Berlin is my favourite city. I relocate there every summer now. It always bothered me that the groups I’d been in found popularity in Paris, but not Berlin. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it left me feeling like an anachronism. Paris is where you go for fashion, for very long walks, to read or write, to have affairs and to eat red meat. It’s architecturally ill-equipped to support nascent music scenes. A nascent music scene requires a populace long neglected by their government, living in a kind of post-industrial tabula rasa, a DIY-or-die kind of pressure. Detroit, Manchester, Sheffield, New York before they cleansed it. Even though it’s been several decades since the reunification that spurred the city’s techno explosion — an explosion now sanctified by Unesco no less — Berlin still has that unfinished energy.

It doesn’t have a curfew either. There’s no infantilising call of “bedtime” from on high. If a club stays open for days, you can sort of “move in” over the weekend. You can learn a lot about yourself if you try this for a few days. Especially if that club is a throbbing, homosexual techno dungeon. Ironically, this governmental act of faith in the good behaviour of its populace came about not long after the fall of the Third Reich. Before the erection of the wall, a tit-for-tat extension of opening times had ensued between the western segment of the city and the Soviet.

In the west, last orders had been 9pm; in the east, 10pm. The moment the west upped the ante, the east responded in kind, until a hotelier named Heinz Zellermayer grew sick of the stand-off. Over a bottle of whiskey, he’s said to have told the commandant of the western sector that “mayhem only comes when the bartender has to say ‘closing time’”. He insisted that zero curfew wouldn’t just be good for business, but would also make for a fine demonstration of liberal values.

The Western powers voted 2–1 in favour of never-ending nightlife: France and America for, Britain against, claiming it would render the city “too rowdy”. I wonder how that same freedom might pan out here in London? For the most part, ours is a culture of post-pub living-room cocaine binges. We are one-room adventurers. Maybe that’s for the best? We lack the inherent love of “order” that underpins the German psyche. Where drink and drugs are concerned, we sprint. We cannot be trusted with a marathon.

The stakes are high in Berlin if you’re looking for a good time. It’s death or glory. You might stumble into transcendent communion with a group of strangers in a warehouse somewhere; you might just as easily stumble into a plague of self-doubt and misdirected recriminations. If you want to play, you also have to accept getting played — by the music and by the heroically cynical door policies.

At a good club everyone is the front person, and no one is the front person. Right at the moment you feel like you’re at the centre of the universe, you suddenly disappear. Through this barely human machine music, social atomisation is inverted, or repurposed, made good somehow. In Berlin, clubs aren’t just places you go to get out of your box — they’re like extra-moral zones where nature’s lack of design is put on trial. It’s fun, but it can also be kind of like graft. Taken too seriously, does pleasure become work? Nowhere is this question more pertinent than at Berghain.

To an extent, Berghain paints its self-portrait in the misery of its rejects, its mythos carved in a never-ending succession of random refusals. The door policy — much like the music played within — is an ode to ephemerality. It is EasyJet-set-proof. You never know when or if you’re ever going to set foot in the place again. The club, an isolating concrete monolith, looms over a stretch of wasteland shrouded in an aura of regal indifference. Its only code of conduct: hard glamour.

I’ve seen people turned away from Berghain who looked like they were born there, head to toe in tattoos, leather and Balenciaga, people who had just queued for three hours. Certitude is passé. The sovereignty of the club precludes all solidarity. It’s easier to think of the place as a kind of tyrannical decades-long immersive art experiment than a night spot. Once beyond the gauntlet, you’re met with a sense of “anything goes” that exists nowhere else on earth. You are met with perfectly tuned German chaos.

The door staff all but extinguished my “youth” on a Sunday afternoon at the tail end of the summer of 2022. A fifth rejection in a row all but broke my heart. It’d been 10 years since my one and only visit. All I’d wanted was for them to turn me into a techno androgyne again: an android allergic to anxiety, a machine that can process nothing save raw enthusiasm. I had it on good authority that my music was being played inside and had gone down well with a few of the residents there. My geisha-gimp alter ego was welcome; I was excluded.

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But then, a year and half later, my band was booked to play the club’s 19th birthday party. This booking became the end point of my imagination: the title fight on the horizon. After this gig, I could retire or die or start writing pompous essays full-time. The gig meant closing the loop and paying my dues. Since my only visit, I would forever try to find my way back to a Berghain state of mind while up on stage. But things weren’t nearly filthy enough in the world of London indie.

I wanted to pay my dues, but of course, I also wanted vengeance. They had cast me aside with barely a shrug time and time again. They’d briefly pitted me against my dear friend Rob, whose resemblance to a demonic Phillip Schofield I blamed entirely for the mass rejection. They had taken a part of my dignity, and sent me back to London pregnant with shadow and self-doubt. I loved them; I had no choice but to love them. But now, it was their turn to love me. Sprawled semi-spread eagle across a monitor, wearing nothing save a half a tub of Vaseline, with one hand wrapped around a microphone, the other searching my own cavity, I think I won that love. I emptied myself entirely.

