his youth, it expresses a strange attachment to a certain idea of Germany; one which transcended even the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.

For Jews with deep roots in that country, people like my father, the possibility of some ongoing connection even after the Holocaust was made easier if your own immediate family had mostly escaped in time, and if your own school days had been marked by protection: by a clutch of loyal friends, by an anti-Nazi Catholic headmaster and the temporary advantages which came of being the child of a frontline solider in the 1914-1918 war.

For me, with two German-born parents and thinking that getting old inevitably meant the acquisition of a German accent (when I was small, I knew nobody over seventy without one), Germany obviously loomed large in my childhood. My grandparents holidayed in Switzerland, where they could bathe in the German-speaking environment without having to confront Germany itself.

In an otherwise essentially English home, I learnt Hoppe, Hoppe Reiter at my mother’s knee, we ate Suppenfleisch and Aufschnitt and everyone got quite excited when Stollen became available in December. But aside from that, in the Britain of the 1960s and 70s, emphasising difference was not something one was encouraged to do.

The formative experiences of my parents were those of wartime — serving in the Army in my father’s case, living in provincial boarding houses wherever my grandfather was stationed and then dodging the Doodlebugs back in London in my mother’s. Penniless and living hand-to-mouth in rooms in other people’s homes, my grandparents felt obliged during the war not to speak the enemy tongue, which is why my mother forgot most of her German and I had to learn it from scratch.

My sister and I were thereafter drilled to appreciate Britain’s generosity in letting our family in, and in patriotically celebrating the inherent decency of the British people and the superiority of the country’s democratic institutions.

On the other hand, as a music fanatic from an early age, I could not fail to notice that all the best music was German. Steeped in Beethoven symphonies, Mozart concertos and Schubert Lieder, taken to concerts at the Royal Festival Hall by German grandmother (always Mutti, never Oma, the latter tag having been taken by the previous generation), I eventually came to Bruckner and more problematically Wagner.

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

It is hard really to understand Der Lindenbaum or Winterstuermen wichen dem Wonnemond without relating them directly to the attractions of a specifically German landscape and sensibility. Likewise, a growing interest in philosophy led me towards Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, although even in translation I found them more impenetrable than the Locke, Berkeley and Hume with which I had started.

This romanticised view of a Germany of high culture and refined thought was occasionally disturbed by encounters with grim historical reality and those who had experienced it. But yet another level of complexity was added when I encountered the actually existing Germany, that admirable and efficient but seemingly rather shallow land, which I visited first in an attempt to improve my German and later, at times on a weekly basis, when I travelled there for work.

There was so much to admire in the Federal Republic, both before the wall came down and even more so afterward when it generously if occasionally insensitively embraced the east. But in an effort to reinvent itself, it seemed to have cut itself off, perhaps inevitably, from the good as well as the bad in its past.

Early in the current decade, with Ukip rising in the polls, some kind of premonition of Brexit led me to apply for German citizenship, which I acquired with speed and ease in 2012, well ahead of a subsequent surge of applications from people with similar backgrounds to my own.

Suggested reading

How the Left lost all purpose

By James Bloodworth

This has added complexity to my attitude to what followed. Something of a Eurosceptic, the idea of actually leaving the European Union (for which, unlike Europe itself, I felt little enthusiasm) seemed far-fetched. I felt some sympathy nevertheless for the Leavers, but thought it would be highly hypocritical to vote to leave having secured my own rights as an EU citizen.

My children eventually followed me. My wife has followed a far more arduous route of becoming a Spanish citizen through her own Sephardic origins. And now I find myself in the camp of those erstwhile Remainers who believe in the importance of respecting the vote that took place.

Layers of complex and contradictory feelings about Germany were added to when my daughter decided to study German (with Russian) at University. Her interest in the language had, I think, little to do with her origins but much to do with perversity of the case system (although, I understand, it is as nothing compared to other languages such as Czech and Hungarian).

We took advantage of our daughter’s year in Germany to visit her in the small Hessian city of Fulda, where she found a welcome from the tiny local Jewish community, mainly made up of elderly Ukrainians, and then weekends in Hamburg and Munich, visiting the local art galleries as well as the local synagogues. Thus she found herself as a Cambridge undergraduate on a year abroad in Germany, but at the same time as a German citizen.

All of which brings us to today and the General Election. There is no doubt that a dread of a Labour victory is a fairly common sentiment among British Jews. This seems not unreasonable when the Leader of the Opposition has invited to Parliament and described as “friends” people who claim that Jews drink the blood of gentile babies and whose organisation calls for the murder of all Jews anywhere in the world.

