Category: history

Peace on earth, goodwill to men… and women

angela findlay4 Comments

I am not a huge fan of Christmas, but I do love the peace of the days that follow the rush and stuffing of stockings, fridges and bellies. A stillness descends as exhausted people navigate the aftermath of families, toy-strewn floors and overflowing bins. Finally, those of us in the northern hemisphere can follow winter’s call to slow down, rest, and listen to the wisdom of our hearts and souls before the new year draws us back into action. 

Peace is not something we can take for granted anymore. Fighting – with words, ideologies or weapons – has increasingly become the norm. We have just been told by the UK defence minister, Al Carns, that “the shadow of war is knocking on Europe’s door.” And warned by NATO boss, Mark Rutte, that “we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great grandparents endured.” In this year marking the 80th anniversaries of the end of the Second World War, I’ve been asking myself: how do we maintain peace in a world in which so many of the vows and institutions created to prevent future wars are under threat? How do we ensure that ‘Never Again’ still holds? Various recent events have been shaping my thoughts.

In early December, the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife, Elke Büdenbender, embarked on a three-day state visit to the UK, the first in 27 years. In his speech at the state banquet hosted by King Charles III and Queen Camilla, Steinmeier highlighted the deep connections between Britain and Germany; how traditions from each country have been woven together so tightly that their origins are now obscured. Not least among these is the Christmas tree. The first one was displayed in Windsor in 1800 by the German Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, and the custom soon spread to living rooms across the UK. The same is true for Battenberg Cake – a story I love and have often told in my work (see my December 2017 blog). 

L-R: President Steinmeier, Dean of Coventry, Elke Büdenbender, Duke of Kent…

On the final day of his visit, President Steinmeier travelled to Coventry Cathedral. He and his wife were greeted by His Royal Highness The Duke of Kent who, among his other roles, is Patron of The Dresden Trust. Coventry and Dresden have been twinned since 1959, linked both by the devastation of the bombing raids each country inflicted on the other, and by the many decades of peace and reconciliation work that have followed.

Al Murray and James Holland

At around the same time, I had been sitting in one of Goalhanger’s recording studios. You may know them for some of their most popular podcasts in The Rest Is… series, including the chart-topping The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Politics. I was there with Henry Montgomery to talk with historian and broadcaster James Holland, and comedian and ‘Pub Landlord’ Al Murray, on their equally popular WW2-focused podcast, We Have Ways of Making You Talk.  Henry, also the grandchild of a high-ranking army officer – in his case the British field marshal best known as ‘Monty’ – and I had previously spoken together on VE Day at the National Army Museum. As I have mentioned in other blogs, we are exploring from our different perspectives how well Britain’s remembrance culture is really working. With ever fewer World War veterans and first-hand witnesses still alive to warn us of the horrors and futility of war, is it doing enough to keep “Never Again” a lived reality?

National Army Museum: Henry Montgomery, me and Daniel Cowling, May 2025

When I look at the visuals of Britain’s remembrance culture that make it into the media – for many people, perhaps the only occasions where they will actively ‘remember to remember’ the lessons of history – I fear we are not going far enough. We see mostly men in dark coats laying wreaths and solemnly reaffirming vows to uphold the peace and international friendship while elsewhere in the world other men stubbornly refuse to make it. We see the bright regalia of royalty and the glinting medals of veterans. It is the language of the military and the state: formal, symbolic and carefully choreographed. All fine and important. But peace is not confined to grand stages or organised occasions.

Listening to Radio 4’s brilliant Reith Lectures, this year titled Moral Revolution (what could be more pertinent in our times?) and delivered by the historian and author Rutger Bregman, I was struck by a description of a Quaker practice to bury the dead in unmarked graves. In stark contrast to the fields of Commonwealth War Graves and annual remembrance rituals, they believe you don’t honour people with costly headstones but with actions. Thomas Clarkson, the famous abolitionist who wrote extensively on the Quakers, said: If you wish to honour a good man, let all his actions live in your memory so that they may constantly awaken you to imitation, thus you will show that you really respect his memory.

In a similar vein, Germany’s counter memorial movement, which began in the 1980s, fundamentally changed the dynamics of memorialisation. Through its shifting, disappearing monuments and memorials to absence, the focus turned toward the millions murdered by the Nazis. Responsibility for remembrance and for ensuring such destruction never happens again was transferred from stone and bronze into the hands of ordinary people. 

And that is where it belongs. Peace is sustained not only by treaties, leaders and ceremonies, but by us – each and every one of us in our daily lives. 

So if, like Rutger Bregman with his call for a Moral Revolution, we were to start a Revolution of Peace, what might it look like? What would its optics be? What language would it speak and who would embody it? I suspect it would be a revolution that brings heart, warmth, listening, sharing and art into our everyday encounters. One with no emphasis on sides and differences, winners and losers, no interest in egos, power games or deception. Idealistic maybe, but arguably closer to what is naturally human for many of us than conflict and war. 

Perhaps over Christmas we can practice peacekeeping: at kitchen tables, in disagreements, in how we speak to one another and how willing we are to listen. In choosing curiosity and compassion over judgment. In noticing where hostility quietly creeps into our own lives and questioning the ingrained narratives that divide the world into a good and right ‘us’ and a bad and wrong ‘them’.  

When peace is on the line, remembrance must shift from an act of looking back to a commitment to shaping the future. Just as conflicts and wars escalate out of countless small decisions, so peace does too. May we – and the world’s leaders – choose peace in the year ahead.

But first, let the mayhem continue… Wishing you all a very happy festive season, a meaningful Winter Solstice, a restful and restorative break and, in 2026, peace on earth and goodwill to men… and women.

The We have Ways… podcast episode is due to be published on 30th December in all the usual podcast outlets.

Remembering, while watching falling leaves…

angela findlay6 Comments

I normally plant bulbs on Remembrance Sunday. But this year I’ve been ill. Instead I went for a gentle walk in nearby woods, silent but for the breeze combing its way through the upper branches.

Down below, all was still. Except for individual leaves falling like snow. Each one taking its moment to break from the twig to which it had been rooted since the spring and dance in a series of pirouettes, twirls and summersaults before landing quietly among the already fallen. Unseen except by a chance walker. 

Do they pick their moment, or are they plucked from life?

A certain readiness is a prerequisite for each leaf to fall. In summer, winds can howl through the branches and yet the leaves remain bound to the tree, weathering the storm, held in place by life forces that ebb and flow in synchrony with the seasons.