One great thing about getting asked to play Berghain is that you can bring a posse. They normally don’t let you in if you show up with a posse. They want you to show up alone. To be alone together. By showing up alone you can more readily disappear. Disappear into yourself. Which is where the first skirmish of their war on banality has to take place. That being said, on this occasion, I got to bring my laddish big bro, whom, by his own admission, “ain’t ever getting let into that fucking place”.

He couldn’t contain his excitement on the main floor later that night. He kept singing sped-up Cat Stevens lyrics over the world’s most elegant techno, much to the chagrin of the hot-pant-clad muscle Marys adjacent. When we got home to England, he summed the place up perfectly: “I miss it like a person, Lias, that club. My heart aches for it. We don’t want safety. We want salvation.”

After two world wars, an aversion to military conflict has long hampered Berlin’s ability to act decisively and shoulder its fair share of responsibility as part of the Western alliance. In the past decade, Germany’s defence budget barely made it across the 1% mark of GDP, never mind the 2% required by Nato. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the fallacies of Germany’s unconditional pacifism, it plunged Berlin into an identity crisis. A national rethink was in order and Chancellor Olaf Scholz dramatically declared in February 2022 that a Zeitenwende, a watershed moment, was underway: “the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” While German aid to Ukraine was initially sluggish and always badly communicated, it is now among its biggest financial and military supporters. Only yesterday, 18 German Leopard 2s arrived in Ukraine.

There are many Germans who can’t and won’t kiss old certainties goodbye. But the two world wars at the root of modern German angst were all-encompassing catastrophes that plunged the entire country into a moral abyss. This trauma is a national one and, since Russia’s invasion, has triggered a lively public debate, leading to a degree of change. Alongside a vastly increased military budget for the German army, Berlin has also just announced that it wants to raise military aid for Ukraine from currently €3 billion to more than €15 billion in the next few years — a clear sign that it is beginning to come around to the idea of contributing to European security on a much greater scale despite its historical inhibitions.

The same cannot be said about another legacy of Germany’s tumultuous 20th century: the fact that it spent much of the latter half as two separate countries. Between 1949 and 1990 two Germanies existed: the Federal Republic in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East. Each found very different ways to move on from the horrors of war and genocide. And unification in 1990 was not enough to foster agreement on Germany’s response to armed conflict, particularly not one that involves Russia.

When East Germany vanished overnight, 16 million people who had been born there became citizens of a country that was in many ways alien to them. Their fellow Germans on the other side of the Berlin Wall may have shared their language and cultural roots, but they had an entirely different understanding of modern Germany’s place in the world.

From West Germany’s very foundation in 1949, its first chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s transatlantic outlook and focus on reconciliation with France laid the groundwork for a thoroughly Western political identity. His American partners supported this process, seeing in West Germany the easternmost outpost of the democratic world, one they wanted to fortify against Soviet influence. As a result of its ringside seat on the fault lines of the Cold War, West Germany became a fully fledged member of Nato in 1955, a mere decade after the end of the most devastating war the world had ever seen. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower declared in 1951 that he did “not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honour” in the Second World War. Adenauer was trusted to rebuild a German army, the Bundeswehr, in the early Fifties.

Adenauer saw no conflict in the fact that he was binding German soldiers to their former Western enemies. He declared in 1955 that Nato’s objectives were “in full harmony with the natural interest of the German nation”. While many Germans, particularly his opponents on the Left, disagreed with him, he pressed ahead, spending over 4% of GDP on defence in almost every year of his tenure, from 1949 to 1963. Bundeswehr pilots learned how to drop American nuclear bombs which were stationed on their soil alongside American nuclear-capable missiles. With male conscription reintroduced in 1956, West German men learnt to fight for and with Nato. Even as defence spending was gradually reduced and a powerful peace movement evolved in West Germany with anti-American strains, the bulk of society remained firmly Western in outlook. Nato was a partner, not the enemy.

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It was this outlook that East Germans were expected to share when they joined the Federal Republic in 1990. After all, they had gleefully watched Western television in secret and obsessed over branded American jeans. They had eventually joined mass demonstrations to bring down their socialist system and then voted for parties that had advocated a swift and one-sided unification process. It seemed reasonable to assume that they had shared the pro-Western outlook of their counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain all along.

Yet East Germans were not asked to return to something they were once part of, but to blend into a state that had evolved without them. They had served in the National People’s Army, formed in 1956, and were integrated into the Warsaw Pact. Unlike the trust Adenauer had enjoyed from his American Allies, the East German leadership had a rather different relationship with Moscow. During the Prague Spring in 1968, when the Soviets suppressed political reform in Czechoslovakia, East German troops only formed supply lines and were kept directly under Soviet command. It was a decision made in Moscow, not in Berlin, that they weren’t deployed in open combat. The East German authorities didn’t even know how many Soviet troops were stationed on their own soil (still around 350,000 in the Eighties). They relied on guesswork based on water use in Soviet military installations to gain a vague picture. This peculiar mixture of being tied to Moscow without enjoying its confidence defined the East German experience for 41 years.

