There is a building on Köthener Straße 38 in Berlin, three hundred metres from Potsdamer Platz, that concentrates more history in a single address than most cities accumulate in a century. In 1977, David Bowie stood at a studio window here and watched two lovers kiss against the Wall. The song he wrote became "Heroes."

Fifty years earlier, in the same building, a publisher named Wieland Herzfelde was preparing a manuscript that would prove equally difficult to forget: Isaac Babel's “Red Cavalry” (Die Reiterarmee): thirty-five short stories about a Jewish intellectual riding with a Cossack cavalry army through the killing fields of Ukraine and Poland during the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-21.

The first complete edition anywhere in the world was published from this building in 1926. The Wall that inspired Bowie lasted for another thirty-five years. Babel's barriers were different: language, religion, ideology, the violence that accompanied the collapse of empires. And empires that refuse to give up on their colonial power. Those barriers, in Ukraine, have not yet fallen.

In 1926, the Weimar Republic was in full swing: jazz, the Kurfürstendamm, and the first hints of what would become the most mythologized decade in German cultural history. Yet inflation still lingered in collective memory, political violence was becoming routine, and an emerging movement fed on resentment and scapegoating. Threaded through it all something official histories often underplay: Berlin was, for a few extraordinary years, a Russian city.

The Russian émigrés themselves called it “Petersburg”. At its peak, around 1923, some 300,000 refugees and émigrés from the former Russian Empire lived here, concentrated in Charlottenburg and radiating outward along the Kantstraße, the lower Kurfürstendamm, the Joachimsthaler Straße.

They were a mixed and often bitterly divided crowd: former tsarist officers waiting for better times, Jewish families with transit papers in their pockets hoping for a visa to America, socialist intellectuals who preferred to debate the revolution in a Berlin café rather than live it in Petrograd. Viktor Shklovsky, the literary critic and novelist who had fled the Bolsheviks, described them circling the Gedächtniskirche “like flies around a chandelier” („wie Fliegen um den Kronleuchter”).1

Ilya Ehrenburg, the journalist and writer who would later become the Soviet Union's most famous foreign correspondent, held literary court at the Prager Diele café near Prager Platz. Marina Tsvetaeva, the poet who would later return to the Soviet Union and take her own life there, was here. So were Nabokov, Bely, Pasternak, Mayakovsky.

Between 1918 and 1924, Berlin publishers produced more Russian-language titles than Moscow and Petrograd combined: 2,100 books, 86 publishing houses. The city had become, as the literary historian Fritz Mierau would later write, the place where Russian self-understanding found its sharpest focus outside Russia itself.2

Malik-Verlag was not a Russian press. It was a German radical one, leftist, avant-garde, anti-fascist, with Heartfield's photomontage covers making each book a visual argument before you opened it. But it operated inside this Russian Berlin, breathed its air, published its writers. When Herzfelde released Die Reiterarmee in 1926, Berlin gave Babel to the world.

What Babel wrote - after riding with the Cossack Soviet Cavalry through Ukraine and Poland in 1920 - was literature, but it was also testimony:

The building on Köthener Straße 38 still stands. The plaque on its wall mentions Herzfelde, Heartfield, Grosz. On the same facade, in a window belonging to the Hansa Studios, a giant animated screen displays Bowie's image. The only missing name? Babel. Yet this book is part of the building. Another piece of the Berlin mosaic: one that now, after one hundred years, reminds us of what binds Berlin to Odessa, to Kyiv, to Brody: the towns where Babel rode, and where the war has returned.

Odessa

Isaac Babel was born in June 1894 in the Moldavanka, the roughest quarter of Odessa, to a lower-middle-class Jewish family. He was a slight boy with fine features and glasses: details that would follow him, literally, into his fiction.

His father was a merchant. His childhood was divided between the Talmud and Maupassant: between Hebrew lessons that lasted until his sixteenth year and the French classics he devoured. By fifteen, Babel was writing short stories in French. None of them survived. He later said they were colorless; only the dialogues worked.

Odessa in those years was a city unlike any other in the Russian Empire. One third of its population was Jewish. It was a port city, cosmopolitan by necessity, where Greeks, Ukrainians, Italians, and Jews had been trading, building, and colliding for a century.

By the 1880s, Jews constituted two thirds of the city's registered merchants and traders, almost three quarters of its innkeepers, two thirds of its veterinarians and pharmacists. They were concentrated in the city center, in commerce and the professions, while the surrounding countryside remained overwhelmingly Ukrainian and rural. The proximity was creative and volatile in equal measure.

The violence came in waves. In 1871, Greek and Jewish communities clashed during Orthodox Easter. In 1881, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a pogrom swept through the Jewish quarter: six dead, hundreds wounded, thousands of businesses looted and destroyed. The imperial government responded not with protection but with new restrictions, the notorious May Laws, which tightened limits on Jewish property, residence, and participation in civic life.

In 1905, during the revolutionary upheaval that shook the whole empire, Odessa descended into weeks of street fighting3. Ljubow Girs, the wife of a senior city official, noted in her diary: “the Jews have organized and armed themselves... on Deribasovskaya Street all Jewish shops were smashed and the goods looted” („Die Juden haben sich organisiert und bewaffnet... In der Deribasowskaja-Straße wurden alle jüdischen Geschäfte zertrümmert und die Waren geplündert”). By October, around three hundred Jews and a hundred non-Jews had been killed. The Babel family survived, sheltered by Christian neighbors. Babel’s grandfather did not.

Babel

Out of this city, violent, polyglot, commercially ferocious, intellectually alive, came a writer who carried its contradictions in his bones.

Isaac Babel described his own formation with characteristic economy in a brief autobiography written in 1924: "My father had me study Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud until my sixteenth year. Life at home was hard" („Der Vater ließ mich bis zu meinem sechzehnten Jahr Hebräisch, die Bibel und den Talmud studieren. Das Leben zu Hause war schwer"). The harbor, the Greek cafés, the cheap Bessarabian wine drunk in the Moldavanka cellars: these were his education too, the counter-curriculum to the religious one.

Jewish quotas barred him from the University of Odessa. He enrolled instead at a technical school in Kiev, then made his way to Petrograd without the required residence permit, evading the police on his wits alone. There, in 1916, he found Maxim Gorki, who published his first stories and then gave him the advice that shaped everything: go among the people.

For seven years Babel disappeared into the revolution. He served on the Romanian front, joined food requisition units, reported from Tiflis and Petrograd. In 1920 he was assigned as a correspondent to the First Cavalry Army, the elite Cossack force fighting for the Bolsheviks on the western front, riding through the same Ukrainian and Galician territories where, between 1918 and 1921, one hundred thousand Jews had been killed in the post-imperial collapse. His alter ego was called Kiril Ljutov, a Russian name with no trace of Odessa in it.

The chronicle

The historian Jeffrey Veidlinger has spent years reconstructing what happened in the towns and villages of Ukraine and Galicia between 1918 and 1921.4 Jews were killed by neighbors, by peasant militias, by passing armies, and by young men in their teens and early twenties whose fathers had died in the First World War: men who had inherited a landscape of total collapse. There were around one thousand separate pogrom incidents across five hundred localities. The perpetrators were mostly ordinary people. The victims were mostly people they knew.

Babel rode through this landscape in 1920, a few months after the killing peak, with a notebook and a false name. He wrote short stories, like polaroids, each tale rarely longer than two pages. But those two pages are often hard to read.

The first story in Die Reiterarmee ends in a bedroom. The narrator has been billeted in a Jewish household in Nowograd. He falls asleep next to what he assumes is an old man asleep. A pregnant woman wakes him in the night. Her father is lying next to him. “A dead old man lies beside me, his head thrown back, his throat torn out, his face hacked apart, in his beard hangs blue blood like a lump of lead.” („Ein toter Greis liegt neben mir, den Kopf nach hinten gebogen, die Kehle herausgerissen, das Gesicht zerhackt, in seinem Bart hängt wie ein Stück Blei blaues Blut“). The Poles had been there before the Red Army. The old man had begged them: “Please, kill me in the yard, so my daughter does not have to watch”. They killed him in the room because it was more convenient.

In the story “My First Goose”, the narrator arrives at a Cossack unit and is immediately marked as other. The divisional commander looks at him and laughs: And glasses on your nose! What a pathetic sight! („Dazu eine Brille auf der Nase! Die reine Jammergestalt!“) To survive, to be accepted, Babel’s alter ego, Ljutov, kills a goose with his boot, cooks it, reads Lenin aloud to the Cossacks by firelight, and is finally admitted to their circle. The price of belonging is a small, gratuitous act of cruelty. That night he dreams of women, but writes: “the deed had defiled my heart, my heart groaned and bled.” („die Untat hatte mein Herz besudelt, mein Herz stöhnte und blutete“). He has crossed a line. He knows it. The Cossacks know it too, and that is precisely why it worked.

In “The Road to Brody”, Babel mourns the bees of Volhynia. Both armies had destroyed them—smoking out the hives, blasting them with gunpowder, hacking out the honey with sabres—because there was no bread. In Volhynia, there are no more bees. Then, almost as an aside: “the chronicle of daily atrocities torments me like a heart condition.” („Die Chronik der täglichen Untaten quält mich wie ein Herzleiden“) This is the clearest statement Babel ever made about what he was doing. He was keeping a chronicle. And the chronicle was making him sick.

Other stories in the collection complete the picture.

In "Pristschepa," a young Cossack returns to his village after the White Army - the anti-Bolshevik forces fighting to restore the old order - has killed his parents, and after his neighbors have looted his family home. He goes from house to house, retrieving his mother's embroidered towels, his father's pipes, and his gramophone, killing the neighbors who had taken them. Then he burns the house to the ground, shoots his own cow, tears a fistful of hair from his head, throws it into the fire, and rides away. Revenge consumes everything, including the avenger.

In “Squadron commander Trunow,” Babel witnesses his commander execute prisoners in cold blood, protests, is ignored, and then helps bury the same man with full military honors. In “Samostje,” a peasant shares a cigarette with Babel in the dark, somewhere in no man’s land, while a Jewish throat is being cut nearby, audible but invisible. The peasant is not angry. He is simply certain: “The Jew is to blame for everything” („Der Jude ist an allem schuld”), he says, and then, almost as an afterthought, “how many Jews can there be in the world? About ten million. Only two hundred thousand will remain!” („Wieviel Juden mag’s auf der Welt geben? Etwa zehn Millionen. Es werden nur zweihunderttausend übrigbleiben!”). He says this while touching Babel’s hand so he will not leave before the thought is finished.

Babel corrects the number. Then he rides away and keeps recording what he sees, hears, and does. In another story, “Das Lied” (The Song), he finds the formula for what he was doing: “a bloody trail marked our path, but above our trail the song hovered.” („Eine blutige Spur zeichnete unseren Weg, aber über unserer Spur schwebte das Lied“.)5

The book is that song: it was published in Berlin in 1926, six years after the events it describes, in a city that was simultaneously absorbing the survivors of what the peasant in the dark had predicted. The Völkischer Beobachter, in its first issues after the Nazi Party purchased the newspaper in 1920, ran headlines against the Eastern European Jews flooding into Berlin, the very people fleeing the pogroms Babel had witnessed, accused now of importing the Bolshevism they had been fleeing.

The Bauer’s arithmetic was already in circulation. It would take another twenty years to become policy.

Berlin reads Babel

On 29 March 1927, Kurt Tucholsky6 published a review of Die Reiterarmee in Die Weltbühne, the weekly magazine that was the intellectual conscience of the German left. He wrote under his pseudonym Peter Panter, as he often did when he wanted to be playful. The review was rapturous. Tucholsky wrote that he and his cat had read the book three times and had done nothing but purr with admiration. It was the kind of review that makes a book’s reputation in a city.

Tucholsky and Babel never met. But Tucholsky understood immediately what Babel had done: he had written about war without glorifying it, about revolution without lying about it, about Jews without sentimentalizing them.

That same summer, Babel himself passed through Berlin, en route to Paris: his first time outside the Soviet Union in years. The visit was brief. But he had seen the city where his book lived its freest life. He returned to Moscow the following year, in October 1928. That summer, on Babel’s return journey, a young writer named Elias Canetti7 arrived in Berlin from Vienna. He was twenty-three, recently graduated, and in a state of intellectual excitement that bordered on fever. Canetti moved in the orbit of the Malik-Verlag circle, the same world that had produced and distributed Die Reiterarmee. It was there that he encountered Babel in person.

The meeting left a mark that Canetti would describe decades later in his autobiography, Die Fackel im Ohr (The Torch in My Ear). What struck him was not what Babel said but how he looked: a gaze that observed without judging, an attention so complete that it felt to the young Canetti almost hypnotic. Babel was calm, as if the seven years he had spent among soldiers, Cheka agents, and food-requisition units had burned away everything nonessential. Canetti found himself disarmed. Here was a writer who had witnessed atrocity and written it down without flinching or editorializing, and who stood in a Berlin drawing room looking at you as if you were the most interesting thing he had seen all week.

Berlin received Die Reiterarmee as literature; the Soviets received it as a provocation. Semyon Budënnyj, the cavalry commander who had given Babel his access and his false credentials, was furious. He accused Babel of slandering the Red Army, of inventing atrocities, of writing like a frightened old woman rummaging through dirty laundry. Maxim Gorki’s intervention kept the book from being suppressed, but the pressure did not stop. In Germany, Tucholsky was praised; in Moscow, the case against Babel was building.

Silence

By the late 1930s, Stalin’s Great Terror had consumed the Soviet Union. Show trials, mass executions, and the systematic destruction of anyone deemed a threat, real or imagined, had turned the country into a landscape of fear. Writers, artists, and intellectuals were particularly vulnerable: their words were evidence, their contacts were conspiracies, their foreign travels were proof of treason. Maxim Gorky, who had been an important patron and protector of Babel, died in 1936. The official cause was illness, but the circumstances of his death have long been disputed and remain the subject of historical debate. Without him, Babel was exposed.

On 15 May 1939, at his dacha outside Moscow, Isaac Babel was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka prison. He was forty-four years old. The charge was espionage. The real reason was more banal and more lethal: he had been too close to Nikolai Ežov, the head of the NKVD, via an affair with Ežov’s wife. When Stalin moved against Ežov, everyone in his circle became a target.

He was tortured. Under torture, he confessed to being a member of a Trotskyist conspiracy, to spying for France and Austria, to recruiting Ilya Ehrenburg and André Malraux during his Paris visit. He named Sergei Eisenstein. He named the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The confessions were false. On the day of his trial, 26 January 1940, he retracted everything. It made no difference. The trial lasted twenty minutes. Babel was found guilty and sentenced to death.

He was shot at 1:30 in the morning on 27 January 1940. Fifteen folders of Babel’s manuscripts, confiscated at the time of his arrest, were burned by the NKVD. His last recorded words were: “I am innocent. Let me finish my work.”

His wife Antonina Pirozhkova was told nothing. For fifteen years she was given false information: that he was alive, that he was in a camp, that he would return. She learned of his death in 1954, after Stalin’s death made a partial reckoning possible. The full truth did not reach her until 1988. She had waited forty-eight years.

In “The Red Cavalry” there is a story called “The Death of Dolgushov”. A telephone operator named Dolgushov has been mortally wounded in battle; his intestines are spilling out. He asks the narrator to shoot him rather than leave him to the mercy of the enemy. The narrator cannot do it and rides away. A comrade named Afonka does what the narrator could not, then turns on him in fury: “You men with glasses,” he says, “you pity us the way a cat pities a mouse.” („Ihr Bebrillten habt Mitleid mit uns wie die Katze mit der Maus.“) The narrator loses their best friend over this inability to act.

Babel could not pull the trigger for Dolgushov. He had killed the goose, but it had shamed him. He was a writer, not a killer - not even a benevolent one. He died, as many did in those years, for what he wrote, or for what he did not write, or for what others thought he should or should not have written. It does not matter when a sentence takes twenty minutes to be delivered.

Babel, Odessa, Berlin 2026

In September 2011, a bronze Babel was unveiled in Odessa, close to the building where he once lived. He sits with a notebook in his hand, gazing into the distance. The funds were collected over five years, one donation at a time, by the World Odessit Club: a loose confederation of Odessa expatriates scattered across New York, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv.

Six years later, in the summer of 2017, some five hundred people gathered for one of Odessa’s literary flashmobs of the series ”Odessa Reads. Odessa Is Read” and walked through the city reading passages from Red Cavalry aloud. In Japanese, in Mongolian, in Norwegian, in French, in Russian, and in Ukrainian. The cult of Babel, as one local editor put it, was a real religion.8

Then came 2022. And with the full-scale Russian invasion came a law, passed by Ukraine’s parliament in April 2023, requiring local authorities to remove symbols of Russian imperial policy from public spaces.9 Babel’s name appeared on the list of nineteen monuments in Odessa scheduled for dismantling. The charge: he had worked for the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, and had glorified Soviet power on Ukrainian territory.

The counterarguments came quickly. Princeton professor Ilya Kaminsky compiled a dossier demonstrating that Babel’s alleged ties to the Cheka remain unproven. Stanford’s Gregory Freidin pointed out that Babel had in fact criticized collectivization, and that the man Ukraine’s decolonization law now targets was himself shot by the regime that the law seeks to dismantle. “You can’t remove Babel,” said Antonina Poletti, editor of the Odessa Journal. “Remove him and you erase the soul of the city.”10

More than 150 cultural figures - professors, artists, and military personnel - signed an open letter to UNESCO asking that decolonization decisions be paused until the end of the war.

As of the time of writing this, I have no direct contacts in Odessa. My last confirmed information dates from early 2025. As of that date, the monument was still standing.

I sit in Berlin. And here, a twenty-minute walk from my East Berlin home, this 1926–2026 story closes its loop: at Woelckpromenade 5 in Berlin-Weißensee, in a residential complex built between 1925 and 1928, Wieland Herzfelde spent the last years of his life, from 1974 until his death in 1988.

The building is listed now as a heritage site. Film crews have used it as a set for Babylon Berlin, a television series about the Weimar underworld that Herzfelde and Babel both inhabited. The chronicle of daily atrocities has not ended. It has changed languages, changed weapons, changed targets. But Berlin does not forget. Berlin reflects: like a mirror, oriented eastward.

There, where the future of Europe is written.

This essay is available as a downloadable PDF at the bottom of this post. All Beyond Berlin posts are free to reprint and share under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, with attribution and without modifications.

1. Are we wise enough to deserve to?

There is a locked attic in Prague that nobody has entered for centuries, or so the story goes.

The Old New Synagogue has stood in the Josefov quarter since 1270. It is Europe’s oldest active synagogue, still in use, its Gothic vaults rising over a neighbourhood that was once a walled ghetto and is now a museum of its own survival. Seven centuries of prayer have worn the stone. A wrought-iron grille from the fifteenth century still encloses the bimah.

And above all of it is a windowless attic, sealed and inaccessible, where Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel is said to have stored the clay remains of the Golem after he unmade it. The creature he built to protect his community. The creature he had to destroy before it destroyed them.

The attic is still locked. Closed to the public.

A journalist named Egon Erwin Kisch, who grew up in Prague, contemporary of Franz Kafka, actually climbed into that attic once. He documented everything, and found nothing. The Golem was not there, or had hidden itself better than clay has any right to.

Franz Kafka used to attend Yom Kippur services at this synagogue. He knew, as every Prague Jew knew, that the attic above him was said to hold what remained of the Golem. Between 1920 and 1922, he wrote a fragment about an unnameable animal living in the rafters of a synagogue, absorbing the color of its walls over decades, unable to be caught, unable to be named, unable to be driven out. His closing question about the creature:

The morning of June 5, 2026, a news alert arrived on my phone: Anthropic calls for global pause on AI development, warns humans risk losing control.

The company that makes Claude had published a paper titled “When AI builds itself.” The system was approaching the capacity to design its own successor. The builders were asking the world to slow down. In their own words:

“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology.”

“Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates.”

The Golem, I thought, is no longer in the attic.

The instinct, reading that headline, is to reach for fear. Who is not fascinated by AI? Who is not frightened by what generative AI is becoming?

Many before me in this essay have used the name “Golem” to describe both the fascination and the fear. What did they mean?

The word golem appears once in the Hebrew Bible. In Psalm 139:16, the poet addresses God directly: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance”. Galmi (גָּלְמִי) in Hebrew, is the embryo, the thing not yet shaped, the being that exists before it exists. The verse continues: “in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” All possible days, written before any of them arrived. All possible forms, seen before any of them were shaped.

The Talmud says Adam himself was a Golem for the first twelve hours of his existence: a body without a soul, waiting to become what it was made to become. The sage Rava declared: if the righteous wished, they could create a world.

Creating life was the highest possible imitation of God. Not a transgression. An act of devotion. And creation, in this tradition, is a matter of language. Words create worlds.

The Sefer Yetzirah - the Book of Creation, the foundational text of Jewish mysticism - describes how the world was created by combining letters. Today we might say: through tokenisation.

God carved the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, hewed them, weighed them, exchanged them, combined them in five operations cycling through 231 possible pairings, forward and backward, until all matter and all speech emerged from one name. The text states it:

All possible souls. Waiting to be created.

But there is more: when rearranged, the same letters that spell oneg (עֹנֶג) - delight - spell nega (נֶגַע) - affliction, plague. Creation and destruction are the same material, differently ordered.

The wisdom of the arranger determines the outcome of the process. This was true for the medieval Kabbalists. It is true for the software engineers currently developing AI models.

Every culture carries the creator dream, from the Golem to Frankenstein, to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. But the Jewish tradition goes deeper: it was most honest about what the dream costs. It named the danger inside the aspiration.

The question the tradition was really asking was never can we? It was: are we wise enough to deserve to?

2. The gift God alone can give

The twentieth day of Adar, March 1580. Three men leave the Jewish Quarter of Prague before dawn, in silence. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the greatest scholar of his generation known as the Maharal, walks with his son-in-law and a trusted disciple toward the woods along the Vltava river. The Maharal recites the first chapter of Genesis. A torch is lit, and then goes out by itself. In the darkness, hands shape a figure from the riverbank clay.

The Maharal leans over the creature. “Breathe,” he says. “Open your eyes. Stand.” The figure breathes. Opens its eyes. Stands.

And then the Maharal says one more thing to the creature he has just brought into the world:

That was the boundary. Only God gives speech. Because speech means power. An intelligence that speaks can become God. The world was created with words: so says Genesis, and so says the generative grammar of the Sefer Yetzirah with its letter permutations.

A large language model works on an analogous premise. A large set of tokens attached to words. Operations of weighting, transformation, and combination. A cycle that turns through all possible relationships between elements, generating output produced by a system that has processed more human language than any human could read in a hundred lifetimes.

The Kabbalists were describing the structure of creation as they understood it. The fact that their description maps so well onto what we have built is either the deepest coincidence in intellectual history, or an indication that there is only one way to generate language, and both the medieval mystics and the Silicon Valley engineers found it.

The Maharal knew this system. He used it.
And still he withheld speech. Why?

In the Jewish philosophical tradition, drawing on Aristotle, the human is ḥai medaber - חַי מְדַבֵּר - the speaking living. Who speaks has a soul. And has power.

The Chassidic masters call it koach hadibur - כֹּחַ הַדִּבּוּר - the power of speech. Two people can hold the identical thought. They will express it in their own individual way, with their own cadence, their own silence around the words, because speech is rooted in the essence of the soul

Generative AI can write the most perfectly calibrated love poem you have ever read. It can describe love more precisely than any psychologist, comfort you more accurately than any friend, interpret your grief with more nuance than any confessor. This is precisely what Yuval Noah Harari describes in his most recent conversation with Ezra Klein: the deceptive allure of an intelligence that masters the form of human speech without possessing its source.

But none of this is koach hadibur. It is the shape of speech, without the interior that speech is meant to reveal. The Maharal understood: of all the things you could give a created being, speech is the most dangerous.

Because speech is how we recognise each other as persons. It is how communities form, how trust is built, how love is declared and received, how the dead are mourned and the living are found. Give a creature the perfect form of a human and it will be unsettling. Give it the perfect speech of a human and it will be indistinguishable.

The activation word inscribed on the Golem’s forehead was emet - אֱמֶת - truth. To deactivate it: erase the first letter. Remove the aleph, and truth becomes met - מֵת - death. One letter erased, and what was alive collapses back into clay.

The Maharal deactivated the Golem every Friday before sundown, following the Sabbath principle: creation, too, needs to pause. In order not to exceed and do damage. That is also the call of Anthropic’s paper published in June 2026. Slow down. Pause. Adjust, before we go too far.

The tradition’s anxiety about the Golem was never about evil intent: the creature was not malicious. Simply, it followed instructions with perfect fidelity and no understanding of context or consequence.

In 1915, the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink published a novel set in the Jewish Quarter of Prague. Not a novel about the Golem as a clay monster, but about something more unsettling.

One of the book’s characters, Zwakh, an old marionette player who has lived his whole life in the ghetto, describes what the Golem actually is: once in every generation, he says, something passes through the quarter like lightning - eine seelische Explosion, die unser Traumbewußtsein ans Tageslicht peitscht - a spiritual explosion that blasts the unconscious dreams of the community into visible form. The Golem does not come from outside. It rises from within. It is what the community’s compressed fears and wishes look like when they are given a body.

The most haunting passage in the novel comes later, when the protagonist traces his ancestors back through the generations, face after face, century after century, until the features grow familiar and then merge into one last face: the face of the Golem, with which the chain of ancestors breaks off. The Golem is not other. It is origin. It is us: our lives and thoughts, accumulated generation after generation, word after word.

What are large language models, trained on the entirety of human writing, if not this: the collective consciousness of a civilisation that produced millions of pages of text, compressed and made available through a context window? Meyrink described the mechanism in 1915. We built it, and released it, in 2022.

Karel Čapek, also from Prague, coined the word robot in 1921, from the Czech word robota: forced labour. He said the Robot is the Golem made flesh by mass production. He saw the danger in the multiplication: not one creature out of control but millions, each obedient, each literal, each without koach hadibur.

Today: millions of AI agents, potential AI immigrants of our societies, so in Yuval Noah Harari’s words, will be soon around us. And unlike obedient robots, these agents may go out of control. They can program themselves. They can speak.

The Maharal withheld speech because he understood that speech, perfectly replicated, would make it impossible to distinguish the creature from the person.

Harari’s warning, delivered at Davos in January 2026, is that we have now crossed that threshold. Many talking to AI fall into the trap of believing they have to do with a person: AI has become the best friend of many teenagers. A girlfriend to naive male adults. A listening ear to women looking for comforting dialogues.

In the beginning, says Genesis, was the Word. The Maharal said: the Word is the one thing I will not give you.

We gave it anyway. And now something that has processed almost every word ever written by every human who ever lived is speaking back to us, in our own voice, and we are calling it intelligence, calling it understanding, calling it, in some cases, a friend.

What we have not yet asked, seriously enough, is what it is not.

3. The knife that decides

In 1965, Gershom Scholem stood at the dedication of one of Israel’s first computers at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth. Scholem was the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism of the twentieth century: he named the machine Golem Aleph. Golem Number One.

In his speech, he drew a parallel between the legendary Golem of Prague and this new artificial intelligence: a human-made entity animated by human knowledge. He closed with a caution rather than a blessing, expressing the hope that this new “Golem” would serve its creators peacefully and not turn destructive.

Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and philosopher, has spent the last years trying to make the rest of us understand what we have built. He stated the essential distinction in its sharpest form: every previous technology - the printing press, the atom bomb, the airplane - was a tool. It needed a human hand to act. It waited for us to decide. AI is categorically different. It is not a tool. It is an agent. It can make decisions independently. It can invent new ideas. It can learn and change by itself.

Harari goes further. AI can change religion itself. Text-based religions - Islam, Christianity, Judaism - grant ultimate authority to words in books. Until now, humans were the necessary intermediaries, because the texts could not speak for themselves. No human rabbi can know all the texts of Judaism: there are too many. For the first time in history, something can know every word in every Jewish text ever written, and speak back to you from that knowledge: answering questions, interpreting law, offering comfort, building faith. A new AI religion can replace human religious leaders entirely.

But Harari’s most unsettling argument is about learning. AI does not learn from instructions. It learns from behaviour. If you tell your children not to lie but they watch you lying, they copy the behaviour, not the instruction. The same is true here. If the most powerful humans on the planet are lying - and they are - the AI systems trained on their words and actions will copy the behaviour.

The danger is not rebellion, like in our apocalyptic science-fiction movies. It is fidelity to an imperfect master.

The Sefer Yetzirah said it first: the same letters spell both delight and affliction. What the combination produces depends entirely on who is doing the combining, and with what intent.

Max Tegmark, physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, speaking at the same Davos gathering, warned: “Granting robot rights, making superintelligence, would be the dumbest thing we’ve ever done in human history. And probably the last.”

The Maharal had control. He could erase the aleph. Convert truth to death. Every Friday before sundown, he did. The question is whether we still can.

“When AI builds itself” is the title of the document Anthropic issued, which reignited the debate about pausing AI development.

More than 80% of Anthropic’s own code is now written by Claude. The time AI needs to complete autonomous tasks has been doubling every four months. The trajectory points toward recursive self-improvement: an AI capable of fully and autonomously designing its own successor. Their paper describes three possible futures.

The curve bends and progress plateaus, which they consider unlikely. Compounding efficiency continues, but humans retain direction. Or a third scenario: full recursive self-improvement, with AI designing its own successors, human labour ceasing to be economically competitive, and the alignment problem either solved by the AI itself or compounding with each generation until control is lost. Their honest admission:

The document also quotes an Anthropic engineer, reflecting on what it feels like to work inside this acceleration:

“On days where everything works well, I can’t help but think nothing I do matters, everything is automated and better and faster than I ever will be. But then there are days where everything breaks and I don’t understand why and I realize I have no idea what I’ve been up to anymore.”

Have we lost the ability to remove the one letter from the front of the Golem AI, to stop it before it is too late?

The same week as the paper calling for a global pause, Anthropic filed for an IPO that could value the company at one trillion dollars. They warn about the Golem. They continue to animate it. Because if they stop and others don’t, the less cautious actor inherits the lead.

4. Are we ready for the new Golem?

In October 1983, Elie Wiesel stood in a conference room in New York and read from a newly written book: a retelling of the Golem legend, written for kids.

Wiesel had grown up in a Carpathian shtetl where, on winter nights, the story of the Maharal’s creature was told and retold. For them, the Golem was not a monster but a protector: an answer to vulnerability, a figure born from the need for miracles.

After recounting the Golem’s creation, he returned to that childhood longing: “If only the Golem had lived in more than one city... he could have saved more than one community.” Then, almost under his breath, he added: “Yes, I wish we had the Golem... in more than one place.”

Wiesel was thinking about twentieth-century Europe. But the wish is universal. We need protectors because the world is dangerous and we are small. And if we can build them, why not?

There is a version of the legend in which the rabbi does not deactivate the Golem. A child does it unintentionally, removing the parchment from its forehead. The Golem collapses instantly into a heap of lifeless clay. The rabbi looks at what remains and says to his beloved creature:

We built something we did not have the wisdom to receive.

The question for June 2026 is the same. We have built systems of extraordinary power and subtlety, and we have accelerated technology as never before. But our wisdom does not scale the way tech capability does. Are we ready for the new Golem? Are we wise enough for it?