Death is natural for these fallen.

As I shuffle through the carpet of rust and gold, the rustle so reminiscent of childhood memories – kicking through the golden floors of beech forests in little rubber wellies – I can only ponder the dead. The war dead all around the world. The families they left behind. The scars of loss, grief, trauma and silence that remain in their wake, often hidden for generations, shaping the souls of those who come after.

We call them the fallen. It softens the reality of how they died. But while we remember them with warm hearts and deep gratitude, let us – with all the advantages of hindsight – not forget the utter horror, violence and futility of war.

As countries around the world build their armies and arsenal, let us refrain from falling into the trap of thinking war can ever be a solution to political, religious, geographical or economic problems.

Let us remember that the cost is always too high.

A Pope, a Rabbi and an 80-year-old Victory 

angela findlay3 Comments

April saw the death of the widely loved Pope Francis, the Jewish festival of Passover, and the gradual build-up to the 80th Anniversary of VE Day (Victory in Europe) in May. An unusual trio of events, yet radio coverage of all three wove threads of reflection into the tapestry of this blog. 

Compassion was central to Pope Francis’s papacy – particularly towards those who are rejected or marginalised. He often spoke about the importance of honouring and never abandoning our grandparents. “If you want to be a sign of hope, go and talk to your grandfather,” he was quoted as saying. They remind us that we share the same heritage, link us to “the beauty of being part of a much larger history… a loving plan [that] is greater than we are.” He also had the humility to say “I am a sinner,” which makes me wonder where that leaves the rest of us!

In a recent Radio 4 Thought for the Day  (at 1:47:45), Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis described Passover as the ‘Festival of Questions;’ a time to ask, to probe, to test assumptions, refine our understanding and uncover the truth. 

If we try to apply the guidance of both spiritual leaders to the forthcoming celebrations of VE Day on 8th May, we may find ourselves asking how the grandchildren of the ‘losers’ of WWII – many of whom had been perpetrators or complicit in Nazi atrocities – might ‘honour’ their grandfathers. How do you love – should you even try to love – someone who has acted immorally, abhorrently, even if those acts were sanctioned or ordered by a higher authority and deemed the right thing to do for Volk and country?

I’m all too aware how unfashionable, controversial and even provocative it is to suggest we spare a thought for the perpetrators. But in keeping with the spirit of my triangle, I am going to ask you to do just that. Many people, from all sides of the conflict, are quick to judge, blame and damn the Wehrmacht soldiers and SS as an indiscriminate mob of ‘monsters’, all morally inferior and wholly undeserving of being remembered. It’s completely understandable. But where does that leave their children and grandchildren? What happens when we continue to draw a line between the ‘good us’ and ‘bad them’, a distinction that may have served its time but no longer helps us move forward? Isn’t one of the most crucial lessons of this horrific chapter in history to recognise that most perpetrators were not monsters, but ordinary people… like you and me… who, through a slow drift of compromise, small decisions and ill judgements became capable of unimaginably heinous crimes? 

Eighty years on, with more than 88% of the German population having been born after the war’s end and a further 11% still children at the time, it’s difficult to place ‘guilt’ for the Holocaust on the Germans of today. After all, people cannot be guilty of things they themselves didn’t do. Yet, like many descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors, some non-Jewish Germans born in the decades after the war still wrestle, often unknowingly, with the unresolved trauma and guilt passed down from their parents or grandparents. They carry what Eva Hoffman aptly described as “the scars without the wound” – invisible wounds that silently shape their internal world and influence their actions in the external world. 

Without detracting anything from the horrors and suffering of the victims, can we imagine for a moment how it might be for post-war generations of Germans to live with legacies of silence, cover-ups, not-knowing, judgement, exclusion, blame or shame in relation to their roots? Mistrusting family stories. Wondering who knew and who did what. What impact does this have on individuals, families, societies, nations and ultimately, the wider world? How can one best deal with such a profound inheritance?

Primo Levi – who, as a Holocaust survivor had every right to think the opposite – declared that collective guilt does not exist. To think that it does is a relapse into Nazi ideology. Both he and Hannah Arendt made a powerful claim: “We are all to blame” for what happened. Collective responsibility is what matters. And that involves understanding how atrocities occur both in society and within the individual. How we become complicit. 

The roots of Nazism found fertile soil in the humiliation wrought by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the deeply resented ‘guilt clause’ that placed full blame for WW1 solely on Germany’s shoulders. Applying a similar dynamic to today, could there be a connection between this historical pattern and the rise of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), Germany’s nationalist far-right party — a movement fuelled in part by a desire to reassert national pride and, as encouraged by figures like Elon Musk, to move beyond what they perceive as an excessive “focus on Nazi guilt”?

The 2019 survey previously cited revealed that few Germans actually feel guilt and 70% (including 87% of AfD voters) believe their country has now sufficiently atoned for the actions of the Nazi regime. Another source revealed that 75% of young Germans (erroneously) believe they come from families of resistors, while 25% can’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto. As the number of living contemporary witnesses dwindles, disinformation, denial and delusions are spreading. With them, the sense of responsibility risks disappearing too – a deeply worrying and dangerous trend. Knowing firsthand the insidiously destructive effects of being shamed for a familial association with the Nazi era, I can understand how, eighty years on, rejecting any semblance of inherited guilt might feel like a healthy response. After all, who among us wants to feel terminally tainted by the wrongdoings of their forebears? Who wants to have to cut off their roots?

The marriage of my parents in March 1962

I feel fortunate that, while living in England with my German heritage was at times challenging, my parents and their families modelled true reconciliation throughout my life. My British father and German mother married just 17 years after the Second World War ended. Both their families had suffered and lost loved ones and/or homes under the others’ military objectives. Yet both found the courage to drop into their hearts and overcome division and enmity. And that, to me, is where the solution lies: in our hearts.

Patriotism is hollow if it is based only on pride and honour. Shame and conscience lead to a deeper bond. Seeing the world in binaries – in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them, good and bad, right and wrong – shuts down love. Reconciliation becomes impossible. As Britain celebrates its triumph over the evil forces, let us also remember we were not all good and they all bad. Among other short-comings, we too were guilty of antisemitism and of failing to help the Jews more. 

In another recent Thought for the Day, Rhidian Brook warned, “If you can’t see the other side’s humanity, you’ve lost.” 

My 80th Anniversary VE Day wish, therefore, as both a British and German citizen, is for us to follow the example set by the late Pope and Chief Rabbi: to think, to probe, to get uncomfortable, and to find compassion for individuals among the rejected and ostracised.

