German Ghosts

Reflections on VE Day and family history

Berlin yesterday was a city of ghosts. My own and Germany's. I happened to be there for the 80th anniversary of VE day having arrived the previous day to celebrate the publication of a book by a German friend about his family roots in East Prussia (of which more later).

The city was eerily empty yesterday morning as I pedalled around on a lime bike: passed the Gedachtniskirche in the heart of the old West Berlin, then on to the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag (which was cordoned off while president Steinmeier delivered a solemn address), the Holocaust memorial, and on to Potsdamer Platz and the iconic buildings of the eastern part of the city. The police were out in force especially by any memorial commemorating the Soviet/Russian contribution to VE, which were attracting handfuls of pro-Putin and pro-Ukraine demonstrators. The fact that tourists seemed to outnumber Berliners across the city was thanks to the fact that VE day was a public holiday for the first time in Brandenburg, the state within which Berlin sits, though not in the rest of the country.

As I pedalled I reflected on what a big part in my life Germany has played. I was fortunate enough to live there for three years, in the old western capital Bonn, as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times during the unification period, 1988-91. It was there that me and my future wife, Lucy, courted, one weekend a month (I would return to see her in London once a month too). We used to visit Berlin often when it was still a divided city with all the strange romance of the frozen Cold War conflict - many buildings even in the west still had the scars of war - and hang out with the cool kids in Kreuzberg or try to catch a few words with Otto Schily (a founder of the Green party) in the Paris Bar. Later in 1991 we lived there for three months, with our first baby Rosamond, as I had a sabbatical from the FT during which I worked in the press department of the organisation, the Treuhand, trying to attract investment into the newly open East Germany. The report I wrote, with British and American investors in mind, was deemed too blunt about the challenges and was binned.

I was also lucky enough to be in the city, actually in East Berlin, on November 9th 1989, the day the wall fell, and sent an eye-witness account of the joy and chaos of that new dawn. I spent a lot of time in East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall and attended many of the famous marches in Leipzig, in particular, getting to know individuals and families in the old DDR, whose views on developments I would regularly seek out and report on, (one of my regrets of that period was losing my address book towards the end of my time in Germany and so losing contact with many of those people, in the era before texts and emails).

I was, and remain, a Germanophile. When I first arrived I recall loving the earnestness and directness of the place, compared with the superciliousness and obfuscation that is too often characteristic of my own land. And how could you not admire the recovery from the physical and moral destruction of 1945? I wrote a pamphlet for the centre-left think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research in 1994 - The Reshaping of the German Social Market - celebrating its virtues even as it faced the biggest downturn since the war. It was influenced by time spent at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin sitting at the feet of the great British political economist David Soskice (and it was edited by a young David Miliband, who was very grumpy when I spelt his name wrong in the acknowledgements).

But we across Europe have also suffered from Germany’s scrupulous over-correction when it comes to the nation state and national citizen preference. ‘Never again’ was once a moral virtue but has turned out to be a security vulnerability. And it has helped to create an over-mighty EU, Brexit, and, now, our apparent inability to reform the outdated refugee laws that is fuelling populism everywhere.

And this is where my book publishing friend, Jochen Buchsteiner, becomes relevant. Jochen was the London correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (the German Times equivalent) until a couple of years ago, which is how I came to know him, and has just written a book about his grandmother’s escape from the family estate in East Prussia, as the Soviet army approached in January 1945, and his own, sometimes comic, attempts to reconnect with a place - now part of Russia - where Germans had lived for hundreds of years.

The Prussians, or more specifically the East Prussians, were the most significant European tribe to be ethnically cleansed after 1945. The place and people that gave us the enlightened absolutism of Frederick the Great, thinkers and reformers such as Kant and Copernicus, as well as the reactionary junkers and the military men with enormous moustaches who were Bismarck’s sword in creating the single Germany in 1870, were wiped from the map.

Immanuel Kant... a good Prussian?

They joined the flood of German-speaking refugees from the east, 15m in all, who were absorbed, somewhat reluctantly at first (see Ed West’s recent substack account), into a shrunken, shattered Germany. They were tough and hard working people - the ‘laptops and lederhosen’ success of modern Bavaria, home to Siemens and other once-Prussian companies, is based on the marriage of conservative small farmers and industrious refugees. But their flight has never attracted much sympathy and liberal-minded Germans, who have happily welcomed millions of refugees from outside Europe in recent decades, have shown little curiosity about the refugee stories of their own grand-parents and great-grandparents.

Jochen wants to change that. Speaking at his book launch the evening before VE day he said he did not wish to downplay Germany’s historic crimes nor to turn perpetrators into victims. He does, however want to encourage people to investigate these stories of family trauma while there are still notebooks with letters and photographs in the attic and even people with childhood memories of flight. The book, We East Prussians, has the subtitle An Ordinary German Family History. He says he knows many people who are now saying ‘I which I had asked more questions about the refugee story’. While I was chatting to him after his talk a former German ambassador came up and said he now felt guilty that he had not properly investigated his own family’s refugee story while that generation was still alive.