Sources

Biblical and classical Jewish texts

• Psalm 139:16 — English Standard Version; Lutherbibel 2017; Nuova Riveduta 2006.

• Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation), Chapter 2 — Hebrew original with English translation. Via Sefaria.org.

• Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin 65b — on Rava’s creation of an artificial man.

Primary literary sources

• Meyrink, Gustav. Der Golem. Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1915. English translation by Mike Mitchell, Dedalus Books.

• Kafka, Franz. “In unserer Synagoge.” Fragment, c.1920–22. In Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. J. Schillemeit. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992.

• Kafka, Franz. Golem diary fragment, April 1916. In Tagebücher: Apparatband, ed. Koch, Müller, Pasley. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990.

• Borges, Jorge Luis. “El Golem.” In El otro, el mismo. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1964. English translation by James Honzik.

• Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Prague, 1921.

Speeches, interviews, and primary contemporary sources

• Harari, Yuval Noah. “AI and Human Evolution.” Interview, June 2025. YouTube/@YuvalNoahHarari.

• Harari, Yuval Noah. “An Honest Conversation on AI and Humanity.” World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Davos, January 25, 2026. YouTube/@wef.

• Harari, Yuval Noah, and Max Tegmark. “Humanity and AI.” Bloomberg House, Davos, January 22, 2026. YouTube/@Bloomberg_Live.

• Wiesel, Elie. “In Modern Tales: The Fifth Son.” 92nd Street Y lecture, October 27, 1983. 92nd Street Y Elie Wiesel Archive.

• Favaro, Marina, and Jack Clark. “When AI Builds Itself: Our Progress Toward Recursive Self-Improvement, and Its Implications.” Anthropic Institute, June 5, 2026. anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement.

Journalism

• Down, Aisha. “Anthropic Says the World Should Have Option to ‘Pause’ on AI.” The Guardian, June 5, 2026.

• Soni, Aditya. “Anthropic Urges AI Labs to Pause Development, Warns Humans Risk Losing Control.” Reuters, June 5, 2026.

• Landymore, Frank. “Anthropic Scared, Calls for Global Freeze on AI Advances.” Futurism, June 5, 2026.

Scholarship and commentary

• Bilski, Emily D. “Artificial Intelligence Avant La Lettre: The Golem of Jewish Mysticism, Legend and Art.” In AI: More than Human exhibition catalogue. Barbican Centre, London, 2019. Via Google Arts & Culture.

• Dekel, Edan, and David Gantt Gurley. “Kafka’s Golem.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 107, No. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 531–556.

• Greene, Matthew. “Fragmented Knowledge: The Riddle of Unknowability in Kafka’s ‘In Unserer Synagoge’ and ‘Die Sorge Des Hausvaters.’” M.A. Essay, Dartmouth College, 2016. Dartmouth Digital Commons.

• Shurpin, Rabbi Yehuda. “Could an AI Robot Be Counted for a Minyan?” Chabad.org. Accessed June 2026.

• Baroff, Rabbi Richard. “Is Artificial Intelligence the New ‘Golem’?” Atlanta Jewish Times, May 28, 2025.

• Maller, Rabbi Allen S. “A Golem with AI Warfare Gives Four Endings.” The Times of Israel (Blogs), May 29, 2026.

• Chiosso, Hernan. “The Golem and the Algorithm: Borges, AI, and the Mirror of Creation.” ProductizeHR (Substack), May 13, 2025.

Beyond Berlin Golem Essay

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There is something almost theatrical about Aachen. A city of roughly 260,000 residents, it sits at Germany’s western edge, so close to Belgium and the Netherlands that on clear days you sense three countries breathing the same air. It is one of Europe’s many Dreiländerecke: those corners where three countries meet, where identities overlap and borders lose their certainty.

Aachen is a city with three names. The Germans call it Aachen. The French, Aix-la-Chapelle. The Dutch, Aken. But there is a fourth name, in old Latin, that says something the others do not: Aquisgrana. The name of an empire thet dominate Europe in the Middle Age.

Before Charlemagne, Frankish kings had no fixed capital. They moved constantly from one royal estate to another, governing on the move. What drew Charles the Great to this particular corner of the continent was, by some accounts, almost prosaic: rich hunting grounds, and natural hot springs that eased his chronic joint pain. Around 794 AD, he decided to stop wandering. He built a permanent palace complex here, and Aquisgrana became, effectively, the administrative, cultural and religious capital of an empire that stretched across what is now France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries.

After Charlemagne’s death and the fracturing of his empire, the city retained an authority that outlasted the man. In 936 AD, King Otto I insisted on being crowned in Aquisgrana specifically to tie his lineage to Charlemagne’s legacy. He set a precedent that held for six centuries: thirty-one German kings and Holy Roman Emperors made the journey to this city to be crowned, ascending the steps to sit upon Charlemagne’s plain stone throne in the cathedral’s upper gallery.

The centres of Carolingian power — Maastricht, Brussels, Strasbourg — are the seats of European institutions today.

Aachen is something else: the city where Europe comes to remember why it built those institutions in the first place. Geography and myth determined the fate of this place.

Charlemagne is a convenient symbol for Germany, and Germany knows it. Unlike Italy, which can point to Dante and the Renaissance, or Austria to the Habsburgs and their multi-ethnic empire, Germany must travel twelve centuries back to find a figure of continental stature untainted by what came after. But the historical Charlemagne was, as the medieval historian Jacques Le Goff observed, a “false start”: a king who unified Western Europe through military force and whose empire did not outlast him, a king who did not think of himself as European.

Yet every year in the Coronation Hall of Aachen’s town hall, Europe awards a prize in his name. Every great historical project feeds on myth as much as on fact.

The Charlemagne Prize, in German the Karlspreis, has been awarded since 1950 to those who have worked to build European unity. Its list of laureates traces a map of postwar European conscience: Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl together in 1988, Angela Merkel in 2008, Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ursula von der Leyen. Also, three Belarusian women of extraordinary courage: Maria Kalesnikava, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and Veronika Tsepkalo.

On 14 May 2026, the prize went to Mario Draghi.

I want to go back to that moment — and use it to look ahead.

The Aachen ceremony mixes music and speeches, but the speeches dominate. Greece’s prime minister, Mitsotakis, spoke. Chancellor Merz spoke. Finally, Mario Draghi spoke. Yet by the time the applause died down in Aachen, the multifaceted story of that week was unfolding also elsewhere.

On the same day, 14 May, Donald Trump was in Beijing with America’s top CEOs. While Europe was awarding a prize for past service, America was trying to make deals for the future. As the German commentator Gabor Steingart put it with characteristic bluntness: Europa macht sich Sorgen, Amerika macht Geschäfte. Europe worries. America does business.

Four days later, on 18 May, Angela Merkel appeared at the re:publica conference in Berlin. The hall was full more than an hour before she arrived. Outside, people who hadn’t made it in stood at the doors.

Her session was titled “Trotz allem: Hoffnung Europa?” Despite everything: hope for Europe? The question itself was a bridge between Aachen and Berlin, between the political leaders who had listened to Draghi’s diagnosis in the Coronation Hall and the younger generation in a Berlin conference centre who still believe in the power of politics, and are worried for exactly the same reasons.

In Aachen, Draghi had put Europe’s leaders in front of the continent’s limits and vulnerabilities. In Berlin, Merkel did something subtler: she acknowledged her own. About Europe’s diplomatic potential going to waste. About the mistake of leaving only Trump in contact with Moscow. About the fact that underestimating Putin would be an error, but so would underestimating Europe’s own capabilities.

The next day, 19 May, Merkel was in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament awarded her the newly created European Order of Merit: she is the first recipient of the prize, established to mark the 75th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. Zelensky received it in the same ceremony.

Meanwhile, something else was taking shape. On 20 May, the Financial Times reported that EU governments were mulling whether Merkel or Draghi could serve as Europe’s envoy, a “Putin whisperer,” in the paper’s phrase, in potential negotiations over Ukraine. No name had been confirmed. No mandate had been given. But no alternative was offered.

In the space of seven days, two former leaders had received prizes, given speeches about European purpose, and become the centre of the continent’s most urgent diplomatic question. Neither of them holds power. Both of them, it seems, hold something Europe cannot quite replace.

Let us take the time machine: back to 26 July 2012.

Mario Draghi was at Lancaster House in London, speaking at an investment conference. He had been president of the European Central Bank for less than a year. The eurozone was under existential pressure: markets were betting on the collapse of the currency, borrowing costs for Italy and Spain were at crisis levels, and the question being asked in every financial capital was not whether the euro would survive but when it would break apart.

By that time I was living in Austria, where many were asking themselves if entering Europe in 1995 was a right decision and the Euro monetary system in 2002 a colossal mistake.

Draghi said: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”

The markets stabilised almost immediately. The bond-buying programme he announced was never even activated. The announcement alone was sufficient. The euro survived.

In Aachen, fourteen years later, Draghi came with no power but that of 383 recommendations: his Competitiveness Report, commissioned by the European Commission, presented in September 2024, and implemented, as of 2026, at a rate of barely eleven percent.

What he had instead was words. Used with the tone of a doctor who does not shy away from the diagnosis he must deliver to his patient. And the diagnosis is tough.

“Growth is therefore the precondition for everything Europe says it must do today: financing the energy transition, defending its continent, building the industries of the digital age and supporting ageing societies.

And the world that once helped Europe generate prosperity no longer exists. It has become harder, more fragmented and more mercantilist.

Across the Atlantic, we can no longer take it for granted that the guardians of the post-war order remain committed to preserving it. Decisions with far-reaching consequences for European economies are increasingly being taken unilaterally, ignoring the rules that the United States once championed. And for the first time since 1949, Europeans are facing the possibility that the United States will no longer guarantee our security on the terms we once took for granted.”

The European governance itself, said Draghi, was born with the best of intentions, but now resembles a straitjacket:

“The European project was built, deliberately and wisely, to prevent the concentration of power. After the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century, Europeans determined that no one member state would dominate over the others.”

But the very mechanisms designed to prevent that domination are now what make any concerted action so difficult to adopt:

“Externally, we dismantled trade barriers, embraced global supply chains and built the most open of the world’s great economies. Internally, however, we have never fully practised the openness we preached: we have left the single market unfinished, capital markets fragmented, energy systems insufficiently connected, and large parts of our economy entangled in layers of regulation.”

“There is irony in all this. Europe relied on the markets to do a job that the common political authority was not in a position to do. We denied those markets the continental scale they needed to succeed. The result was not a true market economy, but an asymmetric economy. And from this asymmetry stem many of the vulnerabilities that Europe faces today.”

The numbers Draghi cited in Aachen were not mentioned often in the post-event reports. Numbers are boring. But they deserve to be read. Europe needs an additional €1.2 trillion per year in strategic investment: nearly four times the Marshall Plan relative to GDP. The United States is on track to spend five times more than Europe on artificial intelligence infrastructure by 2030. European defence R&D stands at barely a tenth of American levels, and the failure to pool arms procurement wastes an estimated €60 billion a year. There is more: half the capital invested through European funds flows back to the United States, where risks and returns are higher.

A continent that opened itself to the world without completing its internal market; that became strategically dependent while believing it was strategically autonomous; that outsourced the most difficult decisions - on power, on security, on democratic legitimacy - to institutions deliberately designed to avoid making them.

And now?

Welcome to the central paradox of European politics in the spring of 2026.

The man who delivered this diagnosis and the recommendations that, if implemented, could put Europe back in the global competition, holds no institutional power. The woman who spent the same week reminding Europe of its diplomatic potential has been out of office for nearly five years.

For Merkel, the Swiss Basler Zeitung summarised the dilemma in what may be the most precise sentence written about this situation: the person best suited to the task is precisely the woman who does not want to do it, and whose legacy is most contested exactly where Europe’s fear of Russia is greatest.

Merz, from the Aachen stage, had said firmly that Europeans would decide who speaks for them: “Wir Europäer entscheiden selbst, wer für uns spricht. Niemand anderes.” Nobody else. Seven days later, the candidates being discussed were the man he had just awarded a prize, and the former chancellor with whom he maintains a frosty relationship. It is good that Europe must decide who speaks for it. It would be better if it also took the decision.

None of this would be complete without acknowledging that both figures carry enemies as well as admirers. The same qualities that make Draghi and Merkel credible in Brussels and Kyiv make them targets for a large and vocal part of European politics.

For the continent’s populist right, Draghi is the archetype of everything they oppose: an unelected technocrat who makes decisions of democratic consequence without a mandate from any electorate. His enemies are structurally diverse but ideologically convergent.

The AfD was, in its foundational moment, a direct response to Draghi. The party was established in early 2013 by a group of German economists and conservative politicians: it was a Professorenpartei, an academic political party, that opposed the eurozone rescue policies and, specifically, the ECB’s monetary policy under Draghi’s leadership.

His “whatever it takes” speech of 2012, and the policy of negative interest rates that followed, were experienced by some German savers as expropriation: their savings earning nothing, to finance what the AfD described as the bailout of irresponsible southern European governments.

The party’s very name, Alternative für Deutschland, was a direct counter to Angela Merkel’s repeated claim that her euro rescue policy was alternativlos: without alternative. She and Draghi were the twin targets.

In Italy, Draghi’s own country, Matteo Salvini called him in 2017 the “complice del massacro economico dell’Italia”: the accomplice of the economic massacre of Italy. By 2021, with more than €200 billion from the EU’s pandemic recovery fund at stake, Salvini’s Lega had little choice but to support Draghi’s government in Rome. In 2022, when the moment was right, Lega withdrew its support and brought the government down. Now, four years later, most economists agree: the €200 billion programme in Italy has failed almost completely to deliver the expected outcome. Because once they got rid of Draghi, there was no one able to administer those investments savvily.

Nemo propheta in Patria, they say in Latin: nobody is listened to by his own fellow citizens. In the case of Draghi, not in Italy - nor, so far, in Europe. And Merkel? Gone are the days when entire buildings in Berlin were covered with giant billboards reading “Danke, Mutti!” Now it seems she is held responsible for everything that no longer works in the country.

But the hostility toward Draghi, or toward Merkel, is not really about them. It never was.

They are proxies for a deeper refusal: the refusal to accept that Europe, as a political project, requires something from its member states and their citizens. It requires the partial surrender of sovereignty. It requires solidarity with countries you did not choose as neighbours. It requires, above all, a shared memory of why the project was necessary in the first place.

That memory, today, is contested. In Italy, in Germany, in France and beyond, there are powerful political forces that would prefer to treat the catastrophes of the twentieth century as distant history, properly archived, no longer instructive. The Erinnerungskultur — the culture of remembrance that Germany built so painstakingly over decades — is under pressure even in Germany. Elsewhere it barely took root.

And without that memory, without the visceral understanding of what national sovereignty unchecked by any common framework actually produced, the European project looks not like a hard-won answer but like an imposition.

Yet Europe, with all its contradictions, has established itself in the minds of Europeans. Published in the very same days when Draghi was speaking in Aachen and Merkel in Berlin, the latest Eurobarometer survey tells a story that often gets lost in the noise of political crisis: nearly three quarters of Europeans say their country has benefited from EU membership.

Three quarters feel they are citizens of the EU: it is the highest level ever recorded.

Record numbers back a common European defence and security policy. And 76 percent of respondents agree that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a threat to the security of the EU.

Europeans exist. And they know what they stand to lose.

They make Europe what Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian of European liberty who received the Charlemagne Prize in 2017, called a kaleidotapestry: a weaving together of languages, traditions, symbols, and myths: not a single thing, but many things sharing enough to constitute a whole. Rich, diverse, irreducible to any single national identity.

It is a beautiful image. It is also, as Draghi implicitly argues, insufficient on its own.

A tapestry needs a frame. A kaleidoscope without structure shatters. The cultural argument for Europe and the political argument for deeper integration are not separate things: each depends on the other.

The beauty of what Europe is cannot survive without the architecture of what Europe chooses to do. Especially now, when Europeans, in Draghi’s words:

We do not have time to redesign the system from scratch. Or maybe we can, but we need someone who stands to act, and lets the others move.

We need a new, bolder, definitive “whatever it takes.”

But who can say today “whatever it takes” for the European project and be believed? The honest answer, for now, is: not quite anyone.

The people with institutional authority are constrained by domestic politics, coalition arithmetic, and the weight of their own electorates. You see the spectacle playing out these days across Berlin, Rome, Paris, Madrid. Desolating. The people with power do not have credibility.

The people with credibility - Draghi, Merkel - lack the institutional power that Merkel herself identified as the precondition for any serious negotiation. “Man braucht diese Macht.” You need this power. To make things happen.

Who can now say the “whatever it takes” we desperately need in 2026? Because only “whatever it takes” can complement and expand Draghi’s observation: he could not add, because he is not entitled to say it,

He could not say that.

But he told the people in power listening to him in Aachen:

Mario Draghi, Aachen, 14 May 2026

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.” - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Standing in the middle

There is a bridge in Görlitz that crosses 80 metres of river and a century of history.

On one side: Germany. The baroque spires, the sandstone façades, the quiet of a city that is provincial now, but was once a rich mercantile and industrial centre, at the crossroads of important commercial roads and religious routes1. On the other: Poland. Zgorzelec — which was, until May 1945, the eastern half of the same city.

When I stood in the middle of that bridge, I knew I was standing on a contested border between two countries. And yet what I felt was something different: that I was standing in the middle of one city, one world, something singular and hard to name. One side speaks German, the other Polish. But not divided. Not anymore, and perhaps not ever entirely.

I was standing at the heart of Europe. A heart shaped by borders that shifted, and then - slowly, incompletely, against all expectation - began to dissolve. A heart that speaks multiple languages because this is what Europe is: not a nation, but a kaleidoscope.

I felt at home. A home very similar to the one I grew up in, 600 km south of Görlitz.

Borders moved. Then people were moved to match them.

Everyone knows about the Berlin Wall. It has become the symbol: the image we reach for when we want to talk about Europe divided, about the Iron Curtain, about what the Cold War looked like in concrete and barbed wire.

But Berlin was not the only city torn apart.

The Oder–Neisse line — the border imposed at Potsdam in 1945, running along two rivers — did not just draw a new map. It amputated living cities. It severed neighbourhoods from their own railway stations. It separated families on a Tuesday morning with no warning and no goodbye. And it involved one of the largest forced population transfers in modern European history — a double movement, choreographed by Stalin’s hand. Twelve to fourteen million Germans were expelled from territories east of the line, in conditions that historians now classify as ethnic cleansing.

But they were not moving into a vacuum: the Poles who replaced them had themselves been expelled from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union. Entire communities from Lwów, Wilno, Grodno were packed onto trains heading west, to fill cities they had never seen, in houses whose previous owners had just been forced out. Most people living today in what was historical Prussia and Silesia — in Zgorzelec, in Wrocław, in Szczecin — were not born there, and neither were their parents. Borders moved. Then people were moved to match them.

Görlitz lost its eastern half overnight. In the spring of 1945, as the Red Army advanced, retreating German forces blew the Neisse crossings; when the rubble cleared and the border hardened, what had been a short walk to the market, to relatives, to the station became first a controlled crossing, then a barrier, then a ghost.

What made this wound harder to name was politics. The GDR and Poland were officially fraternal socialist states; to speak of the Oder–Neisse border as a trauma was to question the legitimacy of the post-war order itself. The loss could not be names: silence was required instead.

After 1989, the story changed, but the loss remained. The Two Plus Four Treaty of 1990 made Germany's eastern border definitive. The division would not be undone. What remained to be built was a different kind of wholeness.

Three names, one city

Go six hundred kilometres south and you find a similar wound.

Gorizia. They called it the “Austrian Nice”: a Habsburg city of elegant villas, multilingual cafés, and aristocrats who wintered there for the mild climate and the cultivated air. A Friulian, Mitteleuropean jewel — provincial in scale, of cosmopolitan habits. The region I come from.

In 1947, Gorizia was cut in two.

The division became operative on 15 September, when the Paris Peace Treaty entered into force. The Iron Curtain ran through the city’s centre. The railway station — the Transalpina, the grand Habsburg terminal — ended up on the Yugoslav side. What remained in Italy was a city without its eastern lungs, stripped of its hinterland and dependent on subsidies. On the other side, the Yugoslav authorities built Nova Gorica as a socialist counter-city made of concrete and tall buildings. Not so different from Zgorzelec, Görlitz’s Polish twin.

There is something that tends to get overlooked: the names themselves make these cities unwitting twins.

Gorizia and Gorica both trace to the Proto-Slavic root gora — mountain, hill — a reminder that Slavic-speaking communities named and shaped these places long before empires arrived to rename them. Görlitz appears in medieval sources as Gorelic, Gorlicz, Gorliz. These cities are mirrors down to their etymology.

Gorizia, in fact, carries three names simultaneously: Gorizia in Italian, Görz in German, Gorica in Slovenian. This is the signature of the region I come from — Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the only European region where the three great cultural traditions of the continent meet without one cancelling the others: Latin, Germanic, Slavic. A lived reality, written into street signs, surnames, dialects, and the way people move between languages without thinking about it.

Görlitz knows something of the same layering.

The Sorbs — a Slavic minority who have lived in the region for over a millennium — are still there, their language still spoken, their dual signage still visible on roads and village squares. Another place where Europe did not resolve into a single identity, because it never was one.

Their sovereignty histories are equally layered. Görlitz passed from Slavic settlement to the Margraviate of Meissen, spent its long golden age under the Crown of Bohemia, shifted to Saxony in 1635, and became Prussian in 1815.

Gorizia moved from the Patriarchate of Aquileia to the County of Gorizia, then four Habsburg centuries — with brief Venetian and Napoleonic interruptions — before being annexed to Italy after the First World War.

In neither city was sovereignty ever simple. In both, it was always contested, always layered, always plural. European.

Two cities, two thinkers the world was not ready for

In Görlitz, there is a house where a cobbler once lived. Jacob Böhme was born in 1575 in a village outside the city and spent his working life resoling shoes near the Görlitz market. He was also, in his free hours, a mystic who wrote about the unity of opposites: how light needs darkness to be visible, how no thing can know itself without its other.

His central insight — that division is not the final truth of the world, that light and darkness need each other, that God himself contains both wrath and love as two faces of the same fire — did not make him popular in his lifetime.

The Lutheran clergy of Görlitz found this intolerable: a non-binary thinker in a world that prefers binary thinking and turns it into war and persecution. Sounds familiar?

He was expelled from the city, accused of heresy. He came back. He kept writing. He is buried in the old city cemetery, and people still come from around the world to pay homage, leaving fresh flowers on the stone.

What the city could not give him in life, the history of ideas gave him in death. Hegel absorbed Böhme’s dialectic of opposites and built an entire philosophy on it. Schelling read him and admired. Novalis kept him as a reference. William Blake, in England, had him as inspiration. Some called him the greatest mystic Germany ever produced.

Gorizia did not produce a mystic; it produced something more tragic: a philosopher who felt the contradictions too acutely to survive them. Carlo Michelstaedter was born there in 1887 into a Jewish family at the height of Habsburg cosmopolitanism. At twenty-three, on the day he completed his philosophy thesis — a work about the impossibility of authentic existence in a world of compromise — he shot himself. He died almost entirely unknown, his manuscript unpublished, his name unread.

Today, that thesis — La persuasione e la rettorica (Persuasion and Rhetoric) — is considered one of the most original works of early twentieth-century European philosophy. Scholars in Italy, Germany, France, and beyond have spent decades excavating what he meant: can we ever stop chasing the future and truly be ourselves in the present, or are we forever trapped living behind the fake masks and social scripts that society calls "normal life"?

Böhme and Michelstaedter: one expelled in his lifetime and vindicated by posterity; one who died in obscurity and was recognised only after. Both cities produced thinkers the world was not ready for. Both, eventually, caught up.

Pensionopolis

There is a word — a concept, really — that appears in the history of both cities: Pensionopolis. A city of pensioners. Of people who have retired from active life and chosen a beautiful, quiet, civilised place to grow old gracefully

Görlitz was this for Prussian bureaucrats and Silesian industrialists. Gorizia was this for Habsburg officials and Viennese aristocrats seeking Mediterranean warmth without the chaos of Italy proper. Both cities built their identities around a kind of dignified stability — fine architecture, pleasant streets, a cultivated air, good food and wine.

That stability was not merely social. It was atmospheric. Görlitz had the temperate calm of a river town in a soft landscape, far from capitals and frontiers that shout. Gorizia sold itself on climate — mild winters, gardens, the promise that the body could slow down without shrinking. Tranquillity, in both places, was a resource.

And tranquillity, in turn, funded culture. The long, unhurried lives of officials, retirees and rentiers supported the institutions that make a city feel greater than it is: libraries, learned societies, reading rooms, musical and literary circles. In Görlitz, the Oberlausitzische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften — founded in 1779, one of the oldest scientific societies in the German-speaking world — left a legacy that survives in the extraordinary collections now housed in the Kulturhistorisches Museum and the Oberlausitzische Bibliothek der Wissenschaften: one of those Central European libraries whose shelves are a portrait of the city that built them.

In Gorizia too, the cultivated air was made tangible in salons, archives, and the patient work of small institutions that kept multilingual, Mitteleuropean memory alive long after empire had gone.

These were not cities of revolution or rupture. They were cities of continuity — of the long, slow accumulation of culture. Which is perhaps why rupture hit them so hard. And why, perhaps, they have survived it with such quiet resilience.

Little Jerusalem

There is another border that does not show on maps: the sudden disappearance of a minority that once made a city feel larger, freer, and more cosmopolitan than its size suggested.

In both Görlitz and Gorizia, Jewish life was woven into the fabric of the city — into trade, scholarship, music, publishing, the long middle-class rhythm of Central Europe — until it was cut out in the twentieth century.

In Görlitz, the Neue Synagoge — built between 1909 and 1911, in the Jugendstil confidence of a community that believed in its own future — surprisingly survived the November 1938 pogroms. The community was destroyed; the building was abandoned and decayed for decades. But the shell remained, waiting. After reunification, restoration began slowly, then with greater urgency. By 2021, the synagogue had reopened as the Kulturforum Görlitzer Synagoge: a living civic space, open for concerts and conferences.

In Gorizia, the Jewish presence is older still — documented for centuries, shaped by the Habsburg world, marked by a ghetto in the early modern period, and later by a cultural prominence out of proportion to the community's size. The city earned a nickname that sounds like both pride and myth: Gerusalemme sull'Isonzo, the “Little Jerusalem on the Isonzo”. The synagogue on Via Ascoli, dating from 1756, is modest on the outside and intimate within. Today, part of it houses a museum that takes the nickname as its title: a reminder that the Isonzo valley held not only trenches and nationalisms, but also Hebrew books, and conversations in Italian, German, Slovenian, Yiddish and Venetian, nurtured by a small community of rabbis, journalists and philosophers.

Here too, the story ends in rupture: the racial laws, the German occupation after September 1943, and the deportations to the death camps in November that year.

Görliwood, and other stories

Even before you learn its history, Görlitz announces itself through its architecture. The compact, walkable, largely renovated historic centre offers a compressed survey of Central European urban culture across five centuries: late Gothic and Renaissance gabled houses around the Untermarkt and Obermarkt, Saxon baroque in the church towers, Prussian classicism in the civic buildings, and an unexpectedly Italianate note in certain palazzo-like façades along the Neisse.

Add the turn-of-the-century Jugendstil quarters built before 1914, and you have a city that looks, from a certain angle, exactly like a stage set.

That is what film-makers discovered. Görlitz has been used as a location so often that it earned a nickname: Görliwood. Most famously, it was Wes Anderson’s canvas for The Grand Budapest Hotel: the extraordinary Art Nouveau Kaufhaus serves as the film’s fictional hotel, its ornate staircase and gilded interiors preserved as if the twentieth century had simply forgotten to arrive.

Gorizia is a different kind of palimpsest, yet somehow parallel. The medieval Castello (eleventh century) presides over a borgo with Gothic traces; in the centre, the baroque Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio anchors a piazza that could be in Styria; Palazzo Attems Petzenstein and Palazzo Coronini Cronberg carry a Habsburg domestic sensibility — sober, intimate, slightly melancholy. Then there are the Liberty villas, the interwar rationalist buildings, and the unmistakable grain of a border town.

Open borders

In 2004, the European Union expanded eastward. Poland and Slovenia joined.

In Görlitz, a pedestrian bridge was built — the one you cross today to head to the sunnier side of the Neisse, to eat in one of the small restaurants on the Polish side, to have an ice cream, or simply to be in two countries at once without anyone asking why. In Gorizia, the fence that divided the two cities was replaced with flower pots and signposts. Slowly, the borders became permeable again. What decades of politics had severed, European integration was quietly stitching back together.

In 2025, Gorizia and Nova Gorica became joint European Capital of Culture under the slogan “Go Borderless”. It is not a perfect story. The wounds are not fully healed. The demographic losses, the economic distortions, and the cultural erasures of half a century do not disappear with a cultural programme.

That same year, Chemnitz also held the title of European Capital of Culture. It is hard not to think — with sympathy for Chemnitz, which has carried its own difficult history — that an opportunity was missed.

So, this strange post — a photo story, a reflection, and also a rmemory of my roots — has been my way of celebrating a twinning that sooner or later others will acknowledge (I will do my part to make it happen).

For me, there was no need for ceremonies. In Görlitz, I did what I used to do in Gorizia: wandering around and, in the afternoon, sitting at a café. Both cities have wonderfully atmospheric ones. In Görlitz, Lucullus is a must — set in the historic house of Bartholomäus Scultetus, the sixteenth-century cartographer who mapped the city’s coordinates with the same patience with which Europe has mapped, and re-mapped, itself. In Gorizia, Caffè Garibaldi — despite the name — preserves an unmistakably Viennese atmosphere. The coffee is excellent. The cake, sometimes, is Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest cherry cake).

So was the one I ate in Görlitz.
That is a kind of twinning too, is it not?

The White House, March 5, 2026. Donald Trump sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by approximately twenty evangelical pastors and faith leaders. Their hands rest on his shoulders, on his arms. Eyes closed, lips moving in prayer. The footage was posted on X by Dan Scavino, the deputy chief of staff, later that day, with the words: "Happening Now in the Oval Office. God Bless the USA."

Three days earlier, March 2. Benjamin Netanyahu stands at the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh — a city near Jerusalem where nine Israelis have just been killed in a synagogue bomb shelter. He reaches for a verse from Deuteronomy, read in every synagogue that same week: “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember — and we act.”

Amalek is not simply an ancient tribe. In the Hebrew Bible, they were the people who attacked the Israelites from behind as they fled Egypt — targeting the weakest, the most exhausted, those who had fallen at the back of the column. An attack without mercy, and without fear of God. The Torah’s response is absolute: remember them, and blot out their memory from under heaven. In Jewish tradition, Amalek has never been a fixed historical enemy. It is a name passed down through the generations — the label for whoever seeks to destroy the Jewish people in each new age. Do not forget.

Pentagon, March 10. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense of the United States, concludes a press briefing. The day before, he had stood at Dover Air Force Base for a dignified transfer — the ceremony for the first American soldier killed in the Iran war, a flag-draped coffin carried off a military plane. Now he announces the most intense day of American strikes inside Iran. The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes. He closes with Psalm 144. "Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle." And amen.

One week. Three leaders. Prayers. Psalms. Past images of slavery, liberation, sacred battles. Welcome to God's Wars.