Military affiliation is just one facet of the worlds that collided in 1990. East Germans had learned Russian at school, they read Russian literature, watched Russian films, and had Russian partner schools and organisations. Meanwhile, West Germans learnt English and watched Hollywood movies.

Unsurprisingly, these differences still echo today. According to one survey carried out last month, only a quarter of Germans living in the former East think of the US as a “reliable ally”, as opposed to the majority of West Germans. Fewer easterners also deem Russia a threat to peace, (though the figure is still high at 73%). Meanwhile, East German politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, the Minister President of Saxony, or Sahra Wagenknecht, a vocal member of the far-Left party Die Linke, have been among the most ardent supporters of a swift peace in Ukraine — even if this means severe concessions towards the Russian aggressor.

On Russia and Ukraine, many Germans in the eastern states keenly feel the economic legacy of division. It is here that oil and gas connections, such as Druzhba, one of the world’s longest oil pipelines, once delivered Russian energy. Many German locals were involved in its construction in the Sixties. Today, however, sanctions and escalating tensions have seen the pipes dry up, leaving entire regions uncertain about their economic future.

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Yet all these ongoing rifts have largely been ignored. East Germans are a minority: there are more than five times as many West Germans. In terms of actual representation, the picture is even more slanted. In his new book, Dirk Oschmann, an academic who was born in the GDR, points out that only 1.7% of the senior positions in media, research, the justice system and the civil service are currently occupied by East Germans. It has been a bestseller for weeks in Germany, obviously voicing concerns that many feel have been ignored for too long.

Will King Charles, caught up in the circus of his first foreign trip as monarch, also ignore them? It seems unlikely, given his special affinity with Germany. He has visited the country more than 40 times since his first trip at the age of 13, and has dazzled audiences with speeches delivered in fluent German. He will also make a point of visiting places in the former East, such as the rural village of Brodowin, 50 miles north-east of Berlin. The respect he will show small East German businesses — such as by visiting an Ökodorf, an eco-farm, where he will make his own cheese — makes the important point that a state visit to Germany should include its eastern regions. At a time when almost 60% of East Germans say they feel second-class citizens in their own country, Berlin’s political class would do well to take note.

For while Germany rethinks its position in the world and in Europe following Ukraine, it needs to rethink its society too. When the East German state disappeared in 1990, the life experiences of its former citizens did not. To airbrush 41 years of political, social and economic history out of the national story as a failed experiment, an anomaly or the side show to the continuity narrative is as ahistorical as it is unhelpful. Reunification was a step towards bringing the nation back together, not the happy ending of that path. A Zeitenwende in German foreign policy might be underway, but a domestic watershed is needed too.

His words echo those of Germany’s minister of state for eastern Germany, who had just been to visit. Joining Burnham at the Conference of the North, Carsten Schneider said: “The goal of creating equal living conditions everywhere in Germany can even be found in our constitution. There are good reasons for it. If regions are drifting apart, it is bad for everyone. If a variety of regions flourish, the whole country will prosper.”

“When you visit Germany,” Burnham wrote, “you can see and feel the success of this policy wherever you go in the high standards of transport infrastructure and the public realm.” Obviously, Burnham has never taken Deutsche Bahn. Thanks to ageing infrastructure and a huge investment backlog, Germany’s railways just are no longer very punctual. An investigation by ARD in September, found the rail network was on the “brink of collapse”. And, as in the UK, it is a symbol of Germany’s failure to invest equally in all its regions.

The policy lionised by centre-Left politicians like Schneider and Burnham is the mammoth project known as Aufbau Ost, the rebuilding of the former communist East over the last 30 years. When the two were reunified, the West’s GDP was 50% higher than the East’s; visiting the latter when I was a teenager felt like travelling back in time to a vaguely dystopian past with tiny, sputtering plastic cars, the ubiquitous whiff of coal smoke, and a vast shortage of house paint and non-scratchy toilet paper. Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised “blossoming landscapes” in the East when the Berlin Wall fell. The opposite happened. Industrial production fell by 70%. A third of eastern factories were shuttered; many were sold for a pittance to westerners. Joblessness exploded. The investment flowing in couldn’t stem the haemorrhage. By 1995, the alarmed Kohl government had forged a plan to properly fund the Aufbau, which he named the Solidarpakt: the “solidarity pact”. The plan was designed to honour the constitutional clause vaunted by Burnham, which makes the federal government responsible for the “creation of equivalent living conditions” across the land.

What constitutes equivalent conditions is, of course, open to interpretation. Conservatives usually understand it to mean equality of public infrastructure — roads, railways, telecommunications. But the Left often stress that it should also mean similar wage and pension levels. Periodically, the state governments bicker over the details of the formulas, with suggestions of tweaks that would work in their favour. Nonetheless, the principle of federal redistribution has remained robust.

