Our co-host just got back from a work trip to Berlin, and his overwhelming impression was one of shiny scar tissue. All the buildings are new and glass and steel and modern, but the city lacks that sense of deep history and organic development that you get in most European cities. He imagined standing there in 1945, surrounded by absolute devastation, and feeling like he was in year zero. It must have been a unique experience to live in a city, a country, that had been completely destroyed - physically, but also morally and spiritually. They had lost everything.
The assumption behind the Allies’ strategic bombing offensive was that, through demonstrating to the enemy the hopelessness of their position, they would cause Germany’s resolve to crumble. They thought that level of destruction would make them give up - as it would later with the nuclear bombs in Japan - and that a swift end to the war would ultimately mean more lives would be saved than would be lost in the bombing. But this assumed rationality. It would have been rational for Germany to surrender in 1943, a series of large defeats followed by nuclear-comparable destruction in Hamburg. It was objectively over by then. But the Nazis kept on fighting, complete madness, and by the 1945 surrender Berlin had been utterly shattered in every respect. What does life look like after that, and how does a city move forward? How does a people move forward?
We discuss “street art”, and a bit of techno, and actually it shouldn’t be a surprise that Berlin of all places has become a world leader in Bacchanalia. It feels like a natural reaction to the defeat, but is it a helpful reaction? This is very clearly a society running away from something. The hyper-liberal modernity hides an emptiness - the physical damage has been repaired many times over, but the spiritual damage remains. Berlin is still processing its trauma, still going to therapy, and we can see this lack of recovery in the government’s attempted clamp-down on the AfD. The culture of the elite still lacks the self-confidence to even allow any challenge to progressive liberalism, and will immediately leap onto any left-coded bandwagon like closing the nuclear power plants or letting in a million Syrians.
But what else can they do? It just takes time to re-grow, to re-emerge as something organic. Germany needs a new story of what it is, and this can’t be created artificially and imposed top-down.
