By trying to atone for her country’s past, the irony is Frau Merkel’s awakened its Nazi demons
TURN left out of the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, walk past the city’s Brandenburg Gate and you’ll come to one of the most moving and unsettling public spaces on the planet. Every day you will find people walking silently among more than 2,500 concrete slabs, some lost in thought, others visibly upset. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated in 2005 as a visible reminder, in the heart of the capital, of the terrible crimes no German can ever forget.
For more than 70 years the Germans have lived in the shadow of the Third Reich and with the shame of the Holocaust. No nation has done more to confront the demons of its past, or tried harder to make amends.
No one epitomises the new Germany better than Angela Merkel.
Serious, moralistic and hard-working, the Lutheran pastor’s daughter could hardly be more different from the strutting monstrosities who dominated her nation’s history in the first half of the 20th century.
Mrs Merkel has never made any secret of her belief that the stains of Germany’s past have given it a historic obligation to the rest of the world — and to humanity itself.
So when the Mediterranean migration crisis erupted in late 2014, she knew exactly what to do.
By the summer of 2015, she had thrown open her nation’s borders. And as hundreds of thousands of people poured into the great cities of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne, she repeated the same words, again and again: ‘Wir schaffen das.’ ‘We can do this.’
As gambles go, it could hardly have been better-intentioned. Unfortunately, it was a disaster.
Last weekend, the people of Berlin went to the polls. In a result unprecedented in German history, they handed Mrs Merkel’s party a drubbing, with her governing Christian Democrats sinking to just 17.5 per cent of the vote.
For Mrs Merkel, who has been Germany’s Chancellor for almost 11 years, Sunday night’s result was probably the worst humiliation of her career. On Monday, she even offered a partial apology for the chaotic scenes that have alarmed so many ordinary Germans.
‘If I was able to,’ she admitted, ‘I would turn back time by many, many years, so I could have prepared the government and the authorities for the situation which hit us out of the blue in the late summer of 2015.’
YET even as she was speaking, a very different group of politicians were celebrating a tumultuous electoral breakthrough. For, with more than 14 per cent of the vote, the anti-immigration, far-Right Alternative für Deutschland had won no fewer than 25 seats in the Berlin state assembly.
The AfD already had representatives in nine of Germany’s 16 state legislatures. But as the capital’s Social Democratic mayor remarked even before the votes were counted: ‘Berlin is not any old city. Berlin is the city that transformed itself from the capital of Hitler’s Nazi Germany into a beacon of freedom, tolerance, diversity and social cohesion.’
No wonder, then, that so many people around the world shudder to see the far-Right on the march in the heart of Hitler’s imperial capital. And no wonder, either, that Mrs Merkel’s own position has never seemed more imperilled.
There is a dark irony in the fact an immigration policy designed to expiate the sins of the Third Reich, and to show how much Germany has changed, has reawakened the worst monsters of the 20th-century past.
Are the anti-immigration AfD exactly the same as the Nazis? No, of course not. And it would be a mistake to write off all their voters as racists or extremists.
Many of them are ordinary, working-class Germans, alarmed by the influx of so many newcomers and by the reports of sexual assaults in cities such as Munich and Cologne. In that respect, they are not so different from the 3.8 million people who voted for Ukip in our last general election.
Well, up to a point. For what’s truly disturbing is that AfD officials tried to book a rally in Munich’s Hofbräukeller, the beer hall where Hitler gave his first speech as a member of the Nazi Party in October 1919.
And they have also tried to revive the word ‘volkisch’ — conjuring up folksy images of the country’s home-grown culture — which the Nazis used to set Germans apart from their supposed racial inferiors.
At the very least, the AfD are not as different from their historical forebears as they’d like to pretend.
Indeed, the former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, has even warned of the coming nightmare of a ‘Nazi renaissance’.
And in case you think that’s an exaggeration, it is worth remembering that Mrs Knobloch knows what she is talking about.
As a Jewish child in the early Forties, she survived the Holocaust only because of the kindness of a Catholic farming couple in rural Franconia (a region of northern Bavaria) who pretended she was their illegitimate daughter.
When Mrs Knobloch speaks, the rest of us should listen. And I think she is right. That so many Germans feel support for such an organisation is indeed immensely worrying.
Yet although we in Britain often like to think of the Germans as genetically predisposed to marching about in uniforms, the truth is that for the past 70 years they have been probably the most moderate and undemonstrative nation in Europe. So why on earth has this happened?
Well, I am afraid the answer is obvious. It was obvious right from the moment Mrs Merkel threw open her nation’s borders to the world — a decision that will surely go down as one of the most disastrous own goals in recent history.
As her own vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, admitted last week, none of her ministers expected a million migrants to pour across Germany’s borders. But that is precisely what happened, even as Mrs Merkel complacently insisted that everything was going exactly as planned.
Her instinct to offer a helping hand to Syria’s refugees was, of course, highly laudable. She was, I think, right to insist on the values of our common humanity and common decency, and to try to ease the suffering of those in need.
But good intentions must always be tempered by pragmatism, and by a realistic sense of ordinary voters’ communal loyalties and national identity.
In repeating her simplistic mantra ‘We can do this’, Mrs Merkel made no allowance for the fact that millions of Germans were deeply uneasy at the prospect of admitting at least a million newcomers from Muslim North Africa and the Middle East, most of whom were young men who did not speak German. She made no serious effort to distinguish between genuine refugees from a horrific civil war and economic migrants hoping to build better lives in Europe’s most dynamic industrial superpower.
Nor did she make any serious effort to ensure the newcomers assimilated with the local population.
Politicians have a duty to take their voters’ anxieties seriously, not to brush them aside with blithe condescension.
But when hundreds of North African men ran amok in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, carrying out more than 2,000 alleged sexual assaults and robberies in a few hours, the authorities actively tried to cover it up, alarmed that the truth would drive a wedge between immigrants and Germans.
SAD to say, the far-Right could hardly have asked for better publicity. If Mrs Merkel had wanted to give them the perfect boost, she could hardly have done a better job. The truth is that the migration crisis has brought out the very worst in Europe’s politicians — from the boorish demagoguery of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who misses no opportunity to demonise migrants in the kind of language last heard in the Thirties, to the patronising, preachy bullying of the EU elite, who refuse to make the slightest allowance for the anxieties of millions of people.
Yet it is Mrs Merkel’s fate that represents the greatest tragedy of all.
Only a few years ago, she was comfortably Europe’s most impressive leader, a genuinely pragmatic, thoughtful and sensible politician who seemed to represent all that was best about modern Germany.
But now, with her credibility and political capital gradually seeping away, her days as Europe’s pre-eminent power broker seem numbered.
She believed that through throwing open the borders, she would help to atone for her country’s past. The dreadful irony, however, is that no German politician in living memory has done more to reawaken the demons of history.