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After all, the Solidarpakt turbocharged a system that had actually been in place since 1949, when the Federal Republic was created under the watchful eyes of the occupying Allies. That system is known as the Länderfinanzausgleich (literally: “State Financial Equalisation”), and grew out of another article in the constitution, which states that “it shall be ensured by law… that the different financial strength of the Länder is adequately compensated for”. Essentially, it regulates the transfer of tax revenue from richer Länder (states) to poorer ones.

But in the Nineties, the Länderfinanzausgleich didn’t provide nearly enough money to prevent total economic meltdown in the East. For this, hundreds of billions were needed. A new temporary “solidarity surcharge” to fund the East appeared on wage slips as 7.5% of Germans’ income tax. Petrol taxes were raised. In addition, large special funds were set up to finance culture, police and infrastructure in Berlin, commensurate with the city’s status as the new-old capital of the reunified country. Additional hundreds of billions of euros flowed into the East, in the form of state pensions that recognised the working lives of easterners, even if they’d been working in a system that had collapsed and whose currency was almost worthless.

Nobody knows exactly how much reunification “cost”, because there are so many different ways of calculating it, but it’s certainly well over a trillion euros. Aufbau Ost was a huge burden on the economy, but it meant that the “new federal states” soon received smooth autobahns and glittering train stations. Town centres and castles from the Baltic to the Czech border were impeccably renovated. Gradually, the solidarity tax was lowered. Today, only high earners pay the surcharge.

Would the English ever accept such a burden? Despite complaints in the press, West Germans generally saw it as a duty towards their brethren who suffered under communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave the project an unprecedented historical urgency. There simply was no alternative. Can one really imagine London and the Home Countries taking one for the North? For as long as it really takes to make a difference?

And how inspired should we be by Germany anyway? Länderfinanzausgleich is complicated in a way that only Germany can do complicated: Sueddeutsche Zeitung once wrote that only a few dozen people actually understand how it works — which shouldn’t be the case in a democracy.

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And though the work of “levelling up” Germany has come a very long way, it is by no means finished. Many cities in the East — Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin — are more prosperous than some of their western equivalents. The country’s unemployment deadbeat is no longer the capital, but Bremen, in the North-West. But income levels in the East remain stubbornly lower: in 2020, the average gross salary, at €36,499, was still €7,440 lower than in the West.

Other vectors point to inequality as well. According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the centre-Left SPD, most rural areas in the East are in a “lasting structural crisis” — thanks to depopulation, low wages and not enough broadband. Many smaller Western cities also struggle with deindustrialisation and rising poverty — not unlike the North of England. Levelling up hasn’t prevented their decline. Nevertheless, most of the net recipients of Länderfinanzausgleich are still in the East.

Then there is the capital — that strange spawn of East and West — which, although it now displays above-average growth, still receives the largest helping out of the pot: €3.6 billion from a total of €17 billion in 2021. It receives additional billions, too, from a separate federal fund for troubled regions, because otherwise the city wouldn’t be able to service its €60 billion in debt. This has been met with grumbling in certain parts of the nation. Though Berlin has rebounded, it is still considered run-down, decrepit and lawless by the rest of the country. When, on New Year’s Eve, youths attacked and injured police and first responders with fireworks in war-like scenes on the streets of Berlin, Bavarian leaders railed against the “chaotic” capital. Once a poor rural kingdom populated by Lederhosen-wearing yokels, Bavaria was a net recipient of financial transfers until the late Eighties. Now, it leads Germany in everything from tourism to tech to education.

Why, Bavarians asked, should they fund the “failed state” of Berlin, which can’t even maintain order — and has to re-do a local election next month because of rampant irregularities?

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Likewise, when Berlin decided to become the first and only German state to offer free day-care a few years ago, the protest coming out of Munich was loud: why should we pay for something those loser Berliners, with their €60 billion in debt, can scarcely afford? On such occasions, politicians from richer states inevitably demand reform: a kind of anti-levelling-up. Last week Bavarian finance minister Albert Füracker said he no longer wanted to fund Berlin’s “feel-good programmes” and  announced Bavaria would challenge the Länderfinanzausgleich in the constitutional court. Should someone tell Andy Burnham?

Just like in Britain, Germany’s capital indubitably gets more than its fair share. Can we, then, really be holding the nation up as a model for levelling up? And, perhaps more to the point: is the Herculean challenge of grafting a bankrupt former communist country onto a modern capitalist economy in any way comparable to the task of tackling industrial decline and a lack of investment in regions like North Eastern England or Wales? Can Britain learn from Germany, or is the German solution too, well, German?

To fully answer this question, we need to look beyond the birth of the Länderfinanzausgleich to the history the policy grew out of. That history is radically different from England’s. Until Prussia bundled together most of the German-speaking lands into an empire (the Second Reich) in 1871, the place we call Germany comprised dozens of kingdoms and dukedoms. No single metropolis lorded over the rest. England, on the other hand, became a country in the year 927. The monarch’s government has been collecting tax from its perch in London for more than a millennium. Only with the Third Reich did Germany truly centralise power (and finances) in Berlin. We know how that went.