Eighty years on, might this be the moment to create new rituals of peacekeeping and unity? Without dampening the spirit of national joy, how can we include – and stand hand-in-hand with – our contemporary German friends in celebrations of peace, rather than reinforce historical divides?

Can we develop broader, more expansive narratives that encourage younger generations of Germans to face the difficult and painful truths of their families’ histories and to assume responsibility, not for what was done, but for what is still to be done? Can we remain vigilant against resting on any imagined moral high ground, against believing we would have undoubtedly been resistors and heroes under the Nazi regime? And can we instead recognise how thin the ice of democracy is becoming once again, and how difficult it is, even now, to change the course of history?

Events coming up:

Friday 2nd May, 12-1pm 
The Second World War 80 years on: Is Remembrance Working? 
Angela Findlay and Henry Montgomery In Conversation
National Army Museum, Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, London SW3 4HT and ONLINE
80 years on from the German surrender to the Allies, Henry Montgomery, grandson of Field Marshal Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery and Angela Findlay, granddaughter of General Karl von Graffen of the German Wehrmacht will reflect on their grandfathers’ roles and actions in WW2 and discuss the differences in the histories, legacies and remembrance cultures of the victors and the losers and how Remembrance can remain meaningful and effective for younger generations. 
Info and tickets (free) here. 

Thursday 8th May, 18.00 – 19.30 
Im Schatten Meines Großvaters / In My Grandfather’s Shadow
Vortrag und Gespräch / Lecture and Conversation 
Marktkirche, Hanns-Lilje-Platz, 30159 Hannover, Germany

Thursday 15th May, 17.00 – 19.00 (UK time)   43. Gesprächslabor, PAKH: The Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust (ONLINE)? Drawing on my own experiences outlined in my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, we will be discussing how such a destructive legacy can be transformed into constructive, reconciliatory approaches and positive actions. More info here: https://www.pakh.de/event/gespraechslabor-40/  

Buy or read reviews on my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, here

Looking at our present and future to find the lessons of the past

angela findlay2 Comments

On February 13th at 9.45pm, the bells started; asymmetrical tones infusing the snow-sprinkled city. 

People wrapped in scarves and silence, stared at the dome of the Frauenkirche that 80 years before had been mangled by bombs into a pile of rubble that would scar the city for over fifty years.

Candles placed on the ground flickered benign flames as memories haunted the minds of those who had witnessed a firestorm that melted asphalt, roofs and neighbours alike.

A human chain of hand-holding citizens wove through the resurrected buildings, knitted together both in remembrance and defiance of the re-emerging forces of lessons not learned.

“Your racism makes us sick”

This year’s anniversary of the British and USA bombing of Dresden was determined not simply to look back and roll out familiar but increasingly empty tropes such as ‘Never Again’. Instead, ‘Future through Remembrance’ was the theme repeated through the activities I attended as a Trustee of the British Dresden Trust. Younger generations from Germany, Ukraine, Poland, UK occupied the foreground mingling the wisdom of elders with messages that gave genuine hope for our troubling times. 

Stay awake. Be aware and curious as a child about what is happening around you. Look at history from multiple angles. Step back to see it in perspective. Take responsibility. 

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem followed by silence in place of applause gave the horror, tragedy and futility of any war the viscerality needed to galvanise us out of complacency into using Remembrance fiercely rather than sentimentally; to unite us as human beings, each with a heart and soul that thump with a longing for peace. 

It was the move from formality to informality, from grand gestures to tiny actions we are all capable of doing everyday, that left the most lasting impression. From pomp and ceremony to conversation; from people in suits or uniforms telling us the importance of remembrance of a time that is increasingly distant, both temporally and emotionally, to a lively exchange between young and old from different nations on the values of democracy and peace.

Peace that is all too easily taken for granted. 

Further Reading and Links

The Dresden Trust

History and politics collide as Dresden mourns its destruction in WWII by Katja Hoyer

DRESDEN: A Survivor’s Story by Victor Gregg

DRESDEN: The fire and the darkness by Sinclair McKay

AIR RAID by Alexander Kluge

The Duke of Kent marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden

Commemoration: 80th Anniversary of the destruction of Dresden

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Remember, Remember… we all lost

angela findlay2 Comments

‘Tis the season to remember. In our progression through the grey gloom of this autumn [just 18 minutes of sunshine since 28th October apparently!] and the celebrations of Halloween, All Souls, Samhain, Guy Fawkes and November 11th, the dead take centre stage. Leaves and forest floors redden while poppies bloom on jacket lapels, village monuments and shop counters. This Sunday in London, as on all Remembrance Sundays, red wreaths will be laid by royalties, senior politicians and Commonwealth High Commissioners before some of the last surviving WW2 veterans march or are wheeled past the Cenotaph.

We have been collectively remembering Armistice Day since 1919, the first anniversary of peace at the end of World War One. Remembrance has since been extended to both World Wars and all those who have given their lives in service to defend our freedoms. It is a hugely important day for the British, the Commonwealth and many other countries around the world, albeit not in Germany. There, since the Middle Ages, 11am on 11.11 has marked the start of the carnival season and, on a more serious note, Armistice Day is not considered to have welcomed the beginning of peace but years of intense unrest and far worse horrors to come. 

British and Commonwealth dead

I often dedicate my November blog to our traditional, deeply moving and impeccably executed rituals of remembrance, but not always without a little questioning too. Through the 15 years of research for In My Grandfather’s Shadow, I came to appreciate a far broader narrative of WW2 remembrance than that which Britain generally embraces and teaches. Granted there has been welcome progress over the decades with the inclusion of women as well as the huge contributions and sacrifices made by Gurkha, Indian, Sikh, African and Caribbean servicemen, among others. But there is still widespread ignorance of the bigger context.

Russian dead

When I give my talks, I often use statistics. They provide a solid, black and white foundation of fact to my more psychological / philosophical ponderings. So often these figures shock. For example, when I ask people to guess the total losses, including civilians, of say Russia, Germany and Britain in the Second World War they are usually so far out that they themselves are horrified. I challenge you to make a guess… I’ll put the answers at the end of the blog. One man literally went white when he realised how wrong he had been in his thinking or, by his own admission, his lack of thinking. Another woman recently wrote to tell me how my book had opened her eyes in so many ways. “First off,” she said, “the big realisation of how little I have understood of the two world wars, my ignorance of those times and the aftermath.” This despite attending remembrance services all her life. 