Suggested reading

The Left is deceiving itself over antisemitism

By Douglas Murray

This would-be Labour prime minister has written a glowing introduction to an Edwardian-era book which argues that the Jews were responsible for the evils of the British Empire, and lauded a mural whose own creator has explicitly declared that it depicts Jewish bankers (but also some gentile ones) playing monopoly on the backs of the exploited of the world. None of which, as far as I can see, has anything to do with the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Looking across the continent we see Jews more comfortable wearing explicit symbols of their faith walking the streets of Warsaw or Budapest than down those of so-called multi-racial Paris or Berlin, while those quickest to defend Corbyn as merely “anti-Zionist” denounce as anti-Semitic people who criticise George Soros (as if his merely being Jewish places him above criticism) or denounce the very use of the term “cultural Marxism” as racist.

As for Germany, it continues to be seen as a model of a modern democracy by most Jews of my generation, a country which has done much to atone for its past. Yet recently a German court ruled that an attempt to burn down a synagogue in Wuppertal was not anti-Semitic but merely “anti-Zionist”; the last time the synagogue was burnt was in 1938. And only last month two people were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Halle.

Both some recent migrants and some of their bitterest opponents in the AfD and on the far-Right blame the Jews for whatever it is they do not like, but alas this is something not limited to Germany alone.

Ja, nein und trotzdem; nothing is simple in the relationship between Germans and Jews and the past, it seems, is never really over.

Some countries are absorbing these conflicts better than others. And there is one place, in particular, that continues to flourish in the era of polarisation — the southern German state of Bavaria.

It is one of the richest and most economically dynamic corners of Europe but is also famous for its conservative politics and Catholic traditionalism and sense of place — even the co-leader of the Bavarian Greens, Katharina Schulze, wore a traditional dirndl dress when canvassing in last year’s state election.

The German lands of Europe have traditionally come under the sway of either Berlin or Vienna, and Bavaria is in some ways culturally closer to Vienna. Bavaria fought on the side of Napoleon in the early 19th century, was one of the least pro-Nazi states, and its exceptionalism is underlined by the fact that it never signed the German “basic law” constitution in 1949.

Historically it was a largely agricultural state with no significant natural resources; Germany’s pre-1945 industrial powerhouses were the Ruhr region in the west and Silesia in Prussia.

But after the Second World War this all changed dramatically and Bavaria was one of the principle beneficiaries. Following Germany’s defeat, Prussia, one of the most successful and significant states in modern European history, was wiped off the map and the Prussians were, in effect, ethnically cleansed. Many of them ended up in Bavaria.

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

It is one of the best kept secrets of post-war German history that Bavaria’s economic take-off after 1945 was partly driven by emigrant Prussians and Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. Millions found refuge in US-controlled Bavaria and some of the biggest names in German industry — such as Siemens, Allianz, Osram and Agfa — moved their headquarters from Berlin to Munich.

Bavaria has its own conservative party, the Christian Social Union, which is autonomous from, but in permanent alliance with, the main German centre-right party, the Christian Democrats. From 1961 to 1988 the CSU was led by the pugnacious but economically pragmatic Franz-Joseph Strauss who helped to establish Bavaria as the economic success story it is today in cars, defence and aerospace, electronics and most recently in the new digital industries.

The region has one of the best education and vocational training systems in Germany, not just for the cognitive elites but for competent middling performers too. It also boasts a network of top universities and research institutes, including the headquarters of the Max Planck institute which also moved to Munich after 1945 changing its name from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Former federal President Roman Herzog coined the phrase “laptops and lederhosen” to describe the state’s unusual blend of innovation and tradition.

The CSU has run Bavaria throughout the post-war period and although it has adapted with the times it remains considerably more conservative than the CDU. CSU leaders were vehemently opposed to Angela Merkel’s refugee policy and almost brought down Germany’s coalition government over it. Viktor Orban is a frequent visitor to Bavaria and his Hungarian Fidesz party was for many years protected by the CSU from being expelled from the main centre-right grouping of European political parties, the EPP. More recently CSU members outraged liberal opinion in Germany by opposing a leadership proposal for quotas for women in the party.

Suggested reading

10 things I hate about Germany

By Peter Franklin

The CSU is probably the last remaining true “Volkspartei” in Germany with a solid representation in all social classes, including the working class.

Bavaria also has a powerful left-liberal tradition in the big cities, which are mainly run by the Social Democrats and/or Greens. The Suddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, is Germany’s most influential liberal daily and has a lighter touch than its northern rivals. Munich is an open city with a distinctively southern variation on German-ness.

But a strong sense of belonging to Bavaria can accommodate both the traditionalist small farmer 100 miles outside Munich and a young, liberally-minded, digital entrepreneur in the state capital. The two-week Oktoberfest beer festival at the end of September every year is a celebration of Bavarian traditions that attracts around 6m foreign tourists and somehow manages to make historic peasant costumes seem cool.