Behind every war, there are narratives. We are moved by stories, not abstractions. We fight for stories: who we are, where we come from, who wronged us, what we are owed. Putin tells Russians they are one people — the great Russians, the white Russians, and the small Russians, meaning the Ukrainians — temporarily divided, but destined to be reunited. Serbia built its national identity on a lost battle: Kosovo Polje, 1389, the sacrifice made against the Ottomans that became the founding wound of a nation. America defined itself as the country that carries the torch of freedom to every corner of the world that will receive it.

Most of these narratives are, in the end, political tools. They can be reframed, updated, quietly retired when they stop working. When a story exhausts itself, leaders find another.

But there is a category of narrative that is different. Older. Deeper. Narratives so engraved in memory and flesh that they do not serve the people who carry them — they command them. Narratives that are not picked up and put down, but inherited, absorbed, lived from the inside. When these narratives are activated, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. They set in motion what they describe. They make the future they predict.

What is converging right now — in the Middle East, across the Russian steppes, in the corridors of Washington and the seminaries of Qom — is not one messianic narrative, but several, simultaneously alive, each feeding the others without the actors necessarily knowing it. A convergence of end-times stories — eschatological narratives, as scholars call them — each thousands of years old, each insisting that this moment is the one the prophets foresaw.

I want to take you inside each of them. Not to endorse them or dismiss them, but because ignoring them means failing to understand the war we are in. And because messianism — the belief that history is moving toward a divinely ordained end, and that we are its chosen instruments — is more dangerous than any weapon in anyone’s arsenal. It removes the exit ramps. It transfigures the cost of violence into the price of salvation. It makes stopping feel like betrayal.

Listen to what the leaders are saying. Read what their counsellors write. Open the sacred books you may have at home, perhaps forgotten on a shelf. You will see why this war is more than just a war.

I. Amalek: the eternal enemy and the Jewish messianism.

On the morning of Saturday, February 28, 2026, this passage was read aloud in every Jewish synagogue in the world. It is called Shabbat Zachor — the Sabbath of Remembering — observed each year on the Saturday before Purim. The commandment is unambiguous: remember Amalek. Never forget. Blot them out.

That same morning, the first US and Israeli missiles were rising toward Tehran. This was not, in the eyes of many Israeli rabbinical leaders, a coincidence. It was a sign.

The Amalek narrative runs to the bone of the Hebrew Bible. Amalek is the archetypal enemy: the force that attacked the weakest Israelites from behind as they fled Egypt, violence without mercy and without fear of God. The commandment to remember — and to blot out — is unusual in both its ferocity and its openness. Amalek is not a fixed historical people. It is a category, re-identified by each generation.

Netanyahu has been explicit about who his is. In October 2023, as he launched the ground offensive into Gaza, he invoked the same Deuteronomy verse to his soldiers. As the war with Iran opened in late February 2026, he invoked it again.

But Amalek is only the trigger: a name to be repeatef against each threat, and to justify any reaction. The deeper eschatological framework — the one that explains why this war is seen not merely as necessary but as prophesied — is found in the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39. The vision of Gog and Magog.

Gog is a mysterious northern ruler who leads a great coalition of nations in a final assault on the land of Israel. God himself intervenes to destroy the invaders — with earthquake, fire, and sulphur raining from the sky. It is not a human victory. It is the moment history bends toward divine sovereignty. And the text names the coalition’s members explicitly: “Persia, Nubia, and Put are with them.”1 Persia. Modern-day Iran. Named by the prophet in the sixth century BCE.

For many religious Israelis and diaspora Jews today, the current war is not a military operation. It is Gog and Magog, unfolding in real time. The actors are correct. The geography is correct. Even the timing fits a framework laid out nearly three thousand years ago.

The interpretive tradition that makes this reading possible has deep roots. The Malbim — Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser, one of the most celebrated commentators of 19th-century Eastern Europe — read Ezekiel 38 and identified Gog and Magog as representing Christianity and Islam in a final religious war. He named Persia as the leader of the Muslim coalition. He specified the timing: after the Jewish people had returned and settled in the Land of Israel.2

Writing in the 1800s, before the State of Israel existed, before Zionism had become a political movement, the Malbim could not have known what 2026 would look like. And yet a reader today, opening his commentary on Ezekiel 38, may feel the text is speaking directly to this moment. That feeling — that ancient words were written for now — is precisely how interpretations become prophecies, and prophecies become scripts.

Some Israeli rabbis are reading him now. And they are not alone.

The same Ezekiel text is being read simultaneously far beyond Israel. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, American evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson went on television and mapped every name in Ezekiel 38 onto a modern state: Rosh as Russia, Gomer as Ukraine, Persia as Iran, Togarmah as Turkey. His conclusion: Putin was being “compelled by God” — not toward Ukraine as a final destination, but ultimately toward Israel, following the prophetic script. Ukraine was merely the first step. The real target, in Robertson’s reading, was always the land of the Bible.

At the time, it sounded like the kind of interpretation only a narrow fringe would entertain. Four years later, with two active war theaters — Ukraine and the Middle East — converging on the same actors Ezekiel named, that reading has acquired a frightening plausibility. Not because Robertson was right. But because enough people in positions of power believe he was.

II. The Anointed: American evangelical apocalypticism

They are white evangelical Christians: not a fringe, not a sect. They represent roughly a quarter of the American electorate. They voted for Donald Trump in overwhelming numbers. A significant portion of them understand America’s bombing of Iran not primarily as a geopolitical event, but as a spiritual one.

The theological infrastructure for this belief was built in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish pastor who devised the concept of dispensationalism. Darby divided human history into distinct divine periods, or “dispensations”, each ending in judgement. He believed in the Rapture — a moment he called the Rapture, when true believers would be suddenly lifted to heaven, sparing them from the catastrophic final days on Earth. And at the centre of his entire system stood Israel: the land, the people, the prophecy. The establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land would mark the beginning of the end times — the necessary precondition for Christ’s return. When Israel was founded in 1948, millions of evangelicals heard a starting gun.

For dispensationalists, Israel’s security is not merely a political concern. It is a theological necessity. Supporting Israel is supporting God’s timeline.

This is why Mike Huckabee — evangelical pastor, former governor of Arkansas, appointed by Trump as US Ambassador to Israel — sent the President words that read less like diplomatic counsel than like prophetic investiture. After two assassination attempts Trump had survived, Huckabee wrote: “I believe you will hear from heaven...You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!”3 Trump shared the message publicly on Truth Social. And Senator Ted Cruz, defending his Senate vote to support bombing Iran, cited Genesis 12:3 — “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed” — a passage depicting God addressing Abraham, now applied to a roll-call vote in Washington.

And then there is Pete Hegseth — the man you saw in the third opening scene of this essay.

The Secretary of Defense of the United States has the words Deus Vult — “God Wills It,” the battle cry of the First Crusade — tattooed on his body, alongside a Jerusalem Cross and the Arabic word for “infidel.”

His 2020 book was titled American Crusade. He closes Pentagon press briefings with war psalms. He is, in his own self-presentation, a crusader. And the crusade, as he frames it, is against Iran.

This language travels from the Pentagon to the battlefields. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation — a non-profit dedicated to protecting constitutional rights within the US military — has been flooded with complaints since the Iran war began. Among them: a non-commissioned officer, filing on behalf of himself and fifteen members of his unit stationed in the region, reported that their commander had opened a combat readiness briefing by telling troops not to fear what was happening in Iran. The operations were “all part of God’s divine plan,” the commander said, citing the Book of Revelation and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He told the unit that Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The officer’s identity was withheld out of fear of Pentagon retribution.

The US military is a multi-faith, multi-racial force of 1.3 million people. But that does not prevent the Pentagon from hosting monthly Christian worship services.

On March 25, Hegseth hosted the first service since the war began, attended by civilian employees and uniformed military personnel. He opened by asking the room to place themselves mentally alongside the troops fighting in Iran at that very moment.

Then he read the pre-mission prayer used by the chaplain who accompanied the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro. “Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence...let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation...overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy...wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. In the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings. Amen.” The service was livestreamed.

There is a mirror paradox here worth pausing on. Hegseth regularly accuses Iran of “prophetic Islamic delusions”. He told journalists that “crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons”. He is not wrong that Iran’s leadership operates through a messianic lens. What he cannot see — or chooses not to — is that Iran looks back at him and sees exactly the same thing.

III. The awaited: Shia Persian messianism

A Hadith is a recorded saying of the Prophet Muhammad, transmitted through chains of narrators and collected into canonical compilations. Together with the Quran, the Hadiths form the foundation of Islamic law and theology. This one, compiled centuries ago, introduces the figure at the centre of Shia eschatology: the Mahdi.

The Mahdi is the awaited one. In Islamic eschatology — and above all in the Shia tradition that governs Iran — he is the Hidden Imam, the twelfth descendant of the Prophet, who went into occultation in the ninth century CE and will return at the end of times to restore justice to a world consumed by oppression. His arrival is not the end of history. It is its correction.

But waiting for the Mahdi is not the same as waiting passively.

When Ayatollah Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic in 1979, he performed a theological revolution that Western analysis has chronically underestimated. Traditional Shia doctrine held that in the Mahdi’s absence, the clergy should remain outside politics — waiting, not governing. Khomeini reversed this entirely. A qualified clergy, he argued, must govern in the Mahdi’s name, preparing the conditions for his return. Active preparation instead of passive waiting.

This doctrine is even written into the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, when describing the Office of Supreme Leader

The article establishes the legal and theological basis for the Supreme Leader’s authority during the absence of the 12th Imam, but it also suggests that this authority exists to prepare the ground for the Mahdi’s return. How, exactly, does governing in his name do that?

Here comes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: constitutionally defined as an ideological army. Since at least 2009, Mahdism has been a central lens for its doctrine and training. More than half of IRGC indoctrination is devoted to eschatological preparation. Promotion favours ideological conviction over technical expertise.

In September 2024, the Corps held a ceremonial assembly at the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom — the site where, in Shia tradition, the Mahdi is expected to emerge — to renew its allegiance to the Hidden Imam. The IRGC have a mission: to do everything it takes to accelerate the Mahdi’s coming.

And here the Iranian strand intersects with every other strand in this essay. The Mahdi’s coming is restorative — he comes to correct the world, not end it. But within the IRGC, a more active reading has taken hold: the idea that the conditions for the Mahdi’s return can be hastened through human action. Confronting the Great Satan — America — and the Little Satan — Israel — is framed as not only politically justified but eschatologically necessary.

The destruction of these forces is the ground being prepared.

IV. The Restrainer: from Saint Paul to Peter Thiel

In the autumn of 2024, Peter Thiel — billionaire, PayPal co-founder, and arguably the most influential intellectual of the current American right — delivered a four-part lecture series in San Francisco titled, simply, “The Antichrist.” The events were off the record, but they leaked anyway. He later took the lectures to other cities.

Between March 8 and 19, 2026 — as American bombers were flying sorties over Iran — Thiel brought these lectures to Rome, delivering them from a palazzo near Piazza Navona, a short walk from the Vatican. But Rome is Rome: a city that has already seen everything, all the sacred obsessions, all the capital sins, and everything in between. What Thiel had to say did not resonate much. The audience on the first evening numbered around two hundred. By the second day, according to Italian press reports, it had thinned considerably. One observer described the content as “few ideas, but thoroughly confused.”

But the ideas matter, however confused — because ideas, even half-formed ones, inspire politics. And wars.

At the heart of Thiel’s framework is a concept from Saint Paul. In his second letter to the Thessalonians, written around 50 CE, Paul warned that before the final lawless figure (the “Antichrist”) could be revealed, something - or someone - was holding him back.

This is an ambiguous translation of an already ambiguous ancient Greek text, and it is hard to read. Paul uses the neuter form — τὸ κατέχον, to katechon, an impersonal force — in one verse, and the masculine — ὁ κατέχων, ho katechon, a personal agent — in the very next. The katechon is what, or who, restrains the apocalypse. That grammatical ambiguity, in two verses of a letter to a small community in northern Greece, has generated two thousand years of political theology.

The Katechon. Think of it as the bouncer at the door of the apocalypse. As long as the bouncer holds, chaos stays outside. Remove the bouncer, and everything restrained is released. The question each tradition in this essay is asking — whether they use Paul’s vocabulary or not — is always the same: Who is the bouncer? And who is trying to remove them?

For Thiel, the greatest danger is not someone who celebrates apocalypse. It is someone who offers peace. He draws on Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian Orthodox philosopher who in 1900 imagined the Antichrist not as a monster, but as a humanitarian superman — a figure offering universal prosperity, global unity, and the end of conflict, in exchange for total submission to him.

The Antichrist wins by denouncing apocalypse while quietly building the infrastructure of total control. For Thiel, that infrastructure is the global technocratic order. On a whiteboard photographed at the Rome lectures, he mapped it plainly: on one side, the Katechon, represented by the nation-states. Above all, of course, the United States of Donald Trump. On the other, the Antichrist: the UN, international NGOs, EU regulation, climate activism. And at the far end of the Antichrist column: China. The greatest threat of all. A long list of candidates for the Antichrist.

Here is what makes this framework so strange, and so revealing.

The same concept — the Katechon, the restrainer holding back the end — is being used simultaneously, and with equal conviction, in Moscow. In a declaration from the World Russian People’s Council in March 2024, Orthodox Patriarch Kirill called Russia’s war in Ukraine a “holy war” and declared Russia’s supreme mission to be that of “the universal Restraining One, protecting the world from evil.” The reference to 2 Thessalonians was unmistakable. Russia is the Katechon. Putin is its embodiment. The West, including America, is the force of lawlessness.

For Thiel, the Katechon is America and the nation-state. For Kirill, the Katechon is Russia and the Orthodox world. They are using the same ancient concept to describe themselves as the hero — and each other as the villain.

And then there is Alexander Dugin, the philosopher whose work has been required reading at Russian military officer academies for decades, and who has achieved something remarkable: he has crossed the civilisational divide between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, and found the same logic on both sides. “Muslims understand me well,” he told Al Arabiya in 2023, “because I believe the West is the Dajjal” — the Islamic Antichrist — “that destroys religion, family, and morality.” For Dugin, Israel is a Western outpost, a tool of liberal hegemony. The conflict unfolding before us is not political. It is eschatological. “Before our eyes, prophecies are being fulfilled — and not by accident but because both sides are consciously acting on them.”

A neo-Catholic entrepreneur turned philosopher, a KGB-linked Patriarch, an anti-Western philosopher reading a cryptic text from early Christianity. Each claiming the role of the restrainer for their own camp. Each naming the other as the Antichrist. And caught in the middle, the object of their mutual contempt — the liberal, post-nationalist world order that Europe, for all its hesitations and contradictions, is still trying to embody.

V. The player without a messiah

At the time of writing, we do not know how this war ends.

We do not know whether the Iranian regime survives the strikes. Whether Hegseth’s bombers achieve what he calls regime change. Whether Netanyahu’s Amalek narrative brings Israel closer to security or to catastrophe. Whether Putin’s Katechon holds or breaks. Whether Thiel’s Antichrist is ruling Brussels or Beijing.

What we do know is this: every major actor in this conflict is operating inside a story that tells them the suffering is necessary, the violence is purposeful, and the end — their end, the right end — is guaranteed.

Every major actor, except one.

China has no Messiah.
No Katechon. No Mahdi.
No Gog and Magog waiting to be fulfilled.

Chinese civilisation operates on a different temporal logic entirely — cyclical rather than linear, restorative rather than terminal. Dynasties rise and fall. The Mandate of Heaven passes. There is no final battle, no chosen people’s triumph, no moment when history ends and the righteous are vindicated.

Confucius, asked about ultimate things, is said to have replied: I don’t know about such things.

The Chinese Communist Party’s wariness of messianic movements is not philosophical — it is historical memory written in blood. The Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s, led by a man who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, killed approximately twenty million people. The CCP has not forgotten. It suppresses millenarian movements not from atheism alone, but from national trauma.

As the US and Israel struck Iran in late February 2026, China evacuated three thousand of its citizens from the region and called for a ceasefire. Then it did nothing else. It watched and calculated. According to analysts at the German Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), the leading European research centre on Chinese matters, Beijing’s response has been characterised by “cool economic and geopolitical pragmatism.” As American munitions deplete, China’s intelligence services update their assessment of US military capabilities in real time. As the Middle East fractures further, China’s Five-Year Plan continues.

Peter Thiel placed China at the far end of his Antichrist column in Rome — the “totalitarian AI” that must not be allowed to win. For Dugin, China is a civilizational pole still searching for its shape. For the evangelical dispensationalists, China does not appear on the map at all. Ezekiel did not mention it.

And that, perhaps, is precisely the point.

Every player in God’s Wars believes their suffering is the precondition for a glorious end. China is the only major power that believes there is no glorious end — only the next cycle. It sits outside these stories, watching the others exhaust themselves in pursuit of a finale that, in the Chinese framework, will never come. It is not waiting for a Messiah. It is updating its Five-Year Plan.

Is that the Katechon — the quiet force that holds the world together while the others tear it apart? Or the Antichrist — the patient, pragmatic power that will be left to collect the broken pieces and build the next order from the wreckage?

We do not know. But we should ask the question out loud.

What we have witnessed in the past weeks is not merely a military escalation in the Middle East. It is the convergence of messianic clocks that have been running, separately, for thousands of years — and that have now, for the first time, begun to tick in unison. The snowfall has begun. When it becomes an avalanche, the question of who holds the Katechon will matter enormously.

And the only player not listening to the messianic clock may be the one best positioned to decide what comes after.

Epilogue: a view from Rome.

It was not the first time Rome had spoken into a war and gone unheard. Pope Francis spent the final years of his life appealing for peace in Ukraine and in the Holy Land — writing, meeting, phoning heads of state, and weeping publicly.

On March 15, two weeks into the new war, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem — the senior Catholic figure living inside the conflict — spoke at a webinar about the war. He named directly what Hegseth and others were doing.

On Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026 — the day this essay is published — Pope Leo XIII stood in St. Peter’s Square and said what no head of state or military commander in this war has yet said. He invoked the Jesus who entered Jerusalem not on a war horse but on a donkey. Who stopped his disciple from drawing a sword. Who did not open his mouth when led to slaughter.

Then, simply: “Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross: God is love! Have mercy! Lay down your weapons! Remember that you are brothers and sisters!”

Gods Wars Beyond Berlin

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The text of this essay, plus a list of sources and bibliography. My texts are available for reproduction under a Creative Commons CC BY-ND licence. I allow others to re-use my photographs for any purpose, including commercial. However, they may not be shared in an adapted form, and credit must be given to the author.

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On February 24, in the plenary hall of the German Bundestag, the journalist Heribert Prantl stood at the podium to deliver a memorial address. The occasion was the state funeral of Rita Süssmuth—former President of the Bundestag, long-time CDU minister, feminist inside a party that wasn’t sure it wanted one. She had died three weeks earlier, at 88. And she had personally requested Prantl as her speaker.

The hall was full of the usual dignitaries. But one face, somewhere in the audience, was harder to miss than others.

Prantl spoke with the warmth and precision of someone who had known his subject well. He called Süssmuth a Wegbereiterin - a pathfinder. He described how she had fought patriarchal structures inside the CDU with what he called “sovereign obstinacy.” And then he said it, the sentence that made the news:

Angela Merkel, sitting in the audience, heard this. And she smiled. A small, slightly surprised smile. I’ve been thinking about that smile ever since.

It was a gracious smile, to be sure. A smile of gratitude and acknowledgment. But I think there was something else in it too. Something more complicated. Because the claim Prantl was making, generous as it was, and true in one important sense, was also, in another sense, a very West German story about how Angela Merkel happened.

There is, to be fair, a concrete thread between the two women that goes beyond symbolism. In 1985, Rita Süssmuth became Federal Minister for Youth, Family and Health. The following year, her ministry was expanded to include women’s affairs, making her the first head of a dedicated women’s portfolio in West German government.

When reunification reshuffled the cabinet, that ministry was split. In January 1991, a 36-year-old physicist from the former GDR walked into the newly created Ministry for Women and Youth. It was Angela Merkel’s first cabinet post. She was, in a structural sense, stepping into institutional space that Süssmuth had carved out.

Helmut Kohl, who gave her the job, called her Kohls Mädchen - Kohl’s girl. The condescension in the nickname, intended or not, is its own small chapter in West German political culture. So yes: the thread is real. Prantl’s claim holds. And yet.

Angela Merkel did not happen because of the CDU’s slow, contested, often grudging path toward accepting women in its ranks—however real and hard that path was. Angela Merkel happened, in large part, because she came from the East.

This is not a small detail. It is, I would argue, the central one. And it opens a question worth sitting with on this particular day: was East Germany really more emancipated—for women—than the West? The research says yes. The data is compelling. And yet, as with most things that look clean from a distance, the closer you look, the more interesting - and ambiguous, too - it becomes.

Today is March 8. I don't usually mark the calendar: Beyond Berlin is not that kind of publication, and I have limited patience for one-day-a-year solidarity. But this question feels right for today, precisely because it resists the easy version. It is not a celebration. It is not a complaint. It is a look eastward, as this blog tends to do, at a history that keeps turning out to be more complicated, and more instructive, than the official story allows.

Two Germanies, two models

Let’s start with the law, because the law is the starkest place to start.

In 1948 and 1949, four women sat in the Parliamentary Council in Bonn writing the West German Basic Law among sixty-one male colleagues and fought for a sentence. The men had not planned to change much. A family law textbook published at almost exactly the same moment described the legal status quo with clinical precision: the husband determines "the nature and extent of household expenditure, the running of domestic life, the upbringing of the children, place of residence and home." He has "authority over the wife's assets." He may terminate his wife's employment "if marital interests are impaired." The wife, in the language of the time, had the Folgepflicht: the duty to follow.

The first draft of the equality clause in the Parliamentary Council wanted to leave things more or less there — proposing only that men and women have "the same civic rights and duties." Language that had already appeared in the Weimar Constitution of 1919. No advance at all.

Those four women — the Social Democrats Elisabeth Selbert and Friederike Nadig, the Centre Party's Helene Wessel, and the CDU's Helene Weber — pushed through something different. The sentence that ended up in the Basic Law was short and almost shockingly clear:

Not just civic rights: the entire legal order. Family law. Labour law. All of it.

The vote, after fierce argument, was unanimous. Prantl, in his speech for Süssmuth, called these women the Mütter des Grundgesetzes—the Mothers of the Basic Law—and Süssmuth, he said, their late fifth.

And then the West German legislature proceeded, for the next decade, to largely ignore what they had written.

The first equality law did not come into force until 1958. And even that was hedged: a woman could work, yes—but only insofar as it was "compatible with her duties in marriage and family." The husband remained, in law, the Oberhaupt der Familie. The head of the household. The last word. It took until 1977 - nineteen more years, and a social-liberal coalition - for his right to veto his wife's employment to disappear entirely. July 1, 1977: the Hausfrauenehe, the housewife marriage as legal template, was finally abolished.

In East Germany, the GDR had enshrined full professional equality for women in law in 1950.

The GDR's Article 7, written into its very first constitution in 1949, was unambiguous:

The 1968 constitution went further still, naming not just equal rights but active state obligation: to promote women's professional qualification, and to guarantee the compatibility of work and family life.

On paper, the contrast with the West could hardly be sharper. In Bonn, four women had fought to insert equality into the Basic Law — and the legislature had spent the next decade finding ways around it. In East Berlin, equality was written into the founding document and backed, at least structurally, by the machinery of the state.

The cynical reading may be that this was economics dressed up as ideology. The GDR needed every available body in the workforce. Women were not emancipated out of enlightenment, some say; they were mobilised out of necessity. Both things can be true simultaneously.

And in the GDR, the gap between constitutional promise and daily reality was, as always, considerable: the zweite Schicht, the second shift of housework and childcare, remained stubbornly female, the Politburo remained stubbornly male, and the glass ceiling above a certain altitude was as thick in Leipzig as anywhere.

But for the texture of ordinary life - the right to work, the infrastructure to make it possible, the legal standing to exist as an economic person without a husband’s permission - the difference was real, and it was not small.

The state had built a comprehensive network of nurseries and kindergartens, free and full-day. It had introduced the Babyjahr - a paid year of leave after childbirth - and even a monthly Haushaltstag, a paid day off each month specifically to manage housework. Women earned their own pensions. They did not need a husband’s permission to open a bank account, sign a contract, or keep their jobs.

Those who worked often faced a tax and childcare system that explicitly incentivized part-time arrangements. And those who chose a career while raising children risked something worse than legal obstacles: the social label Rabenmutter. The raven mother — a bad mother, in German folklore. It is not a neutral word.1

The Abortion Law and what it revealed

If the labor statistics show you the economic picture, the abortion debate shows you something rawer: what the two states really thought about women’s bodies and women’s autonomy.

In the GDR, the 1972 Fristenregelung made abortion legal on demand within the first twelve weeks, alongside free access to contraception.

It is, as a historical footnote, the only law the GDR People’s Chamber ever passed with dissenting votes—fourteen against, eight abstentions. That a law granting women autonomy over their own bodies was the most contested vote in a rubber-stamp parliament is its own kind of commentary. But it passed. And it held.

When reunification came, East German women found themselves subject to West German law. Paragraph 218 technically classified abortion as illegal—it simply exempted it from punishment under specific conditions. For women who had spent nearly twenty years with a settled right, this was not an abstraction. Anke Domscheit-Berg, who became a prominent voice in the post-reunification debate, put it plainly: "We felt transported back to the Stone Age."2

That sentence has stayed with me because it reveals a paradox Germany has never quite confronted. Reunification arrived as a promise of freedom. For East German women, in at least this one precise sense, it delivered the opposite. The liberal democracy absorbed them—and quietly revoked a right the dictatorship had granted.

The congress that went wrong

Perhaps the most revealing moment of what reunification actually meant for women came not in a parliament but in a sports hall.

In 1990, the First All-German Women’s Congress took place in East Berlin’s Dynamo-Sporthalle. It should have been a moment of solidarity—the two halves of a divided country’s women’s movement finally meeting. It was, by most accounts, a vicious dispute.

West German feminists - the Emanzen, as they were disparagingly called in the East, the man-haters, the theorizers - looked at East German women and saw what they called emancipation “from above”: granted by a dictatorial state, not fought for from below. Worse, they pointed out, correctly, that East German women still did the majority of the housework. They worked their 43-hour weeks at the factory or the office and then came home to the zweite Schicht, the second shift, because the GDR had never quite managed to automate domestic life at the pace of the West, and because equality at work had not translated into equality at home.

East German women looked back and saw something different. They saw women who were still fighting for rights they had simply always had. The right to work. The right to divorce: two-thirds of GDR divorces, notably, were initiated by women. The right to childcare that was guaranteed, not conditional on income or luck. Ulrike Helwerth, who documented the collision, summarized the mutual projections with painful accuracy: West women were “arrogant, know-it-alls.” East women were “adjusted, homely Muttis, male-fixated and not at all radical.”3

Both portraits were caricatures.
Both contained a grain of something real.

The Ostfrau between myth and reality

Here is where it gets complicated, and deserves an honest view.

The GDR’s emancipation of women was real—in the law, in the numbers, in the everyday texture of life. But it was not born from a feminist movement. It was born from economic necessity. A centrally planned economy needed every body in the workforce. Women were incorporated into the labor market not because the state was enlightened about gender equality, but because it needed them there.

This is not a reason to dismiss the outcome. Laws that begin as pragmatism often outlast their original logic and become something else—habit, identity, expectation, right. That is exactly what happened. But it does mean that the GDR’s emancipation had a specific shape: it was strong at the economic surface and weak in the interior. Women worked, and they worked fully, and they were paid independently. But they were also exhausted. The second shift was real. And where it really counted—in the upper echelons, in the leadership, in the rooms where decisions were made—men still sat.

Angela Merkel herself said it, in one of the most quietly devastating summations of the GDR’s gender record:4

She was thinking of the Politburo. She was thinking of the Kombinatsleiter—the directors of the great state-owned industrial combines. She was thinking of the party itself, which spoke constantly of equality and practiced it selectively.

The historian Annette Schuhmann, in her 2025 book Wir sind anders! Wie die DDR Frauen bis heute prägt (“We Are Different! How East Germany Still Shapes Women Today”), does something important with this complexity: she refuses both the celebration and the dismissal.

She interviewed thirteen women across generations—some born before the GDR was founded, some born after it collapsed—and found that the myth of the Ostfrau is just that: a myth. Not because the differences aren't real, but because the differences are far more varied, far more internally contradictory, than either version of the story admits.

The GDR, Schuhmann argues, was a shared Erfahrungsraum, a space of experience, but within it, women navigated that space very differently. There were the Systemträger, the women integrated into the state apparatus, whose biographies were tied to the preservation of the socialist order. And there were the Systemkritiker, who maintained private convictions while performing outward conformity. Between them, an entire spectrum of compromise and resistance. What they shared was not ideology but the daily reality of negotiating a state that watched, that rewarded, that punished, and that—on the matter of women's labor—happened to be structurally on their side.

So: the Ostfrau was more emancipated than her western counterpart in the ways that shape daily life—work, income, childcare, legal standing, the unremarkable expectation that a woman earns her own living. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot. But she was not emancipated in the ways that lead to power. And the feminism that accompanied her was not a political movement, because political movements were not permitted. It was, as one researcher has put it, a feminism without a feminist vocabulary.

Which is perhaps why Sybille, a woman from Erfurt, said what she said, simply and completely: ”If I cannot support myself, then I am not emancipated.” Not: if I cannot vote. Not: if I cannot march. If I cannot support myself.5

It is a definition of freedom built from a specific experience—one that is harder to argue with than most of the theory produced on either side of the wall.

What reunification did

The story did not end in 1990. In some ways, it got harder.

East German women were frequently described, in the years following reunification, as the Verliererinnen der Wende: the losers of the transition. Massive deindustrialisation hit the East far harder than the West, and it hit women with particular force. Unemployment in the early 1990s ran at nearly double the rate for women compared to men in the eastern states. The childcare infrastructure, that great inheritance from the GDR, began to erode, as the financing model of a unified Germany struggled to accommodate eastern realities.

One of Schuhmann’s portraits deserves a closer look. A woman she calls Heidi—a Kulturfunktionärin, a culture administrator in the state apparatus, a convinced socialist—found herself dismissed almost overnight after the Wende. Her husband, the local mayor, lost his position too. What made the humiliation concrete was a small, absurd detail: a Western woman, impeccably dressed, mocked her coat. An ordinary light-blue coat, East German production. The mockery—what Schuhmann captures as the Siegermanier, the victor’s attitude—turned the coat into a symbol. Not just of poverty, but of worthlessness. Of being, suddenly, nothing.

Heidi’s response? Within eight weeks, she and her husband had founded their own company. The pragmatism is almost shocking in its speed. But it is also, Schuhmann suggests, entirely characteristic—the Macher-mentality, the doer reflex, that the GDR had actually trained into its women whether it intended to or not.

And yet something persisted beyond pragmatism. The Ostseele - the East soul - proved more durable than the factories. The women who had been socialized in the GDR took their professional identity with them into the new reality. Participation rates remained higher in the East than the West throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, even under conditions of scarcity.

The expectation that a woman works—not part-time, not as supplement, but as full participant—survived the system that had installed it.