German dead

The quantity of deaths doesn’t mean each death was any less keenly felt. But I think she voices what is probably true of most of us. I certainly was ignorant of the broader landscape of loss and destruction, and no doubt still would be if I hadn’t had German roots that needed excavating and hadn’t made trips through Germany and Russia that exposed me to other ways of looking. The World Wars are the episode in history with which the British are often accused of being unnaturally obsessed. And yet, as a nation, we often present it as a deceptively straightforward story of good triumphing over evil. The victors write history after all. 

Every nation has its ‘chosen traumas’ and ‘chosen victories’ which serve as cornerstones to its identity and prevent true healing from the past as they continue to play out in the present. We frequently have binary views of how we should feel based on – to use the reader’s words again – “simplistic, reductionist understanding… goodies and baddies…” Rarely have we “considered what it must feel like to have a different identity…” 

I really appreciate and admire this woman’s soul-searching honesty. The humility and gentle opening to hearing the other sides’ stories gives me huge hope.   

Healing, reconciliation, peace, forgiveness… all goals we strive for within our culture of Remembrance… can best come about when we become familiar with and find some understanding for the other side’s experience. Maybe, with our greater distance from both the acute trauma and the impassioned jubilation of our forebears, that is what generations now and in the future can strive to do more of. 

Answer to my statistics question: Out of the around 60 million people killed in WW2, 26 million were Russian, approx. one third of them military and two thirds civilians. Between 7-9 million Germans died, roughly 6 million were soldiers and 3 million civilians. In the United Kingdom, just under 451,000 were killed. That’s 383,800 military, including combatants from overseas territories (Crown Colonies and the Indian Empire), and 67,200 civilians.

The changing faces of Berlin…

angela findlay6 Comments

For more than 30 years I have been watching cranes and diggers deconstruct and rebuild the architectural face of Berlin. It is an infinitely fascinating process to follow.

Neue Nationalgallerie by Mies van der Rohe… with cranes

The focus of my most recent trip, however, ended up being the people who inhabit the city, both past and present. And typically for Berlin, it has created a brilliant exhibition to trace the changing faces of those who lived through its turbulent history.

Enthüllt / Unveiled is housed in the Renaissance Citadel in the western borough of Spandau and not only offers a surreal experience but also an inspired response to the emotionally and politically charged ‘statue debate’. 

Albrecht the Bear and others

Housed in the 114-meter-long former Provisions Depot of the fortress, Berlin’s once revered or feared rulers, Prussian military heroes and bishops rub marble and bronze shoulders with thinkers, revolutionaries and victims. Spanning a timeline from the 12th century Albrecht the Bear (whose face you learn would not have been known so would have been crafted from a local tradesman or friend of the sculptor’s) to contentious GDR border guards, most of the statues have been removed from their plinths to stand at eye level. Many are missing limbs and noses or even their entire bodies. With chests still puffed but their status removed, you meet the figures of history on equal terms. It is a powerful experience.

Various headless/faceless/slightly worse-for-wear Electors, Chancellors and Counts from the 1500s

Monument to the Grenzposten / Border guards (1971)

One of the highlights of the exhibition comes right at the end. Displayed on its side, Lenin’s 3.5-tonne granite head once rested atop a 19-meter-high statue by Soviet Sculptor, Nikolai Tomski. Created in 1970 and designed to blend with the Soviet architecture around Lenin Square (now United Nations Square), it was pulled down in 1992, cut into more than 120 blocks, buried in the Müggelheimer Forest and covered with gravel. It was recovered in 2015 for the Citadel exhibition, complete with nibbled ears (people chiselled off chunks for souvenirs) and transportation bolts sticking out of the crown.

Founder of the Soviet Union, Lenin

Traditional memorials are generally markers of achievement and greatness. Raised on plinths, you ‘look up’ to the person or event being celebrated. But what happens when they no longer reflect the values of the time, when their legacy becomes toxic? Do you leave them as lifeless witnesses to a time past with no apparent power in the present? Do you topple or remove them in an attempt to lose the history, or does that lose the discourse and potential to learn lessons? Do you contextualise them with plaques…? 

Germany, with its contentious past has explored these questions possibly more than anywhere else. Accompanied by huge debate, emotion and financial investment, statues and monuments have been removed, banned, dismantled, buried, unburied, re-erected in new locations, built from scratch… All this can be read about in the ubiquitous digital documentation running through the exhibition. But Dr Urte Evert, the curator of Unveiled, seems to have done something very clever. By allowing visitors to touch the statues, children to clamber on them, artists to respond to them, performers to dance among them, she encourages engagement and dialogue, not only with the art forms, but with history. And this feels more important today than ever.

Queen Luise, ‘Queen of Hearts’ (1776-1810)

What is also striking, but not surprising, is that every statue from Kaiser Wilhelm I to Alexander von Humboldt and Immanuel Kant is a man. Apart from one, Queen Luise, wife of King Friedrich Wilhelm III and an early form of celebrity referred to as the Queen of Hearts… or according to Napoleon “the only real man in Prussia.” Even in today’s Berlin there are few statues celebrating women and even fewer to individual women.

Käthe Kollwitz

In a square named after her in the fashionable district of Prenzlauerberg, a rather lumpy and grumpy-looking Käthe Kollwitz, artist, sculptor, committed socialist and pacifist sits on a heavy block narrowly dodging graffiti. She is remembered everywhere and this is just one of many statues of her.

Memorial to the Trümmerfrauen / Rubble women (1950s)

Originally placed on a hill made of the bombed remnants of the city but now reposing with hammer still in hand in the greenery of Hasenheide Park, a Memorial to the Trümmerfrauen of Berlin offers acknowledgement to the ‘rubble women’ who cleared and sorted Germany’s destroyed cities by hand, stone by stone.

Block of Women, Rosenstraße

More centrally and on the site of the destroyed Old Synagogue, the Rosenstraße Monument, also known as the Block of Women, marks the 1943 peaceful uprising of some 600 non-Jewish German women who demanded the SS and Gestapo release their detained Jewish husbands awaiting deportation. It was a rare moment of successful protest against the Nazis. 

Rosa Luxemburg Memorial

And Rosa Luxemburg, one of the founders and heroines of the anti-war Spartacus League is remembered in big letters spelling out her name along the side of the Landwehr Canal where her tortured and executed body was fished out in 1919. She also has a figurative statue outside the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Friedrichshain.