Can this happy co-existence of Anywheres and Somewheres last? I was making the case for “model Bavaria” to a Social Democrat politician in Berlin a few months ago who, not surprisingly, did not like the idea. Moreover, he claimed that Bavaria is becoming a victim of its own success. By attracting so many people from all over Germany the distinctive Bavarian brand is being diluted. Soon, he said, it will be a German state like any other.

Other Germans, some of them migrants to Bavaria, say that is to miss the point — newcomers like, and want to preserve, Bavarian-ness. And, as its post-war history shows, this powerfully rooted place has been able to absorb millions from outside.

By the same author

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

This was true before the war too; Ludwig Erhard, one of the shapers of Germany’s post-war economic miracle, came from the Protestant community of the wine region of northern Bavaria which also once had a flourishing Jewish community, Henry Kissinger and my own distant relatives the Lehman banking family were products of it.

Although CSU politicians take a hard line in general against mass immigration, they took a disproportionate number of refugees after the 2015 surge. Bavaria is likely to make a greater success of the influx than most other states thanks to the most efficient administration in the whole of Germany and the most no-nonsense police force.

It is too early to say how the integration process is going but it is generally easier for outsiders to integrate into a place that has a strong sense of itself, as, in the UK context, Scotland has shown in recent decades. Bavaria has a strong but open indigenious culture, anyone can wear lederhosen, and perhaps illustrates how a clear Leitkultur (dominant culture) rather than something to be ashamed of can help to foster integration.

Bavarians also tend to have strong sub-Bavarian local and regional connections and a healthy relationship to the bigger national entity. They say: “Because I am Bavarian I am German.” By contrast, a Scot is more likely to say: “I’m a Scot, hence British but certainly not English.” And many Catalans would say: “I’m Catalan, hence not Spanish.”

Bavaria is not, of course, completely untouched by the winds of polarisation, and the hard-right AFD polled 10% in last year’s state election, reducing the CSU vote share to 37%, its lowest figure ever. But conservative Bavarian politics has now also thrown up a new big beast — Marcus Söder — who seems capable of pushing the CSU back up over 40% and is now being whispered about as a possible successor to Angela Merkel in Berlin.

If only some of that Bavarian magic could be sprinkled over the whole of Germany and, indeed, the rest of Europe.

And one can’t blame London liberals for looking longingly to Berlin. Germany is a land where Blairism, Cleggism and Cameronism never went away. German ‘conservatives’ are solidly centrist and staunchly pro-EU; British Tories ever less so. Furthermore, German social democrats are compliant coalition partners to the above; the radically Left-wing Labour Party would never be so docile.

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

Mutti Merkel is due to bow out at the next election, but whoever replaces her is bound to be equally dependable. According to Nick Cohen in The Spectator, there could never be a “German Boris Johnson”. Like so many UK liberals, he believes the Germans are sound of mind, while Brexity Britons have lost theirs:

“I do not see how the conservative myth that the English are a pragmatic people, with no time for the wild, utopian ideologies that have stirred continental Europeans, can survive this descent into make-believe.”

Cohen is not alone in this view. For instance, consider the following from AN Wilson in The Telegraph:

“A Europe in which Germany, assisted by Britain, is dominant is one in which we are all better off… Surely to stand alongside this unfolding, benign success story should be Britain’s deepest wish. But no. We apparently prefer to vote Ukip and demonstrate to the world not merely our insularity, but also our stupidity.”

Jeremy Cliffe of the New Statesman, formally Berlin bureau chief for The Economist, also believes that the British need rescuing from themselves:

“Britain’s tragedy is that its public services and civic spaces are horribly run-down but the resulting misery has flowed not into support for German/ Nordic-style Christian- or social-democracy but into support for authoritarian hucksters of left (Corbyn) and right (Brexiteers).”

When British liberals describe themselves as ‘pro-European’, what do they actually mean? Clearly, there’s an awful lot about the nation that they don’t like, but what part of Europe do they want Britain to be more like? Presumably not the struggling South of the Continent nor the somewhat scary East. Probably not riotous France or fissiparous Belgium either. The Nordic countries are widely admired, but you don’t get Scandinavian levels of welfare provision without Scandinavian levels of middle class taxation. That basically leaves Germany and its wingmen, Austria and the Netherlands. When it comes down to it, British Europhilia is basically Germanophilia. Indeed, polling shows that Britain in general is a Germanophile nation.

More from this author

What if Germany's economy toppled?

By Peter Franklin

But the liberal myth of Grown-up Germany needs to be challenged. Yes, there’s a great deal to admire in our neighbour’s post-war history, but the notion that there’s something especially virtuous about the country’s politics or the part it plays in Europe and the wider world does not stand up to scrutiny.

What follows is a top ten of German irresponsibility — proof that Germany is every bit as capable of selfishness and irrationality as any other democratic nation.

