Hunforgiven by AA Gill

Germany, July 1999.
Time between leaving Berlin’s Tegel airport and mentioning the war: eight minutes, ten at the outside. And it wasn’t me, I swear, Iron-Cross my heart with Oak-leaf cluster. I’d been told in no uncertain terms: “You’re not to mention the war, we know what you’re like. The war is verboten, out of bounds, off limits, bad form, we’ve moved on from all that.” Well, it wasn’t me, it was the taxi driver. “Berlin, in area, is the same size as London,” he informed me in that emphatic, punctilious way that Germans have with English, as if there were a euphonium playing in their heads. “When it was laid out at the turn of the century we had the fastest birth rate, but then came the war, and the Nazis and, well..." Gong! Sorry, you mentioned the war, no prize, Fritz.

The first thing you notice about Berlin is how few people there are compared with other great capitals. It feels like an overlarge patchwork suit worn by a man who has gone on a crash diet. The people rattle around the streets and there is a 1956 amount of traffic. Actually, that’s not the first thing you notice. The first thing is the cranes. Berlin’s skyline is a forest of cranes, a navvies’ rollercoaster theme park of elegantly circling girders. “What you must remember,” the driver says, with added oompah, “is that what you’re seeing in Berlin is a moment in a process. We are building the future.” Or perhaps just burying the past.

The Mercedes slides round a vast column with a gilt-winged victory on the top. “This used to be outside the Reichstag, but Hitler moved it brick by brick,” he adds, with barely disguised admiration. It’s the siegessaule, a monument to wars against Austria, Denmark and France. The gilt and marble Teutonic exclamation that marks the beginning of a united Germany. The Prussian Bismarck, with typical German tact, chose Versailles to announce the formation of his new Uberstaat, made up of the diverse and disparate German-speaking principalities, dukedoms and self-governing cities, and collaterally instigating the longest-running, most eternally popular hate affair in Europe.

For we all hate the Germans – come on, it’s all right, admit it, we’re all agreed, we hate them. Of course we don’t hate them individually, one at a time they’re fine, thoughtful, polite, cultured – above all, cultured. But collectively, in columns, we hate them. “Oh, he’s a German,” is a dismissive remark that speaks reams in every European language. As political correctness irons out the parenthesis of prejudice, there will always be a special, sour dispensation for Bismark’s baby; hating the Hun is perhaps the only thing that truly emulsifies the rest of us. By any measure you care to choose, the creation of a greater Germany has been the greatest disaster, the cause of more misery than any other political act in our continent’s history. In fact, in the whole bloody story Germany has only been a united country without foreign occupation for something like 65 splintered grey years. For all its vaunted economic metal-bashing success as a homogenous nation, Germany has been an unmitigated, ghastly failure.

At the other end of the marital avenue that boasts the priapic column stands the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s most famous image, and it’s rather a disappointment. Smaller than you imagined, and coarser. It’s rather not the Arc de Triomphe, it’s not even Marble Arch. Just the last of many city gates of the old Prussian capital that was always famous for being exotic and vicious louchness in the 1930s. Beside it stands the phoenix of the new Reichstag, the seat of the Bund and, so the persistent whisperers insist, the hub of a new European superstate-in-waiting.

Norman Foster is having a party to hand over his remarkably beautiful re-creation to the city. It’s very impressive, with its glass dome and mirrored funnel for extracting all the hot air of German irregular verbs. It will, Norman tells a soberly nodding audience, run on vegetable oil and has already conserved 95% of its energy year on year. Well, that’s what we can do with the olive-oil lake, then. Incongruously, Carol Thatcher is here: “I haven’t told Mummy, she’d have a fit, unless I brought some matches.” Margaret Thatcher was virtually alone in voicing strident reservations about German reunification. She may have been alone saying it but, as usual, she wasn’t alone in thinking it.

It’s now ten years since the Berlin Wall came down, and Germany has been swinging cranes and pouring concrete day and night to build something that works this time. The new Reichstag has preserved some of its old scars: the bullet and shrapnel holes, the graffiti. Germans know they are constantly treading on eggshells, tiptoeing over cemeteries, that they’re observed from outside with distrust and concern. They are careful to keep their natural arrogance sotto voce. But this obvious gesture of humility turns history into an exhibit, pacifies it into culture, which is a trick I’m to discover the Germans do a lot.

Graffiti is something of a tiresome obsession with young Berliners. The border wall was covered in impasto layers of the most hideous daubs. It elevated the artless into important political statements, and a whole school of wall-defacing artists sprang up. The wall may have gone, but the graffiti of incomprehensible pneumonics lingers. Every perpendicular surface in Berlin is smeared with it. It has none of the wit and panache of New York. German, it need hardly be said, is a written language that uniquely fails to lend itself to the precision of hit-and-run spray painting.