There are no doubt more but today the demographics of Berlin look very different. It’s a cool international city of young hipsters, artists, entrepreneurs, thinkers, activists, expellees, refugees, LGBTQ people, politicians, former GDR bureaucrats and prisoners… the list is long and colourful. John Kampner’s excellent book In Search of Berlin charts its development over the centuries, its ruptures, reinventions and constant search for identity. I keep thinking I know Berlin quite well now, that I have seen a lot of it… how wrong I am. There is more… so much more. And a highlight of this trip was joining Matti Geyer of Tours of Berlin on one of his private tours. (I love a good walking tour and have been on many.) As a born-and-bred Berliner with incredible knowledge and delightful delivery, he could bring new corners of the city to life and introduce me to further gems in this ever-transitioning city. I am already look forward to accompanying him on another.

Matti Geyer who offers a whole range of readymade or tailor-made tours https://www.toursofberlin.com/private-tours


Germany’s relationship to its past and Berlin’s unique relationship with itself have been fraught with challenges. But while you can feel the unsettled rumble of discontent that has spread throughout Europe and beyond, the wounds and divisions appear to be healing. There is an effortless confidence in its integration of past shadows into its present identity which none of the shiny new façades can hide.

Further reading (as always not necessarily reflective of my views):

Aryan homoeroticism and Lenin’s head: the museum showcasing Berlin’s unwanted statues by John Kapner, The Guardian

History set in stone by Penny Croucher

In Search of Berlin by John Kampner

Counter Monuments: Questions of Definition by Memory and History Blog

Oh dear, what’s happening in Germany…? Could this be the result of a lingering attribution of collective guilt to generations that can’t by definition of the word be ‘guilty’?

angela findlay4 Comments

“Sometimes in moral philosophy it’s important to think about plants.” I heard these words in last week’s In Our Time and they chimed with my current shift of focus from war to flowers. They were said by the leading philosopher, Philippa Foot, to a room full of Oxford males. She was basically saying that moral evaluation should be see as a continuum of the way in which we see other living things.

A week earlier, I was sent a link to a video by Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, whose proposed speech in April at the Palestine Congress in Berlin was stormed by police and banned. [You can have a listen to his reconstruction of it here.] Somehow I found the two were connected.

So what is happening in Germany in relation to Israel’s war on Gaza? Some reports are pretty concerning. It is understandable that Israel’s security and right to exist has long been Germany’s ‘Staatsräson’ (reason of state). However, since the Hamas-instigated horrors of October 7th, the belief in Israel’s right to defend itself has evolved into a fairly uncompromising pro-Israel position that seems to equate any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies with anti-Semitism. Friends in Germany relate how alarmed people are by the shutting down of debate and silencing of different voices, both painfully reminiscent of the authoritarianism and loss of democracy of Nazi Germany. 

The German government’s unswayable support of Israel in whatever it does is a result of Germany’s past. It is seen as morally the right thing to do. But could nearly eighty years of the world’s media placing Germany and Guilt in the same sentence to explain everything, from its open-arm policy towards refugees to its hesitancy to supply weapons for use against Russia, now be backfiring?

My German mother will be 90 this weekend. She was 11 years old when the Second World War ended and is one of increasingly few Germans who experienced Nazism first hand.

My mother, Jutta, aged 11

In the post-war decades, collective guilt and accusations of complicity in the Nazi atrocities were attributed to the entire German population. Plenty of people consider subsequent generations guilty too, by way of blood / nationality / family association. You might remember my 2018 blog  ‘Shot for what you represent’ with the incident of the English woman who, on hearing I was half-German, picked up her hand off the table, turned her fingers into a gun and shot me in the face! In her eyes, all Germans are unquestionably guilty and “jolly well should feel guilty” too.

This is in stark contrast to many Holocaust survivors such as Sabina Wolanski, who said at the inauguration of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial in 2005: I do not believe in collective guilt. The children of the killers are not killers. We must never blame them for what the elders did, but we can hold them responsible for what they do with the memory of their elders’ crime. Similarly Viktor Frankl, author of the seminal book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, who in a 1988 speech spoke out against the very concept of ‘collective guilt’ describing it as a continuation of Nazi-ideology.

I believe they are right. I understand how Germans, myself included, might feel shame for being part of a group who allowed genocide to happen. Many also feel a deep sense of responsibility for not allowing it to be forgotten and making sure it doesn’t happen again. But guilt?

Let’s explore the dynamics of this word for a moment. 

Guilt is the result of an action within our control and responsibility. To be guilty, you have to have done (or failed to do) something that falls out of the framework of what is socially acceptable by the group with consequences of harm to an ‘other’. Frequently ‘guilty’ parties will not feel guilt or shame as they see their actions as having been justified, necessary, righteous even, within the context in which they were committed. Resentment and retaliation for being deemed ‘guilty’ can follow.

In Who’s to Blame? Collective Guilt on Trial, Coline Covington describes how Judeo-Christian cultures place particular emphasis on guilt, forgiveness and atonement alongside rituals that are supposed to restore moral order, cleanse the groups of shame and hatred, and prevent or close cycles of vengeance. For a long time, I have believed this was right and Germany’s culture of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working through the past) and counter memorials was an example to all of us of how things could (and should?) be done. I am no longer sure that is what’s needed now.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman, Berlin

The problem is, Covington says, that most restorative rituals for peace-building are built on a binary understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, victims and offenders. “The finger of blame is pointed and yet true healing is meant to eradicate blame. This inherent contradiction contains the seeds of failure.” Could it be that we are witnessing this failure in Germany, Israel/Gaza, Russia/ Ukraine and elsewhere, resulting in new perpetrators and victims of atrocity and trauma? 

If so, how do we overcome binaries? I tried a couple of weeks ago in an online group of Jews, non-Jewish Germans, my own Anglo-German mix and others. Someone had been talking about the frightening increase in anti-Semitic acts and some members of the group had dismissed those behind them as ‘idiots’. A common reaction to unacceptable behaviour, and I have said the same many times in relation to certain members of the Tory party! But it got me thinking… because when we proclaim a shocked judgment: “How could they!” How stupid!” “How awful / evil / weak!”, we are basically believing: If I were them, I wouldn’t do what they are doing. We are seeing ourselves as morally superior, stronger, more intelligent and right, while ‘they’ are inferior, guilty, ignorant, wrong. 

Does this dynamic not replicate, in an initially small but precise way, the dynamics behind the Nazi, or indeed any, discriminations and judgments against apparent ‘lesser mortals’?