After the war, the country was purposefully re-crafted to have no strong centre. Although Berlin is beginning to flourish economically again — it attracts more start-up capital than any other German city — it will never be a London, generating the bulk of the nation’s wealth then distributing it like a whimsical king. To disrupt structures so deep-rooted takes a catastrophe, or else decades of slow change. German “devolution” was originally imposed by the force of a few words in a constitution, dictated by occupying powers, the country having been at the stage of some of the 20th century’s most harrowing dramas. The collapse of two dictatorships demanded drastic measures. England has not seen such severe upheavals in modern times.

An awareness of history and a deep desire for stability means the German state has been willing to take on huge tasks — and throw real money at them — in a way that might seem foreign and exaggerated to some in Westminster. I’m not sure Andy Burnham realises the scale of change required to transform England’s system into something like Germany’s. One might dream of transforming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland into a federation. Maybe that’s what it really takes to achieve more equality. But would London ever agree to such a radical move? Muddling through, having the provinces beg for crumbs, probably suits the capital just fine.

What form did this ‘high ground’ take? According to the Harvard student who introduced her 2019 commencement speech at the Ivy League college with a litany of her good deeds: “She has passed Germany’s first minimum wage, closed Germany’s nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear explosion, promoted marriage equality, led progress in tackling climate change, and opened her country to over one million refugees from the wars of the Middle East.”

Merkel’s junior coalition partners the Social Democrats would no doubt roll their eyes if they heard that; the policies listed by the Harvard student were all theirs. Take the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Merkel, a conservative, actually opposed it for all of her career, but, sensing a shift in the Zeitgeist, let it pass through parliament in 2017.

But that was typical Merkel. She always let the public mood determine her policy choices: she was the first German chancellor to receive a weekly detailed briefing on opinion research from her press department. Perhaps that’s why she was synonymous with dithering, sitting on the fence and remaining quiet on key issues — so much so that a neologism was spawned: merkeln, the Langenscheidt dictionary’s 2015 word of the year. “To Merkel” is defined as “to do nothing, make no decisions, issue no statements”.

It was not her strong convictions that endeared her with German voters. It was her lack of them. She is the opposite of a visionary; once asked what she associated with Germany, she said “well-made windows”. Not Germany’s rich cultural heritage, not its landscapes, not its football squad, not even its robust Grundgesetz (a set of basic laws put in place after the war, essentially a constitution). Far more important are its… well-sealed windows.

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So, is she really the “liberal West’s last defender”, as the New York Times would have it? Much of the ‘moral compass’ talk is based on Merkel’s momentous decision to open the German border to more than a million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015. No doubt it was an event of historic importance that changed Germany and Europe forever. But was it really on par with Willy Brandt’s epic 1970 genuflection in Warsaw, as some have suggested? Or, as some commentators said at the time, a monumental, healing gesture that showed the world that Germany had finally shaken off its Nazi baggage and become a force for good? Not quite.

Only two months before she opened the borders, Merkel had appeared at a townhall-style event called Living Well in Germany, in which she engaged with a group of teenagers from across the country. There, Reem Sahwil, a 14-year-old Palestinian refugee who spoke flawless German and had stellar marks in school, expressed her fear that her family would be deported, extinguishing her dream of attending university in Germany. Without a hint of empathy, Merkel told her that if everyone like her stayed, thousands of other refugees from the Middle East and Africa would flood into Germany, something the country couldn’t cope with. When Sahwil began to cry, Merkel said: “But you’ve done really well for yourself. Let me give you a stroke.” (Something she actually did.)

When, just two months later, tens of thousands of Syrians were passing through Hungary and Austria towards Germany, Merkel first considered taking a hardline approach and mobilising thousands of police officers to secure the southern frontier. Opinion polls, however, suggested most Germans favoured a compassionate, welcoming approach. So without consulting EU partners, she opened the borders. Within days, she was shooting selfies with young Syrian men.

In a matter of months, however, Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) started to haemorrhage support. And the supposedly moral Merkel was soon replaced by her old pragmatic, shape-shifting political self. She tried to export the refugee problem to the outer borders of the EU and brokered a dodgy deal with the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stem the tide of human beings fleeing across the Aegean. To placate the conservative wing of the CDU, she spoke at a December 2016 party conference of banning the burqa — to jubilant applause. She also started to take a harder line on the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers who had committed crimes, even to war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.

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But for many it was too late. The massive influx of refugees was the boost the odious, far-right AfD had been waiting for. Largely thanks to Merkel’s shambolic immigration policy, the party is now a permanent fixture of German politics and commands a majority in two eastern states.

Merkel’s political contortions extend well beyond immigration, however. On climate policy, too, she has been immensely disappointing. Granted, she had a few successes on the diplomatic stage, such as persuading Russia’s Vladimir Putin to sign up to the Paris Agreement. But when it comes to actually reducing Germany’s climate footprint, her governments’ actions have been woefully half-hearted. Following a tiny slump during the pandemic, carbon dioxide emissions are up again, and it looks unlikely that Germany will hit its target of a 65% drop in emissions from 1990 levels.