The wall itself has essentially vanished. Literally Jerry-built in the first place, the few remaining slabs are being ironically resprayed with signs asking for them to be left standing as memorials. Symbolic irony is also something I found Germany has a surfeit of, mostly entirely uncomprehended by the natives. The stressed concrete of separation has been chopped up into tiny pieces for sale as souvenirs. You can’t see the Berlin Wall any more but you can see any amount of Berlin gravel. Presumably this is done by former East Germans who saw the thing as their last natural resource, to be exploited after they all got made redundant when their factories were bought for a song (probably “Tomorrow Belongs to me”) by West German entrepreneurs to be converted into BMW showrooms and lofts.

So, in ten years what has happened to East Berlin – indeed, what has happened to the former German Democratic Republic (GDR)? The answer is that greater Germany has managed to do it what it so nearly did to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It has made it disappear. It’s impossible now to tell whether you are in East or West Berlin – even the taxi drivers don’t always know. You can’t tell by looking at the buildings, because it’s all hideous communist architecture, and anyway, it’s all being pulled down to make way hideous and precipitously constructed postmodern unity architecture. Whatever you thought of the old GDR – that it was grey and dingy and fearful and cynically created as Russia’s gum shield – it was for all that a real country. There was a national anthem, a flag, a parliament, a civil service, an infrastructure, people got born, married and died in it, but now, just a decade on, it has ceased to be; vanished, without a tear or a discernible whimper, beneath the balletic cranes. Only a handful of tarnished Olympic shotputting medals remain to show hat East Germany ever existed at all.

What is being put in its place? Well, nothing. Really, Berlin is as close to an awful lot of Sturm and Drang signifying absolutely nothing as you’ll wish to find. It’s a non-place, it has less atmosphere than Uranus. I thought it a lukewarm Knightsbridge, or a watery Hull, or a black-and-white Torremolinos. Apart from the Reichstag, Berlin is a dumping ground for the back-of-envelope doodles of unemployable architects. It’s a city that comes up to you and says: “That’s enough about me, what would you like me to be?”

Of all the people of Europe, Berliners look the most like us. And yet I think I have more sympathetically in common with Kalahari Bushmen. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They’re good, but there’s always some tell-tale sign that they’re not quite right. There are the clothes, for a start. The men are into this mix’n’match jacket-and-trousers thing, often wearing two or three parts from different suits. You’ll look at some chap and think: “Well, I can understand the whistle, and I could just above live with the tie, but where on earth did the socks and sandals come from?” German men must all go into Burberry and say: “Ja, this fits perfectly, I’ll take it, two sizes bigger.” Couples like his-and-her windcheaters, sunglasses and hats. I saw one pair who had matching Versace ties and headscarves. You’ve got to be pretty jolly Junkers to do that.

There are other little things which tell you that, although they may look like us, they syncopate to a different beat. They can’t walk in crowds, for instance, which is surprising because they’re so good at marching. Germans are constantly bumping into each other with barely restrained looks of fury; perhaps they’re just habituated to invading other people’s personal space. But then again they’ll stand for lengthy minutes with a bovine serenity at completely empty crossroads waiting for the little green man to tell them to cross. As it happens, the little green man is the only bit of the former GDR that anyone wants to have. He’s a perky little cartoon chap, Apfelmann (apple man), who has fallen foul of modernity and EC traffic light directives. Nobody seems to have noticed that, with his jaunty hat, crooked arm and pointy feet, he looks disturbingly like an anthropomorphised swastika.

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a touch of schadenfreude in seeing quite how clunky modern Germany really is (so German to have invented just the right word for this). The design of everything from lighting to street furniture is abysmally transitory, modern gimmicks that look nerdy and tired the moment they’re erected. Form follows whim rather than function. If most of what you know of German quality and polish is lardy-voice car commercials, then the truth of the place comes as a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t work very well, the service is as stroppy and sloppy as anything you could expect to find in provincial France, there are fewer mobile telephones, computer terminals and annoyingly integrated banking machines than you might expect from Portsmouth.