Do Ho Suh, Karma Juggler, Thread embedded in cotton paper

In this particular constellation, I naturally belonged in the ‘German perpetrator’ rather than the ‘Jewish victim’ category. It’s an uncomfortable place to be, but I have noticed that since finishing my book, the label no longer sticks as well. My grandfather’s shadow that once draped over my identity like a huge cloak has been so comprehensively unpicked, understood, transformed and woven into the fabric of my whole being that I can no longer see people in such binary terms. Like the beautiful art of the Korean artist, Do Ho Suh, whose exhibition Tracing Time I saw on a recent trip to Edinburgh, I can see how we are all threaded together into a colourful tangle of humanity, each one necessary and part of the whole. 

Do Ho Suh: Blueprint (2013), Thread embedded in cotton paper

There were people in the group who suggested I was ‘absolving’ myself and wanting to free myself of the burden of guilt, almost as if this was utterly impossible or prohibited. I do understand that response and how for descendants of survivors, this could feel an affront. But, without diminishing any of the suffering of and compassion for the descendants of survivors, I myself choose to no longer see people in terms of “my side/your side”, as one member put it. I believe that in order to overcome the judgmental binaries of ‘us-good’ and ‘them-bad’, we all need to make a greater effort to understand what lies behind bad or evil deeds. We not only need to step into the other person’s shoes, but into their entire situation. Only then can we recognise that if we were in the totality of their internal and external life, we would act, or would have acted in exactly the same way as them. The results of Milgram’s 1961 experiment with obedience to authority suggested something similar. Apparently good people, like us, can also become capable of extreme bad.

You will all I am sure now know about the horrendous, inhumane conditions of HMP Wandsworth and so many of Britain’s jails, and the decades of glaring failures of our Criminal Justice System in general. (If not, you can get an impression here and here and here) None of us live very far away from a jail, and yet so many of my Art Behind Bars talk audiences say they had “no idea.” Will we too one day be judged and found guilty of the stigmatisation of offenders that enables this shamefully degrading system to exist in our name as a fulfillment of our wish for governments to be ‘tough on crime’? Will we be accused of turning a blind eye, not acting and later claiming ‘we didn’t know’?

I am deliberately being a little provocative to make a point. Because as far as I can see, the only way we have a chance of breaking the catastrophic cycles of blaming and shaming, violence, retribution – all outcomes of seeing each other as ‘other’, separate and different from ourselves – is to create a level playing field of mutual respect where both (or all) sides are treated equally. And it can start within each one of us. In everyday situations. Now.

This is the African concept of ‘Ubuntu’, a philosophy of interconnectedness, sometimes translated as ‘humanity towards others’ or ‘I am because we are’. The most recent definition provided by the African Journal of Social Work (AJSW) describes Ubuntu as: A collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing – an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world.

According to Charles Eisenstein, author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, aligning ourselves with the truth that ‘if I were in the totality of your circumstances, I wouldn’t do differently from you,’ and the compassion that arises from putting ourselves in another’s shoes and seeing us as one, is “perhaps the most powerful way to magnify our effectiveness as agents of change.” I think I agree.

Further Reading / Listening (as always, not necessarily my opinion)

What’s behind Germany’s support of Israel? – Inside Story Podcast, 10th April 2024

As war in Gaza rages, what’s behind Germany’s support of Israel? – Al Jazeera

Historical Reckoning gone haywire – Susan Neiman, The New York Review

Germany’s crackdown on criticism of Israel betrays European values – Al Jazeera

Germany’s historical guilt haunts opponents of Israeli war in Gaza – France 24

A Clean Break by Tom Holland – A Point of View, BBC Radio 4

In search of ‘nothing’… Part 2 

angela findlay4 Comments

(You can find Part 1 here)

Roughly 220 miles east of Perth, beyond the salt lakes of the Western Australian Wheatbelt and within the remoteness of Hyden’s various outcrops of mineral-striped granite, the mouth of Mulka’s Cave opened just enough to allow us to clamber inside. With the brash sun denied entry, it took time to adjust to the dimness of leaked light… and silence. That’s when we saw them. 

A few miles away, Hyden Rock, more famously known as Wave Rock, buzzed with flies and visitors posing for selfies and family snaps. It is better served than the cave with a visitor’s centre and trail signs tasked with the nigh on impossible endeavour of condensing 4,500 million years of evolution into digestible snapshots. Like the constellations of night skies, how do you explain the making of some of the oldest exposed rocks anywhere on earth? 

Well, with a little appropriation, I am going to give it a go. For to travel in Australia is not only to experience the elements as art forms of uncompromising intensity and beauty. It is also to engage with Australian history. And that involves confronting another story of darkness that relates to the pitch dark episode of more recent times that many people will be remembering this Saturday 27th January… Holocaust Memorial Day.

Approximately 2,500 million years ago, a mass of granite rock known as the Yilgarn Block was intruded into the earth’s crust right across the southern half of Western Australia. It remained below the surface as the first plants and trees emerged, as the first amphibians, reptiles and insects moved, as the dinosaurs came and went between 230 and 130 million years ago. Meanwhile, hidden out of sight, a process of sub-surface weathering was occurring in three massive phases of erosion. 

Water that ran off Hyden Rock seeped into cracks and nibbled away at the structure of the granite. While winds and heat would dry the upper layers of soil, deep down it remained wet and salty, rotting the rock face and breaking it down. When natural erosion finally lowered the surface level of the surroundings, the crumbled rock also washed away leaving a 25-meter-high and 110-meter-long crest rising from the darkness of geological history. To put humans into perspective, if the whole evolution of the earth was reduced to a single calendar year, modern man would make his entrance onto the world stage in the final half-second of December 31st!

The palette of coloured stripes is created by water’s impact on the tiny lichens (the first plant form to colonise granite), mosses and blue-green algae that stain and streak the stone with shades of black, orange and silver.

Similar processes occurred at the nearby domed granite ‘Humps,’ one of which houses Mulka’s Cave. Crafted over millions of years by salt, water and wind and painted in strokes of ochres, greys and pale cobalt dotted with small green shrubs, they were home to the vital gnamma holes. These were Aboriginal people’s natural water holes capable of storing rainwater run-off and replenished from underground stores. From the 1890s, the influx of thirsty new arrivals made these already vital sources of water even more precious than the gold they came to mine. The sacred gnamma holes became scenes of conflict. Many were drained, destroyed or polluted, others were lined and claimed as the gold diggers’ own. 