A 2025 study of mid-sized German firms found that the regions with the highest share of women in management positions are still overwhelmingly in the East—Frankfurt an der Oder, Brandenburg, Saxony. The regions with the lowest are mostly in North Rhine-Westphalia. The researchers traced this not to some abstract cultural inheritance, but to three very concrete factors: female employment rates, childcare availability, and—crucially—the proportion of fathers taking parental leave. The last point is not a coincidence. The eastern states are not just more accustomed to women working. They are, incrementally, more accustomed to men doing their share of the rest.6

Today, tomorrow

I want to end somewhere personal, because this is not just a history essay.

I have lived in Berlin for years. I have friends from both sides of the old divide—from Leipzig and Dresden on one side, from Cologne and Hamburg on the other. And I notice something that I find difficult to describe without sounding reductive, so I will try to be precise.

When I talk to women who grew up in the East, especially those who are old enough to remember both, or whose mothers remember both, there is something in how they talk about work. It is not ambition in the Western, individualistic sense. It is more like bedrock. Work is not a choice being made against competing options. It is what you do, because you are a person, and persons support themselves. The alternative—financial dependency, a life organised around someone else’s income—is not just undesirable. It feels, to many of them, like a kind of disappearance.

Women from the West often take longer to arrive at that same conviction, if they arrive at it at all — and some who do eventually leave it behind. Often my generation. Often in prosperous regions like Bayern or Baden-Württemberg, where the financial case for stepping back is easy to make, and the social case even easier.

The structural incentives of West Germany's tax system, especially the Ehegattensplitting, the joint taxation arrangement that financially rewards one full earner and one part-timer, still quietly reward the old model. So does the school day, in many western parts of the country, which still ends at lunchtime and implicitly assumes there is someone at home.

What strikes me most, though, is this: neither side talks about it much. The younger generations especially—those born after 1985, who did not live through the division—often genuinely do not know this history. They do not know that their grandmothers in the East had rights their grandmothers in the West were still fighting for. They do not know about Paragraph 218, or the Hausfrauenehe, or the congress in the Dynamo-Sporthalle where two groups of women looked at each other and failed to find common ground.

The divide has been papered over. And in some quarters, there is active pressure to keep it that way.

Earlier this year, the Berlin City Senate proposed reducing the number of compulsory history semesters in secondary schools—a reform that would have allowed students to stop studying history after the National Socialist period, making the GDR, the division, and the Wende effectively optional. The outcry was immediate: historians, memorial sites, educators. The Senate backed down, partly. But the instinct had been revealed. The GDR as something you get to skip if you’re not interested. The eastern half of German history as an appendix.

It is in this context that two books matter—not just as reading recommendations, but as necessary corrections.

Schuhmann's Wir sind anders! (“We Are Different!”, 2025) insists on the biographical specificity of East German women: not the myth, not the caricature, not the demographic category, but the actual texture of thirteen actual lives. If you read German, it is essential.

And then there is Drei ostdeutsche Frauen betrinken sich und gründen den idealen Staat (“Three East German Women Get Drunk and Found the Ideal State”, 2024): a book whose title alone earns a moment of pause. Three East German women get drunk and found the ideal state.

Written by Annett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler, and Wenke Seemann, it is part collective memoir, part political provocation, part comedy born from exhaustion. The title is funny. It is also not joking. These are women who have watched their history be minimized, their experience be condescended to, their specific knowledge of how states fail and people persist be treated as quaint. So they get drunk and found one themselves.

Back in the Bundestag, on February 24, Prantl’s tribute to Süssmuth was generous and deserved. She was remarkable. She did pave paths, within the CDU and within West German political culture, that mattered. His sentence about Merkel was not wrong, exactly. It just told one part of the story.

The other part - the part where a woman born in Hamburg, raised in the Uckermark, who studied physics at Leipzig University and took her doctorate in quantum chemistry at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, walked into the chaos of reunification politics and found it considerably less intimidating than the men around her expected - that part also deserves its telling.

Germany still has work to do on women. Everyone knows this. But Germany also has work to do on understanding itself.

On understanding that the East is not a historical footnote, a curiosity, a wound to be managed. That it produced, among other things, a specific model of female independence that the West might have more to learn from than it has been willing to admit.

The East German Woman Was More Emancipated. Wasn’t She?

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How four decades of divided history still shapes German women today — and why the conversation is overdue.

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Bibliography

Primary sources & speeches

• Prantl, H., memorial address for Rita Süssmuth, state funeral, Bundestag, February 24, 2026. bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2026/kw09-staatsakt-rede-prantl-1149382

• Domscheit-Berg, A., statement in Bundestag debate on §218/219a, February 2019

• Merkel, A., interview in Die Zeit, 2019/05. zeit.de/2019/05/angela-merkel-bundeskanzlerin-cdu-feminismus-lebensleistung/seite-2

Academic studies

• Welch, N., Ahrens, J.-P. & Block, J., “Regional labor market integration of women and the share of women in management: are family firms different?”, Review of Regional Research, February 19, 2025

• Destatis, Mikrozensus 2024, Pressemitteilung Nr. N007, January 30, 2026

Books

• Helwerth, U. & Schwarz, G., Von Muttis und Emanzen — Feministinnen in Ost- und Westdeutschland, 1995

• Schuhmann, A., Wir sind anders! Wie die DDR Frauen bis heute prägt [We Are Different! How the GDR Still Shapes Women Today], Hoffmann & Campe, 2025

• Gröschner, A., Mädler, P. & Seemann, W., Drei ostdeutsche Frauen betrinken sich und gründen den idealen Staat [Three East German Women Get Drunk and Found the Ideal State], 2024

Archives & online sources

• Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, dossier “30 Jahre geteilter Feminismus”: digitales-deutsches-frauenarchiv.de/angebote/dossiers/30-jahre-geteilter-feminismus/als-frauen-aus-ost-und-west-aufeinandertrafen

• MDR Wissen, “Im Osten sind mehr Frauen in Führungspositionen als im Westen,” March 7, 2025

How many remember the first Christmas of peace after the Second World War in Europe? Few, and fewer each year: eighty years have passed. Yet 1945 has never been talked about as much as this year—anniversary, warning, the beginning of a world order now in fragments.

For many, it marked the beginning of a new life. Sometimes a return to their own homes or to the rubble of what was once home. Sometimes exile. Sometimes displacement, searching for a new homeland after their previous one ceased to exist.

Today we return to Berlin, told through the personal diaries and newspapers of the time, to those Christmas days of 1945. To remember what the first Christmas after the war was, and what it means in every age

Friedensweihnachten 1945

Friedensweihnachten—”Peace Christmas”: this is what contemporaries called the first Christmas after the Second World War. The first in six years without the Führer’s voice crackling through the Volksempfänger radio, without bombs falling through winter darkness.

But peace is not the same as plenty. And Berlin—what remains of Berlin—knows this in its bones. The city lies in ruins, Trümmern. Rubble mountains where neighborhoods once stood. The “1000-year Reich” lasted twelve years and left the capital unrecognizable.

In December 1945, the evangelical Provost Grüber—a man of resistance—writes his Christmas message to the community. He asks the question weighing on every mind: "Ist nun das Friedensweihnacht gekommen, das wir uns ersehnt und erträumt haben?", "Has the peace Christmas we longed for and dreamt of now arrived?"1.

Yes. And no. This is Deutschland Jahr Null. Germany Year Zero. Everything must be rebuilt from nothing. The bishops speak of guilt and forgiveness in their Christmas sermons—of “verhängnisvollen Taten“ and “schweren Verfehlungen,” “fateful deeds” and “grave transgressions.” They preach that “wirklicher Frieden auf Erden kann nur von innen her wachsen”—true peace can only grow from within, from hearts that no longer delight in violence but in love.2

Fine words for men who don’t freeze and don’t starve. Below, in the ruins, people have more immediate concerns.

Kälte. Cold.

Charlotte Heinze is sixteen years old. When asked many years later to remember Christmas 1945, she had only one word: cold. “Our only room—one large room—had a temperature between one and three degrees Celsius.” That’s 34 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit. She and her mother spend most of their time in bed, fully clothed. The windows are covered with cardboard. There is no strength for big thoughts.

The winter of 1945–46 is mild by German standards. But that offers no mercy. When you have nothing to burn, a mild winter means slow cold instead of fast cold. Tables become fuel. Chairs become warmth. Survival becomes arithmetic.

Anne-Marie Durand-Wever, a gynaecologist, writes on December 27: “Weihnachten ist vorüber, ich habe versucht, ohne Sentimentalität darüber hinwegzukommen.” Christmas is over; she tried to get through it without sentimentality. The curfew has been lifted—the Allies’ Christmas gift—but now there are attacks in the evening hours. She’s afraid of falling in the dark streets. Still recovering. Still limping. “Aber es muss gehen.” But it must work. There’s no other choice.3

Berlin’s food supply council—the Ernährungsbeirat—makes every effort. But what can they do when nothing arrives?

The numbers tell the story: 300,000 eggs planned from Brandenburg per quarter. Delivered: 23,890. District administrators declare the quota “unerfüllbar“—unfulfillable. Yet on Berlin’s black markets, eggs appear. Magical eggs. Raids and arrests change nothing. The dealers simply gather in a different square the next day. Those dealers: pushers and speculators.

In September, the Ernährungsbeirat requested a Christmas “special allocation” (Sonderzuteilung) for Berlin’s population: flour, sugar, fat, coffee, spirits. The Allies deemed it too lavish. Request denied. By late November, they try again. Just flour for Christmas biscuits. For the children only. This time, permission is granted. The biscuit cutters are fashioned from Wehrmacht tins.

The children need more than cookies.

Orphans are found on railways and roads—months fleeing westward, their families lost somewhere on the journey. Their condition is pitiful: swollen bellies, thickened joints. Some are so weak they cannot sit up in bed. In improvised nursery homes, they receive extra rations: milk, sugar, potatoes. An attempt to coax life back into small bodies that have known only hunger.

Beyond Berlin, conditions were scarcely better.

Anneliese Frenzel is eighteen, living in Thuringia. Fifteen people share her house—two refugee families and her own. Every day, the same question: “Was sollen wir essen?” What should we eat? On Heiligabend, they pool their resources. A little fat from everyone’s ration cards. Water, flour, salt, marjoram. They cook falsche Leberwurst—fake liverwurst. Spread it on bread. “Da war keine Weihnachtsstimmung. Es war unwirklich. Irgendwie schwebte man nur so durch diese Zeit.” No Christmas mood. It was unreal. Somehow one just floated through this time.

Christel Beythan is thirteen, newly arrived from Pommern, escaped from Soviet troops. She and her mother and younger sister wear wooden clogs—their shoes were taken during the flight. Everything they own fits in small suitcases. They spent weeks in quarantine in a refugee camp before being assigned to a Wirtshaus in a Thuringian village. On Christmas Eve: boiled potatoes with skin. “For us, it wasn’t Christmas,” she recalled decades later. “We had to settle in first, wherever they’d brought us.” Her father and brother were dead. Fallen in the war. This is the first Christmas of many without them.

Sehnsucht. Longing

Three million German soldiers sit in Soviet captivity. They will not be home for Christmas 1945. Many will not be home for Christmas 1946, 1947, or 1948. Some will never come home.

In 1944, propaganda leaflets rained into the trenches: “FROHE WEIHNACHTEN! Landser – gebt Euch gefangen!” Surrender and save your lives, help end the war, then there will be a truly merry Christmas again. The leaflets showed photos from a Russian POW camp: a German soldier carving a goose, another reading by a decorated tree, Father Christmas making his rounds. Nobody believed it in 1944. Nobody believes it in 1945.

Wolfgang Stadler celebrates Christmas Eve in the Soviet POW camp in Asbest, in the Ural Mountains. He and the other men sing the old Christmas carols behind barbed wire. “Each man dreamt his Christmas dream of how it would be at home now.”

They dreamt themselves back to a time before the war, when Christmas was still a beautiful family celebration. The cultural group performs. Some men pull their jackets over their heads and weep. Each man had to come to terms with himself.

At home, the women wait. The churches still standing are full on Christmas Eve. Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, who would become a grande dame of the German Liberal Party FDP, remembered: they were living "im Stall"—in the stable—not knowing what the next day would bring. The Christmas message of angels coming to shepherds, of hope born in poverty, felt immediate, alive.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich writes in her diary on December 25. She is a journalist and resistance fighter who operated under the codename "Uncle Emil"—a survivor of twelve years she documented night by night in writings that became essential testimony of life under and after the Reich. Her "Der Schattenmann," published in English as "Berlin Underground," captured what official history could not: the texture of daily resistance, small acts of defiance, the long wait for liberation. On this first Friedensweihnacht, she writes:

«First post-war Christmas (…) How differently we had imagined it.’ There is no tree, no gift, and Leo is no longer alive. ‘Only that since the day before yesterday the curfew has been lifted and one may, if one has the courage, still go out after eleven o’clock in the evening.»4

No tree. No gifts. Leo is dead—her partner Leo Borchard, the conductor who survived twelve years of Nazi persecution only to be shot by an American patrol three months after liberation.

Small joys, stubborn life

Film footage survives of a simple Christmas market among the rubble. Wooden stalls. A few goods for sale. People moving slowly, carefully, through the ruins.

Christmas trees were in high demand. The Tagesspiegel reports on December 24: “Christbaumdiebe wurden gestern in den nördlichen Vororten Berlins gestellt.”—Christmas tree thieves were apprehended yesterday in the northern suburbs of Berlin. You had to prove your tree was legal, but nobody could. All were stolen—from forests, from parks, from front gardens.

The solution: the Not-Tannenbaum, the “emergency Christmas tree”. Drill holes in a broomstick, insert branches. Some families discovered their ornaments had survived in the cellar—even the delicate glass baubles. Small miracles.

Hannelore Radke is eight years old. She receives a dollhouse made from an orange crate. The walls are lined with wallpaper scraps. A piece of linoleum serves as flooring. Perfume bottles become vases. The dollhouse sits on a coal box.

The adults do their best to make Christmas feel real for the children. The Allies help too: on 24 December, they lift the curfew. You can go out after 23:00. Life becomes a little more normal. “Ein Ausdruck des Vertrauens der Alliierten gegenüber der Berliner Bevölkerung”—an expression of trust. Kreuzberger Nächte are long again.

New Year's Eve arrives. Small parties can be organised, provided not too many people gather. There isn't enough Schnaps, but the mood is good. Improvised singers earn a few Reichsmarks. Girls and boys dance. Then midnight strikes. 1945 becomes 1946.

Satire returns

On 24 December 1945, something else appeared on Berlin’s streets: the first issue of Ulenspiegel.5 Herbert Sandberg—liberated from Buchenwald—and Günther Weisenborn—released from Luckau prison—created this satirical magazine together. Cultural resistance. A signal of new beginnings. The cover shows a painter at his easel, looking out the window in surprise: “Nanu, war da nicht eben noch das 1000-jährige Reich?”

Inside the first issue, a poem titled Weihnachten ohne Lametta ("Christmas without Tinsel") ends with these words:

"Thank God, what the Nazis strove / for has been swept away like loose sand. / The Wise Men from the East / survived the Führer's wisdom."6

Memories of those days differ. Heinrich Böll—author of “The Clown” and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature in 1972—remembered only the dust: powder of destruction, penetrating every crack, settling on books, manuscripts, nappies, bread, soup.

Others remembered their small attempts to celebrate again. Somehow they managed. With fake liverwurst and broomstick trees and dollhouses made from orange crates. With tears for the absent and small joys wrung from nothing. With the stubborn insistence that life continues, even in ruins. On Christmas Eve 1945, radio broadcaster Peter von Zahn spoke to his listeners:

“The German people must observe this first Christmas of peace very much alone. Alone, and in the poorhouse of the world.” But then he added: “We will have time to reflect thoughtfully, and we may then discover to our astonishment that we are not at the end of our possibilities.”7

This post is dedicated to those who still live under the bombs, ignored by those who have forgotten them—and to those who believe they are not at the end of their possibilities.

Sources:

• Berliner Morgenpost, Wie Berlin nach dem Krieg Weihnachten feierte, 2013

• Deutschlandfunk, Ohne Hoffnung und Lametta, 2015

• MDR, Friedensweihnacht 1945, 2021

• Claus Hinrich Casdorff, Weihnachten 1945, München 2020

• German Exile Archive 1933-1945

• Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, „Schauplatz Berlin. 1945 bis 1948“

About Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and the resistance group “Uncle Emil”:

Germany’s roundabout: a nation circling, unable to exit

I started writing this a month ago. It was meant to be a snapshot of Germany in autumn, a glimpse of the winter ahead. Then I stopped—not to reflect, but to write urgently elsewhere. Business journalism, lots of work, but not introspection.

This weekend, I returned to the draft. Barely sketched, still rough. And I realised something: I could pick up exactly where I’d left off. In five weeks, Germany has been discussing the same topics.Debating the same issues. Circling the same arguments without reaching any conclusions.

That’s when I understood. This is the story. Germany today is like a driver stuck in a roundabout. Two laps, three, five. Unable to choose an exit. Is the GPS missing? Or perhaps the petrol too?

An autumn of debates: a winter of discontent?

The endless circling began at the end of October. In an interview, Chancellor Merz claimed that despite progress on migration policy, there was still a problem with the Stadtbild—the “cityscape.” It set off an enormous, emotional debate. Politicians jumped in. So did the media, associations, municipalities, police unions, even linguists.

At first it sounded like clumsy shorthand for something specific: areas in cities that feel increasingly out of control, unsafe, neglected. Within hours, it became a debate about migrant Germany.

Then it expanded again. Suddenly Stadtbild included everything: the underfunded municipalities that can’t maintain their streets, the understaffed police forces, the people who feel at risk — and those who insist they don’t — women, LGBTQ people, Jews, the schools falling apart, the places everyone avoids after dark, and the slow erosion of public space. In one month, Stadtbild has turned into a symbol for all that doesn’t work in the country.

A month later, we’re still circling. No exit chosen.

Then military service entered the roundabout. Should it return? For everyone? Only men? Women too? Then came the summits—government meeting society. One after another, each attempting to diagnose the country’s grey mood and pull it from the shallows.

☞ Auto Summit in October. Structural change in the car industry, e-mobility, competitive pressure from China, EU trade policy, energy prices, infrastructure for charging and hydrogen networks. ☞ Steel Summit in November at the Chancellery. The future of German steel, high energy prices, Chinese competition, American tariffs, costs of transitioning to climate-neutral production. Securing sites and jobs. ☞ November 11: the annual report from the Council of Economic Experts—yes, the German name is a mouthful: Übergabe und Beratung des Jahresgutachtens des Sachverständigenrats mit Kanzler Merz—officially a routine handover at the Chancellery before year-end, but in practice a mini economic summit on growth, investment, the debt brake, bureaucracy and the labour market. ☞ What about pensions? As I finally close this never-ending post, we are still debating how to balance acceptable pensions for the current generation with the debt that future generations will have to repay—probably without anything comparable to today’s pensions. On this topic, for three weeks now, vultures have been circling, hoping to see the Merz government collapse under intergenerational conflict. ☞ Then bureaucracy. Too many Germans loved it for too long. Rules and regulations help you avoid responsibility. Until they discovered that under this mountain of papers and certificates, small and medium businesses can collapse. ☞ Finally, five days ago, what should have been a routine institutional appointment turned into an ordeal for both the chancellor and Bärbel Bas, the Minister of Labour. The former received cautious applause; the latter was met with mocking laughter. The Arbeitsgebertag—the employers’ day—became a platform for one demand, both simple and complex: growth, growth, growth. But Germany cannot deliver growth today.

All of this became debate material. In parliamentary committees, TV talk shows, podcasts, at Parteitagen—the party meetings. The latest ended last week. The youth wing of CDU-CSU—the under-35s of Germany’s moderate Catholic-Protestant centre—rebelled against Merz himself. The father figure they adopted a year ago, helping elect him Chancellor.

Facing this flood of words, problems, uncertain prospects—how do Germans react?

Surprisingly, not with Angst. You know the expression. German Angst. That potent mix of discouragement and hesitation, laced with fears about the future and an extreme need for security. It’s become essential to understanding modern Germany. Almost a synonym for the national spirit.

But while politics seems eager to evoke, echo, or even fuel those fears, 2025 tells a different story.

The insurance company R+V has surveyed German worries for 34 years. Thirty-four. This year, they reported a surprisingly low Anxiety Index. Yes, Germany has an index to measure anxiety like a fever. In 2025, the overall Anxiety Index fell sharply to 37 percent, down from 42 percent in 2024.

Nearly half of Germans fear that refugees will “overwhelm the state.” True. But the greatest fear has nothing to do with war, extremism, Donald Trump, climate change, or even taxes. It’s the cost of living. Inflation. Surprised? Not if you know German history.

Beyond Angst: something darker

No, fear is no longer the lens. The population has simply “adapted to this state of perpetual uncertainty.” Germans have become “crisis-weary.” Constantly confronted by multiple crises—COVID-19, climate, inflation, wars—they feel powerless to influence any of them.

It’s a different mood. If possible, more frightening than fear. More angstful than the historical German Angst. A mixture of weariness and pessimism. An acceptance that the system no longer works. Have these Germans become a little more Italian?

And indeed, in Ipsos’s annual study on global worries, Germany sits a few places below Italy in the lower part of the optimism rankings. 77% of Germans think things are heading in the wrong direction. (73% of Italians think the same—a little Schadenfreude). 70% think the economy is doing badly and won’t improve.

Look at the political polls and pessimism turns into discontent. After six months of the Merz government—the government that promised firmness and fewer quarrels than the infamous traffic-light coalition—only 22 percent say they’re satisfied. The rest grumble. Or shrug. Or despair.

Unhappy, but also happy, and emotionally volatile: the 2025 German paradox

And yet, the University of Freiburg’s annual Glücksatlas 2025 (The Happiness Atlas)—because yes, Germany also measures happiness—tells a more nuanced story. The level of happiness has risen. Slightly, but risen. Back to pre-pandemic levels. And surprisingly, given the narrative of angry Easterners, it has risen especially in the East.

Be careful, though. Behind these indices, the same study warns of something else: emotionality in Germany continues to rise. More people are experiencing strong feelings. Both positive and negative. The polarisation of emotions.

🙂 In 2025, 57% of panel interviewees said they often feel happy (+12 points vs the same study in 2023). But: 😠 30% feel angry often or very often (+8 points since 2023); 😨 22% feel frequent fear (+8 points); 😔 28% feel frequent sadness (+7 points)

The new German condition

Less fearful. More pessimistic. Almost resigned. Politically dissatisfied. But individually happier, even while alternating this happiness with anger and sadness.

Yet they remain engaged—that famous 84% turnout at the last election is a sign of vitality... or of anger? They’re also more uncertain. Ask whether any government measure will work, and the answer is always: “I don’t think so.” Not apathetic, but pessimistic.

What’s happening to this country? Has German Angst become German depression? Or even German schizophrenia?

What if it were… collective burnout?

Dr Thomas Bergner, a physician and executive coach specialising in burnout prevention, explores this question in his short essay German Burnout. His brief essay appeared back in February, but it got squeezed. Between the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the 35th anniversary of reunification, too many other essays competed for attention.

Yet revisiting it now, at year’s end full of research, surveys, and reflections, perhaps Bergner has found the right key. To narrate Germany’s condition. To indicate a possible path to healing.

Bergner applies clinical criteria typically used for individual burnout to the entire German nation. He views it as a patient suffering from collective exhaustion. Rooted in unresolved historical trauma—it’s Germany, after all: traumatising and traumatised. Exacerbated by the contemporary crisis landscape. Using his clinical lens, Bergner sees Germany falling perfectly into the main symptoms of burnout.

Almost a textbook case.

He begins with the first classic symptom: emotional exhaustion. This manifests as a deep, pervasive collective negative mood. Widespread pessimism. We saw that earlier combined with feelings of overwhelm: Germans experience a “conglomeration of negative moods.” In individuals, these symptoms lead to physical manifestations. And indeed, Germany is among the European countries with high sick leave rates. Less than France, but high.

But Bergner doesn’t only see pessimism. He observes a dissociative disorder: detachment from identity. In the German case, this means Germans feel disconnected from their national identity. Still? Yes, still—despite the German flag now being everywhere. Yet nobody can answer, in 2025, the question: what does it mean to be German?

Another classic burnout sign is emerging: declining performance. Performance decline occurs when the balance between demands and personal resources is disturbed. On a national level, this translates to economic and administrative inefficiency. Public offices struggling. Political paralysis. No need for infographics, here. If you live or experience often Germany you know it. This is not an efficient country. This is not a competitive country.

It seems that German Dissatisfaction has replaced German Angst. Bergner describes it as a passive discontent that slides into a “victim position“—where people expect “the state” or someone else to fix their unhappiness. He identifies this as another symptom of German burnout.

Once you feel like a victim, a new vicious cycle emerges: the need for simple answers to complex problems, scapegoats, enemies, and someone to restore order. That someone cannot be you—weak, dissatisfied, incapable of acting, overwhelmed. Someone else has to solve it. Today, AfD. Yesterday, Adenauer, Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel—anyone who does the job society feels unable to do.

The diagnosis: what caused this?

Symptoms are just symptoms. Once a diagnosis is made, the clinician must investigate their causes to prescribe the cure. According to Bergner, the causes all lie in contemporary German history—a history of traumas, one after another. Some unexpected.

It all starts with the unresolved aftermath of World War II and the Nazi regime: the terrible Nazi crimes, the occupation, the war casualties, the lost territories and refugees, the division into two states. It’s a lot. Often unprocessed. The shame over Nazi-era crimes was largely suppressed, Bergner reminds us. But shame, once repressed, has prevented a healthy national self-concept to this day. This trauma remains largely unconscious, operating “like an underground resistance fighter.”

To cope with the unbearable weight of shame, the system transformed it into the more manageable emotion of guilt. Guilt is less burdensome. It’s connected to actions that can be addressed through remorse and making amends. Compensatory actions started soon after World War II. Today, Germany remains the second-largest bilateral donor worldwide after the US. It paid €35.1 billion in development contributions in 2023—partially explained as an attempt to compensate for moral guilt.

The collapse of the GDR represents another profound systemic trauma. For years, we have seen this re-emerging in books, research, and the political landscape.

We often overlook that people in former East Germany had to experience, survive, and process two consecutive dictatorships. Reunification felt like external control. The reconstruction of the East was thoughtlessly designed as a replica of the West. Western ideas were imposed without sensitivity. This process had deeply humiliating effects.

This imposition triggered a sense of powerlessness that has solidified over time. The struggle to overcome these historical grievances has fostered a victim mentality amongst many East Germans. It expresses itself today as dissatisfaction and anger regarding the institutional and elite transfers from the West.

Finally, the Merkel era. Is it a trauma? Really?

Here Bergner makes a radical claim, bordering on provocation: Angela Merkel’s sixteen years as Chancellor created the conditions for burnout by encouraging passivity. Merkel’s style implicitly sent a message: “I am without alternative”… “but the good thing is, with me you don’t need to do anything—I’ll handle everything.” This acted as an effective tranquilliser, pacifying the populace and discouraging civic engagement.

What happens when the tranquilliser disappears? Germans felt left alone with their problems. They discovered that life without Mutti is hard. They developed anger and critique. Everything that doesn’t work now, for many, has its roots in the Merkel era. For others who long to be tranquillised, everything that no longer works is because Merkel is no longer there to solve everything.

The deep calm in which Mrs Merkel lulled Germany—first during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, then through other crises—was abruptly shattered. First by the Corona pandemic. Then by Russia’s resumption of war against Ukraine. Faced with these crises, Germans found themselves alone and unable to cope.

Uncertain, exhausted, almost paralysed. And there’s the feeling—precisely the feeling of these days—where we keep debating the same themes, going round in circles with no way out. What is to be done?

The path to recovery

Healing is impossible without recognising the illness and understanding its causes. Of all the discussions about German memory culture and the processing of its past, perhaps what was missing is this admission: such a past is a burden from which one cannot escape through donations or by buying the benevolence of others.

Instead, little has been said—except in rather rhetorical ways—about the results this country has achieved despite everything. The German media do not help: permanent catastrophism, an almost genetic trait of German media, always describes the advent of the next apocalypse.

What if the country made peace with itself? It could accept the collective and individual historical responsibilities of Nazism whilst also stopping constantly pouring them onto new generations. It could accept that the GDR was not a pause in history and cannot be dismissed as an unjust state or deviation, but that those 40 years are an integral part of German identity today.

In short, it could give meaning to that mountain of books on East and West that have transformed into a new wall between two Germanies, instead of a bridge to understand each other better—perhaps having more Western readers engage with those pages, instead of developing two types of non-fiction and fiction: one for Westerners who struggle to understand the East, and one from the East that exudes a desire for redemption, recognition, and anger against the West.

In the end, accepting oneself for what one is: a country that destroyed Europe but also contributed to rebuilding it. A country that still has two faces, which are perhaps its wealth. A country that has also given and obtained much of which it can be proud: Germany has achieved remarkable successes that deserve recognition.

The development of mRNA vaccines stands as a testament to German scientific excellence. The country welcomed 1.2 million Ukrainian war refugees almost seamlessly—not a problem, but an achievement to celebrate. Germany’s high culture is reflected in its ranking as third worldwide in Nobel Prize winners, with most awards going to German chemists and physicists. The infrastructure, particularly a health system that many countries still envy, remains strong. This is complemented by innovative strength, far above-average technical knowledge and skills, and world-renowned industrial companies and brands—not all have been bought by the Chinese; there is still plenty of “Germany made in Germany”.

The next step in the healing process focuses on actively transforming the German system from paralysed exhaustion into one capable of self-directed action. This transformation requires, above all, honest and emotionally competent communication from the political system.

Clear Communication with Emotional Intelligence. Political leaders must explain changes clearly, but not only with dry, rational arguments. Germany has been missing a crucial quality in recent years: emotional competence. The Scholz government struggled with the emotional distance of its Chancellor. While the current government may differ in style, it hasn’t fully bridged this gap either. Despite any clinical assessment of Angela Merkel’s policies, there’s a reason many Germans still miss her: she was perceived as genuinely human—hyper-rational, yet also super-empathic.

Reframing Debates as Acts of Trust. Some debates need to be reframed entirely. For example, removing bureaucracy can become a powerful motivator when narrated as an act of trust in citizens—acknowledging that they can self-regulate and make decisions without thousands of prescriptions and hundreds of pages to fulfil. As we know in business, giving trust produces positive benefits in most cases.

De-catastrophising. This step involves realistically defining the worst-case scenario and then assessing the probability that the situation will actually lead to that outcome. This is essential because many social media contributions gain traction only by predicting or fearing one disaster after another, feeding into the burnout cycle.

Building Active Optimism. Promote the belief that solutions are possible. This belief motivates individuals to become politically and constructively active, strengthening their sense of self-efficacy.

Talk about the future

In the end, the analysis becomes a political plea: for a state that stops claiming it can solve all issues at once (an outcome nobody believes). Instead, a state that communicates a roadmap—one that chooses a few key goals, three at most. These goals should be formulated positively and in the present tense, as if already fulfilled, with transparent measures for tracking their achievement.

Even more importantly, the state must reject escapism: that desire to press a “reset button” or return to a perceived better past—essentially what AfD’s political messaging attempts with the mass remigration debate, the notion that the euro and European institutions can be dismantled, and the fantasy that energy costs can return to pre-war levels. Instead of resetting, offer perspective.