Meanwhile, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, Merkel rushed to fast track Germany’s plan to drop nuclear power. Yet renewables haven’t picked up enough to fill in the gap in power production. Instead, Merkel has pushed for the Nord Stream pipeline (admittedly initiated by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now even sits on the operator’s board) through the Baltic Sea, enabling Germany to pipe in Russian gas directly without paying fees to those pesky middlemen such as Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Did her moral compass slide off deck?

And then, as always in Germany, there is das Auto. Successive Merkel governments have been slavishly beholden to the car industry. How else are we to explain Dieselgate, where it took the US authorities — and not the corrupt or incompetent German regulators — to reveal that Volkswagen was installing software that enabled its cars to cheat during emissions testing. Sales of German cars fell briefly. But few heads rolled.

Instead, Merkel merkelled: she held ‘diesel summits’ at which the hitherto extremely profitable carmakers — the perpetrators — begged for and received mountains of cash in the form of subsidies and government-funded customer incentives to prop up demand for electric, petrol and — yep — diesel cars of the slightly cleaner variety.

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But Dieselgate was, for the most part, unexceptional. The Merkel years were defined by scandals of incompetence and corruption, none of which, incredibly, stuck to the chancellor herself. She had a knack for outsourcing difficult decisions to commissions, for delegating hot button issues to her foot soldiers. It was always easy for the press to point a finger to one of her flailing ministers. She remained aloof from the mudslinging — while working on her ‘moral compass’ act with earnest speeches and high-profile international negotiations.

Yes, she was Germany’s first female leader, and the first chancellor from the East. But the fact that she was a protestant pastor’s daughter in a communist country — a tale of humble origins spun in every English-language profile — didn’t make her the deeply moral politician so many made her out to be. Rather, during the Trump years, when it felt that the world was being taken over by blustering male populists, her plodding, unflashy style made her stand out. Against that backdrop, her measured mediocrity was mistaken for a moral virtue.

That probably isn’t what Obama had in mind when he spoke of her saintly principles. But let’s not forget that even saints are only human.

Just as Boris Johnson represents everything that British remainers hate about Britain, Angela Merkel embodies everything they love about Germany — the country they regard as the grown-up in the room.

Her fans do have half-a-point. Merkel is the epitome of Germany’s role in the world. But as we’ll see, that’s not something to be proud of. Indeed, the closer you look at her record, the less there is to show for it. 

There’s no denying her staying-power. When she first became Chancellor, in 2005, her opposite numbers in Britain and America were Tony Blair and George W Bush. She certainly hasn’t lacked for time.

Or look at it this way: just one Chancellor (Gerhard Schröder) separates Merkel’s Chancellorship from that of her mentor, Helmut Kohl. However, there were five Prime Ministers between Boris Johnson and Kohl’s contemporary, Margaret Thatcher (and five Presidents between Joe Biden and Ronnie Reagan). Is it any wonder that Germany’s leaders look down upon their allies with a certain Teutonic superiority?

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With so many terms as Chancellor one might assume Merkel to be a political genius — an election-winning machine in the mould of a Blair or Thatcher. But that’s not the case. In fact, she’s bungled one election after another. 

The first one was 2002. As leader of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel should have been the centre-Right’s candidate for Chancellor. But instead she was out-manoeuvred by Edmund Stoiber — the leader of the CSU (the CDU’s Bavarian sister party).

She had to wait until 2005 to get her first shot at the top job — and she very nearly blew it. A lead in the polls was lost after loose talk about introducing a flat tax. Instead of increasing her party’s vote share as expected, she reduced it. She was only saved by the fact that the incumbent Chancellor — Schröder — lost more votes that she did. 

It was a shattering experience for Merkel — but it taught her two things: Firstly, never to be interesting again. And, secondly, that she didn’t have to succeed in order to win, she just had to do less worse than her rivals. 

And so she became Chancellor — but only by forming a “Grand Coalition” with the Social Democrats. At the next election in 2009, her vote share went down again. Luckily for her, her coalition partners (and main electoral opponents) were pulverised. Moving swiftly on, she swapped them for a new coalition partner — the Free Democrats.

Her second term in office was dominated by the Eurozone crisis. That was when the rest of the EU realised who was in charge. The so-called ‘PIIGS’ — Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain — were forced into austerity measures that made George Osborne’s budgets look positively Keynesian.

Populist protest movements began to stir all over Europe. But Merkel didn’t mind. Her hardline policies were popular at home and at the next election in 2013, she scored her one clear victory — the highest share of the vote for the CDU since the days of Kohl. Yet, as per usual, her allies didn’t fare so well. In fact, the Free Democrats crashed out of the Bundestag altogether.

Shortly before he became Prime Minister, David Cameron asked Angela Merkel what it was like to lead a coalition. “The little party always gets smashed”, she observed through crocodile tears. In 2013, Merkel needed a new little party, having broken the old one. In practice, that meant another Grand Coalition with Social Democrats.