1. Who lost Britain?

Brexit need never have happened. If David Cameron had come back from the pre-referendum renegotiation with more than a slap-in-the-face, Remain would have won.

An ’emergency brake’ on immigration would have been entirely reasonable — a recognition of the UK’s situation as a English-speaking nation with an open, flexible labour market and a non-contributory social security system. The UK was always going to be a magnet for migrants — and the political consequences of a rapid escalation in the level of EU immigration should have been predictable. It’s not that the UK would have used a brake to close its borders, but it would have restored a much needed sense of control and agency.

However, even the already watered-down British proposal was rejected. That wasn’t Germany’s decision alone, but Angela Merkel, on whom Cameron’s hopes were pinned, could have made all the difference.

Was the problem that the EU establishment, like the UK establishment, simply assumed that Leave would not win? Perhaps, but the deeper issue is an inflexibility at the heart of the European project that fails to see that what suits Germany can become an unbearable imposition on other members.

It is a rigidity that fragilises instead of stabilising Europe.

2. The refugee crisis

It may be that the Germans are such sticklers for the rules because they don’t trust their own instincts.

We may think of modern German governance as reassuringly dull, but that overlooks a tendency towards impulsive, but highly consequential, gesture politics. Angela Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis of 2014-15 was a case in point.

To offer desperate people a new home is in many ways an admirable thing to do, but there are good and bad ways of going about it. Resettling more than a million people required a carefully organised process of transporting incomers safely from refugee camps and targeting help to those in greatest need. That would have been better than encouraging hazardous and illegal journeys across multiple borders.

To unilaterally open (and then just as suddenly close) Germany’s borders to so many migrants in such a short space of time — and with a plan summed up by Mutti’s infamous “Wir schaffen das” (we will manage) — helped to de-stabilise politics and a fuel a populist backlash across the Continent. This includes the backlash within Germany itself. The results of elections in Thuringia and other eastern regions show a worrying level of discontent.

3. Germany’s nuclear shutdown

Another example of the weird spasms that suddenly seize German policy-makers was the decision to shutdown the country’s existing nuclear reactors. This came in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan — when the 2011 tsunami seriously damaged a nuclear power plant.

Half-a-world away, Germany is not a country known for earthquakes, let alone tsunamis. Nevertheless, the German government decided that it would shut down all of its existing nuclear power capacity by 2022.

While deciding not to build new nuclear power stations is entirely rational, prematurely closing the ones you’ve got already makes no economic or environmental sense — and especially not when your generating system is still burning coal.

4. A thousand points of lignite

While Germany’s nuclear phase-out is set for 2022, its coal phase-out is set for 2038 — a completely screwed-up sense of priorities.

Germany is Europe’s biggest producer and burner of coal. And, what’s worse, the greater part of it is lignite or brown coal — just about the filthiest fossil fuel there is. Whole swathes of ancient forest are still being sacrificed to allow the opencast mining of this environmental nightmare. Unsurprisingly, the country is the EU’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, which has the knock-on effect of undermining attempts to get Germany’s eastern neighbours, especially Poland, to clean-up their smokestack industries.

Of course none of these inconvenient truths have stopped outsiders from lavishing praise on the Energiewende (Germany’s unnecessarily expensive subsidy programme for renewable energy) or Angela Merkel from being honoured as as the “Climate Chancellor”.

Meanwhile in Bonkers Britain, the last coal-fired power station should be gone in the next few years and renewables, including offshore wind, have become cost competitive.

5. Dieselgate

One might have thought that Germany’s nasty coal-habit would have prompted compensatory behaviour elsewhere. But no other country is more responsible for Europe’s great diesel disaster.

With the support of the German government, German industry pushed dirty diesel engine technology on the rest of Europe. In 2015 the news broke that Volkswagen had falsified emissions tests. Given the deadly consequences of air pollution, the dieselgate scandal is arguably the worst case of corporate malpractice anywhere in the West this century.

Quite rightly, we’re angry about the tax-dodging, data-hoarding activities of big American tech companies. But we’ve been weirdly unmoved by what Germany’s economic giants have done to fill our lungs with particulates.

6. A tottering economic model

Still, what goes around comes around. The strategic bet on diesel which served the big German car companies so well for so long is now unravelling.

Despite state support for crop-derived biodiesel (yet another environmental disaster), it is clear that the best way to de-carbonise transport and combat vehicular air pollution is a comprehensive switchover to electric vehicles.

This is the mother of all technological disruptions, placing the densely interlinked supply chains that make up German industry under intense threat from foreign competitors (especially the Chinese). The highly collaborative and specialised nature of German industry, which made it so good at what it did best, is leaving it vulnerable at a time when what is required is adaptability.