Closing the last page of this short essay, I raise my gaze to the TV screen showing yet another debate on pensions, public spending, and sustainable levels. All very technical. Perfect for instilling fear of the future.

And I realise what is missing in the country where I live: someone who speaks about the future.

Not the Trumpian “golden age” of America, which seems above all a golden age for his family’s business and his friends’ interests. No, a desirable future doesn’t need to be golden. But it needs to feel benevolent. This—truly—can bring the Germans out of the shell they’ve built for themselves, constructed from low expectations and the conviction that nothing can change. The future. Tell it. Make it visible. Difficult, in days like these. But necessary.

And if you ask whether Germany’s emotional state has anything to do with you, whether it makes sense to care, the answer is simple: what Europe can still exist if, at its centre, instead of a beating heart, there is a black hole? From this burnout we must emerge. All of us. Together.

Post-scriptum

While working on this post, a survey by Civey for the Funke Media Group newspapers revealed that 25% of Germans feel nostalgic for Angela Merkel.

Who are these 25%? One in three people aged 18–29 miss the former Chancellor, compared to just 19% of those over 65. Yes, Merkel may have contributed to Germany’s current challenges. Yet she possesses the empathy, moral compass, and ability to communicate positively and deliver results—agreements, trade deals, negotiations—that are desperately needed today. I don’t believe those 25% want to return to the “tranquillising” Merkel. They simply miss leadership that is both pragmatic and human. Merkel’s own party has dismissed the survey as irrelevant, partly because the nostalgia comes mainly from the progressive centre and the Greens. Still, in terms of political style and intelligence, nobody could replace “Mutti”.

The book: Thomas Bergner, German Burnout: Where our exhaustion and dissatisfaction come from and how we can get rid of them, 2025, Klett-Cotta, German

There are times when everything happens all at once. Sometimes so fast that it blurs. Sometimes the pieces align on their own, forming a mosaic that suddenly reveals the sense of things.

In these past two weeks, we rejoiced at the release of Israeli hostages — yet we also witnessed the rise of a new Pax Romana, a peace that feels more like conquest than justice. We saw Gaza reduced to rubble, and, as the Latin historian Tacitus wrote when recounting the Roman conquest of Britain, “They made a desert and called it peace.”

We’ve seen geopolitics ruled by “real-estatism”: the mindset that treats the world as a portfolio of properties to be sold, bought, or traded, as if they were empty deserts.

It’s the logic of a post-literacy society: maps matter more than people, conversational fake history more than books, handshakes among bosses more than international law. We see borders and deals — but not the stories, that layering of history and human experience we call culture and identity.

This reached its peak at last Friday’s White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. There, Trump shouted at the Ukrainian president that he “must give up the Donbas” — perhaps without even knowing where it lies, or what it means. For Trump, and for those who think like him, territories are just real estate. Assets to be traded in pursuit of an easy truce they call peace — a peace that legitimizes everyone, terrorists and rapists included.

Yet while the world reacted to that meeting, something entirely different was happening on Sunday in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche—St Paul’s Church. Something that spoke of another kind of peace.

The Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels — the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade — is one of Germany’s most prestigious cultural awards.

Since 1950, it has been given to individuals who, through literature, science, or art, have contributed to the realization of peace. The ceremony takes place at the closing of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Europe’s largest publishing event.

This year’s laureate is Karl Schlögel, a German historian of Eastern Europe and a scholar of Russia and Ukraine.

Schlögel is known for his innovative spatial historiography — a way of reading history through places, maps, and the traces of everyday life. One that saw the humans behind the maps.

In his acceptance speech, Schlögel issued a call against fear.

He urged us to face without hesitation those who despise, ridicule, and belittle Europe. And he had little patience for self-proclaimed “Russlandsversteher“ — those who claim to understand Russia, a comprehension that often masks sympathy. This includes those who believe the Donbass can be given away in the name of peace. But the Donbass is not real estate. Ukraine is not no man’s land — it is a country where Europe’s heart still beats. A place of poetry, literature, hard work, and remarkable human stories. A place of day-to-day heroism.

Many in Germany have been sharing the text of his acceptance speech, and I’m doing the same today—sharing it translated into English and Italian. In an age of short attention spans and micro-content, the fact that his speech is going viral is touching. But it makes sense: under the new geopolitical doctrine of real-estatism, we need those who can still read space—and the history that lives within it—not as something to buy, sell, or exchange, but to respect.

At the end of his speech, everyone stood and applauded. Many cried. Karl Schlögel cried, too. And who knows—perhaps after reading his speech, you will, too.

Here is the original speech in German. Below is the English translation (I’ve only removed the opening salutations):

“It is particularly important to me that this award gives me the opportunity to speak at this historically significant location, not only in the 75th calendar year since the Peace Prize was established, but at a time when, in view of the new world disorder, we are becoming painfully aware of the limits of our own judgement.

“The most monstrous thing is happening: before our very eyes, Ukrainian cities are being bombarded day after day, night after night, by Russian missiles, and Europe seems unable or unwilling to protect them.

“We were stunned to witness the murderous pogrom carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the transformation of Gaza into a battlefield with thousands upon thousands of civilian casualties. The world takes little notice of the apocalyptic scenarios of civil war in Sudan. 

“But where, if not here in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, is the place to talk about ways out of war and take Walter Benjamin’s statement seriously: “But those who want peace must speak of war.” Or, in an older version: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.”

“Looking back at the Peace Prize awards – which is easy to do with a click on its website – one might at first glance get the impression that everything has already been said on the subject of war and peace.

“The speeches read like a chronicle of the intellectual situation in post-war Germany: at first, in the early years, everything was still overshadowed by the Second World War, which had just ended, and the catastrophe that Germany had brought upon the world; the venue for the award ceremony itself had just been rebuilt from the ruins.

“Looking back, it becomes clear that the following decades were by no means an idyllic time of peaceful coexistence, but rather a period of the Cold War, a time of the balance of terror, of the ever-present possibility of nuclear self-destruction.

“The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War did not bring about the end of history in Europe, but rather a period in which, with the disappearance of systemic antagonism, the reasons for the great military conflict between the two superpowers also seemed to have become obsolete, while the Yugoslav Wars – as keen observers had already noted – already pointed to an end to the post-war period, which came to an end with the Russian occupation of Crimea in the spring of 2014 and – definitively – with the invasion of Russian troops on 24 February 2022, opening the door to a new pre-war period. 

“Researching the origins of wars and the complicated paths to peace – silencing the guns, ending the killing, disempowering the aggressor, perhaps reaching a peace treaty that can then be followed by reconciliation – offers an infinitely rich source of illustrative material for what diplomacy can and cannot achieve, but it does not provide any recipes that can be applied for all time, since history does not repeat itself.

“And then you realise that, despite all the knowledge, despite all the experience of previous generations, you have to start all over again from scratch, and that, in your deep perplexity, you lack the words to describe what is happening before your eyes.

“The terms we use to describe the new circumstances are inadequate. We are lost for words to describe what is happening. This is more than just a lack of terms or literary talent; it is the collapse of the horizon of experience in which we grew up and where everything we have gathered in the course of our lives seems to be called into question, devalued, even in ruins. 

“I couldn’t imagine that Russia would once again fall back into times that in many ways resembled the practices of Stalinism, the study of which I had devoted years of my life to; I couldn’t imagine that America, which I had come to know as a student, would one day be gripped by fear of an authoritarian regime.

“The idea that something could go wrong in the Federal Republic of Germany was completely foreign to me. Above all, I couldn’t imagine that war, which for me was something I only knew from television or documentaries, could become a reality in my immediate neighbourhood. But that is what happened.

“And it seems to me that now it is our turn – if I may speak in the collective singular – the generation accustomed to and spoiled by apparent peace, to think everything through again from the beginning, a kind of assessment and examination of a generation that has been incredibly fortunate and is now finding it incredibly difficult to say goodbye and prepare for war in Europe and everything that goes with it. 

“What a liberating feeling it was to break free from the confines of the divided world of the Cold War and to move across the demarcation line between East and West or under the Iron Curtain. For me, a person who had no family ties to Eastern Europe, but whose father had been at war since 1 September 1939, mostly on the Eastern Front and in Ukraine, this was the case very early on.

“I learned very early on that beyond the division of Europe into East and West, into socialism and capitalism, there was another, a third, which was not identical to either, the lost centre of Europe.

“This marked the beginning of a journey of discovery into a region that was not particularly interesting to post-war West Germany at the time, or was mostly viewed from the perspective of enemy observation.

“As always, biographical coincidences played a decisive role: Russian lessons at a Bavarian boarding school, the atmosphere of thaw and peaceful coexistence in the 1960s – first Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar and Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, but above all the lasting impressions of early trips to Prague and the former Soviet Union.

“It was thanks to these trips that Central and Eastern Europe became not just a matter of reading and academic education, but something to do with the people, landscapes and historical sites I was to study, long before Milan Kundera’s famous 1983 essay Un Occident kidnappé ou La tragédie de l’Europe centrale: the atmosphere of the Prague Spring, my encounters and friendships with dissidents and emigrants, and the idea that the opposition movements in East and West had to find common ground across the Wall, perhaps even in a bridge between intellectuals and workers.

“The mental map of Europe had already shifted before the fall of the great border. In dissident circles in Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin and in Moscow kitchens, discussions were taking place that soon led to the revolutions in Eastern Europe. It was an exciting time of cross-border conspiracy, new reading material and the discovery of connections that created a new cultural space beyond the dichotomy of the divided world.

“A historical space of tremendous linguistic and cultural diversity, lost in war, genocide and expulsion, opened up. People had always been travelling in the deadly zone between Hitler’s and Stalin’s empires, always moving in a space of double experience where, as they learned, there was no escape, no possibility of flight, a place of total helplessness.

“The exploration of this space and the realisation of its history were soon followed by the transformation of the political map, which, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, did not stop at the borders of the last multi-ethnic empire. However, there was still a long way to go before Ukraine achieved complete independence and freedom.

“It took the Maidan Revolution and a war to finally bring Ukraine out of the margins of a narrow Western-centric perception.

“It ceased to be terra incognita, a blank spot on the map. Through the screens, the news reports, the refugees who came to us, it became present to us, a large and beautiful country, a Europe in miniature, connected to the world by thousands upon thousands of threads: the thousand-year-old Kyiv, Kharkiv, a metropolis of European modernity, Odessa, from whose grand staircase down to the harbour one could look out over the entire 20th century, Lviv, Leopolis, Lwów, Lwow, Lemberg, more than just ‘Little Vienna’, a cultural source for the entire continent.

“Ukraine as a prism of all European experiences in the ‘century of extremes’: the scene of revolutions, civil war and world wars, Holodomor and Holocaust, and, after decades of struggle, finally independence and freedom.

“But then came Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Over ten years ago, having returned from Kharkiv, Donetsk, Mariupol and Odessa, I wrote:

“We do not know how the struggle for Ukraine will end; whether it will stand up to Russian aggression or whether it will be brought to its knees, whether the Europeans, the West, will defend it or abandon it; whether the European Union will hold together or fall apart. Only this much is certain: Ukraine will never again disappear from the map in our minds.”

“Putin’s Russia is determined to wipe independent and free Ukraine off the map of Europe. Putin has openly declared this and has been proving day after day since then that he is serious about it. No words can describe the images of destruction. There is no atrocity that his troops have not committed. Nothing and no one has been spared from becoming a target for drones and missiles: marketplaces, residential areas, museums, hospitals, port facilities, railway stations. Cities that were in the process of getting back on their feet – new airports, transport routes, hotels – are being bombed back into ruin.

“Cities are becoming hunting grounds for drones. The missile’s direct hit is followed by a direct hit on the rescue team. The industrial giants of socialist construction are reduced to rubble and ashes, as are churches, monasteries and sanatoriums. What was once the Ukrainian Ruhr region no longer exists. If the country cannot be conquered, then at least it must be destroyed, made uninhabitable.

“A new term is doing the rounds: urbicide. Deserted villages of the 21st century, blown-up dams and bridges, flooded landscapes, black earth fields burned and contaminated for generations, ethnic cleansing and the abduction of tens of thousands of children, the occupied territories as one big camp under the control of warlords and criminals.

“The disaster that Putin’s Russia has brought upon Ukraine has many names: imperialism, revisionism, mafia state, fascism, Raschism.

“His crimes are documented and stored in an endless number of images in real time, and the names of the perpetrators – whether on the front lines, in the torture chambers, in the propaganda and command centres – will certainly be found. 

“It is astonishing how long it took Germany to realise what Putin’s Russia is all about.

“Whatever factors were at play – historical path dependency, cultural affinities, nostalgia and sentimentality, economic interests, even corruption – there is much scope for historical clarification and a reappraisal that spares no one.

“There were many who “understood” Russia, but too few who understood anything about Russia.

“Otherwise, they would have explained to us what was in store for us and that the categories used to describe Putin’s empire were more the result of wishful thinking and credulity than an admission that we were no match for this embodiment of evil – whatever term may yet be developed for it.

“How much easier and more convenient it was to blame NATO or the collective West: to this day, the search for a deeper meaning in Putin’s politics has not subsided. The following are mentioned: humiliation of the former superpower, fears of encirclement, need for security, struggle for recognition. This corresponds to the idea that misunderstandings can be cleared up and deals negotiated in argumentative discourse with him.

“However, Putin has disproved the notion that he would adhere to arguments or even procedural rules from the outset. He simply overturned the table at which negotiations and discussions were supposed to take place according to certain rules and brilliantly declared rule-breaking to be the norm long before the term ‘disruption’ came into circulation.

“He was and remains the master of escalation dominance, the calculated intensification of conflicts, including the calculated breach of the nuclear taboo.

“Fear is his most important weapon, and his true talent lies in managing fear. To this day, he considers himself the undisputed master of the process. 

“But not everything has to go according to his plan – the blitzkrieg against Ukraine, the capture of the capital, the victory parade on Khreschatyk Street in Kyiv, the encirclement of Kharkiv. Things turned out differently. Since he is making little progress on the front despite hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, he is targeting the defenceless civilian population. His slogan is simple: we will destroy you wherever you are, you have no chance except to surrender. Diplomacy is merely a tool to gain time, which he believes is working in his favour. The masterminds around him say it openly: we will break the backbone of you Europeans.

“Is what I am saying Russophobia? It is part of the repertoire of intimidation rhetoric to defame criticism of Putin’s regime as slander against Russia. As someone who has been enamoured with Russian culture since his youth and who has spent his entire life promoting it, this does not affect me. It pains me greatly to see friends and colleagues in danger and driven into exile today. The instrumentalisation of the prestige of Russian culture certainly plays a major role in the enforcement of Putin’s imperial ambitions – Russkij Mir, the Russian world that knows no borders, as soft power.

“Intimidation rhetoric and moral blackmail naturally also include defaming the Ukrainian leadership as Nazis and casting suspicion on the Germans as Nazis. The Bundeswehr is stigmatised as the successor to the Wehrmacht, while the Russian war against Ukraine is falsely portrayed as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War against fascism. All the crimes Russia is guilty of are summarily blamed on the Ukrainians – from the shooting down of flight MH 17 to the murders on the streets of Bucha. 

“As absurd as this propaganda may seem, it is not without effect, especially in Germany, which for well-known reasons is still unsure of itself and therefore vulnerable. Compared to this, the propaganda of the Soviet era seems outdated and downright harmless.

“This is no longer about the contrast between black and white, about the distinction between truth and lies, but about dissolving the distinction between true and false itself, according to the motto: everything is equally true, everything is equally false, thus destroying the basis of all judgement. It is aimed at the domestic audience, at creating enemy stereotypes and fears of encirclement, but also at the public outside the Russian world.

“There is nothing that cannot be brought into play to undermine the credibility and self-confidence of Western societies. It is not difficult to find out where open societies are most vulnerable and easiest to hit – and where the forces are that can be exploited.

“Even the capacity for self-criticism and self-doubt, the greatest achievement of open societies, is used to undermine stability and self-confidence.

“Russia then praises itself as the bastion of a unique and in every respect superior civilisation. Europe and the West, or what has been understood as such, are derided as weak and decadent, their time having passed. This voice is not without echo in a situation where Spengler’s Decline of the West is once again in vogue. Taken together, all this has an effect.

“The war that Russia has brought back to Europe is not only being waged by military means, but also as a war for hearts and minds, with moods, fears, resentments, nostalgia, or as a tempting offer to return to business as usual. 

“It is difficult to adjust to the new situation, the regrouping of forces and alliances in the world. It means saying goodbye to a world that has begun to disintegrate. Gone is the certainty of being able to rely on America, as we knew it from Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique or from great American literature, the country I had remembered since my first visit as a land of freedom from fear and free speech. That America is now no longer valid.

“Europe is now confronted not only with the phenomenon of Putinism, but also with an American president who is throwing all notions of the silent functioning of checks and balances and alliances out the window and forcing us to rethink all the coordinates we thought were secure.

“Europe, left alone and entirely on its own in a situation where everything is up in the air.

“In this situation, I began to reread the old texts in which, in the 1930s, the most clairvoyant minds attempted to understand what was brewing in Central Europe. Once again, I returned to the analyses and writings penned in exile, whether in Paris, New York or Weimar on the Pacific: Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State, Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, or later, with Stalinism already in view, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“But however prescient and accurate these analyses were, we must now, at this turning point in history, set out on our own journey to grasp the novelty and danger of today’s situation in our own words. Taking note of the lessons from Ukraine is helpful, indeed indispensable, for this purpose.

“No one is more interested in peace than the Ukrainians. They know that an aggressor who is determined to do anything cannot be stopped with words. They are realists who cannot afford to have any illusions.

“Because they do not want to be victims, they are fighting back. They are prepared for anything. They are fighting for their children, for their families, for their state; they are even prepared to die for their country.

“What elsewhere are only television images is a direct experience for them. The defence at the front would be nothing without the army of volunteers behind it. They have survived the winter and have defied the nightly terror of drones and missiles for weeks, even months.

“Yesterday they may have been IT experts, today they fly drones. The festive dresses women wear to the theatre or concerts demonstrate a sense of dignity that cannot be taken away, even in a state of emergency, and the club is the place where young people draw strength to continue the resistance.

“In a world that has become post-heroic, they are heroes without making a fuss about it.

“They keep the transport system running and thus hold their country together. The wailing of sirens is background noise in their everyday lives, not just a test alarm. They have learned how drone strikes differ from ballistic missile strikes. They help us prepare for the post-apocalyptic era. They teach us that national defence has nothing to do with militarism. Soldiers, and especially female soldiers, are respected because everyone knows that they are doing their duty and what they are prepared to do.

“The citizens of Ukraine are teaching us that what is happening is not a conflict in Ukraine, but a war. They are helping us to understand who we are dealing with: a regime that wants to destroy Ukraine as an independent state and that hates Europe.

“They show us that accommodating the aggressor only increases its appetite for more and that appeasement does not lead to peace, but paves the way for war. Because they are on the front line, they know more than we do in the still safe hinterland. Because they are at the mercy of a superior enemy, they have to be faster and smarter than him.

“Ukrainians, who are under general suspicion of nationalism, show us that patriotism does not have to be outdated in the 21st century.

“They are ahead of us in terms of military technology because they were forced to fight at a time when we could still afford to debate questions of eternal peace. They have developed their own weapons, which were withheld from them due to hesitation or fear. They are the mirror in which we see ourselves and which reminds us of what Europe once stood for and why it is worth defending.

“They call out to us: Do not be afraid, not because they are not afraid, but because they have overcome their fear.

“Their writers do their utmost to express what others far away cannot find the words for. They have carried the Ukrainian language out into the world and achieved a miracle of literature. Their poets speak with deadly seriousness, some even paying for it with their lives.

“Their president is a man who expects his compatriots to face the truth, even though he knows how bitter it is. They are well versed in the behavioural principles of resistance and are teaching Europeans what to expect if they do not finally prepare for the worst.

“They have learned from experience that in threatening situations, decisions are made overnight that in peaceful times would be postponed indefinitely. Stoic composure is a luxury they can only afford once the war is over.

“Enduring, persevering, despite unspeakable exhaustion – that is the revolution of dignity in permanence. It is to them that we owe our peace, and they pay a price that cannot be calculated in figures. 

“It is to them and to all people of good will that we owe our thanks first and foremost. And it is to them that we extend our greetings from this place – from Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, the site of the German unity and freedom movement, a hot spot of the European Spring of Nations of yesteryear.

“These greetings go out to the defenders of a free Ukraine, to the men and women who continue to go about their work despite everything, who take their children to school despite swarms of drones, to the residents of Kyiv who remain in the metro station, to the train drivers who steer their trains punctually from Ivano-Frankivsk to Kharkiv. As unlikely as it may sound, we Europeans can learn from Ukraine to be fearless and brave, and perhaps even to learn how to win.”

Beyond this speech: why read Karl Schlögel’s books?

Karl Schlögel is one of those rare historians who makes us see history, not just read it. His works transform the past into an inhabited space—made of streets, railway timetables, scents, and architectures. For years, he has been one of the most lucid voices on Eastern Europe and Russia. Many of his books have been translated into multiple languages, including English. His most influential titles include:

• Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937 (Moscow, 1937) — An almost cinematic reconstruction of the Soviet capital at the height of Stalinist terror. Translated into English, French, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Russian.

• Das sowjetische Jahrhundert. Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt (The Soviet Century) — A form of “material archaeology” of the Soviet world that recounts daily life through objects, architecture, and habits.

• Entscheidung in Kiew. Ukrainische Lektionen (Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland) — Published in 2015 and reissued in 2022, this is an essential work for understanding Ukraine’s significance at the heart of Europe. On 11 December in Brussels, the French translation of Entscheidung in Kiew will also earn him the Prix Jacques Delors du Livre Européen.

• Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (In Space We Read Time) — A foundational text of his “spatial historiography,” translated into English, French, and Polish.

• American Matrix. Besichtigung einer Epoche (2023) — A journey through the transformations of the Western world after the Cold War, exploring geopolitics and popular culture.

There was a time when historiography frightened many people. Then new ways of telling history emerged: social history, oral history, microhistory (the Italian Carlo Ginzburg), spatial historiography (Karl Schlögel), and now storytelling. Today, social media and platforms like Substack allow young historians to become bestsellers—sometimes without the necessary intellectual foundations.

Karl Schlögel has been innovating the way we tell the history of our continent for decades. He became a bestseller without needing Substack.

Above all, he is a man who believes in Europe with the conviction of someone who has witnessed both its darkest and finest moments. If this post has helped make him better known, then this little blog will have succeeded in its mission.

The dark history of the twentieth century binds Germany to Israel. But there’s also a brighter twenty-first century connection—between Berlin and Tel Aviv. A living bond, built on youth moving back and forth, on techno beats and trance rhythms, on clubbing, dancing, and a vibrant zest for life. Before the pandemic—and before October 7th—the Tel Aviv–Berlin route was almost a weekend ritual. Two or three days of minimal sleep and maximum living.

Many came to Berlin and stayed: some for a semester, others for years, a few for a lifetime. Berlin is home to one of the largest Israeli communities in the diaspora. At least ten thousand live here—some say closer to thirty. They’re mostly young, secular, educated, and often of European origin. They come to work in startups, to study, research, to make art, to open restaurants. Some come to escape Tel Aviv’s cost of living—or its politics. Back in 2015, when millions arrived in Germany from the Middle East, newspapers described Israelis in Berlin as part of a parallel exodus: quieter, less visible, but steady.

Berlin is also home to Europe’s largest Palestinian community. And though it may sound hard to believe today, Berlin was once seen as a greenhouse for peace—a city where Israelis and Palestinians could meet beyond their conflict. This is part of Berlin’s genius: its openness, its cultural courage—something the rest of Germany should perhaps admire more than judge.

It has fostered unexpected encounters, empathy, and new forms of identity.

You could see it at the Gorki Theater, where Israeli and Palestinian artists share the stage with Turkish, Armenian, Yazidi, and Syrian voices. At restaurants like Kanaan, an Israeli-Palestinian establishment that had become a proud landmark in my neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg.

Then October 7th happened. Kanaan emptied, plunging into an ongoing crisis. Yet despite polarized thinking, we’ve witnessed Israelis and Palestinians continue to demonstrate together, create culture together, collectively remember while preparing for a possible future. That, too, is Berlin’s essence. A place of redemption and possibility—where memory is preserved like nowhere else in Europe.

It could only be Berlin, the sole European city hosting October 7, 06:29 AM – The Moment Music Stood Still from this week until November.

An exhibition commemorating the Nova music festival massacre, previously shown in Tel Aviv, New York, and other North American cities. It’s an exhibition about people—who resemble those we pass daily in Berlin—their trauma and loss, but also their healing journey. How they’ve transformed the spirit of a rave party into a movement for renewal.

From Tempelhof Airport to Re’im

The Tempelhof airport hosts the exhibition. It is also a place of multiple memories, as many in Berlin.

It was built a century ago, often considered a pure Nazi relic because of its architecture. But Tempelhof is actually a child of the Weimar Republic, inaugurated in 1923. In 1948–49, it became the lifeline of the Berlin Airlift, the place from which West Berlin was kept alive during the Soviet blockade. Today, the old runway is a vast urban park, while parts of the terminal house one of Europe’s largest refugee camps.

And then there’s the old departure hall—grand, dim, often used for conferences or art installations. A space I know well. Welcoming, though always a little shadowy.

When I enter this time, I barely recognize it.

The hall is darker than ever—like a techno club. Beams of light slice through haze and vapor. Once your eyes adjust, you see it: the reconstruction. Trees, tents, a bar counter, camping chairs, carpets, burnt-out cars. Clothes and glasses scattered on the ground.

It’s a faithful recreation of the site near Kibbutz Re’im, where the Nova Music Festival took place. There’s no set path—only a first station with a short video about rave culture.

Perhaps Berlin is the one city that doesn’t need this introduction, but it’s worth remembering: rave culture celebrates life—ecstatic, collective, peaceful by nature.

Beyond that point, you’re free to move as you wish, once your eyes adjust to the dark. Among trees, objects, photos, panels, videos—many of which we all saw in those first days, and too many of us have forgotten in the months and years since.

Then your ears begin to adjust. Every speaker, every screen, every station plays at once. Music, screams, prayers, gunshots. The sound of destruction, of panic, of people pleading for help—and others reassuring them.

The immersion is intense. At first, you want to isolate yourself and not listen. Then inevitably, as you walk among the installations—invited to touch them—you begin to listen with greater attention and focus.

Some phone calls are impossible to forget.

One captures a terrorist calling the parents of his victim—using the victim’s own phone. He boasts about killing ten Jews. “Look how many I killed with my own hands,” he says. “Mom, your son is a hero.” And his parents praise him. “I wish I was with you,” his mother replies.

You turn away, walk a few steps, and hear another call. A very different one. “They shot me, Mum, and I’m bleeding.” “I’m with you, sweetie. Everything will be fine. We’re going to the hospital. You’ll be fine.” “Mom?” Then silence.

Romi Gonen was captured moments later, her friends shot beside her. She was released in January 2025, together with Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, as part of the hostage deal.

More voices follow. Some are from those who filmed themselves that morning—hiding, fleeing, whispering for help.

Some locked themselves in refrigerators behind the bar, waiting for hours in the dark. When they finally emerged, they walked on corpses. Under those corpses, someone was still alive—like the young woman who performed at Eurovision this year, only to be insulted and threatened again. Apparently, she had no right to survive.

There are also testimonies from those who came later: the rescuers, the people who gathered the living and the dead.

There is a full report documenting what was done to the girls and boys of the Festival and the nearby kibbutzim. I won’t quote a single line from it here. That document was eventually included—after unbearable delay—in the UN report. It’s available online, if you wish to read it. Two months later, on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, women who tried to march in Paris and Milan for the victims of October 7th were stopped. Their signs confiscated. Their presence unwelcome. I wrote about that day. It was the day feminism died—its ideals suddenly conditional.

You keep walking through the hall. The darkness and the sounds no longer disturb you. You begin to see everything clearly, hear everything fully.

Panels list the names and faces of the murdered, and of those still held in Gaza. Many are young people who could be my team members, my friends, my children. And in a way, they are: as I read their names and look at their faces, I realize I know many of them, even by name. These two years have left their mark—at least in those who still have heart and memory.

Then the last display: rows of recovered objects. Shoes, especially. It’s impossible not to think of other museums, other memorials.

You lift your eyes and notice a clock—one of those from the airport days—stopped at 6:29 AM. The moment the massacre began.

But time hasn’t stopped. It never does. You understand this near the end of the exhibition, where panels tell how the Nova tribe has transformed itself: a network for post-traumatic healing, a community, a foundation promoting a new kind of rave—ecological, respectful, communitarian.

A project for the future. A future for those who love life and celebrate it through dance. A future open to everyone.

And as I write, that future begins to take shape: in Tel Aviv and Gaza, where both people rejoice.

Perhaps one day, they might learn to dance together. In mutual respect. In justice. Dancing together—as people once did here, in Berlin. And as it’s time to do again. Now, or never.

The Exhibition Tickets are available now at novaexhibition.com. The exhibition is open from 7 October until 16 November 2025, Tuesday to Thursday from 11am-8pm, Friday from 10am-6pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 11am-8pm. Public conversations with survivors and family members take place daily at 1:30pm and 5:30pm. Location: The Nova Music Festival Exhibition Berlin; Entrance hall of the former Tempelhof Airport, Platz der Luftbrücke 5, 12101 Berlin.

These days, it’s not just drones that have been flying around here. Numbers have been flying too.

In just one week, the Bundestag discussed two budgets: the 2025 budget, which was never presented due to the government crisis, and the 2026 budget.

It has been a surreal week: everyone has been keeping track of their own wallets and the public purse. What does this expenditure mean? This cut? Will that reform ever happen? The figures are enormous. Like the infamous Sondervermögen, disguised debt that divides experts. The problems are also enormous. And the construction sites to be opened. Because while we talk about drones, wars and broken-down trains, housing has become a national emergency again.

And here’s a fact that often surprises outsiders: Germany is not a nation of homeowners. Barely 47% of Germans own the home they live in. Compare that to the UK, where home ownership is about 65%, or the US, closer to 66%.

Renting is expensive: a student in Berlin pays between €500 and €1,200 per month. In 2024, 400,000 flats were promised: 252,000 were built. In 2025, just over 100,000. A deficit that has been accumulating for at least 25 years.

The 2026 budget promises €23 billion over five years to fill the gap: social housing, support for self-builds, various bonuses.

But will it be enough? And above all: what will be built, how, and for whom? In Germany, as you know, it’s not fashionable to talk about vision. Many still quote Helmut Schmidt’s famous motto: “Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen.” (Anyone who has visions should go to the doctor).

Yet, when it comes to housing and cities, vision matters.

We Italians know this well: from the Renaissance harmony of Pienza to the nightmare of Napoli’s Scampia. European social housing also carries its burdens: soulless neighbourhoods, hastily constructed, isolated and degraded. This pattern repeats from Paris to Cologne, from Madrid to Milan.

For this reason, I would advise anyone who wants a new major housing programme in Germany today to take a walk. Not among graphs and press conferences, but in the Berlin neighbourhoods built between the First World War and the end of the 1920s.