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When will Germany grow up?

By Katja Hoyer

And so we come to Merkel’s calamitous third term in office — and in particular her chaotic mishandling of the refugee crisis. The Syrian civil war wasn’t her fault, of course. Nor is there anything wrong with helping refugees. However, suddenly flinging open Germany’s borders (and then slamming them shut again) was entirely the wrong way of going about it. She destabilised politics at home and abroad — while providing a massive encouragement to the people smugglers.

In the 2017 German general election, the CSU was punished with its worst result since the 1950s and the Social Democrats with their worst result since the 1930s. They still had enough seats to cobble together a not-so-Grand Coalition, but the populist AfD was left as the largest opposition party.

So, with the exception of 2013, Merkel has never received a ringing endorsement from the German electorate. She’s just been in the best position to pick up the pieces of her own political failures.

Then again, holding together a broken system is what she’s all about. That’s not just in Germany, but across Europe — where the system in question is the single currency.

German leaders — and Merkel is no exception — love to preach fiscal responsibility. They’re in a strong position to do so: Germany’s record of balanced budgets compares well to the spiralling debts of other nations. 

The bit that’s left unsaid, however, is that German rectitude is built upon a mercantilist scam of continental proportions. The Eurozone is a distorting mirror whose effect is to make German exports permanently cheaper than they should be and those of weaker economies more expensive. Add to that the trade barriers erected around the Single Market (but removed within it) and German exporters can hardly fail.

The trade imbalance forces Germany’s partners into debt — and thus dependency upon the European Central Bank, conveniently headquartered in Frankfurt. Right how, the deficits of countries like Italy and Spain are entirely financed by ECB bond purchases — which means they must do as they’re told. 

Merkel did not design the Eurozone. She inherited the system from her predecessors. Nevertheless, during her Chancellorship, Germany has exploited its position to reach a level of economic and political dominance that is, if not unprecedented, unusual for having been achieved through peaceful means.  

Very few German politicians are willing to say any of this out loud. One of them is Sahra Wagenknecht, an outlier even within her own Left Party. She has accused her country of “abusing a highly dangerous, half-hegemonic position.”

“Half-hegemonic” is exactly right. Germany dominates, but it doesn’t lead. Under Merkel, Germany’s power has been used not for reform but to embed the status quo — no matter how difficult a position this places her friends in. 

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Europe is waiting for its Napoleon

By Peter Franklin

She is, for instance, directly responsible for Brexit. By refusing to give David Cameron any concession on free movement of people across borders she doomed the Remain campaign to defeat. For her, the theoretical framework of the “four freedoms” was more important than the real world difficulties of an English-speaking nation that was wide open to the impact of uncontrolled immigration. 

Another failure of leadership is Europe’s security. When Donald Trump was elected President, the New York Times breathlessly proclaimed Merkel the “the liberal’s West’s last defender”. Really? Her and whose army? Certainly not the sub-par German military, nor the fabled European Army that Merkel paid lip service to but never had any intention of paying for. Meanwhile Trump has come and gone, and America is still defending Europe’s borders.

Germany’s main contribution to Europe’s security during the Merkel years has been to undermine it. On the one hand Germany joins in with ritual denunciations of Russian and Chinese aggression, but on the other enthusiastically pursues lucrative trading relationships with both regimes. 

There’s no better example of this than the Nord Stream gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. The route is specifically chosen to bypass Russia’s vulnerable neighbours, thus weakening their economic and strategic positions at a time of growing tension. Merkel wasn’t responsible for the first of these pipelines, but it was her government that doubled down with Nord Stream 2, in the face of bitter opposition from Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. 

Germany wouldn’t be so dependent on Russian fossil fuel imports if it had made more progress on decarbonising its economy. For a while this was a policy area on which Germany did, for once, take the lead. Merkel went out of her way to identify herself with the issue, becoming known as the Klimatkanzlerin (“Climate Chancellor”). 

But that went out the window when, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, she caved in to a crazy plan to phase out Germany’s existing nuclear power stations. Not even Japan, where the disaster actually happened, went that far. By prioritising the end of nuclear over the end of coal, Germany will continue spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere until 2038. 

It is now the United Kingdom that leads the world’s biggest economies on this issue — and Boris Johnson who’ll preside over the closure of the last British coal-fired power station in just two years time. 

Aside from global warming, Merkel has bequeathed two final gifts to the world. The first is Ursula von der Leyen — the deeply unimpressive defence minister who Merkel installed as President of European Commission. It was a foolish appointment, as made clear in the shambles of the vaccine procurement programme.

Merkel’s other parting shot is Armin Laschet, her chosen successor as leader of the CDU and candidate for Chancellor. This is a man is so uninspiring that German voters have turned to the dying Social Democrats in desperation. 

The CDU, meanwhile, is set to get its worst ever result — a verdict not just on Herr Laschet, but on 16 years of Angela Merkel. 

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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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).

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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.

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.

Further reading

The German hard right's immigration fixation is missing the point

By Michael Burleigh

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.)