There are, however, great dolloped turds of dire public art. Berlin is pocked with meaningful erections that make the cranes and concrete mixers look aesthetic. Apart from the Reichstag, the building that Berlin is proudest of is the new Jewish museum. It’s on the cover of guidebooks, on posters and postcards, very futuristic, very liberal, very part-of-the-process. This is the new, caring, cutting-edge Germany, a smart, angular bit of kit, all flat metal and futurist slots and holes. There is one problem, though: call me old-fashioned, but it doesn’t really work as a building. You get inside, and you’re in a murky labyrinth of dead ends and sloping walkways and spaces that might be rooms, but then again might just be spaces. It comes with the sort of wordy, art-autopsy bollocks that Germans respect with a furrowed awe: “Represents the three journeys of European Jewry, based on the 3,000 angles found in the Star of David.” That sort of tosh. And there’s another thing: you and I might think this is a fundamental kind of thing. It’s quite empty. The perfect emperor’s new museum: totally, nakedly bare of exhibits. And a persistent voice whispers in my ear as I get lost: “If this is the Jewish museum, then where, pray, are the Jews?”

Apart from the traffic signals, the only other bit of East Germany you can find without a shovel is in the flea market that at weekends runs up from the Brandenburg Gate. Here you can buy the mistakenly confident tat of the Warsaw Pact, boxes full of thin medals in lieu of freedom. You can purchase an East German border guard’s underwear or a fireman’s gas mask. You can have as many busts of Lenin and posters of nubile gymnasts as you could shake a Stasi at, but nobody’s buying much. It all seems a bit tiredly previous. With capitalism you get fashion, and totalitarian chic came and went. An old woman offers me a chain-link evening purse. “Very good value,” she oompahs, “very beautiful.” And then as the clincher: “Made entirely from human filings.” You don’t say. How riveting. I’ll think about it.

Beside the market is the Tiergarten, Berlin’s park, the biggest inner-city park in Europe, once a Prussian hunting ground, once turned into matchwood by RAF Bomber Command. Here, strangely, is somewhere with some atmosphere. On a bright May bank holiday it’s full of families, cycling in strictly descending order like mobile Russian dolls, and picnicking, elaborate picnics with gas barbecues and trestle-tabled buffets. Dogs and children run after balls around the naked men. Oh, didn’t I mention the naked men? It is a truth understood across Europe that, given half a chance, a German will whip off his kit, and here they disport, Teutonically akimbo, blond, paunches and willies lolling as the families grill their symbolic bratwurst. In the middle of Berlin, so unlike our own Hyde Park.

Germans have a unique and mystical relationship with trees. If you understand their feeling for forest, I’m not sure that you understand them any better, but you come close to understanding how they understand themselves. The forest is the spiritual, mystical heart of Germany, the engine and the ultimate metaphor of their literature, poetry and music. Nature’s cathedral is always young and still timelessly ancient. Constant but regenerating, the great German forest is the cradle of German identity. It had hidden and protected and nurtured them and it goes to their very bloody origins.

In AD9 was the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The Roman commander Quinctilius Varus led 25,000 legionaries into the heart of Germany and was slaughtered by Arminius’s spearmen, who rushed from their holy groves. Six years later, their skulls nailed to trees, their bones piled in torture pits and on votive altars, the Roman Army was discovered by the appropriately named Roman general Germanicus. It was the greatest tragedy ever to befall the Roman Empire and it sent a shudder of horror and shame across the civilised world that has vibrated in our subconscious for a thousand years. The slaughter in the Teutoburg Forest divided Europe into the warm south, who forever saw forests and dreadful places to be avoided and cleared, homes to dragons and trolls, antitheses of the civilised city, and the north, who understood them to be healing, protecting, mystical, spiritual places. How you feel about a silent birch forest at twilight says more about your blood and kin than your passport. The Germans are children of the woods, people of the dappled half-light, the secret glade, the silence and camouflage.

Driving east through the former GDR, you’re flanked for mile after mile by forest, breaking occasionally into flat farm land and squat, ghastly, prefab boxed industrial towns, like goitred fungus clinging to the swathe of wood. The autobahn hisses towards the Czech border and we pass streams of lorries that all seem to be carrying either cement or live pigs. For us, Dresden is one thing, it’s the away draw for Coventry. Not a lot of people know that it produced the world’s first beer mat, the first toothpaste tube, the first mouthwash (Odol, still available), the world’s first coffee filter and has the second largest Dixieland festival. And there’s more. It has a cherry stone with more faces carved on it than anyone else has ever bothered to manage. On the Elbe, it is also the capital of Saxony, sometime birthplace of the kings of Poland, the cradle of Lutheranism, and was once called the Protestant Vatican. It has Europe’s finest porcelain collection and an art collection that beggars expectation.