The pattern from there on is all too depressingly familiar. Domination, subjugation, exploitation, cruelty, destruction, suffering, death. A particular human / inhumane trait prevails the world over when man is consumed by greed and a sense of superiority and entitlement. But is that our true nature or an aberration of what we are designed to be?

One could say that since 1633 when Galileo was convicted of heresy for upending almost 2000 years of western scientific thinking by claiming the sun – rather than the earth – was the centre of the universe, there has been strong resistance, especially by the Catholic Church, to the ensuing demotion of man’s position in the world. 

Behind this refusal lies the still-existing widespread conviction of alpha male’s rightful position at the pinnacle of nature. In the mid 19th century, a complete misinterpretation of ‘survival of the fittest’, the catchphrase that became shorthand for Darwin’s ground-breaking theories on evolution, conveniently advanced his apparent confirmation that physical dominance triumphs. 

Such misunderstandings and claims of man’s importance and right to dominate have had devastating consequences, most recently seen in the ideologies and doctrines such as Nazism, eugenics, racial and gender discrimination and society’s policies on and treatment of the ‘weaker’ more vulnerable in society – the elderly, sick, poor, lesser-abled, foreign… and, in Australia, the indigenous Aboriginals and their descendants. (Hmmm… I can feel a Part 3 to this blog might be needed.)

Fortunately, countless scientists of different disciplines are finding that it is not physical dominance that assures survival but the human traits of friendliness, kindness, generosity, sacrifice, empathy, cooperation.

Compassion, for example, stems from a really old part of the brain. It activates the vagus nerve – the longest bundle of nerves in the human parasympathetic nervous system. Research shows how feelings of caring for someone in need activate the vagus nerve. Have a listen to this. It’s not my area of expertise, but it feels all too relevant to some of the problems in the world today. 

When I left England at the beginning of December, I realised I felt saturated and helpless in the face of the wrongness and tragic outcomes of human actions, both past and present. (For background you can read my November Blog.)

Travelling through the landscape of the Western Australian outback washed, warmed and blew the density away creating endless space… a blank inner canvas. It was a form of recalibration and alignment with nature. A state of empty ‘nothing’ full of potential and hope. And that’s what I saw in Mulka’s Cave when I saw ‘them’.

As my eyes acclimatised to the dipped light, I found myself surrounded by the traces of 3-4000-year-old, possibly much older, hands waving gently from the walls.

Some printed, others stencilled, they revealed the inextricable interplay of positive and negative space, of simultaneous absence and presence, the creative dance of inner and outer. The entirety of the world quite literally in the palm of a hand. 

These early displays of human creativity seem to bridge the synthetic divisions of secular modernity and the differences that lead to wars. They close the false divides between past, present and future to depict human beings’ true position in the scheme of things. As part of a greater whole.

To me, those ancient hands that refused to spoil or damage what their ancestral deities had made in the Dreamtime prove that we are both the created and creators. That we are both all and nothing. 

With this blog and in a very different way to usual, I acknowledge Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday 27th January and remember the millions of people who were brutally murdered by those who could not see that ultimately, we are one.

Where history resides in the soil, tangibly awaiting excavation…

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There was something profound about launching the German translation of my book in Germany, first in Hamburg, the city I have known and loved all my life, and then in Berlin, the epicentre of that extraordinary episode of history in which I have been immersed for over 15 years. 

In My Grandfather’s Shadow: A trauma that is talked about can better heal

I had no idea what reception it or I would receive. The audience have, after all, breathed the air of Germany’s past for decades; been shaped by it – whether they have engaged with it or not. German 20th century history is still very much alive in the present, a minefield of sensibilities and taboos through which I had to pick my way, all too aware that as a half-Brit, I always had an airlift out of the horrors. What on earth could I bring to the intensely discussed narratives?

So I was touched by how warmly I was received. How attentively people listened. How sincerely they responded, one elderly man, born in the same year as my 89-year old mother, standing up and telling the story of his childhood flight from the Soviets for the first time. The entry level of questions was so deep, so knowing, so very real. 

Unintentionally colour-coordinated with the beautiful decor of Berlin’s Literaturhaus!

As always, it was the post-talk discussions, with much needed glasses of wine in hand, that brought home to me once again the importance of talking about what is all too often buried. People expressed how completely new it was for them to hear someone talk so openly both about German soldiers and themselves. This is deliberate on my part. By baring the inner machinations of my soul and that of my grandfather, I was and am inviting people to explore theirs. By touching on taboos, exposing shame to the light of empathy and sharing the tools I developed and steps I took to release myself from the crippling weight of Germany’s Nazi legacy, I can offer hope that there is a way through. Through, not out of. For such an unprecedented past must necessarily maintain the weight of responsibility. 

As a nation, Germany continues to respond to its crimes in countless ways, not least through its counter memorial culture about which some of you may have heard me speak in my lectures. One memorial in particular chokes me up every time. It is the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism placed right in the heart of the city between the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gates. (I mentioned it in my June BLOG on Berlin)

The central feature is a circular pond with a triangular ‘island’ on which a fresh flower is placed every day. That some official is tasked with performing this ritual intrigues me. So, after receiving permission to witness it, I joined a delightful man in uniform by the water’s edge and duly followed him into the bushes. Hidden from public view, he pulled opened a grated trap door and gestured to me to descend the precarious metal ladder and proceed along a damp corridor until I was standing directly below the retractable triangle. At 1pm precisely he pressed a button. An accordion-like black triangular pillar began to lower, folding into itself until the flower was within reach. 

I was then allowed to select and place a new flower on the triangle – a slight disappointment that for practical reasons, the flowers are no longer fresh but plastic! Then, with another push of the button, up it went to take its place in the still water for another day.

As we emerged from the bushes, a school class of pupils who had been brought to watch the ceremony approached us. The teacher had noticed me disappearing into the undergrowth and asked if I would explain who I was, what, why…etc. which I did. And, long story short, from that encounter and the interest it generated, I received an invitation to come to their school next time I am in Berlin and tell them about my story and my book!