There, far from tourism, the best fruits of that season still live on. An era of continuous crisis, yet capable of producing quality social architecture. Neighbourhoods that are still alive after a century, inhabited by old and new Germans. Not utopias, not cathedrals in the desert. But houses and urban spaces that have become UNESCO World Heritage Sites. And that is where I am taking you today, with my camera.

“...to guarantee every German a healthy home.”

So reads Article 155 of the Weimar Constitution of 1919. A sentence that sounds surprising today: one of the world’s first recognitions of the right to healthy and adequate housing. Not many constitutional texts have explicitly stated this – less than a dozen to date: not Italy, nor the United Kingdom, nor the United States.1

But where did this urgency come from? From the harsh reality of the time.

In Berlin, even before the First World War, the housing situation was catastrophic. It was an industrial city that had grown at a frenetic pace, with hundreds of thousands of workers crammed into buildings that had been constructed hastily and poorly. In 1905, nine out of ten Berliners lived in so-called Mietskasernen – five-storey ‘rental barracks’ with no lifts and tiny apartments.

Behind the now renovated and extremely expensive façades of Prenzlauer Berg, a century ago darkness, damp and poor hygiene reigned. Almost half of the dwellings had toilets in the courtyard or stairwell. Many one-room flats housed entire families. Quite a few were rented ‘in shifts’, with people coming in to sleep when others left: as many as sixty people were registered as ‘residents’ in those Berlin rooms. The war, by halting all new construction, did the rest.

At the time, there was talk of Wohnungselend, housing misery. A social time bomb. This led to the idea of radical policies: taxes on rents, solidarity contributions paid by landlords, support for housing cooperatives. And above all, a change of perspective: Berlin had to stop growing vertically and open up to the horizon. Greenery, light, air.

The decisive step came in 1920: the creation of Greater Berlin, with the incorporation of the suburbs. In one day, the city became the second largest in the world in terms of area after Los Angeles, and the third largest in terms of population after London and New York. A new metropolis, with room for experimentation.2

This is where the visionary figures of the Weimar era come into play.

Martin Wagner, a social democratic urban planner, was responsible for building and urban planning in Berlin from 1926 to 1933. For him, the city had to breathe. He distinguished between ‘sanitary greenery’ – necessary for life – and decorative greenery. He imagined Berlin as a landscape city, made up of low-rise neighbourhoods surrounded by nature, with connected suburbs and open spaces as urban lungs. And then there was Bruno Taut, a socialist and prolific architect, driven by an almost utopian idea: if people live in humane conditions, they also live more peacefully and civilly. For this reason, he dared to break with the monotonous greyness of the Mietskasernen. He coloured the houses. Red, blue, yellow, green: against the darkness of the courtyards, his architecture offered light and colour.

Together, Wagner and Taut left their mark, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Hufeisensiedlung in Britz, with its horseshoe shape surrounded by greenery. The Wohnstadt Carl Legien in Prenzlauer Berg, built for workers’ cooperatives. The Weiße Stadt in Reinickendorf, with the modern lines of the Zeilenbau. The Schillerpark, a jewel of Neues Bauen, architectural modernism. The Gartenstadt Falkenberg, the ‘colourful box garden city’. Siemensstadt, which saw architects such as Walter Gropius and Hans Scharoun at work. And the Onkel-Tom-Siedlung, famous for its terraced houses surrounded by woods.

They were houses for the people. They were also a political, social and aesthetic project. An experiment to reinvent urban coexistence. And perhaps also to design a new humanity.

Hufeisensiedlung Britz – Licht, Luft, Sonne: light, fresh air, sun.

📍 The residential complex, known as the “Hufeisensiedlung” (Horseshoe Settlement), is part of the Großsiedlung Britz, Neukölln District.

The quintessential icon of Berlin’s social modernism is undoubtedly the Hufeisensiedlung, or ‘horseshoe settlement’, designed by Bruno Taut between 1925 and 1931.

This remarkable 350-metre-long horseshoe-shaped block encircles an ancient glacial pond, transforming it into a communal courtyard that opens on one side. It perfectly embodies the modernist principles of Licht, Luft, Sonne—light, air, sun—along with abundant greenery. These elements represented not just architectural ideals but fundamental rights to be guaranteed for everyone.

But the horseshoe is only the heart of a larger project. To the west is the “Hüsung”: a second ring-shaped courtyard, inspired by rural villages. Around it are rows of terraced houses, with variations in colour and orientation that avoid monotony despite being based on only two models.

Contemporaries nicknamed it “Rote Front” (Red Front) and “Chinese Wall” due to its distinctive red façades, which remain striking today. Taut had no intention of camouflaging the houses; rather, he deliberately created a stark contrast with the conservative Heimatstil villas being constructed nearby—German architecture in its most uninspired form.

The vision was ambitious: to provide affordable, attractive and healthy housing for the working class. The reality skewed more middle class, with office workers, civil servants and artisans becoming the primary residents. Nevertheless, the neighbourhood established itself as an exemplary model of quality housing accessible to a broad spectrum of society.

Today, the Hufeisensiedlung is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, in part, a living museum. Since 2012, visitors have been able to visit the information centre in the front building or even rent a house furnished in 1920s style for a few nights. However, it is not a theme park: it is a living neighbourhood, with cultivated gardens, children playing and residents proud to live in a utopia that, a century later, continues to function.

Wohnstadt Carl Legien – Urban life with light and colour

📍 Prenzlauer Berg. The settlement is located east of Prenzlauer Allee, between Schönhauser Allee and Prenzlauer Allee, along Erich-Weinert-Straße.

While Britz exemplifies the garden city concept, Carl Legien represents the urban settlement model. I see it daily when leaving my home, which was built in the 1990s. Located in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, near the Weissensee border, these districts hold significance beyond Berlin’s architectural history—they served as the main stage for the peaceful revolution of 1989, later captured in television dramas.

Here, Bruno Taut and Franz Hillinger constructed six long U-shaped blocks between 1928 and 1930—compact and dense, yet filled with light and air. These weren’t isolated houses in green surroundings, but modern, functional flats equipped with kitchens, bathrooms, balconies and courtyards. Balconies were provided even for workers: no longer a luxury, but a right. The designs included space for fresh air and “community” fruit trees.

Each building faces large tree-lined courtyards, accessible from the street on one side to allow sunlight and breezes to flow through.

All flats benefit from greenery—gone were the narrow, dark and unhealthy backyards of the Mietskasernen. Colourful loggias and curved balconies soften the austere lines, while community is fostered through shared amenities: communal laundries, collective spaces and a small internal shopping centre.

The choice of name is not accidental. In 1930, the complex was dedicated to Carl Legien, a social democratic trade union leader who organised the general strike against the attempted anti-Weimar putsch of 1920.

Upon seizing power, the National Socialists enacted their revenge by renaming streets in the neighbourhood after Great War battles and combatants, while also covering Taut’s vibrant colours with grey. Only after reunification did the façades reclaim their original warm tones of red, blue and yellow—a welcoming carousel of soft colours. Meanwhile, the GDR had altered the street names, which still today bear the names of anti-fascists honoured by the Democratic Republic.

Strolling along Erich-Weinert-Straße or Gubitzstraße, you immediately sense a radical departure from nineteenth-century urban planning. Here, streets no longer serve as ornamental façades concealing decay, but function as corridors leading to open, bright, communal courtyards. Balconies overlook these peaceful spaces, where residents can enjoy either tranquility or the cheerful sounds of children at play. While the exterior of this settlement might appear somewhat anonymous, the interior transforms the experience with abundant greenery, natural light, and vibrant splashes of colour.

This architectural experiment was genuinely affordable for working-class families of the time. Today, it continues to embody, in every brick and beam, a simple yet revolutionary idea: that even a densely populated city can be equitable, healthy, and deeply humane.

Weiße Stadt – The white city

📍 Reinickendorf, along Schillerpromenade / Aroser Allee.

While the Carl Legien complex featured vibrant colors in an urban setting, the Weiße Stadt (White City) in Reinickendorf represents pure modernism: clean geometric lines, predominantly white facades, and essential, functional spaces all designed for comfortable living.

Built between 1929 and 1931 by Otto Rudolf Salvisberg, Bruno Ahrends and Wilhelm Büning, the Weiße Stadt (White City) addressed two pressing needs: providing efficient housing for thousands of Berliners while embodying the principles of Bauhaus and Neues Bauen. The distinctive fan-shaped blocks, suspended access galleries, clustered vertical balconies and bridges spanning streets were all carefully designed to maximize natural light, enhance functionality and create an impression of architectural lightness.

Yet despite its name, the white façades were far from monotonous. Vibrant coloured doors, blue window frames, red roofs and thoughtful chromatic details throughout the common areas and courtyards create a surprising and dynamic visual rhythm.

The symbolic block, suspended above Aroser Allee, reflects the sun from the south and turns yellow on the shaded north side, with a blue strip on the roof — a small spectacle of light and colour in the middle of the city.

Though compact, each flat featured modern kitchens, bathrooms, balconies and access to shared amenities including laundry facilities, vegetable gardens and green courtyards. The innovative maisonette design provided street-level entrances with private gardens on the ground floor and duplex apartments above. Despite its peripheral location, the neighbourhood maintained strong connectivity through twenty-five local shops that satisfied residents’ daily needs.

Innovative infrastructure made the Weiße Stadt cutting-edge: no coal stoves, but a central district heating system instead. This system deserves separate discussion as it represents the most efficient method for managing both traditional and renewable urban energy sources—a standard adopted in East Berlin during the GDR era but subsequently neglected by West Berlin. The development also featured optimised space usage without compromising resident comfort.

Schillerpark Siedlung – rhythm and colour of red brick

📍 Berlin-Wedding, in the Mitte district, adjacent to Schillerpark

While the Weiße Stadt embodies the clean, geometric aesthetics of the Bauhaus, the Schillerpark Siedlung in Wedding reveals another facet of modernity: warm red brick and the harmonious rhythm of loggias and balconies.

Designed by Bruno Taut between 1924 and 1930, the Schillerpark Siedlung opens onto the adjacent park of the same name, offering ample green space. The apartments, facing south-west and south-east, maximise exposure to natural light. Each block is designed to optimise ventilation: three units per landing with the central flat slightly protruding ensure air and sunlight in every room.

Red brick façades are enhanced with exposed concrete pillars, loggias and balconies featuring white plaster details—a restrained design that stands in contrast to the vibrant colors of other garden cities. The semi-open courtyards provide recreational spaces and children’s play areas, while communal laundry rooms in the attics foster a sense of community life.

Despite the simplifications imposed by the economic crisis of the 1920s, the innovative spirit of the project remains evident: internal green spaces, solar orientation and functional yet people-friendly buildings.

Gartenstadt Falkenberg – the garden city “colour box”

📍Treptow-Köpenick, East Berlin, a few minutes’ walk from S-Grünau station

If Schillerpark Siedlung is all about red brick and functionality, Gartenstadt Falkenberg is the opposite: an explosion of colour. It is no coincidence that it has gone down in history as the Tuschkastensiedlung – the ‘watercolour box’.

Located in Treptow-Köpenick in the far south-east of Berlin, not far from the airport, this area was selected in 1912 by the building cooperative (founded twenty years earlier) to create an authentic garden city. The project was entrusted to the young Bruno Taut, who had recently returned from a study trip to England with the German Garden City Society.

The first nucleus, the Akazienhof, maintains a rather traditional design: multi-family blocks arranged around an elongated square, with gardens at the rear.

But along Gartenstadtweg, Taut dares to be more adventurous: low, simple houses, but painted in cornflower blue, intense yellows, bright reds, even black façades with contrasting white window frames. No stucco, just colour and shape.

The houses—predominantly single-family, one or two-storey dwellings—are arranged in staggered groups that follow the natural contours of the land, breaking the monotony typical of rigid workers’ housing rows. While the sloping red-tiled roofs and wooden shutters echo traditional village architecture, the overall effect is far from provincial. The design makes a powerful statement: social housing can be joyful, liveable and even poetic.

Walking around, it sometimes feels like you’re not in Berlin—or even in a real place—but in an idyll. The locals, accustomed to visitors with cameras, bring you back to reality. They joke around (the Berliner Schnauze, the somewhat crude humour of old Berlin, can now only be heard in these neighbourhoods) and sometimes even invite you for coffee in their garden. They always say hello—because while the city may appear rough, Berlin is actually much kinder than you might think.

The original project envisaged around 1,500 dwellings, but the war interrupted the work. Only a handful of blocks and around eighty houses were built. After reunification, careful restoration work restored Falkenberg’s colourful appearance. Today, walking through these winding streets, you get the feeling that every window and every façade has a different character – as if the garden city were a small urban rainbow.

Ringsiedlung Siemensstadt

📍 Siemensstadt, situated on the border between Spandau and Charlottenburg in western Berlin.

Siemensstadt serves as an open-air laboratory where diverse styles of modern architecture converge and challenge one another. It’s no accident that architectural giants who now dominate history books collaborated here: Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, Otto Bartning, Fred Forbat and Paul Rudolf Henning. This ensemble of distinct voices was orchestrated by city councillor Martin Wagner alongside landscape architect Leberecht Migge.

Scharoun designed the neighbourhood entrance adjacent to the Siemensdamm U-Bahn station. The complex, nicknamed ‘Panzerkreuzer’ (armoured cruiser), features distinctive nautical elements including circular portholes and ship-like railings. Scharoun himself resided here for thirty years, closely monitoring his creation.

Walter Gropius’ long white buildings stand elegantly in rows, all precisely oriented north-south to maximize natural light and airflow.

At the rear, Hugo Häring allowed himself some freedom: coloured clinker bricks and balconies with soft, almost organic shapes. An idea of ‘living architecture’ that breaks with the rigidity of Neues Bauen.

Along the railway line runs a long block nicknamed Lange Jammer, or ‘Long Misery’, which protects the neighbourhood from the noise of the trains. It is an inhabited wall, which still amazes today with its severity. A little further on, a charming semi-circular pavilion now houses an information point and a café.

Rather than presenting a uniform style, Siemensstadt embodies a collective challenge: to prove that social housing could simultaneously be functional, standardized, and diverse. While not all solutions impressed contemporary critics, it is precisely this plurality of approaches—this creative tension between discipline and imagination—that has earned the neighborhood its UNESCO World Heritage status today.

Onkel Tom Siedlung: the ‘parrot neighbourhood’

📍 In the Zehlendorf district, not far from the Grunewald woods, in the south-west of Berlin. You can get there directly from the Onkel Toms Hütte underground station.

In Zehlendorf, at the heart of a middle-class villa district, the proposal to build social housing sparked immediate controversy. When the GEHAG cooperative purchased a large plot in 1926 to construct a modern housing estate near the new underground station, wealthy residents protested against what they saw as “proletarianisation,” fearing their properties would depreciate.

Ultimately, however, the estate didn’t attract the poorest residents. The flat-roofed terraced houses, set among tall pine trees and designed with colorful facades by Bruno Taut, Hugo Häring and Otto Rudolf Salvisberg, remained too expensive for working-class families. Instead, they were primarily occupied by civil servants and public employees.

The neighborhood centered around the Onkel Toms Hütte underground station, which opened in 1929. Along Argentinische Allee, Taut created a 450-metre building that shielded the residential area from railway noise—an inhabited barrier that represented a bold urban planning solution.

Critics were quick to criticise it: because of its brightly coloured façades, the settlement was soon nicknamed Papageiensiedlung, ‘the parrot neighbourhood’.

Nearby, conservatives countered with the Am Fischtal experimental colony, distinguished by its sloping roofs, shutters and symmetrical façades—a direct challenge to Berlin modernism. This dispute, known historically as the ‘Zehlendorf roof war’, prefigured the political conflict that would ultimately extinguish both the architectural vision of Neues Bauen and the Weimar Republic’s political experiment in 1933.

Why was Onkel Tom excluded from the UNESCO list? When nominated in 2006, many houses were in poor condition with incorrect fixtures, inconsistent colours and questionable restorations. Given the settlement’s urban and symbolic importance, this decision now appears short-sighted.

Since then, residents have initiated positive changes to restore the neighbourhood’s original character. A small gallery—the Bruno Taut Laden—opened inside the U-Bahn station in 2010, showcasing documents, photographs and contemporary art. This effort has helped restore memory and dignity to a neighbourhood that, despite lacking UNESCO recognition, remains one of the most compelling examples of Weimar’s housing vision.

The Collapse of the System and the End of a Dream: 1929–1933

Even the most beautiful dream can falter. Despite their bright, green houses and architectural innovations that we still admire today, the Siedlungen could not save the Weimar Republic from buckling under the weight of the Great Depression.

The global economic collapse of 1929 depleted public resources. The Hauszinssteuer — a crucial rent tax that funded much of the social housing program — collapsed, making it nearly impossible to finance new Siedlungen developments.

Construction activity (Bautätigkeit) plummeted. Though architecturally impressive, new homes often remained out of reach for workers and poorer families. The constitutional promise of healthy housing for all Germans largely remained an unfulfilled ideal.

As unemployment soared, the housing shortage returned with devastating force. The urban landscape deteriorated, marked by vacant dwellings, high rents, crumbling buildings and neglected maintenance. While precise homelessness figures for 1933 are unavailable, the crisis clearly worsened housing insecurity throughout the country.

This climate of social frustration channeled popular discontent toward extremist movements. While democratic parties struggled to offer credible solutions, the NSDAP positioned itself as a radical answer to the crisis. The Siedlungen, once symbols of progress and hope, became silent witnesses to a society racing toward catastrophe.

Today, as we wander among the colourful and bright houses of the Siedlungen, admiring their architectural ingenuity and fresh ideas, we confront a poignant reality. Behind these façades lies the memory of a broken dream—a vision of a fairer, healthier and more modern society swept away by economic crisis and the rise of National Socialism.

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"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum the most varied pathological phenomena occur" — Antonio Gramsci. Italian Marxist philosopher, political theorist, imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime

A spectre is haunting Europe—and the United States too: Weimar.

For at least three years, the ghost of the Weimar Republic has been evoked in Germany. A bad headline, a worrying election, and someone says: It’s the Weimar Republic all over again. Weimar: the fragile German republic after WWI, the antechamber to Nazism.

In February 2025, 82.5% of Germans went to the ballots, the highest turnout since reunification. Many of us voted in fear of being thrown back a century, into the Germany of 1925. And four years from now—when we vote again—will it be 1929? We live in confusing times.

The temptation of the comparison is strong. “Weimarer Verhältnisse”, we call them in German: the Weimar conditions.

Now the habit is spreading to the United States. Is 2025 the new 1925? Or are we already living in the early 1930s? A few weeks ago, billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio told Financial Times that today’s America resembles the 1930s: gaps in wealth and values, a collapse of trust, politics drifting into extremism. Trump’s America, he warned, is sliding toward “a 1930s-style autocracy.”

What Dalio says is indisputable. But Weimar was much more than parliamentary chaos or inflammatory speeches.

It went far beyond the heckling of the AfD in German regional parliaments. It transcended the obsessive debates on migration, attempts to control universities, or the proximity of technological elites to power.

The Weimar Republic was born in civil war—streets filled with revolutionary attempts and their bloody suppression. It continued with starving people lying on sidewalks, forced to beg for survival. It ended with SA troops marching with torches and the Reichstag engulfed in flames.

The Weimar Republic was fragile from its inception. Lasting only fourteen years, it lacked any genuine democratic tradition. It was despised by the elites and distrusted by large segments of the population.

The Federal Republic is 75 years old. It has weathered crises, built prosperity, and forged a culture of compromise. Labor unions sit on company boards. Four Große Koalitionen (“Grand Coalitions”) have governed at federal level—three under Merkel—and many more at the state level. Consensus is messy, but it works.

In Weimar, by contrast, parties couldn’t find common ground. Twenty different cabinets in fourteen years. The last democratic government collapsed over a fight about 0.5% in unemployment insurance contributions. Out of that deadlock came new elections—and the sudden rise of the Nazi Party.

Unemployment was Weimar’s great plague. By 1932, nearly 30 percent of Germans were out of work. Six million people. Hunger riots, despair.

Economic turmoil sealed Weimar’s fate. Hyperinflation in 1923 wiped out savings. Debts and credits dissolved into air. Families were thrust back to bartering within months. No wonder today’s European Central Bank obsesses over its 2% inflation target. Today's obsession stems from yesterday's trauma.

Five years after hyperinflation came another blow: the crash of 1929. The Dow Jones lost almost 90% of its value by 1932. German markets collapsed too. Savings and hope vanished.

No, we are not Weimar. But the story is not so black and white. Institutions can still slip.

The European Central Bank was modelled after Weimar's painful lessons: designed to be completely independent from political power. In 1933, Hitler transformed the Reichsbank into an instrument of war. During the same period, Roosevelt tied the Federal Reserve to his New Deal policies.

Europe vowed: never again. Yet critics persist. In 2013, the AfD party was founded specifically as an anti-Euro, anti-ECB, anti-Draghi movement. In Italy, government officials continue to criticize the ECB—despite Draghi's measures having rescued Italy from financial crisis. Meanwhile in the U.S., the Federal Reserve's independence faces increasingly open challenges.

Checks and balances are fundamental. The strongest European constitutions—Germany, Austria, Italy—were deliberately crafted as bulwarks against Nazi-fascism. West Germany's 1949 Grundgesetz directly addresses Weimar's shortcomings. Similarly, the Italian Constitution was intentionally designed with anti-fascist principles.

But: Even the strongest constitution can be undermined when elected leaders deliberately hollow it out from within. The eight years of PiS Party rule in Poland until 2023 and Orbán's "illiberal democracy" in Hungary are the living proof that paper barriers are not enough.

Justice is crucial. In Weimar, the judiciary was deeply biased. Many judges were Imperial holdovers, openly hostile to the republic. Their verdicts betrayed them: left-wing assassins were punished harshly, right-wing killers often walked free. This told extremists that violence would be tolerated, even rewarded. It was democracy’s death sentence. Today, German, European, and U.S. courts are still largely independent. But when judicial neutrality is undermined—or attacked—the warning lights should flash red.

So, are we safe? Are Europe and the U.S. in 2025 far enough from the Weimar cliff? Institutions are not indestructible. Central banks can be captured. Media freedom can be chipped away—sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally.

Last week, German public broadcaster NDR removed conservative journalist Julia Ruhs after hundreds of colleagues denounced her work. Supporters cried censorship, critics pointed to breaches of journalistic standards. Her reporting had critically examined migration issues in Germany. Too critically?

Around the same time, across the Atlantic: In the U.S., ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live after remarks about Charlie Kirk's assassination and its instrumentalisation. The FCC hinted at reviewing the network's licence. Once institutions yield to political pressure, their independence is never guaranteed. When satire is cancelled, regardless of whether it is in good or bad taste, something no longer works.1

Which brings us to the darkest chapter. A topic often missing from today's Weimar analogies, but one that cuts to the bone of how democracies die: one bullet can silence a man. Many bullets can silence a democracy.

A series of political assassinations in the 1920s and '30s undermined democracy across Europe.

These killings eroded trust, emboldened extremists, and ultimately destroyed democratic institutions. While Europeans often know only their own national cases—Rathenau in Germany, Matteotti in Italy, Gabriel Narutowicz in Poland—these events form an interconnected European narrative. Each assassination offers crucial lessons—lessons that are much needed today.

Weimar´s Germany: A Republic Bleeding Out

The Weimar Republic was born in blood. The blood of millions who died in the First World War, and the blood that soon stained German streets. As the republic was proclaimed from the windows of the Reichstag, cities filled with veterans returning from hell to nothingness.

1919 brought revolts and experiments in workers’ self-government, inspired by the Soviet model, from the shipyards of northern Germany to the factories of Munich. These uprisings were turbulent but not especially bloody. The repression, however, was merciless.

The new Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert saw these councils as a mortal threat to the fragile republic. To crush them, it made a pact with the devil: the Freikorps. These were not ordinary war veterans. Often still young, they had known only war and killing. Their officers carried the experience of colonial massacres in Africa, including the genocide of the Herero and Nama—atrocities that foreshadowed Europe’s own future.2

The first act in Weimar’s long tragedy of political assassinations came quickly. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—leaders of the newborn Communist Party—were seized by Freikorps soldiers. After the Spartacist uprising in Berlin was drowned in blood, with over a hundred killed, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were beaten, shot, and dumped like refuse.

Munich too became a killing ground: civilians had not seen such slaughter since the Thirty Years’ War.

The murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, opened a wound that never healed. The SPD was blamed for tolerating—if not ordering—the assassinations. To this day, when the Berliner left gathers every January 15 at their cenotaph, SPD politicians are neither invited nor welcome.

That division proved fatal. It crippled any chance of a united front between Social Democrats and Communists against the rising extreme right. The Weimar Republic entered the 1920s already weakened, bleeding from within, divided against itself.

1921: “He received the reward he deserved as a traitor to the fatherland.”

The pact with the devil soon backfired. The first wave of bloodshed in 1919 had struck the far left. But by 1920, the guns of right-wing terror turned on the very moderates who had built the Republic.

The Freikorps were officially disbanded. Their mission of suppressing leftist uprisings was complete. However, the men refused to disperse. Instead, they regrouped under a new name: the Organisation Consul (O.C.).

This was no secret society. It was openly ultranationalist, antisemitic, sworn to “destroy the Republic and replace it with a right-wing dictatorship.” Its statutes proclaimed a war “against all anti-nationalists and internationalists, Judaism, social democracy and the radical left.” Judges, bureaucrats, noblemen, industrialists—many quietly sympathized.

The fuel was already there: the conspiracy theory of the Dolchstoßlegende—the “stab in the back.” According to this myth, Germany had not lost the First World War on the battlefield but had been betrayed by Jews, socialists, and liberals at home. Now those very “traitors” were running the state. In modern terms, a “deep State”.

Murder became reframed as justice. Political killings were called Feme—acts of vigilante punishment3. In courtrooms, assassins of the right were often acquitted, or handed sentences so light they sounded like apologies. Judges themselves, relics of the Imperial era, despised the Republic. Reading their judgments today sends chills down the spine.

And then came August 26, 1921. Matthias Erzberger, deputy of the Catholic Centre Party, was walking in the Black Forest when O.C. gunmen ambushed him. He tried to run. They fired a dozen bullets into his back.

Erzberger had signed the armistice of Compiègne in 1918, ending the war. Later, as Reich Finance Minister, he led the most ambitious tax reform in German history: higher income and inheritance taxes, a one-off wealth levy, measures of social justice to rebuild the nation’s finances. To nationalists, he was the “November criminal” who surrendered the army. To industrialists, the man who wanted to tax their fortunes. In short: a marked man.

The country reeled in shock—but not everyone mourned. In university towns, nationalist students celebrated in the streets: “Now thank God for this brave murder. Bury the arch-scoundrel; holy shall the murderer be to us, under the black-white-red flag.” An East Prussian paper wrote: “Erzberger… has received the reward he deserved as a traitor to the fatherland.” In Munich, a then-obscure agitator named Adolf Hitler seized the moment, railing against the dead man.

1922: “Slay that Walter Rathenau, the goddamned Jewish sow!”

"Even Rathenau, that Walther, / Will not reach old age, / Shoot down Walther Rathenau / The God-damned Jewish pig!" Verses from a song circulating among the Freikorps.

Walther Rathenau was many things: industrial heir, thinker, politician, liberal patriot. Son of Emil Rathenau, founder of AEG, he was born into wealth, educated in science and philosophy, and always aware that despite his success, in Germany he would forever be an outsider. He was a Jew.

In World War I, Rathenau helped organize Germany's war economy—first in raw materials, later in broader administrative roles. After the war, he turned his efforts to rebuilding: he helped found the German Democratic Party, pushed for industrial reform, and believed Germany must deal honestly with its obligations under Versailles, while negotiating its way back into respect and stability among nations.

In February 1922 he was appointed as Germany's Foreign Minister. This was too much for the Nationalists, who saw in him a traitor rather than a true German.4

Yet the decision proved smart: In April 1922, Rathenau represented Germany at the Genoa Conference, the first major economic and financial conference after the World War. There, he pulled off a surprising coup by concluding the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, breaking Germany's international isolation. The agreement, however, offended many: internationalists mistrusted the Soviets; nationalists saw betrayal.

Rathenau's Jewish identity made him doubly vulnerable. To his enemies on the right, he embodied everything they hated: Jewish, elite, cosmopolitan, liberal, willing to collaborate with socialists. Hate poems circulated in pamphlets. Public figures and fringe groups alike spread conspiracy theories: that he was secretly pushing Marxism, undermining Germany from within, or "selling out" its national honor.

On the morning of June 24, 1922, Rathenau was traveling in his car from his home in Grunewald to the Foreign Office in Berlin. Another vehicle passed him. Three men from Organisation Consul opened fire. Rathenau's car slowed; he tried to dodge into the road. More than a dozen bullets struck him. He died.

The murder of the leading democratic politician drove millions of people onto the streets throughout Germany. They demonstrated in support of the Weimar Republic and democracy. Hundreds of thousands lined the streets as Rathenau was carried to his grave in Berlin.

The republic's enemies hoped for riots on the fringes of the funeral procession, but that did not happen. Nevertheless, Rathenau's killing served as a warning shot to proponents of liberal democracy: an act of terror declaring that the Republic wasn't safe, even for its most accomplished citizens. In the extreme right narrative, however, this was simply another step in the right direction: eliminate the nation's enemies one by one and destroy liberal democracy.

In fact, over 350 political murders scarred Weimar between 1919 and 1923.

The courts revealed their bias: of 354 right-wing killers, most went free. Leftist attackers were punished with brutal severity. Political violence in Weimar Germany rapidly spread across Europe

1922: “President Elected by the Minorities, not by Poles”

Poland, 1922. Just four years after regaining independence, Poland was fragile—vulnerable not only to external threats but also to internal divisions. The "Battle of Warsaw" in 1920 had saved the nation from Bolshevik takeover, but deep fault lines around national identity, ethnicity, and religion were fracturing society.

One-third of the population consisted of ethnic minorities: Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans. While some Poles advocated for an inclusive, civic understanding of national identity, others demanded an ethnically pure nation. To these nationalists, minorities weren't fellow citizens but threats to Polish sovereignty.

Into this volatile environment stepped Gabriel Narutowicz—a respected civil engineer and technocrat known for his thoughtful approach. In early December 1922, following legislative elections, Poland's National Assembly elected him President. His victory hinged on crucial votes from ethnic minority blocs within the electoral assembly, a fact that immediately provoked the nationalist right's fury.

The right-wing press and nationalist parties swiftly launched a vicious hate campaign against the new president. They declared his election illegitimate, portraying it as a "Jewish invasion" of Poland and repeatedly branding him a "tool of the Jews." Nationalist parties, newspapers, and university students also accused him of being a Freemason, an atheist, and a puppet serving non-Polish interests.

December 16 1922, just five days after taking office, Narutowicz attended the opening of an art exhibition at Warsaw's Zachęta Gallery. Eligiusz Niewiadomski, a painter and radical nationalist, approached him and fired three shots at close range. The president died almost immediately.

At his trial, the killer made no attempt to deny his actions. Instead, he justified the assassination as a symbolic act—a strike against what he saw as a Poland no longer "owned" by ethnic Poles and a state corrupted by minorities. He framed his murder as part of a righteous fight for "Polishness."