Further reading

There are few heroes in Europe's migration saga

By Michael Burleigh

In January 1947, the US and UK unified their respective zones in Germany itself to form what was known administratively as Bizonia (the French would combine with them 18 months later in Trizonia). Then, in March that year, the tension increased with the breakdown of the Moscow conference of foreign ministers and the enunciation of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ (President Harry S Truman pledged US support for free peoples against armed subjugation, primarily through economic and financial aid).

In June, the US Secretary of State, the former General George Marshall, announced the European Recovery Program. The purpose of the Marshall Plan, as it came to be called, was not only to support economic recovery in Western Europe but to create a bulwark against Communism by drawing participating states into the US’s economic orbit.

Early the following year, 1948, the US, UK and France began to plan the creation of a new German state from the three occupation zones. On discovering this, the Soviets withdrew from the Allied Control Council and began to restrict rail and road access to Berlin. The Red Air Force also began to violate West Berlin airspace, ‘buzzing’ flights in and out of the city, and on 5 April, a Soviet Yak fighter collided with a British European Airways Viking airliner, killing all aboard both aircraft.

In June, the western allies introduced the new Deutschmark in Trizonia, and also in West Berlin to wrest economic control of the city from the Soviets and enable the introduction of Marshall Aid, as well as curbing the black market. The Soviets responded by issuing their own currency, the Ostmark, and on 24 June, Soviet troops imposed a total blockade of rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas of the city, cutting off electricity as well as food and coal.

The allies had been making contingency plans for such a case, but the Soviets had calculated that an airlift of food and fuel for the civil population and the allied garrisons would be simply too expensive, even if it were technically possible. Nevertheless, two days later the US Air Force launched Operation Vittles (cf “victuals”) with the aim of doing just this. Britain, though in the grip of post-war ‘austerity’, with fuel and food still rationed at home, and Clement Attlee’s Labour government trying to introduce its great scheme, the National Health Service, followed suit on 28 June. With understated punning literalness, the RAF called theirs ‘Operation Plainfare’.

Truman and Attlee had calculated that the Soviets would not forcibly interfere with the airlift of humanitarian aid, especially after the crash of the BEA airliner, but as a warning, Truman sent nuclear-capable B-29 bombers to the UK.

The Soviets offered to drop the blockade if the Allies withdrew the Deutschmark from West Berlin. The Allies refused. In September, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany – the German Communist Party of the Soviet zone of occupation) marched on the Berlin City Council and forced it to adjourn. Fearing the Allies might halt the airlift and cede West Berlin to the Soviets, in turn 300,000 West Berliners rallied at the burned-out Reichstag to show their opposition to the Soviets.

Further reading

How a handful of elites gave Germany to the Nazis

By Michael Burleigh

As the months passed, the airlift became ever more efficient. The number of aircraft and sorties increased, and the turn-round times – loading, unloading, refuelling and take-off – decreased. At the height of the campaign, one plane was landing every minute into either Gatow, Templehof or Tegel airfields from hub airfields near Hamburg, Hanover and Frankfurt.

When Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949, aircrew from the US Air Force, the RAF, the French Air Force and from the Commonwealth, and civilian lines, had flown 277,804 sorties in 689 military and civil aircraft (441 US, 147 RAF and 101 British civil) carrying 2.3 million tonnes of supplies – two-thirds of it coal. Berliners had received an average of 2,300 calories a day – higher than in food-rationed Britain.

The Berlin blockade, though a resounding and largely bloodless victory for the Western Allies, nevertheless solidified the division of Europe. Shortly before its end, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created, and two weeks after the blockade was lifted, the Federal Republic of Germany was formed from Trizonia, though for the time being the Allies retained control of foreign policy (the Soviets replied with the creation of the German Democratic Republic). And Berlin – Angela Merkel’s father’s city – became both the actual and symbolic outpost of freedom and democracy in the fight against Communism.

Today, Templehof is no longer an airfield but an open space in the middle of the city, where Berliners jog, skate, sunbathe and barbecue. At the airfield’s former entrance, however, they might catch a glimpse of the Luftbrückendenkmal (airlift monument) commemorating both the aerial lifeline and its 76 casualties, both aircrew and civilians. Designed by the Bauhaus architect Eduard Ludwig and unveiled in 1951, it is reminiscent of a hungry hand reaching up. The curved concrete structures have three claws facing westwards to symbolise the three air corridors – Hamburg, Hannover, Frankfurt – through which Berliners were sustained, and the three sustaining powers – the US, UK and France.

Modern, prosperous, united Germany exists only because Britain stood alone against Hitler in 1940, and then after the war helped contain the Soviet Union. Yet how much of this is weighed in the balance when it comes to Brexit? It would not perhaps be quite a Ronald Reagan moment, when he stood at the concrete divide between East and West Berlin and said “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, but perhaps when next she goes to Berlin, Theresa May might consider making a speech in front of the Luftbrückendenkmal– something along the lines of “To avoid the danger of learning nothing, it is first necessary to forget nothing”.

Further reading

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