When Germany hosted the 2006 football world cup I returned to Bonn with my two sons to stay with my old neighbour Nestor for an England game nearby. At the time there was much talk, amid the flag-waving, about the ‘normalisation’ of German national feeling. Full normalisation is not realistic but a more comfortable, less paranoid, relationship to the national past and present would be a blessing for all of Europe and maybe Jochen’s book is making a small contribution to that end.

Berlin’s spy agency, meanwhile, in its designation of the AfD populists as “extremist” illustrates just how far there is to go. No doubt German populists will always be judged by somewhat different standards but this is a party that received 20% of the vote at the last election and has a programme that could have been drawn up by the main centre right party the CDU in the 1990s. The desire to deport illegal immigrants, even when expressed in spicy language, is not an extreme view. The experience throughout Europe is that populists moderate as they get closer to power. Voters dislike extremists but they also want borders controlled and national sovereignty respected and if mainstream parties cannot deliver they will vote for populists. Excluding them has not worked anywhere. If the courts uphold the extremism designation the new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is unlikely to actually ban the party but it will likely weaken the forces of moderation within the AfD and make German politics even more dysfunctional as it is difficult to establish workable coalitions with the populists siphoning off so many votes.

My own political journey from mainstream progressive to feeling some sympathy for the populist revolt began in Germany. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the red-green SDP led by Oscar Lafontaine during the 1990 reunification election. I then made the mistake of meeting my hero. I was on the Lafontaine train travelling around the country during that campaign surrounded by political journalists all of whom were SDP supporters and thought it was hilarious when Lafontaine made jokes about the supposedly primitive views of East German voters. This was the haughty, ultra-liberal, post-national ‘Tuscany’ fraction of German politics in full view and I was appalled. It continues to turn up its nose at moderate nationalism and continues to have too loud a voice in German life.

I have many reasons to feel grateful to Germany. Reporting on a world historic event in my early thirties made me aim for something higher than a comfortable berth at the FT for another 30 years, it led me to take the risk of setting up the political monthly Prospect magazine in 1995. Germany, as noted, opened my eyes to some of the failings of modern liberalism, and also to just how quickly political euphoria can turn to disappointment as East Germans came to feel like second class citizens in the united Germany.

Living in a foreign country for a few years and trying to master another language was also a blessing. I will never be a fluent German speaker having arrived without even a German O level to my name. But thanks in part to travels in East Germany, where people spoke little English, I picked up enough. By the time I left Germany in 1991 taxi drivers mistook my German for that of a Dutchman which I took as a compliment.

The FT had been understandably reluctant to send me to Germany in 1988 as I knew no German and had no German connections, but the number two job in Bonn was considered the most boring on the whole foreign correspondent circuit and no one else applied. And it turned out that I did have a German connection. It was not one that I knew much about when I went, until reminded by my own father’s discomfort that I was returning to the land his great-grandfather had left in the mid-19th century.

That great-grandfather, my own great-great grandfather, was Mayer Lehman, who along with his two brothers left Germany to establish in Alabama the business that would later become the legendary investment bank. As a minor beneficiary of that success four generations later I have had choices and economic security denied to most people, so thank you again Germany for prompting Mayer’s exodus. Living in a small town, Rimpar, outside Wurzburg in northern Bavaria the Lehman boys faced more restrictions as Jews than they would have done if they had lived in supposedly illiberal Prussia, which granted Jews full citizenship in the early 19th century. They left Germany partly because of those restrictions, Mayer was especially disappointed at the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt parliament to usher in a new era.

I visited Rimpar just once in 1994 along with other British and American Lehman relatives to attend a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first Lehman bother leaving for the new world, before the name Lehman became synonymous with economic disaster. There was a ceremony where I gave a short speech in German, reflecting on the fact that I was probably the first Lehman relative for two generations to speak the tongue. There were telegrams of greeting from Helmut Kohl and Bill Clinton. A local historian of the Lehman family, Roland Flade, also spoke.

The Lehman dynasty in the US produced many distinguished figures including the US senator and leading liberal Democrat and protege of FDR, Herbert Lehman, whose first cousin Eva Thalheimer perished at Treblinka. The dynasty also claims a connection via marriage to a less popular figure, Henry Morgenthau Jnr, Treasury Secretary to FDR and author of the notorious Morgenthau plan of July 1944 for returning Germany to being a purely agricultural country.

The plan was initially taken quite seriously by FDR and Churchill but they soon realised it would have led to mass starvation and would have created resentment among those Germans who remained 1,000 times worse than left by the Treaty of Versailles. Nonetheless the plan did have a significant, though unquantifiable, impact on the last few months of the war. For the plan was, inevitably, leaked and it was a gift to Goebbels inspiring Germans to defend the fatherland with even greater vigour in the belief that American Jews wanted to return them to conditions of 1500 years ago. American military commanders did report more vigorous resistance in the weeks after the plan was reported in the German press. Maybe without the Morgenthau plan we might be celebrating VE day a few weeks earlier.

It is not only Germans who have skeletons in the family closet. We are almost all descendants of both slaves and slave-owners if you go back far enough. In fact, in my case, you don’t have to go back too far. Mayer Lehman, the understandably disgruntled German Jew became, briefly, a slave owner in Montgomery, Alabama. His son, Herbert, played a prominent role in the early days of the civil rights movement. History is messy.