Despite Brexit, it is the spluttering German economy that is now the greatest cause for concern in Europe. Who saw that coming?

7. Ordo-mercantilism

Ordoliberalism is Germany’s post-war economic philosophy — basically, it means state intervention in the service of an efficient marketplace. In 1999, it took on a new dimension with the creation of the single currency, which is managed from Frankfurt by the European Central Bank.

Replacing the Deutschmark with the Euro locked-in a permanent and unfair price advantage for German exporters, enabling the country to run up huge trade surpluses. This has destabilised other economies, not least because deficits in Germany’s trading partners have been financed by excessive borrowing (as enabled by the distorting effects of the shared currency). The result was the Eurozone crisis which devastated the ‘peripheral’ economies, and especially the Greek economy.

Despite benefiting from enormous and artificial trade advantages, Germany has resisted the fiscal integration that is necessary to offset the imbalances created by monetary integration.

8. Germany’s economic backyard

The EU does facilitate some degree of fiscal integration — thanks to its pooled system of farm subsidies (the Common Agricultural Policy) and ‘cohesion’ spending on transport and other infrastructure in the poorer member states. It’s a system that left the UK making a hefty net contribution to the EU budget — a key driver of British euro-scepticism.

Europhiles point out that Germany makes an even bigger net contribution and you don’t hear them complaining. But that’s not surprising — EU spending has disproportionately benefited German industry by improving its links to export markets and suppliers in Eastern Europe (which for geographical and historical reasons is massively more important to the German economy than the British economy).

Indeed, Poland, Hungary and Czechia have been described by Thomas Piketty and colleagues as “foreign owned countries” because of the extent of (especially) German ownership of local industry.

Thus what looks like a big net contribution from Germany is in fact a subsidy for its own direct economic interests, helpfully topped-up by other net contributors like the UK.

9. An indefensible defence policy

With such a big economic and political interest in its eastern neighbours, Germany ought to make a significant contribution to their defence. It doesn’t. In fact, Germany with its ramshackle navy and airforce is in poor position to defend itself, let alone anyone else.

Despite having the biggest economy in Europe, comparatively low levels of public debt and regular budgetary surpluses, Germany’s defence spending is persistently and significantly lower than that of the British and French (who are by far the most significant European contributors to NATO).

Also worth noting is that the supposedly insular Brits devote a higher percentage of their GDP to overseas aid than do the supposedly internationalist Germans.

10. A pipeline of selfishness

Given their reluctance to contribute positively to Europe’s security, it would be nice if the Germans didn’t go out of their way to undermine it.

But that’s exactly what they did with the Nord Stream project — a gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany via the Baltic seabed.

As such, it bypasses the territory of the countries sandwiched between Russia and Germany. This makes it easier for Russia to exert pressure on the likes of Poland and Ukraine, because it can threaten their gas supplies without interrupting deliveries to lucrative markets in Germany and the rest of western Europe.

Germany and Russia are now close to completing a second Nord Stream pipeline. America, Poland and Ukraine are bitterly opposed, but it’s good for Germany so that’s alright then.

As if extending Russia’s grip isn’t enough, Angela Merkel is also helping the Chinese reach out by refusing to exclude Huawei from Germany’s 5G network. Again, this is in the face of objections from other EU countries and the US.

*

Sometimes you have to wonder whose side Germany is on. Or, rather, you don’t, it’s on its own side and acting in its own immediate interests.

Same as every other country you might say — and you’d be right. It would be easy enough to compile a top ten of British irresponsibility, for example.

But, that’s just my point: the Germans may be no worse than we are, but they’re certainly no better.

Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.

So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.

Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was,  at least in the bilateral form it then took?

The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.

How different became apparent when I took part in a discussion at the annual debating festival, the Battle of Ideas last weekend, entitled “Can we stop World War III?”.  Our panel put forward a range of views, but almost entirely absent — either from the presentations or from questions — were the following: any suggestion that World War Three would be waged between East and West in the old Cold War sense; arms control treaties, including nuclear weapons treaties; and even — strange though it might seem in the light of Washington’s recent preoccupations — Russia.

Suggested reading

The liberals are falling into Putin's trap

By Peter Franklin

The biggest difference between then and now is the focus on China, and the prospect of an eventual conflict with the United States, as the one power rises and the other — perhaps — declines. Thirty years ago, China was nowhere as a global player. It was isolated after after its leaders had crushed the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square; it was not projecting its power any further afield. Even now, it is reasonable to question how sure and steady China’s continued rise will be. It faces economic and demographic difficulties, the Communist Party has not relinquished — or been forced to relinquish — power. Internal turmoil cannot be excluded.