It is also, of course, home to the most successful bombing raid in history. But for us rather parochially compare Dresden with Coventry and think one-all stretches jingoistic relativism to breaking point. Dresden was one of the finest baroque cities the world has ever seen; Coventry made bicycles. Dresden, like Berlin, is a forest of cranes. They’re building a bright, glorious future here too. Only here they’re constructing a perfect replica of the 18th century, stone by stone, blasted chard by chard, they’re putting Humpty Dumpty back together again and it’s impressive in a macabre sort of way. The centre of Dresden is a Nutcracker fairytale setting but it’s surrounded by the most grotesque and personally abusive state-ordained city imaginable – public spaces that make you physically recoil, vast, squalid, careless housing projects, factories that offer nothing but soul-destroying state-school-to-state-pension graft. Old/new Dresden sits incongruously unconcerned in the middle, listening to its fountains splash and its multibelled clocks tintinnabulate politely.

But Dresden isn’t a reconstruction. It’s no Disneyland, not to the Germans. It’s a moment in the process. And it is here that I realised possibly the most profound truth about them: their attitude to culture. Germans are very big on culture, big and smug and arrogant. They have Kultur with a capital K. everything from sausages to Schiller fills the Teutonic heart with pride. They have the most profound writers, romantic poets, incisive philosophers and mobile-Christmas-decoration woodcarvers. And about everything, they have music. No other country in the world can hold a tuning fork to German music. A to Z they only have to get to the Bs and Germany has a globe-trouncing team with Wagner still on the subs’ bench. But they see culture as divorced from history, parallel but separate. We, on the other hand, understand our culture as being inextricably entwined with events. Indeed for us, culture and history are almost interchangeable words – not for the Germans, and with good reason.

If you were German would you want to look back at history? For them it’s a century and a half of undiluted misery, humiliation and grovelling apology. By keeping the culture separate, immaculate, eternal and timeless, the Germans have a sense of national pride and unifying glory. The skein of their art is far older than their country. D?rer had no concept of a united Germany, but none the less he was utterly German. Dresden isn’t a retrospective re-creation, because it exists in a separate continuum from the events that formed it. This is a very bizarre, even psychotic way to get on. It means that you live in one place, but exist in another esoteric, imaginary plane, unshackled by fact or memory. It’s like admiring the china, but ignoring what’s on your plate. There should be a large metalwork sign erected over the Brandenburg Gate: Amnesia macht frei.

In the basement of the grand, reconstructed hotel is a restaurant that features authentic old-time German food. It’s a theme restaurant for authentic old-time Germans, where they can eat dumplings and sauerkraut at long trestle tables, there are birch and oak trees nailed to the wall, the waitresses wear bosomy peasant costumes, and a bloke dressed in lederhosen strums a guitar and sings old folk songs. The diners sing along with gusto. This isn’t for tourists. If I had to choose the best thing about Germany, it’s that there aren’t any tourists. These are Germans coming together for some bogus, bucolic heritage, oblivious to how absurdly ridiculous they look or indeed how vile their food and singing is. They also appear oblivious to the fact that on February 13, 1945, Dresden was bombed, causing a firestorm that sucked cyclones of boiling air out of cellars like this – no, this exact cellar – suffocating an entire city. Thirty-five thousand souls vacuumed into the roaring Baroque flames. And these old folk who were children then can sit here scoffing pig and Pilsner and sing hodie-ho songs about the woodcutter’s daughter.

To be perfectly honest, three months ago I had no idea that Weimar was a town. I thought it must be a district or piece of paper, the Weimar Republic and all that. But then someone at a London dinner party said, you simply must visit Weimar, it’s this year’s Prague. So I’m back on the autobahn listening to the appalling German pop stations. For people with such a vaunted musical heritage, they play the very worst British and American 1960s and 70s stuff across the dial. As “Mighty Quinn” comes on for the third time, I push the button; I’d rather listen to the squealing pig trucks. We skirt Leipzig and its chemical factory, which produced the phosgene gas for the Great War and the Zyklon B for the second. “You get the war, we’ve got the gas.” Weimar is this year’s European capital of culture and, boy, does it have culture. Goethe ran the theatre, Schiller wrote the plays, Tolstoy made pilgrimages, Kafka fell in love here. Any number of composers beginning with B and Wagner composed here, the Bauhaus was started here, the Liszt is endless. Weimar is Stratford squared and looks like Port Isaac made out of gingerbread. It’s everyone’s idea of a perfect little German market town. There is a square with a maypole and a stall selling roast sausage. It was flattened by the Americans, of course, but they’ve cloned it. There’s even a hurdy-gurdy man. He grinds out “Colonel Bogey” without irony. I don’t think any of the milling culture Krauts know the words.