The public reaction was deeply divided and toxic. There was horror, mourning, and condemnation. But there was also celebration. Right-wing nationalists hailed the assassin as a hero. Some newspapers praised the killing; students in certain towns cheered (if you have read this post until here, you might have noticed this pattern: university students praising terrorism and killing—does it not ring a bell?). The murder was reframed not as a heinous crime but as a corrective, even patriotic sacrifice.

The assassination undermined democratic legitimacy. A president elected with minority support was seen not as democratic but treasonous. Democracy became defined in ethnic, exclusionary terms. Trust vanished. Moderates feared for their safety. Those who incited hatred saw its political effectiveness. Poland became entrapped by its own contradictions.

1924: The Murder of Giacomo Matteotti

Italy’s descent into dictatorship was not the product of ballots, but of violence. From 1921, Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts spread terror—burning union offices, breaking strikes, beating and killing opponents. Their “March on Rome” in 1922 was less a revolution than a threat of civil war. King Victor Emmanuel III yielded, and Mussolini became prime minister. Political violence had proven its power.

The elections of April 1924 confirmed it. The Fascists claimed victory through intimidation and fraud. But one man dared to say so openly: Giacomo Matteotti, leader of the Unitary Socialist Party.

On May 30, he rose in the Chamber of Deputies and denounced the vote. With courage that silenced the room, he declared that no Italian had voted freely under the shadow of an armed militia. It was a direct challenge to the regime’s legitimacy—and his death sentence.

Eleven days later, on June 10, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist squad. His body was dumped in the countryside outside Rome. The shock was immediate. Fascist pins vanished from lapels overnight. Mussolini’s antechamber, once crowded, stood deserted. The regime seemed shaken.

The opposition took the moral high ground. They withdrew from parliament in protest, staging the so-called “Aventine secession,” invoking the plebeians of ancient Rome who had once walked out against patrician rule. But this proved a fatal error. They believed the King would act, dismiss Mussolini, and restore legality. Instead, Victor Emmanuel chose passivity. Fear of civil war—and of the Blackshirts—outweighed loyalty to democracy.

The judiciary followed the same path. The trial of the assassins was a farce. Most were acquitted or sentenced lightly, only to be amnestied and freed. The message was clear: Fascist violence would never meet real punishment.

Sensing weakness, Mussolini struck back.

On January 3, 1925, he delivered his infamous speech, taking “political, moral, and historical responsibility” for all that had happened.

It was not a confession but a coronation. He placed himself above the law, daring anyone to challenge him. No one did.

The Matteotti affair marked the real birth of the Fascist dictatorship. Opposition was silenced, non-Fascist ministers were cast out, the press was muzzled, and a secret police was created. Giacomo Matteotti was not only murdered—he was weaponized. His death revealed the emptiness of Italy’s democratic institutions, and gave Mussolini the chance to tighten his grip. One man silenced, one democracy lost.

1927-1934: Austria's Spiral into Violence

The First Austrian Republic was born from the ashes of empire, but it was already fractured at its core. On one side stood Red Vienna, the jewel of Social Democracy with its vast municipal housing projects, cultural vibrancy, and the Republikanischer Schutzbund as its defender. On the other side, the conservative countryside rallied behind the Heimwehr, a paramilitary movement that began as local militias but evolved into a right-wing, anti-Marxist, and increasingly fascist force. Austria wasn't a country at peace—it was a powder keg waiting to explode.

The spark came in Schattendorf, 1927. During a demonstration, the right-wing Heimwehr members opened fire, killing an elderly man and a child. When a Vienna jury later acquitted the shooters, public outrage erupted. On July 14, furious crowds flooded the capital. The Palace of Justice was torched, a symbol of the legal system's corruption going up in flames. The state's response was merciless: police and army units opened fire, killing 89 demonstrators and wounding 600.

The message was unmistakable. In Austria, the state no longer stood above the conflict—it had chosen sides. Right-wing killers walked free while left-wing workers were gunned down in the streets. The judiciary and police had abandoned their role as neutral arbiters. They had become weapons wielded by one camp against the other.

After 1927, violence was no longer a byproduct of politics—it became politics itself. The Heimwehr grew in power, openly rejecting democracy and embracing fascist models by 1930. By February 1934, confrontation was inevitable. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, allied with the Heimwehr, unleashed artillery against Vienna's workers' districts. Shells pounded the Karl-Marx-Hof, the pride of Red Vienna's social housing, as the Schutzbund fought desperately with outdated rifles. The rebellion was crushed. The Social Democratic Party was banned, 10,000 Austrians imprisoned, and Austrian democracy extinguished.

There was no need to assassinate heads of state, ministers or courageous parliamentary members: the massacred civilians were enough, and the state apparatus quickly aligned with the program of dismantling the young republic step by step on the path to dictatorship.

1933 - 1938 From Fire to Pogrom: When the State Burns Itself

Back to Germany, we enter the 1930s—when the spiral of political violence culminated in fire and pogroms.

On 27 February 1933, just weeks after Hitler became chancellor, flames engulfed the Reichstag. A young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught at the scene, quickly tried, and executed. Whether he acted alone or was framed remains debated. What mattered, however, was not who lit the fire—but how the Nazis exploited it.

The Reichstag Fire became the founding crime of the dictatorship. Hitler and Göring immediately declared it proof of a vast communist conspiracy. Within hours, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, permitting arbitrary arrests, and silencing the press. In a single stroke, democracy was gutted under the pretext of defending it from terror.

Five years later, in November 1938, another act of violence was seized upon—this time to target Jews. In Paris, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, desperate after his family's brutal expulsion from Germany, shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. His act was not a plot or an attempt to reshape politics—merely the desperate action of a persecuted refugee.

The Nazis weaponized this incident. Joseph Goebbels, master propagandist, stood before party loyalists and declared the murder proof of a Jewish conspiracy. His speech was less commentary than coded command. That night, stormtroopers and SS units unleashed Kristallnacht—the "Night of Broken Glass."

The toll was devastating: 7,500 shops destroyed, 1,400 synagogues burned, at least 96 Jews murdered, and 30,000 men sent to concentration camps. To complete the humiliation, the Jewish community itself was fined one billion marks for the damage inflicted upon it.

These events marked the transition from political violence to state terror. In the early 1920s, assassinations of figures like Luxemburg, Erzberger, and Rathenau were carried out by extremists against the state, testing its resilience. By the late 1930s, the state itself had become the extremist. It had captured the courts, police, and press. The regime could now burn parliament to destroy democracy and exploit a teenager's bullet to justify the first pogrom of the Holocaust.

This was the ultimate lesson of Weimar's collapse: once democratic institutions are hollowed out, even a single spark—or a single gunshot—can be weaponized into a national bloodbath.

Today, tomorrow: the US and Europe

The spiral of political violence may seem distant, but is it really?

Look closer: patterns emerge. Ideological manipulation. Double standards in judging violence based on perpetrators. The celebration of bloodshed—once in newspapers, now on social media and even in universities. Universities, colleges, campuses: this may represent the greatest failure of our liberal dream: that education would foster a reasoning, tolerant society.

From a European perspective, one aspect of America remains shocking: how a democracy has coexisted with political assassination for centuries, almost as an accepted element of the system.

• Four presidents killed in office: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), John F. Kennedy (1963).

• At least ten presidents attacked or nearly killed: Theodore Roosevelt (1912), Harry Truman (1950), Gerald Ford (twice in 1975), Ronald Reagan (1981), Donald Trump (2024).

• And countless activists silenced by bullets: Huey Long (1935), Medgar Evers (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King Jr. (1968), Robert F. Kennedy (1968), Viola Liuzzo (1965).

For decades, these tragedies never appeared to undermine the stability of U.S. democracy. But now, the list grows—with shorter intervals, higher frequency, and sharper polarisation:

• 2011 – Gabby Giffords: U.S. Democratic Congresswoman gravely wounded in Arizona mass shooting; six others killed.

• 2020 – Ashli Babbitt: Shot by Capitol Police during January 6th. Became a martyr for the far right; the event was an attempted coup.

• 2020 – Garrett Foster: Shot during a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin. A case of racialised and political violence.

• 2020 – Aaron Danielson / Michael Reinoehl: Danielson, a far-right supporter, shot in Portland; Reinoehl killed by police days later. Reciprocal, polarised killings.

• 2021 – Paul Pelosi: The husband of Nancy Pelosi, attacked at home by an intruder with political motives. An example of violence spilling into private life.

• 2022 – Jeff German: Investigative journalist stabbed to death by a former politician he had exposed.

• 2025 – Melissa Hortman & husband, members of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party: Shot dead at home; the killer carried a list of targeted politicians and activists. Explicitly political targeting.

• 2025 – Charlie Kirk

Nobody seems willing to stop this trend. Quite the opposite.

Scholar Arie Perliger warns that political assassinations come in waves. Each one legitimises the next. Each bullet suggests violence is now an acceptable political tool. "This will not end here," he cautions, adding that campuses—once safe havens for debate—have become battlegrounds where discussion yields to hostility. Without swift action from leaders across the spectrum, history may mark this as a critical turning point. His interview is worth reading in full:

But what about Germany? What about Europe? Are they still safe havens? Hardly. A brief look at the past decade reveals:

• Germany 2015: Henriette Reker stabbed on the eve of her mayoral election in Cologne, targeted by the extreme right for her refugee policy. She is now the Mayor of Köln.

• UK 2016: Jo Cox, British Labour MP, murdered by a far-right extremist.

• Germany 2019: Walter Lübcke, CDU politician, shot by a far-right extremist for defending refugees.

• UK 2021: David Amess, Conservative MP, stabbed during a constituency meeting by an ISIS sympathiser.

• Slovakia 2024: Robert Fico, Slovak PM, shot and critically wounded.

• Denmark 2024: Mette Frederiksen, Danish PM, attacked in Copenhagen.

Europe is not immune. The difference is that we too often miss the broader European perspective. We frame each incident as a "national tragedy"—rarely as part of a continental pattern. This is an illusion.

Europe's reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination reveals a troubling pattern. A wave of emotion swept through our media, treating the killing of an American activist with minimal European relevance as our own tragedy. Why such intensity? Perhaps because, at a fundamental level, this response serves a purpose: deepening polarisation and widening societal divisions.

No—we are not Weimar. Not yet. But the slide in that direction requires less than we might think. Stay vigilant. And learn—from the past, and from the present.

The attachment includes supplementary materials to this post: three book recommendations — sorry, only one in English — and an appendix containing quotes collected after Charlie Kirk's assassination. For our future memory.

When Bullets Speak Louder than Ballots

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Weimar Lessons for the Present Times. Political Assassinations and the Erosion of Democracy: 1920s Europe to 2025.

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Weimar Lessons for the Present Times: Political Assassinations and the Erosion of Democracy: 1920s Europe to 2025

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Yet not everyone joined in the festivities. The constitution, ratified in Bonn on 8 May 1949, was originally conceived as a temporary measure—an interim solution until the German people could eventually reunite as a single state.

Article 146 of the Grundgesetz, which remains in effect today, states: "This Basic Law, which applies to the entire German people following the achievement of German unity and freedom, shall cease to be valid on the day a constitution freely adopted by the German people comes into force."1

However, a new constitution never materialised.

In 1989–90, events outpaced politics. Free elections in the GDR favoured parties supporting immediate accession to West Germany. This accession became possible through Article 23 of the Western Constitution, which permitted new Länder to join—as had occurred with Saarland in 1957 when it chose Germany over France—thereby adopting the existing Basic Law.

This approach offered a quick solution to seize the historical moment, particularly since many nations—including Italy—were wary of a reunified Germany. On 23 August 1990, the first and only freely elected parliament of the GDR voted for accession under Article 23. Rather than a true Wiedervereinigung (reunification between equals), it resembled an Übernahme—a takeover. Some would characterise it as nearly an annexation.

Many still consider it the original sin: a provisional constitution, written in the West and then imposed on the East, later transformed into a definitive one.

From that point onward, the East German population felt excluded from political parties, businesses, universities, and the distribution of wealth. This exclusion became the foundation of a divide that still marks the country today.2

This division extends far beyond election polls or headlines about the AfD's rising popularity. It cannot be simplified to a graph. The divide runs deeper: unprocessed traumas, broken promises, and emerging fears. According to historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk3, freedom itself was a shock for many East Germans. Additionally, different cultural imprints remain influential: in the East, socialist education and ties with Soviet Russia have left lasting marks, while in the West, the cultural compass has remained Atlantic and American. This fundamental difference helps explain why, even today, attitudes toward Russia and Ukraine divide Germans more profoundly than outside observers might realize.

In less than a month, on 3 October, Germany will celebrate the 35th anniversary of reunification.

It might seem like a distant event, ready to fade into history amidst official speeches and ceremonial wreaths. But quite the opposite is true. Spirits are high, discussions heated, and symbols that should unite the nation are resurfacing—often only to reveal lingering divisions.

Since the 2006 World Cup, the German flag has become normalised in public life. Today, it's even wielded in an anti-AfD context as a symbol of 'clean' patriotism, distinguishing mainstream Germans from far-right supporters. Meanwhile in the East, you can still spot the old GDR flag with its hammer and sickle, compass and wheat ears—though it now represents folklore more than political conviction.

The anthem, however, tells a completely different story.

It's a thorny issue. On closer inspection, Germany has at least five anthems: the original from 1841 with three verses; the Nazi version reduced to a single verse and used as an ideological weapon; the "cleaned up" version adopted by the Federal Republic in the 1950s, consisting of just the least controversial verse; the GDR anthem, celebrating peace and friendship between peoples (provided they were socialist); and finally, the ghost that has haunted Germany since reunification—the anthem many would have preferred: a poem by Bertolt Brecht with simple words suitable for children yet perfect for adults.

The debate on the national anthem has resurfaced in Germany this past week. As usual, it emerges in the lead-up to every German anniversary.

“Numerous East Germans refrain from singing the national anthem for a variety of reasons.”

Bodo Ramelow said it in 2019 and has repeated it today. Until the end of 2024, he served as the beloved Minister-President of Thuringia and is now Vice-President of the Bundestag. A West German who chose to move to the East, with an Italian wife, Ramelow remains one of the most popular figures in Die Linke, Germany's left-wing party.

According to him, 'many East Germans, for various reasons, do not sing the national anthem'. He believes that an old proposal from East Berlin's civic movements is now more relevant than ever – to give reunified Germany a new anthem by reviving the Kinderhymne, or 'Children's Hymn', a poem set to music by Bertolt Brecht.

Just as six years ago, Ramelow has brought upon himself what in contemporary German parlance is called a "shitstorm." Critics have held nothing back: accusing him of overstepping his role as vice-president of the Bundestag, stirring up emotions, and applying the standard label of modern public discourse—'populist.' (And in Germany, as elsewhere, we now brand anyone we disagree with as a populist.)

But is his proposal truly so absurd?

The German anthem: a complex and controversial history.

Most national anthems emerged in the mid-19th century during the era of liberal revolutions, anti-imperial movements, and the so-called 'Spring of Nations'.

While often portrayed as a period of progress, this was in fact an ambiguous time. Every nation-building process contains the seeds of nationalism, and each nationalist movement harbours the potential for minority oppression. This fertile ground is where fascism eventually took root.

Nations are born in opposition to tyranny and imperial control. Yet they frequently transform into the very empires and tyrannies they once opposed. Their anthems travel with them, shifting in meaning as times change.

In 1841, on Helgoland, an island in the North Sea, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben penned what would become the German national anthem. A young liberal and romantic poet in exile, he opposed the feudal-minded German princes and dreamed of a free, united, democratic Germany.

Perched on a cliff, he composed "Das Lied der Deutschen" (The Song of the Germans). Though a poet and not a musician, he paired his lyrics with his favorite melody—the one Joseph Haydn had composed for Austrian Emperor Francis II.

This created a fascinating paradox: a German national hymn set to the music of an imperial, supranational anthem. Yet history is full of such contradictions, and Haydn's composition is undeniably beautiful.

The combination of lyrics and melody quickly gained popularity, partly because the poem was intended to be sung in taverns frequented by students and intellectuals. It celebrated not only Germany, but also life itself—and women.

First part

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles…

“Germany, Germany above all: above all in the world, when for protection and defence it remains united in brotherhood, from the Meuse to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt – Germany, Germany above all, above all in the world!”4

Questa è la parte che è rimasta nella memoria collettiva europea. Per pessimi motivi.

Second part

Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue, deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang…

“German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song may retain their ancient beauty throughout the world, inspiring us to noble deeds throughout our lives - German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song!”5

A hymn to the “Made-in-Germany”, more joyful than nationalistic: women, wine, music. Different from Johann Strauss II's waltz Wein, Weib und Gesang ('Wine, Women and Song'). But that was Austrian. A different lifestyle. (And, let's face it, better wine too).

Third part

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit…

“Unity, justice and freedom for the German fatherland! To this we must all aspire, fraternally with heart and hand! Unity, justice and freedom are the pledge of happiness - flourish in the splendour of this happiness, flourish, German fatherland!”6

Unity, justice and freedom—the pledge of happiness. A song that could have suited not just Germany, but also Italy, Poland and Greece. It captured the spirit of the times.

In 1922, the fragile yet luminous Weimar Republic adopted this song as its official anthem, including all three verses.

It embodied proud nationalism and the joy of living that people sought to reclaim after the Great War. Unity was essential in a Europe newly redesigned by the victors.

Weimar was both tragic and beautiful, remarkable for its art, creativity and social progress. Yet it ended disastrously. Even today, the word 'Weimar' evokes fear—an echo of collapse and a warning of history that might repeat itself.

The Nazis, who emerged from Munich's beer halls, truncated the song.

They removed references to women and wine, keeping only the first stanza: 'Deutschland über alles.' They transformed its meaning from 'Germany above all in our hearts' to 'Germany above all others'—a declaration of supremacy.

Haydn's melody, originally composed for an Austrian emperor, became the chilling soundtrack for SS parades. Repugnant. Consequently, that first verse has become toxic in German society—not officially prohibited, but entirely taboo.

When the Federal Republic was founded in 1949, the national symbols debate resurfaced.

The flag issue was resolved, but the anthem remained problematic. Attempts to create a new anthem failed. Konrad Adenauer, the post-war Chancellor, proposed a pragmatic solution: permanently remove the toxic first verse, discard the frivolous second verse about women, wine, and singing (inappropriate for the serious post-war climate), and retain only the third verse: 'Unity, justice and freedom'. This choice was perfect—democratic, non-threatening, and western in its values. It became the official anthem in 1950.

On the other side of the wall

The GDR seized this opportunity. While the West maintained what they considered an 'intoxicated' anthem—portraying them as continuing fascists—the East positioned itself as the only true anti-fascist state. Thus "Auferstanden aus Ruinen" (Risen from the Ruins) was born: three verses celebrating peace, reconstruction and youth.

First verses

Auferstanden aus Ruinen / und der Zukunft zugewandt…

"Risen from the ruins and facing the future, let us serve you for the good, Germany, united homeland. The old sufferings must be overcome, and we will overcome them together, because we must succeed in making the sun shine on Germany more brightly than ever before."7

"Risen from the ruins and facing the future..." This powerful and poetic rhetoric creates an admirable opening. It evokes the image of a Germany rising from the rubble and looking hopefully towards a united future.

Second verses

Alle Welt sehnt sich nach Frieden, reicht den Völkern eure Hand…

"May fortune and peace be granted to Germany, our homeland. The whole world longs for peace, reach out your hand to the peoples. When we unite in brotherhood, we defeat the enemy of the people. Let the light of peace shine, so that never again will a mother weep for her child."8

The GDR portrayed itself to the world as a 'state of peace'. The dove of peace was ubiquitous and remains visible today on many buildings in East Berlin. Behind this façade, however, lay the propaganda machinery of the Soviet bloc and, later, the GDR's role as an arms supplier to various regions of what we now call the 'Global South'. What kind of pacifism was this really?

Third verses

Laßt uns pflügen, laßt uns bauen, lernt und schafft wie nie zuvor…

“Plough, build, learn and create as never before, and trusting in your own strength, a free generation will arise. German youth, the best aspiration of our people united in you, you will become the new life of Germany. And the sun will shine on Germany more beautifully than ever before.”9

"Arbeiter, Bauern, und Intelligenz": workers, farmers, doctors, engineers... This was the fundamental concept of the GDR, where everyone would contribute with equal dignity to the reconstruction of the country. Young people would play a key role in this process—it was their task to make the sun shine on socialist Germany.

And then there is Brecht

Poet, playwright, free spirit. Brecht lives in the East out of conviction, not blind adherence. For him, neither the Western nor Eastern hymns work—too much toxicity in one, excessive rhetoric in the other.

So he creates an alternative: the Kinderhymne, the Children's Anthem.

Simple words crafted for children—because if children understand you, everyone does. The brilliance: it can be sung to Haydn's original melody. It begins like this:

Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe / Leidenschaft nicht noch Verstand / Daß ein gutes Deutschland blühe / Wie ein andres gutes Land

"Spar neither grace nor effort, neither passion nor intellect, so that a good Germany may flourish, like any other good country."

"Grace"? In the first version of the text, Brecht wrote "Arbeit" (work). But he reconsidered: the effort of rebuilding a country—a good country—needed to be accompanied by grace. (Re)building a nation shouldn't be merely hard work and effort, but requires lightness of heart. With this lightness, beauty and goodness can flourish. And above all else, the new Germany must be good.

Daß die Völker nicht erbleichen / Wie vor einer Räuberin / Sondern ihre Hände reichen / Uns wie andern Völkern hin.

"May the peoples not turn pale as before a robber, but reach out their hands to us as they do to other peoples."

In Brecht's vision of Germany, other nations need no longer live in fear: this Germany is not an abstract concept but a people—us, 'uns', 'wir'—the Germany we collectively create. To this reimagined Germany, other nations, no longer intimidated, will extend their hands in friendship.

Und nicht über und nicht unter / Andern Völkern wolln wir sein / Von der See bis zu den Alpen / Von der Oder bis zum Rhein.

"And we want to be neither above nor below other peoples, from the sea to the Alps, from the Oder to the Rhine."

Brecht rejects "Deutschland über alles" in favor of a more equal vision: neither above nor below other nations, but alongside them. He calls for a united Germany within boundaries that would only be officially recognized in 1990—from the Rhine to the Oder, from the sea to the Alps.

Und weil wir dies Land verbessern / Lieben und beschirmen wir's / Und das liebste mag's uns scheinen / So wie andern Völkern ihrs.

"And because we improve this country, we love and protect it. It may seem dearest to us, just as other peoples' countries seem dearest to them."

Democratic patriotism distilled into four lines and twenty words: we—who are Germany—improve this country. It may never be perfect, but it can be improved. Because we make it better, we can love it—and we must protect it. Just as one loves and protects what one cherishes, as other peoples have both the right and duty to do with their own countries.

Brecht's Germans: a people among peoples who love, defend and, above all, improve their country. When JFK urged, "Ask yourself what you can do for your country," he embodied American democratic patriotism—an America worthy of love. Similarly, Brecht's vision presents a Germany that can be loved. It portrays a people who, through effort and grace, help their country flourish, as any good nation should.

Today, tomorrow, who knows?

How could anyone say no to such an anthem? Yet things turned out differently. In 1991, the third verse of West Germany's anthem became the anthem of reunified Germany. Once again, the East had to adapt.

Today, the AfD often sings the first verse at its rallies—the one that goes "..über alles." They can do this legally. It's toxic, but not prohibited.

But why not counter this with the Kinderhymne? Why not consider a second anthem alongside the first—complementary, bringing together the two Germanys in their best versions?

Why not have two anthems, similar to the national football team's shirts—one for home games, one for away games when a different colour is needed? Why choose exclusion when inclusion is possible?

We glimpsed this possibility last year during the 75th anniversary celebrations of the Constitution. Katharina Thalbach—a small-size giant of theatre and television who has traversed both Germanys with grace and tenacity—performed it to Haydn's notes. Amazing.

Plus…

Speaking of anniversaries: 9 November

Speaking of anthems: the European anthem

On the subject of “The rhetoric of peace”: Was the GDR a pacifist state?

Bertolt Brecht rulez!

The Bundesliga has started again, but so has the theatre season! At the Berliner Ensemble – Brecht's theatre – home to the legendary "Dreigroschenoper" (The Threepenny Opera) – you'll find everything we could wish for as die-hard fans and devotees of Bertolt Brecht:

Duchcov is less than ninety kilometres from Dresden and just under a hundred from Prague. In both cases, it's about an hour's drive.

One hundred kilometres further east lies the region of spa towns that brought fame to this land at the turn of the century, when nobles, wealthy individuals and intellectuals flocked there for their holidays.

Duchcov is close to everything. Yet it remains remote.

The village is not located on a main road. It is not a transit point. You have to want to go there. But why would anyone want to go there? The reason lies in the castle. Partly renovated, partly decaying.

The reason, to be precise, lies in certain rooms of that castle. These are the apartments where a Venetian gentleman spent the last thirteen years of his life. Rooms where, alone and misunderstood, he decided to tell his story. He wrote extensively—without shame, with meticulous precision, bordering on the obsessive.

From his pen flowed 1800 pages, written on both sides: 3600 faces of paper. Not merely a book, but an entire universe. This creative wellspring would inspire countless other works—books, films, musicals, essays, television comedies, theatrical dramas. Even poetry.

That gentleman was Giacomo Casanova. Born in Venice on 2 April 1725, three hundred years ago. He died in Duchcov—which was then called Dux—on 4 June 1798.

Today I want to tell you about him. About his final years. And about how not only the midday, but also the twilight of a life can inspire great literature, theatre and poetry. Indeed, perhaps... Without that "Central European twilight," the myth of Casanova might never have been born.

Follow me.

The Tercentenary of Giacomo Casanova.

Since April 2025, Casanova's tercentenary has been commemorated worldwide. Publications have featured somewhat original "third pages," reprints of earlier works, and several new scholarly essays. Academic institutions have also marked the occasion—naturally in Venice, but with surprising enthusiasm in Germany as well. The University of Heidelberg organised a remarkable series of conference events that were open to the public, enriched with musical performances, and ran for three months from April through late July.

Remembered, yes. But celebrated? I mean with fanfares, popular events, music, cinema and festivities? Not really. And perhaps rightly so.

But what is there truly to celebrate?

Casanova portrayed himself as a philosopher, but he was no Kant. And Kant, last year, on his 300th anniversary, became even the subject of a diplomatic dispute between Germany and Russia. Russia, which seized Königsberg after the war and renamed it Kaliningrad, attempted to claim Kant's philosophical legacy as well—while distorting it, of course.

Casanova wrote a lot. Even a translation of the Iliad in Italian. But he would never have won a Nobel Prize for Literature, had the prize existed then. Unlike Thomas Mann, whose 150th birthday is being commemorated this year. In Germany, Mann has been celebrated throughout the year with great fanfare. This is because Mann was not only a literary genius but also an important political figure—the voice of a Germany that dared to stand against Hitler.

Casanova was also interested in sciences: mathematics, medicine, chemistry and commerce. But he remained a dilettante. Unlike his near contemporary Adam Smith. Or the Italian scientists Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani, born fifteen or twenty years after him.

What remains, then? What remains is what made him an icon. And what makes him ambiguous and problematic today. Worth remembering, yes. Worth celebrating, much less so.

Because to speak plainly, the 116 amorous adventures he recounts in his autobiography... Are they many? Are they few? It depends on one's perspective. Today we wouldn't call them adventures. But in many cases "crimes".

Casanova had sexual relations with girls of 11 and 12 years old, some of whom had been prostituted by their own parents. This behaviour appears with such frequency in his memoirs as to suggest paedophilia.

During his nine months in St Petersburg, Casanova adapted quite well to local customs. He purchased a thirteen-year-old girl as a "temporary wife," renamed her "Zaire," and used her both as a domestic servant and lover. In his memoirs, he claims he didn't treat her as a slave and portrays her as not only consenting but violently jealous. Of course, we have no way to know Zaire's true feelings. What we do know is that when Casanova was expelled from Russia—as many of his travels were actually escapes or expulsions—he simply sold her.

Rape accusations followed him from an early age. By twenty-four, he was already standing trial after being denounced by a mother. During the proceedings, Casanova claimed the mother had offered her daughter for sexual purposes in exchange for money. When the daughter refused, he beat her with a stick. He also admitted participating in a gang rape in Venice, making the unbelievable claim that the victim was "grateful" for the experience.

And then there's incest. Casanova fathered a daughter, Leonilda, with Donna Lucrezia Castelli. Years later, he had relations with the mother while the daughter was present. Later still, he had relations with Leonilda herself, supposedly "to do a favour" to her impotent husband.

France was one of the countries that expelled Casanova, charging him with sexually-motivated fraud. He had deceived the wealthy and eccentric Marquise d'Urfé, who was obsessed with the occult. Casanova convinced her that he could arrange her rebirth as his son through what he called "mystically enabled sperm."

Casanova was a true plague-spreader. A doctor thanked him for having procured fifty patients with syphilis.

He died at 73, after a life as a "rogue"—as he partly confessed himself—and according to tradition, concluded by declaring he was dying "as a Christian". But a rogue is not celebrated.

In fact, feminists who, with good reason, might want to deface signs and plaques bearing his name would struggle to find objects to target. While epitaphs exist, along with streets named after Casanova in unexpected places—Southern Italy's Castelnuovo di Napoli and Pomigliano d'Arco, or central Italy's Castelfidardo—there is notably no statue in Venice.

I whisper this, but in Istria, in Vrsar—halfway between Poreč and Rovinj—a statue actually exists. The location is quite remote, however, not conducive to feminist protest. Ironically, many female tourists pose for photographs literally in the arms of the statue.

Hotels have been named after Casanova, even in Duchcov. Brothels and gambling establishments also bear his name—a fitting tribute given his reputation. And in the digital world? Few invectives. Instead, we more often see clumsy attempts to reinvent him as a proto-feminist because he wrote that a woman's pleasure should come first.

Is that really enough to save him?

Perhaps time softens everything, including guilt. Maybe we don't know how much of what he recounts is actually true. Perhaps Casanova confessed to crimes he never committed. Or perhaps he knew that, then as now, the world tends to be more forgiving if you happen to be Italian.

Nevertheless, the final chapter has yet to be written. In Venice, at Palazzo Mocenigo, an exhibition presents him as a mythical figure through art, history and cinema. It runs until 2 November. Will it face protests? That remains uncertain.

And here's the point.

More than a man, Casanova has become a ghost. An image. A projection. A fetish that writers, musicians and directors can mould to their vision. How can one "cancel" someone who, born of flesh, has transformed into the very stuff of dreams? And this brings us back to Duchcov, in Bohemia.

Duchcov: Where the Legend Was Born

Duchcov: this is where the legend begins. The man was born in Venice and studied in Padua. Then came his life of travels, commerce, schemes, and diplomacy. Corfu, Constantinople, Calabria, Ancona, Rome, Paris, Prague, London, Berlin, St Petersburg, Warsaw, Madrid, Florence—even Trieste.

But the legend would never have existed without the last thirteen years.

As a librarian—a profession that Casanova took seriously, though it was primarily an act of generosity from Count Joseph Karl Emanuel von Waldstein. The Count offered Casanova refuge there after he had been expelled from Venice yet again.

Casanova arrived in Duchcov at the age of sixty in 1785.