“Truth speaks from the ground” Anne Michaels wrote in Fugitive Pieces. I have always felt this since my first visit to Berlin in 1990. I remember wandering through the recently gentrified area around Hackescher Markt excited by its contemporary art galleries but wholly unaware of its history as a Jewish quarter from which thousands of Jews were rounded up and deported. But “… as the day wore on, I became increasingly aware of an uncomfortable sensation rising inside me. Something seemed to be seeping up from the pavement through my feet and weighing down my legs. It rose further, turning my stomach hard. By the time we stopped at a café, it had reached the level of my heart, at which point it spilled out in a huge wave of sobs…” (IMGS p.153)

Maybe that is why one sculpture spoke to me so strongly at Berlin Art Week’s POSITIONS exhibition housed in the long-disused hangar of Tempelhof Airport, site of the Western allies’ 1948-49 ‘Berlin Airlift’ in response to the Soviet Blockade.

I didn’t get the name of the artist (apologies), but to me their work brilliantly, wordlessly captures what I instinctively feel about being in the unique and extraordinary city that is Berlin, where past meets present with a potency that can’t be ignored.

For NEWS of forthcoming events in England and Germany, please see my website: www.angelafindlaytalks.com

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To apologise, or not to apologise (for slavery), that is the question.

angela findlay5 Comments

I am already anticipating a deeply divided and critical response to the recent announcement that Charlie Gladstone and five members of his family, all descendants of the Victorian-era prime minister William Gladstone, are travelling to Guyana to apologise for the significant role one of their ancestors played in the slave trade. But I’d like to ask those who are cynical of such a trip to consider what the alternatives might be.

John Gladstone, William’s father, was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies. You can read all about him in the links at the end, but basically he made a fortune as a Demerara sugar planter enslaving hundreds of Africans to work in his plantations until slavery was abolished in 1833. He then became the fifth-largest beneficiary of the £20m fund (about £16 billion today) set aside by the British government in 1837 to compensate planters for loss of income. The final instalments of this compensation were paid out in 2015.

Charlie Gladstone is roughly the same age as me and, though the ‘crimes against humanity’ perpetrated by his family member were nearly 200 years ago whereas those my German grandfather was involved in were a mere eighty, the burden of shame may well weigh as heavily. As I describe in detail in my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, the unresolved deeds of our forefathers remain in a family blood line, in our roots. Whether you are ignorant of or choose to engage with them, there will be an impact that needs resolution of some sort. 

Apology is one of many steps that can be taken to try to repair wrongdoing, and personally I think it is good that people such as those in the group Heirs of Slavery, including David Lascelles 8th Earl of Harewood, are finally beginning to address not only the sources of their family’s wealth, but also our collective colonial history and the traumatic consequences that can still be witnessed all too clearly in racism, inequalities in health, wealth, education and opportunity. In their cases it is about apology and accountability, with some of them making financial contributions towards charitable institutions and – in the Gladstone’s case – further research into the impact of the slave trade.

Harewood House, built between 1759-71 with the profits made from plantations and slavery

Others are at it too. Back in July, the Dutch King, Willem-Alexander, apologised on behalf of his country for the Netherland’s historical involvement in slavery and asked for forgiveness. It’s of course a flawed gesture in its incompleteness, but isn’t a heartfelt apology, whether possible or not so long after the event, at least a gesture of recognition of wrongdoing that can lead to a willingness to redress the former total loss of humanity? So many victim groups would attest to the immense value of a genuine ‘I’m sorry’.

King Willem-Alexander apologising on 160th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands

Our prime minister doesn’t think so. Back in April, Rishi Sunak refused to apologise for UK’s role in slavery saying that ‘trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward’ and that the focus, ‘while of course understanding our history in all its parts and not running away from it, is making sure that we have a society that is inclusive and tolerant of people from all backgrounds.’

Fair point about looking forwards. But how can you truly ‘understand’ such a horrific history, underpinned by past government policy, without being moved to demonstrate some direct expression of remorse to those it continues to affect? Or is that precisely what we are scared of? That an apology equates to an admission of culpability and therefore an obligation to compensate?

In his series of essays based on lectures delivered at Oxford University and bound into the 2009 book Guilt about the Past, Bernard Schlink, German author of the 1997 bestseller The Reader and various other literature, tackles not only German guilt about the past, but other long shadows of collective and global past guilt. (I am well aware we can’t actually be guilty of something we didn’t do, but we can still feel guilt.)

In the essay entitled ‘The Presence of the Past’, he addresses the issue of remembering or forgetting a traumatic past. “A collective past, like that of an individual, is traumatic when it is not allowed to be remembered and is just as much so if it has to be remembered… Detraumatisation is the process of becoming able to both remember and forget; it is leaving the past in the past, in a way that embraces remembrance as well as forgetting. This applies in the same way to the victims and their descendants as to the perpetrators and their descendants.” (p.36)

We need to find that balance.

One of Schlink’s claims that struck me most while exploring my own sense of guilt for my German family’s past was in the chapter on ‘Forgiveness and Reconciliation.’ He says that if someone seeks forgiveness for their own guilt it has weight, but “to ask for forgiveness for someone else’s guilt is cheap.” (p.73) 

Cheap… So where does that leave those of us living today and the question of apology for things that happened decades or even centuries ago? 

Detail from Patricia Kaersenhout’s ‘Of Palimpsests and Erasure’ (2021) (https://www.pkaersenhout.com)

Schlink and I come to a similar conclusion. It’s about understanding. He says, any kind of reconciliation requires “a truth that can be understood.” And “true understanding is more than searching for and finding causes. It includes putting yourself in someone else’s place, putting yourself in someone else’s thoughts and someone else’s feelings and seeing the world through that person’s eyes.” Doing this, he says, establishes equality. “We make [the other person] equal to us and us to them; we build up society when we understand.” (p.82)

This form of ‘understanding’ goes way beyond the slightly glib understanding the current leader of our country suggests. It requires engaging in the truth of what happened and feeling it. Feeling how appalling it was and being moved to act to heal and make good the wrongs that still poison our national veins and those of the human beings living today whose forefathers were harmed.

Further reading, as always not all links reflect my own opinions:

William Gladstone: family of former British PM to apologise for links to slavery 
William Gladstone’s family to apologise for historic links to slavery

‘I felt absolutely sick’: John Gladstone’s heir on his family’s role in slavery

Rishi Sunak rejects calls for slavery reparations from UK

When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity?

Dutch king apologises for country’s historical involvement in slavery

Campaigners urge king to do more to acknowledge UK’s slavery role

The British aristocratic families reckoning with their slave owning past

The German translation of In My Grandfather’s Shadow will be published in Germany in September. Please contact me for details of forthcoming events relating to in Germany.

Title painting: ‘Salt of the African earth‘ by Angela Findlay, 1994