We sit in a café, drinking hot chocolate with an entire cow of cream on top, looking at the town festival guide and wondering why so many Germans carry walking sticks with those little metal place plaques nailed to them. Do they have Rotterdam, Stalingrad and El Alamein? And then I noticed in very small, bracketed, italic letters the 16th recommended thing to do in Weimar: Buchenwald. The name leaps from the page. I hadn’t planned to see a concentration camp but in retrospect it was Wagnerianly inevitable that this is where the story would end. I’ve never been to a concentration camp before. I’m glad I went. I never want to go again.

Two miles out of town, past the ironic rifle clubhouse, on a ridge up the road of blood built by the inmates, is the Buchenwald, or what’s left of it. Rightly it was flattened. There are no cranes here resurrecting a moment in a process. No it’s no more than a shadow of brick and concrete and horror. The main gate and the watchtower still stand with their ironwork inscriptions, “Each to his own”. There is a monstrous Russian-inspired memorial. Buchenwald means beech wood, and the forest is still here. When they cleared the land for it, they left one large oak standing inside the barbed wire. The locals called it the Goethe oak, Goethe who wrote Faust, a man who sells his soul to the devil. I won’t describe the sense of the place, not because there aren’t words to describe this monstrosity, but because there have been others better qualified to utter them than me, and to add to them is to detract, to bury the sin again in language. Unbelievable, though, there is a restaurant here, set in the woods, rustic and jolly, with a view and a children’s plastic slide. I’ve always thought that professionally I could eat anything anywhere. But I found my limit. I couldn’t eat German food in a concentration camp.

After a couple of hours, we returned to Weimar and any residual sense of cosy marzipan charm had vanished. It is a ghost town, a town of unquiet shades. This railway station was a transit stop to the death camps. This city was the base for the first Nazi regional council in Germany, the delightfully named Junior Crossbow Society grew up to be the Hitler Youth. The gem?tlich hotel I’m staying in was Hitler’s favourite; he even helped design it. And some grey committee in Brussels has thought about all this, considered and decided in their infinite wisdom that this place of genocide should be the European cultural capital. God forgive them.

It’s not that Weimar has wholly denied Buchenwald, it has just wrapped it in its ethereal, Teutonic, clean-anything, whiter-than-white culture. There is an exhibition of Hitler’s kitsch nudi-art collection, and a crapulous, thick-tongued deconstruction of good and evil as if Buchenwald were an artistic problem, like perspective or metre. It was here that I understood quite why we hate the Germans. It’s not “don’t mention the war” – the war is understandable, explicable, we’ve all had a war or two. The war is soldiers reminiscing, and combat comics and Jack Hawkins movies. What we don’t mention is the Final Solution, the lengths and the breaths and the depths of German genocide. That’s unique. Only they in the history of humanity have built Buchenwald, and others like it. The crime stands beyond credulity or forgiveness. But there is also pity. I pity the Germans. The helpful, smiling young waitress, the children on school outings. They weren’t born when Buchenwald gave up its ghosts. Why should they bear the weight and the mark?

“It wasn’t us, it was our father,” is what your fathers said of your grandfathers. Germany is the country that invented the idea of predestination, the Lutheran concept of being born into sin, and it is only in Germany that I’ve ever really understood what that truly means. What can a good German do now in our bright, shiny, millennial togetherness, our community? What can they do to stop us seeing them as Europe’s psychopaths? They can run to the future, stride for new dawns. Never live in the past, barely step into the present. They can run but they can’t hide, and we can’t stop remembering. There is nothing they can do other than live with the stain and the guilt, because so many millions can’t.

Of course in the end it will fade, like all pain, become dull in anecdotage, and the German forest will grow over the Final Solution. We walked in silence through the beech woods. The ruins of the SS falconer’s cottage and the commandant’s schloss were cluttered with vegetation, looking almost picturesque. The evening sunlight dappled through the leaves, casting shards of light onto the bridle paths. It was the saddest place I’ve ever been. A breeze sighed through the branches and we came to a glade, a secret place of fir and silver birch. It hid a pit, deep and broad. It isn’t empty; only the bodies had been disinterred. Their heavy silence still filled it. The grave’s edges were softened by spring wild flowers, the earth’s cyclical promise. And because the symbolism of this land is as thick as loam, the blood-and-earth metaphor was inescapable. The coloured blossoms were like the rough, triangular patches sewn on striped uniforms. And the greatest number of them were dandelions, long swathes of yellow heads clinging to the rubble, each individual and wonderful, yet all the same. Here and there, they’d already run to seed, the wind caught at them and the delicate spores danced through the wood like puffs of smoke.