But the US and its neighbours are already uneasy about possible plans Beijing may have to control the South China Sea, and there is a fresh interest in maritime power. Perhaps those two British aircraft carriers some dismissed as a vanity project are not such an irrelevance after all. There is also much about China, from mass surveillance to the treatment of its non-Han ethnic groups, to the way it acquires other people’s technology, that could spell dangers, even confrontation, ahead. Hong Kong today has become a front-line of sorts, where one system is confronting another, but the imbalance in power between the two sides suggest that, if it escalates further, it will be settled only one way.

Then again, the whole nature of warfare is changing. There is no sign that regional conflicts will cease but whether they could escalate into a world war, however, is another matter. If you consider the existing or likely flashpoints of today — the greater Middle East, Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula — only Syria has come near to becoming a proxy conflict on the Cold War model and it is winding down. US self-sufficiency in energy has radically altered its calculation of risk when considering military engagement, even of a relatively limited kind.

Suggested reading

Who'll blink first: Trump or Xi?

By Helen Thompson

Will the next world war — if there is one — even be about territory at all, or control? Will it entail physical combat? It is not necessary to make prophecies about Artificial Intelligence to conceive of conflicts conducted remotedly, wars waged by cyber threats to critical infrastructure and weapon systems that require no human intervention.

This is why Mikhail Gorbachev sounds as though he lives in another world when he calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide as his prescription for world peace. Nuclear weapons still pose an existential threat, but the nuclear threat is now one among others, and deterrence may no longer be the only answer. If the US has the capability to sabotage other countries’ nuclear research and perhaps even their tests, that “smart” technological approach might achieve the same effect as developing your own nuclear weapon at vastly less cost.

International arms control treaties might not have completely outlived their usefulness. After all, they were never just about counting missiles and warheads. They were about establishing a framework of trust — which is one reason why they were seen as a useful start to trying to improve US-Russia relations whenever those relations soured. But the age of bilateral arms control has to be over. New arms negotiations might just foster a US-Russia rapprochement (though this looks unlikely before the next US election), but — as both the US and Russia quietly acknowledge, any serious arms control in future must include China.

In 30 years the world of international security has changed beyond all compare: geographically with the rise of China and the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states; technologically with the advent of cyber warfare, and philosophically with the evisceration of Soviet communism and threat from climate change. None of this was on the horizon when the Berlin Wall fell. A hero of his time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s anniversary call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons offers a salutary reminder of how far and fast the world has moved on.

Die Linke, Germany’s equivalent of Corbynite Labour but (happily for Germany) its very own party, also did well in Thuringia — spectacularly so, hitting 31% and becoming the strongest single party in a state administration for the first time.

So, judging from those results, is German liberal democracy caught in a fatal pincer-movement of the populists, who claim to be mortal enemies but are both anti-EU, anti-NATO and pro-Putin?

Recent election posters from the populist “left” and “right”, accusing the establishment of NATO warmongering.

Well, yes and no. It depends on how you look at it; or rather, where you look at it. For talking about German politics nationally is becoming almost as meaningless as talking about the UK as if it were, in our days, a single political unit.

A map of the 2017 Bundestag election shows this division with extraordinary clarity.

But why do Easterners vote so differently from Westerners, thereby upsetting the political applecart of Europe’s most important economy? Right across the respectable political spectrum, Germans seek desperately for easy, modern explanations.

Conservatives tell themselves that the East Germans did, after all, unfairly pay the final bill for 1933-45, being traumatised by half a century of occupation by the Red Army, so that it’s no surprise they feel hard done-by; free-marketeers in the German ordoliberal tradition, which assigns the state a more active role in enabling and regulating than Anglo-Saxon classical liberals do, argue that more should be done to attract — effectively, to bribe — private enterprise into the old East.

Suggested reading

The far-Right's appeal to resentful Germans

By James Bloodworth

And then leftists claim that former East Germans are simply driven by righteous if misdirected anger at having been de-industrialised by predatory western capitalists, who asset-stripped perfectly viable ex-GDR State businesses (although they’d struggle to find any actual viable examples). Because of this they thus deserve massive, ongoing state help.

Meanwhile, the old West just keeps on footing the bill, and since 1990, well over €2 trillion has been pumped from Western taxpayers to the East. The so-called Reunification has dragged West Germany back into the role which Bismarck assigned it: to subsidise the economically moribund East because it is their patriotic duty.

Western German voters, rather sick of this, are more and more wary of keeping up this settlement, on top of their traditional role as paymasters of the stable Europe from which German industry benefits so greatly. Yet the Prussian myth of “reunification” has trumped economic reality, which goes to show something we in Britain should know all too well: that there is nothing worse for a country than to misunderstand its own history.

Southerners in the USA dwell on the Civil War as if it were yesterday, but who in western Germany now recalls that Germany was never “united” in the first place? It was militarily defeated by Bismarck’s Prussia in 1866, after which Austria was kicked out, some of the beaten states simply annexed by Prussia, and some allowed a sort of half-life until 1871. Who, today, dares to say that the only definition by which East Germany was more German than Austria is Bismarck’s definition?

Suggested reading

Will Brexit leave us dining on rat poo?

By Tom Chivers

The founder of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, knew his history. After the First World War he begged the French and British to help him split Prussia off from Germany. When he had to visit Berlin, he would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering “Here we go, Asia again!” (“Schon wieder Asien!”) After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.

The most obvious sign that there are two countries is the confessional divide between Catholics and Lutherans. Anyone who doubts how significant that division is should just look at a map of the Nazi vote in 1932 superimposed onto a map of the Catholic population according to the 1934 census. They are, to all intents and purposes, mirror-images.

Religion in Germany is really just a sign of the Germany you come from: the one which partook centrally of western European civilisation right from the start — or the one which has a completely different trajectory. The classic line between these two Germanies is the River Elbe, which the Romans thought the natural limit of Germania. Charlemagne’s restored “Roman” Empire ended there, too.

While early medieval western Europe was developing its unique signature, the power-sharing of international Church and national-state, the lands beyond the river Elbe were still populated by pagan, illiterate tribes. No real attempt was made to exert German control and settlement beyond that point until 1147; Cologne had already been a flourishing western European city for 1,200 years when the first German conqueror-farmers reached Berlin.

If there’s one thing worse for everyone than a successful mass-colonisation, it’s a half-successful mass-colonisation — ask anyone in Ulster. East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs (some, the Sorbs, remain even in the truncated eastern Germany of today, just north of Dresden).

Suggested reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

For 800 years, generation upon generation experienced this same colonial reality. Within living memory, whether you called your hometown Posen or Poznan, Danzig or Gdansk, could be a matter of life and death, on both sides.

So while no one ever disputed that the western Germans belonged where they were, the eastern Germans always knew that the helots might rise up one day. Like the poor whites of the American South, the settlers of Rhodesia, the Protestants of Ulster or the Pieds-Noir of Algeria, the eastern Germans came to believe that they must, above all, have a political elite of their very own tribe, ready to respond instantly and ruthlessly if their supremacy was ever challenged.

Social psychologists call this “social dominance orientation”, the cultural belief that “we” have to at all costs lord it over “them”. The Germans of the east came to accept rule by a caste of warlords — the famous Prussian Junkers — and, later, the new Lutheran paradigm of a state which controlled its very own Church and against which there was hence no appeal.

Not for nothing did Friedrich Hayek see Prussia as the template for all modern totalitarian states, whether of the Left or of the Right. Max Weber constantly referred to a place he called Ostelbien, East Elbia, palpably different, for all its local variation, to ciselbian, western Germany

Of course, psychologists, philosophers and sociologists can all be wrong and often are. Electoral maps, however, do not lie. They show that ever since Germans have had votes, eastern Germans have voted very differently from western Germans.

Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives — conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite — depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.

The First World War changed nothing. In the first normal elections of the Weimar Republic, the extreme Prussian conservatives of the DNVP (officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, violently antidemocratic, their members implicated in several high-profile political murders) were the second largest party nationally but — exactly as with the AfD today — that position was entirely dependent on votes from the East.

And when the deluge finally came in 1933 it was, again, only thanks to heavy votes in the East that Hitler got 43.9% nationally, enabling him (with support from the rump DNVP) to seize power by semi-constitutional means. If the whole country had voted like the Rhineland or Munich, he could only have attempted an armed coup, which the Army would have crushed.

In short, wondering how voters in the East of Germany would go for antidemocratic, authoritarian and anti-EU politics, while the West of Germany sticks with the CDU and goes Green, is like asking how it can be that a Democrat should win New York at the same time as Arkansas and Alabama vote Republican. It’s all about cultural history, and Germany has its very own version of the Mason-Dixon line, but far older and deeper.

This is bad news, of course, for Germans wedded to the notion of a united and more or less culturally homogenous state. On the other hand, it is very good news for Germans who fear that the politics of eastern Germany might spread. They won’t, any more than New York is ever going to be an Open Carry state.

If the West holds its nerve — that means, on a practical level, no preferential financial treatment and never entering coalitions with the AfD or Die Linke, however awkward that may make things — the “spirit of the East”, as Adenauer called it, is no longer strong enough to pull Germany away from its natural place at the heart of Western Europe.

The conventional part was growing up in a textbook, nuclear family of mum, dad and two kids, in a detached house in a commuter village in Fife, Scotland. We weren’t rich, but my parents — who both grew up on Glasgow council estates and left school at 15 and 16 with few qualifications — had worked hard to afford a home of their own and the ability to take a family holiday abroad each year.

We weren’t a political house, but we were a dutiful one. No protest marches or party memberships growing up, but a distinct sense of civic duty — voting, paying taxes and supporting the monarchy. A Daily Express through the week and a Sunday Times on the Sabbath, plus Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell on the BBC at Six o’clock, in the background while Mum made tea. Even if I hadn’t turned out to be a Conservative with a big ‘C’, I was raised in a household that was conservative with a small one.

More from this author

We need to talk about death

By Ruth Davidson

The unusual part was that my family were rocked by the sort of private cataclysm that utterly unpins every comforting routine parents hope to build for their children. When I was five, I was hit by a truck and severely injured. I broke my leg, smashed my pelvis, crushed my femoral artery, severed the main nerve down the front of my right leg and suffered so much internal damage my mum was told I might grow up unable to have children.

I spent weeks in a specialist children’s hospital in Edinburgh, first in traction and later in a full body cast — plaster of Paris starting under my armpits and reaching my toes on one side and my knee on the other. When it was finally removed, with me screaming in fear at the circular saw, I was put on the long road back to recovery. The surgeons had saved my life and my right leg (initially it hadn’t been clear if they could rescue either) but if I were ever going to walk again, it would be only after painful months of physio, hydrotherapy and analgesics.

It is not much fun being the only child at primary school with a zimmer frame. I hated it. I hated not being able to run as fast or for as long as my classmates. I hated being told to sit out some parts of PE. I hated not being able to bend or do gymnastics or put my ankle up to my ear as most children can with the flexibility of youth. Some kids might have retreated inside themselves, become bookish or engrossed in daily newspapers, or otherwise divorced themselves from the rough and tumble they could no longer be part of.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Not me. I have a competitive streak a mile wide; I am dogged and cussed and contrary. If I couldn’t do something, then I’d just keep trying until I could. So my early childhood wasn’t about learning or engaging with the world around me — it was spent blocking out everything that didn’t immediately help me climb trees, play football, build dams down the beach, climb out my bedroom window onto the flat roof of the conservatory below or partake in a hundred other physical labours — just to show that I could. And that I could keep up, too

The world was for other people to worry about. I wanted to play with my friends, pretend I was Roberto Baggio on the football field and teach my poor dog to jump through a raised hula hoop for treats.

The thing that made me think that — maybe — the world was worth paying attention to wasn’t a speech in the House of Commons or a public debate on the state of Britain. It wasn’t Live Aid or Band Aid or a Blue Peter appeal. It wasn’t Princess Diana holding the hand of a patient with AIDS or the Lockerbie Bombing. It was something that happened a thousand miles away in a country I’d never visited.

More from this author

My manifesto for post-Brexit Britain

By Ruth Davidson

On 9 November, 1989 — the night before my eleventh birthday — the communist government of East Germany announced they were opening the border and that future democratic elections would be held in the country. The people of East and West Berlin, watched by border guards, started dismantling the wall with picks, sledgehammers and even their bare hands. The pictures of crying, hugging and dancing on the hated barrier that had divided families, countries and a German-speaking people was immensely powerful.

I hadn’t paid any attention to similar unrest that had occurred previously in Poland or Hungary, but I somehow knew that Germany was different. That this — if not an end in itself — signified that an end was coming. I don’t know if I thought that the Berlin Wall was the iron curtain that kept ‘us’ from ‘them’ but it was clear in my head that ‘we’ — as in, the West — had won. The forces of freedom, democracy, property, individuality and fairness under the law had triumphed over a nameless, faceless communism designed to suppress the individual, impoverish the citizen and crush the human spirit.

I also knew it must be momentous because I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch the specially extended Nine o’clock news.

Suggested reading

Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

Not long after the wall came down, I found myself dragged along to a debating competition my sister had entered through school. While the judges went off to deliberate, the floor debate took place, with the chairman inviting contributions from the audience. I’d sat next to my sister’s friends so my mum didn’t have a clue my hand had snaked up, until she heard me reedily give my first public speech, off the cuff and without notes. I’ve no idea what I said, or even what the motion had been, but in my battered black chords and a hand-me-down paisley pattern shirt, I had to correct the chairman who called me “the young gentleman” before launching into my argument.

The English teacher who ran the debating society made a mental note to look out for me when I followed my sister to secondary school the next year. My newfound interest in current affairs meant there was something other than sport I could be competitive at. And I was — all through my school and university career. Debating took me to countries I would never otherwise have seen and introduced me to people I would never otherwise have met.

While I might have gone on to play tennis for my club, football for my school and squash for my university, it was debating which saw me all the way to the world championships, into my first career as a journalist and into the job I have now.

And I would never have been confident enough to stand up and make that first floor speech at 11-years old, if the fall of the Berlin Wall hadn’t ignited my interest in world events. The fall of communism liberated more than just those under its yoke.