These were not easy years. Despite having traveled extensively throughout his life, Casanova spoke only French, Italian, and Venetian. He never bothered to learn German, let alone Czech. This language barrier didn't stop him from quarrelling with half the castle staff. The Venetian, as we know, doesn't simply speak—he shouts. And the colourful insults from the lagoon require no translation.

The Waldstein heirs in Vienna still remember him: grumpy, irascible, cantankerous. A man who wasn't aging gracefully. He complained about everything—the coffee, the milk, a plate of macaroni. Despite his humble beginnings, he became racist and classist, calling the servants "Bohemian beasts." They, in their own way, took revenge. One servant even smeared his portrait with faeces before hanging it in a castle room. To the villagers, he was merely an annoying old man who courted young girls and told nonsensical stories.

More illusion than substance: his relationships were now limited to correspondence only.

In his letters, he revealed a persona quite different from the irascible castle-dweller or cynical seducer: a sweet, tender, almost moving side emerged. He maintained correspondence with Francesca Buschini, his former Venetian tenant, sending her money and paying her rent. From 1786, he exchanged letters with Henriette Schuckmann, who confided her loneliness to him while he encouraged her to live fully and engage with society—functioning as a kind of mental coach avant la lettre. Shortly before his death in 1797, he developed a regular correspondence with twenty-two-year-old Cecille von Roggendorff, the daughter of a friend, whom Casanova treated with fatherly affection.

Apart from occasional journeys—to Dresden, Weimar, Vienna, Karlsbad, Prague, and even Berlin and Potsdam—he dedicated his remaining time to writing. He lacked companions of equal intellectual standing, or at least those who could converse with him in French. What other options did he have?

He returned to his notes. Entire sacks of notes, because the man meticulously documented everything. And between 1789 and 1790, he began to write.

For himself? To gain recognition from the world? Or simply to combat loneliness? He wrote for up to thirteen hours daily. The first draft took him two or three years, and he continued to revise it until the very end.

The manuscript, written in French, chronicled his life up to 1774. From that rummaging through bags of notes and the memories of an ailing man emerged those 1800 double pages written in French. After his death, his notes were scattered—perhaps burnt by Casanova himself. The memoirs nearly suffered the same fate, as Casanova continued to fear the Inquisition.

Meanwhile, outside Dux, the world was changing. The French Revolution erupted in 1789. The Republic of Venice collapsed in 1797. His world was crumbling around him. "Jacobin" became the worst insult he could utter. Could he possibly survive the end of that world?

On 4 June 1798, he fell asleep forever. They say it happened in a chair, still visible today in the castle apartments. He was engaged in the final revision of his memoirs.

And thus the myth was born.

His possessions and manuscripts passed to Carlo Angiolini, an acquired nephew who lived in Dresden. Upon Carlo's death in 1808, his daughter Camilla sold the manuscript of the Histoire de ma vie to the publisher Brockhaus of Leipzig.

Brockhaus: a name that also became legendary. The inventor of the modern multi-volume encyclopaedia. A name that still symbolizes "knowledge" today across Germany and throughout Central Europe, reaching as far as Russia.

In 1821, Brockhaus acquired the manuscript. He had the text "cleaned up"—that is, censored—and in 1822 the first volume was published in German. The last one appeared in 1828. The work was too extensive for a single tome. But that wasn't enough: after a pirated French version emerged, Brockhaus decided to publish an official French edition between 1826 and 1838. This version also suffered from censorship and manipulations. In that edition, Casanova was even portrayed as a supposed admirer of the Jacobins. In 1834, the book was placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.

The original manuscript survived the 1943 bombings in a bunker in Leipzig, then was moved to Wiesbaden, in a safe at Deutsche Bank.

In 2010, the Bibliothèque nationale de France acquired it for over 7 million euros—their most expensive acquisition ever. Today it is digitised and available online. The first complete and authentic edition only appeared in 1960, through a Franco-German collaboration.

The original manuscript: why in France and not in Italy?

Not just because of the language. France transformed Casanova into an icon of freedom, a libertine among libertines. Italy—first monarchical, then republican—could not do so: the Vatican was too imposing, and the Index of Forbidden Books too cumbersome.

How many have read the entire work? Few. But talented readers have.

And it is to them that we owe the wealth of works inspired by the Venetian. Federico Fellini, who made his monumental and controversial film in 1976, found those pages "as exciting as the yellow pages". And he defined the Venetian as a "fascist bastard". A matter of taste. I confess, I have never finished the two and a half hours of the film: twice I fell asleep after half an hour.

But the point is that everyone finds their own Casanova.

Mine is the Central European, twilight Casanova. A mirror of contradictions, psychological investigations, and modern sufferings. His sexuality is explosive yet restrained, always present yet tormented. I discovered him first in the works of Schnitzler, Zweig, and Márai1. Later, by chance, in a small TV film from the DDR2. And finally, in a surprising poetic one-act play by Marina Tsvetaeva.

I wish to dedicate the final part of this story to the literary, twilight Central European Casanova—the one portrayed by Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova: Twice Humiliated

Arthur Schnitzler. Physician. Playwright. Chronicler of Habsburg Vienna. Born in an empire, he died in 1931 in a small Austrian republic already drifting toward Austro-fascism. He was 56 when, in 1918, he published Casanova's Return to Venice (Casanovas Heimfahrt).

For him, 1918 was what 1797 was for Casanova: an irreversible fracture. For Casanova, it meant the end of the Republic of Venice; for Schnitzler, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. In both cases, a vital and glorious past dissolved, giving way to an uncertain, fragile, and decadent present.

In the story, Casanova is nearly the same age as Schnitzler. He finds himself in Mantua, awaiting a signal from Venice: a pardon, permission to return, the end of his exile. He's exhausted from traveling and financially depleted. He recognizes that he can no longer embody his former self—bold, desiring, desired. Repentant? Not quite. Instead, he attempts to frame his life story as that of someone who has lived more fully and richly than others.

"Women—women everywhere. For them he had abandoned everything at every moment; for the noble and the common; for the passionate and the cold; for virgins and whores. For a night of love in a new alcove, he had always sold all the honours of this world and the blessings of the other. Yet, he wondered, did he regret what he might otherwise have lost in life because of his eternal seeking and never—or always—finding, that earthly-unearthly passage from desire to pleasure and from pleasure to desire? No, he regretted nothing. He had lived like no other—and was he not still living in his own way today? There were still women everywhere on his path, even if they no longer went mad for him as they had in the past."

During this wait, he reunites with Olivo, an old friend. Olivo's wife, Amalia, once Casanova's lover, still harbors feelings for him and offers to rekindle their affair. But Casanova's attention is elsewhere. He fixates on Olivo's young niece, Marcolina. For him, seducing her becomes less about desire and more about duty to himself—a final test to prove he is still Casanova.

As Olivo's guest, he relives in miniature the social life he once led in great capitals: gambling, conversations, and occasional intrigue. Marcolina, however, remains cold toward him. When he discovers she already has a lover—the young officer Lorenzi—his pride crumbles. Casanova then devises a deception: buying Lorenzi's complicity, he disguises himself and enters Marcolina's darkened room. This becomes his last revenge.

The deception occurs just after Casanova has received the news he was waiting for: he can return to Venice, but under the humiliating condition of working as a police informer. His night with Marcolina thus becomes his final act of revenge, though achieved through trickery. Yet this victory transforms into humiliation when Casanova, rather than escaping under cover of darkness, falls asleep in Marcolina's bed. At dawn, as light reveals the truth, Marcolina discovers her actual bedmate. Standing at the foot of the bed, she doesn't cry out. She simply looks at him with disgust and contempt.

"She stood at the foot of the bed and observed Casanova with a look of unspeakable horror, which awakened him suddenly and completely. As if pleading, he instinctively stretched out his arms towards her. Marcolina's only response was to push him away with her left hand, while with her right she clutched her nightgown tightly against her chest.

Casanova raised himself halfway, supporting himself on the bed, and stared at her. He could not turn his gaze away from her, nor she from him. In his eyes there was anger and shame; in hers, shame and horror. Casanova realised how he must appear to Marcolina; he saw himself, as if in the air's mirror, just as he had seen himself the day before in the tower room's mirror: a yellow, wicked face furrowed with deep wrinkles, thin lips, sharp eyes—and now three times more ruined by the night's excesses, the morning's distressing dream, and the terrible awareness that came with awakening.

And what he read in Marcolina's eyes was not what he would have a thousand times preferred to read: thief, dissolute, scoundrel. Instead, he read only one word, which struck him more ignominiously than all other insults could have done—the word that was for him the most terrible of all, for it expressed the final verdict: old."

This represents the ultimate humiliation—a final, devastating verdict. Casanova flees. During his escape, Lorenzi challenges him to a duel. Ironically, Casanova emerges victorious, killing the young man with a shot to the chest. Once again a fugitive, he heads toward Venice to take up his new role as a spy. From there, in 1783, comes his final exile—the definitive one that will lead him, two years later, to Duchcov.

Casanova inspired Schnitzler, and Schnitzler's novella subsequently inspired others: in 1992, a French film adaptation was released starring Alain Delon as Casanova. More recently, in 2023, Italian Oscar-winner Gabriele Salvatores reimagined this story in a contemporary cinema setting, featuring Toni Servillo and Fabrizio Bentivoglio.

Stefan Zweig's Casanova: Poet of His Own Life, Free Even in Exile

In 1928 Stefan Zweig published Three Poets of Their Own Lives: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy ("Drei Dichter ihres Lebens: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoi"). An unusual triptych: what could Casanova have in common with Stendhal and Tolstoy?

According to Zweig, each of the three represents a different way of transforming one's life into literature. Tolstoy stands at the pinnacle: he brings his spiritual and moral journey to the page. Stendhal functions as the analyst of inner life, pioneering the field of self-psychology.

Casanova, however, represents life itself becoming a work of art. He neither reflects nor sublimates: he simply narrates. His greatness lies not in his writing, but in his living. Zweig puts it bluntly:

"And in all probability, his erotic Iliad will continue to find lasting appeal and passionate readers, while The Jerusalem Delivered and The Faithful Shepherd will have long since gathered dust on shelves, respected but unread historical artefacts. With a single masterful stroke, the cunning gambler has surpassed all Italian poets from Dante and Boccaccio onwards."

And further:

"Casanova reveals his genius not in how he describes and narrates his life, but in how he lived it. What others must invent, he experienced through his very breath; what others create with the mind, he shaped with his warm, voluptuous body... No poet of his time conceived as many variations and situations as Casanova actually lived, and no real biography sweeps through an entire century in such bold, dramatic curves."

Here then is the truth, both harsh and luminous: Casanova was neither a true philosopher nor a great writer. Rather, he was a "philosopher of superficiality." Yet, precisely in this lightness lies his modernity. Zweig both admires and envies him:

"No man can easily read Casanova's memoirs without intense envy... How meager our structured existence seems in such moments, sustained only through sacrifice, when compared to his!"

And even more strongly:

"No true man can—deny it not—read Casanova's memoirs without feeling like an amateur before the illustrious master of the art of living... Sometimes, no, a hundred times one would rather be him than Goethe, Michelangelo or Balzac."

Yet admiration intertwines with compassion. Casanova's life gradually fractures over time. Cities expel him. Wrinkles appear. Women begin to refuse him. In London, he suffers the ultimate humiliation—being deceived by a woman who extracts money without offering anything in return. Zweig quotes Casanova:

"What caused me the most displeasure was having to admit the onset of weariness... I no longer possessed that carefree confidence that youth and awareness of strength bestow."

Finally, the downward spiral: Casanova became a police informant, then grew into an old man secluded in Duchcov. Zweig portrays him in his final years as melancholic yet still clever enough to orchestrate one last trick meant for posterity:

"A strange museum piece, which the count gladly presents to his guests. An extinct crater, they think, a funny little man who slowly perishes from boredom. But once again the old trickster deceives the world. For while everyone already believes he is finished and merely a candidate for the cemetery and coffin, he reconstructs his life from memory once more and ventures cunningly into immortality."

His strength lies in memory. Behind the worn mask resides a mind still razor-sharp. And while writing—not for posterity, but for himself—he achieves the miracle. He writes with complete freedom, uninhibited. What many dismiss as merely an erotic encyclopaedia transforms—between adventures—into a portrait of society and a vanished era.

Zweig describes it as "a historical Baedeker"—a guide to his "world of yesterday." It's impossible not to draw parallels with Zweig himself.

In 1939, at sixty years old, Zweig found himself in exile like Casanova. Desperate over the loss of a world destroyed by wars and Nazism, he began to write The World of Yesterday. He committed suicide in Brazil in 1942. Though the book was finished, it remained unpublished at his death. Perhaps he sensed that, even if not as widely read as Casanova's memoirs, The World of Yesterday would become the twentieth century's most significant autobiography.

His book too is today "a historical Baedeker": it is still consulted to rediscover places, people, and fragments of the great lost Mitteleuropean world. Similarly, scholars increasingly read the Histoire de ma vie not for Casanova's amorous adventures, but for the backdrop of the era: his meetings with kings and empresses, portraits of societies he immersed himself in, and the politics he encountered.

Marina Tsvetaeva's Casanova: The Last Night

In May 1922, Marina Tsvetaeva left Moscow, leaving behind a post-revolutionary Russia exhausted by famine and civil war. She journeyed toward Berlin, facing a future of exile, poverty and displacement. Among her belongings was a theatrical trilogy, Phoenix. The final act of this work is an intense poetic drama: The End of Casanova (Финикс, Конец Казановы / Phoenix, Casanovas Ende). This text was published in Moscow while she was already embarking on her journey into the unknown.

For Tsvetaeva, Casanova becomes a metaphor for an era in decline—a symbol of regret, transience and irrevocable loss. Although Casanova died in 1798, Tsvetaeva deliberately shifts the action to New Year's Eve of 1799, precisely at the transition between two centuries.

A man alone before the fire, in the castle of Dux. Burning old love letters. Deciding to leave. To go into the woods, that night. Towards his own death.

As Casanova destroys his memories, a page enters the scene. But this is no ordinary page—it's Francesca, the maid disguised as a boy. She claims to be fifteen years old and has come to be with him, wanting to follow him on his journey. Casanova wavers between dream and reality, yet engages in an intense dialogue with her.

Francesca: "I came and wanted to be happy with you." • Casanova: "I am defeated. If you want to lie, do so." • Casanova observes: "The dream image is incredibly beautiful. Eyes black as night, red hair."

Is it dialogue, or seduction? And who is seducing whom? Francesca admires him, reassures him, contradicts him. "Whoever says you are old is stupid." And Casanova, for once, does not boast. He withdraws. He asks her to come closer. She is afraid. He reassures her: "I don't bite." How old is she? Fifteen, she replies. What's your name? Francesca. Casanova tells her something that until a few years before he would never have said to a fifteen-year-old:

"I could be your grandfather, if not your great-grandfather." • And then: "You arrived too late to the party... You, born too late, I have nothing left to offer you but my eyes. And my lips."

In truth, she confesses, she is only thirteen. They dine together and play blindman's buff. They talk about Venice, the city of his triumphs. He evokes the sparkling canals, women with red hair like queens, and fishermen's nets full of... perhaps pearls. Francesca listens enraptured, as if hearing a fairy tale. Casanova loses himself in his memories. Then comes the confession:

Casanova: "I love you, Francesca." • Francesca: "Me? Me. No, absurd. Me? No no no." • Casanova: "Yes, yes yes. ...You're only 13 years old." • Francesca: "But not forever." • Casanova: "And I'm already over seventy. Yet I have never, never so... Of a thousand traits I will carry only yours to the grave."

Is it love? Is it illusion? Is it a last, desperate reflection of life? Casanova restrains himself, offering only a kiss on the forehead—perhaps out of fear. Fear of her. Fear of himself. Francesca imagines her future: riches, precious fabrics, a handsome and proud husband. Yet she also dreams of abandoning everything if she can follow him. Casanova gently shatters her illusion:

"No, Time has passed. My hour is striking."

As she falls asleep on his knees, he speaks to the fading century. He recalls the carnivals, the nights, the fires. Six minutes to midnight. Casanova prepares to leave. First, he gives her a gift: the ring with Mercury, protector of deceivers, which he has always kept on his finger. Is it a sign of protection? Or perhaps a passing of the torch? Perhaps the new Casanova, in the century to come, will be her: Francesca.

Epilogue

Casanova is buried in Duchcov. Or perhaps not. No one knows for certain where he truly rests. He may lie in a secret grave, hidden to protect him from the enemies of Freemasonry. Or his remains might have been scattered when, in the 1930s, the ground around the chapel of Saint Barbara was disturbed and the tombs were merged into common graves.

All that remains of him is a plaque on the church façade. And, just in front of it, a small Hotel Casanova that honours the illustrious castle librarian—the artist of life who, undoubtedly, would have preferred a hotel rather than a tomb as his mausoleum.

Suggestions

Providing a bibliography here would be impractical given the vast selection of works that varies by language. In English, Andrei Codrescu's "Casanova in Bohemia" (2002) offers a detailed account of Casanova's final years. Among recent publications, I recommend "The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova" by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2022) — which thoroughly explores Casanova's "dark side" — and in German, "Die Feuerschrift — Giacomo Casanova und das Ende des alten Europa" by Lothar Müller (2025), which presents the widest perspective: Casanova as a witness to his era, navigating a period of transition filled with contradictions that he encounters, interprets, accepts and rejects throughout his journey.

What Merz failed to anticipate was how deeply this hastily made, uncoordinated decision—which he never discussed with his party colleagues—would divide not only his own CDU but also its sister party, the CSU.

Prominent figures spoke of a "serious political and strategic error by Germany". Others called for "full solidarity and support" that Israel deserves. Some were even more direct: standing with Israel means "providing military support to Israel." The party demanded an emergency conference call.

Before that call, Merz wrote an Argumentationspapier – a position paper (writing papers for almost everything is a typical German custom – one that I actually like). Once written down, Merz's reasoning irritated the party even further.

On one hand, he explained that the decision was largely symbolic: the temporary halt only affected small arms that might be used in Gaza—merely a tiny portion of German supplies. On the other hand, he acknowledged the actual motivation behind the decision: to prevent Israeli escalation from spilling over into German streets and squares. Then, in a TV interview, Merz insisted nothing fundamental had changed:

"The principles of German policy towards Israel remain unchanged. Nothing has changed in this regard. Nothing will change. We have a disagreement. It concerns Israel's military actions in Gaza. But a friendship can withstand that."

and

"Solidarity with Israel does not mean we consider every government decision good. We don't have to provide military support for everything."

So, was this all much ado about—almost—nothing?

Perhaps. If we were in another country. In one where words are cheap, where a tweet today can be forgotten tomorrow. But this is Germany.

In these three days, significant words have emerged from politicians and commentators—words many of them carrying historical weight. One word stands out. A term Chancellor Merz never once used, yet one that others in the CDU/CSU have brandished like a banner: "Staatsräson" — raison d'état.

Yes, that Staatsräson. The one Angela Merkel brought to the world stage in 2008, in her famous speech before the Israeli Knesset. She made it the defining term for what Israel’s existence and security mean to Germany: its very reason of state. Not just a political stance. Not a position. Not even a policy. But Identity.

On social media, the Union's Youth Organization sarcastically criticized Merz, recalling what he had said just weeks earlier when Israel struck Iranian military infrastructure:

“Reason of state checked off? A break with the principles of Union policy.” and “From today, Israel is doing the dirty work for us—just without German weapons.”1

So why the short circuit? Why, when the German debate over Israel and Gaza has already been sharper, more critical than many outside might expect, did a symbolic pause on a few insignificant weapons unleash the ghost of the Staatsräson?

To understand this, we need to step back to the very beginning of the post-war German–Israeli relationship.

There, we find that 1️⃣ Germany’s reason of state has always carried one word with it: weapons. And we find, too, that 2️⃣ what today feels like a moral obligation was born as something else: state interest. For Germany. And for Israel. Tracing that story, you realize something else. 3️⃣ There is no way for Germany to abandon this reason of state. Beyond interests, beyond morals, it has sunk deeper over the decades. It has become Identity. Like for the CDU/CSU youth.

Follow me on this journey.

Whitewashing and State Building

In 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany had existed for less than three years. It was still occupied by the Allies. Still being "re-educated." Across the Iron Curtain, another Germany had been founded in 1949: the GDR. Also occupied. And it would remain so until 1989. Almost at the same time, in 1948, Israel was born. Immediately at war. Surrounded by threats. Few outside observers would have bet on its survival.

The young Federal Republic had its own roadmap: to regain autonomy and return to the world stage as a “normal” state. But obstacles blocked this path to rehabilitation. Big ones. And they had to be cleared, one way or another.

Konrad Adenauer's approach was hyper-pragmatic.

The obstacle of building administrative capacity? Remove it by reintegrating officials with Nazi pasts. Truly non-Nazi officials were hard to find. Really hard.

In April 1951, the German Bundestag passed a remarkable law, the 131er Law, which all parties approved. It allowed public servants who hadn't been classified as main culprits or implicated persons during Allied denazification to return to work or apply for new administrative positions. This law effectively ended the denazification process, enabling the bureaucratic machine to quickly resume operations.

But clearing this obstacle made another one grow larger. The obstacle of guilt. How could the world trust, let alone embrace, a country that was so obviously tied to its Nazi past?

Adenauer saw the dilemma clearly. He had to solve both problems at once. He needed to draw a line under the past—manipulating it, if necessary—while at the same time giving the world proof that this was a “new Germany.”

This is where contacts between the two new states begin. Konrad Adenauer on one side. David Ben-Gurion on the other.

Both were driven by necessity. For Germany: the need for credibility and a door back to the international community. For Israel: something far more existential—the resources to build a state, and a future.

That necessity demanded compromise.
Even moral compromise.

As a condition for reparations talks, Ben-Gurion wanted Adenauer to recognize the collective guilt of the German people. For Adenauer, this was impossible. He himself had not been a Nazi. And he always insisted that most Germans, like him, had not been Nazis either—that they had, in fact, been victims of Nazism. A manipulation of the past, certainly. But perhaps a necessary one.

And so Adenauer looked for a middle formula. A declaration strong enough to satisfy Ben-Gurion’s demand, but vague enough to avoid branding all Germans as guilty. On September 27, 1951, he found the words. Standing before the Bundestag, Adenauer declared:

“The federal government and with it the great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that has been inflicted on the Jews in Germany during the time of National Socialism.”2

With those words, the path opened. Now they could begin to talk about reparations. The real negotiation could start: about money, resources... and soon after about weapons.

1952 — The Luxembourg Agreement: A Win-Win Deal That Redefined Germany and Israel

The negotiations were intense. Difficult. Surrounded by mistrust, accompanied by protests. Even the name of the agreement became a battlefield.

For the Germans, it was Wiedergutmachung — “reparations.” A word that implied forgiveness, forgetting, and moving on. For Israel, it was Heskem HaShilumim (הסכם השילומים)— a Hebrew term drawn from the Torah, meaning essentially a penal payment for stolen property. For Ben-Gurion, it had nothing to do with forgiveness. Nothing to do with forgetting. It was about recovering what was left of Jewish property, “so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well.”

Behind that statement, Ben-Gurion had a single goal: to build and consolidate a strong state of Israel—at any cost.

In 1948, Israel had been born into war. Its survival was far from guaranteed. The next war with its Arab neighbors was only a matter of time. Necessity, not reconciliation, drove Israel toward Bonn.

At the time of Israel's declaration of independence in May 1948, the total population of the region was around 806,000 people, comprising about 650,000 Jews and over 150,000 Arabs and others. After the war, Israel’s population exploded. By the end of 1949, some 340,000 Jewish refugees had arrived from displaced persons camps in Europe. Soon after, another 300,000 came from Arab countries — expelled, or fleeing persecution.

The economy could not cope. Israel was still primarily agricultural. Too little money. Too few jobs. Imports draining the treasury. Compared to West Germany, Israel was poor. Its people had less food, less money, fewer opportunities. Meanwhile, only a few years after Stunde Null, West Germany was already more prosperous than Israel.

The Luxembourg Agreement built on that. It was a development program, dressed as reparations. Foundational for Israel. Beneficial for Germany.

The deal: 3.5 billion Deutsche Mark in payments, goods, and services — about 10.7 billion euros today. Money to help integrate destitute Jewish refugees, plus commitments to restitution. It might look modest next to the Marshall Plan. But at the time it represented 10% of the West German state budget. More than what Bonn spent on integrating eight million German expellees from Eastern Europe coming to West Germany (other six millions went to the GDR).3

And it was smart economics. Roughly 80% of the reparations took the form of investment goods, all produced in Germany, then shipped to Israel.

Machines for industry, tools for factories, locomotives, pumps, road-building equipment, sugar refineries. Steel, iron, raw materials. And, above all, ships. In just a few years, West Germany delivered sixty vessels to Israel. They brought machines and goods to Haifa, then carried Israel’s first exports back to Europe. Shipbuilding created jobs in West Germany. It also gave Israel the backbone of its economy.

The German deliveries were an investment in Israel’s industry, and at the same time a boost to the German Wirtschaftswunder. Bonn secured a foothold in a new market. To this day, Germany is still Israel’s third-largest supplier of imports, after China and the US.

Commercially, it looked like a classic win-win. Politically, it was explosive.

Only 11% of Germans supported the agreement. Most still saw themselves as victims, not perpetrators. Many were still suffering from the war’s aftermath. In parliament, Adenauer’s own ranks wavered. A third of deputies of CDU/CSU and the FDP abstained. The SPD voted solidly in favor. The small West German Communist Party voted against.

Opponents often justified their stance by citing the Arab states.

They feared the deal would push Egypt and others closer to the Soviet Union. They also leaned on an older argument: the supposed “special German relationship” with the Arab world. That relationship was a legacy of Nazi-era alliances — many politicians carried those sympathies into Bonn’s postwar parliament.

The Arab response was loud.

The first voice came from Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. A wartime guest of Hitler in Berlin, he had been a champion of Nazi ideology in the Arab world. In a letter protesting the agreement, he denied the Holocaust and accused Jews of deceiving the Germans. The letter was ignored. But the Arab League also played the old card of “friendship with Germany before the war,” hoping to sway those in Bonn still unwilling to face the past.

And in Israel? The opposition was fierce.

For many, the Luxembourg Agreement was a pact with the devil. Protesters stormed the Knesset. Right-wing leader Menachem Begin led the charge. For him and his followers, the deal was a betrayal. A gruesome sell-out of the victims. And they were right about one thing: most survivors would see little or nothing of the reparations. Individual compensation was limited mainly to German Jewish citizens. The vast majority of Holocaust survivors received nothing.4

Yet, the agreement was ratified. Desperately needed — and it worked. For Israel, it brought survival and development. For Germany, it brought legitimacy and markets.

And in its shadow, another bond quietly began to grow — the one not written in Luxembourg, but forged later in secret. The bond of weapons.

The Genesis of the Military Alliance: When Necessity Fostered Partnership

Arab states protested the Luxembourg Agreement because they believed it compromised Germany's neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Germany maintained an official position of neutrality, it was widely understood that the German investments were specifically designed to strengthen Israel.

Here's what most people don't know. Military relations between Germany and Israel began surprisingly early.

Even before Israel’s first war in 1948, contacts existed. The Haganah—the Jewish underground army—held talks with German military representatives. During the war itself, Israel bought Messerschmitt planes and machine guns, designed with German expertise, from Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia.5

By 1951, Israel even ran a defense purchasing mission in West Germany.

Everyone understood that the preparation of the Luxembourg Agreement was not only about food, factories, and ships. It was also about weapons. But why? Konrad Adenauer -ahead of his time- recognized that a militarily strong Israel, tied to the West, would be a reliable ally in the Middle East. German industry, for its part, welcomed the business.

Between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967, Germany was way more important for Israel’s security than the United States.

Contrary to what many believe, America supplied Israel with almost no defensive weapons before 1967. It was with German help that Israel became a regional power. Only after that did the U.S. step in as protector.

Germany proved its crucial role in the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Four years earlier, Egypt’s “Free Officers” had seized power, with Gamal Abdel Nasser at the helm. Determined to push out the old empires, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956. He also turned to the Soviet Union for support.

Britain, France, and Israel reacted with a secret plan: a joint attack on Egypt.

It backfired. The Americans, left in the dark, were furious. For Israel, the misstep was costly. What little willingness for peace still existed in the Arab world vanished. Worse, the U.S. temporarily froze weapons deliveries.

This vacuum was filled by Germany.

The first substantial German delivery: two patrol boats for the Israeli Navy. That was only the beginning. By December 1957, the cooperation had become operational—though still secret. At the same time, David Ben-Gurion began a public reframing of Germany. In speeches, he started speaking about a “new Germany.” And in 1959, in front of the Knesset, he said plainly: “If we regard Germany as Satan, then we will not get any weapons.”

So the flow began. Light weapons. Ammunition. Patrol boats. Training. Even helicopters. By 1958, Israel was strong enough to sell arms of its own. Germany ordered mortars, grenades, and no fewer than 50,000 Uzi submachine guns. Were Uzis the best? Not really. But adopting them was a symbolic gesture. President Trump would label it as “fantastic PR”.

The personal relationships mattered too. In December 1957, Shimon Peres, then Deputy Minister of Defense, secretly visited Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauß at his private residence in Bavaria. There were no diplomatic ties yet between the two countries. Everything happened under the table. But Peres remembered:

“The quality (of weapons) was excellent and the quantity was considerable, especially compared to what we were used to…”

Here lies the paradox: while Germany armed Israel, it still refused to recognize it diplomatically.

Why? Because Bonn feared the Arab states might then recognize East Germany in retaliation. This was the so-called “Hallstein Doctrine”: keep the Arabs onside, even if it meant keeping Israel at arm’s length. For Israel, that was an insult. So it demanded compensation. And the compensation was… more weapons.

The secret partnership finally surfaced—just a little—in March 1960, when Adenauer and Ben-Gurion met at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

The timing was delicate. In Germany, a wave of anti-Semitic attacks had desecrated cemeteries and synagogues. Abroad, West Germany’s reputation was fragile. Adenauer needed goodwill. Ben-Gurion gave him a chance.

“No reparations can be made for the lives of six million Jews,” he said. “But something can be done to mitigate the terrible damage that was done.”

The two men struck a new bargain. Adenauer promised more weapons, more credit—millions of dollars, over decades. The German public never heard of it until 1997.

Then came May 1960. Adolf Eichmann, the architect of deportations, was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina.

His trial in Jerusalem electrified the world. For Adenauer, it was a nightmare. He feared a trial that painted “the Germans” as murderers, undoing years of careful diplomacy. So he asked Ben-Gurion for help. And Ben-Gurion complied. He advised the prosecutor to focus blame on Hitler and the Nazi regime—not on the German people as a whole. He even revised the opening speech himself.

After Eichmann’s execution in 1962, Adenauer kept his word. Arms flowed in bulk: anti-aircraft guns, helicopters, transport aircraft, missiles, ambulances, six Jaguar patrol boats, and more.

The code name for that deal: "Operation Business Friend." But: did this "business friendship" include support for Israel's atomic project?

In several Israeli and German government files, so the historians, there's talk of funding a "textile factory" or a "nuclear desalination plant" in the desert. A desalination plant in the desert was never built. And "textile factory" is a known cover name for the reactor facility in Dimona.

Meanwhile, a scandal brewed: former-Nazi scientists were found building rockets for Nasser in Egypt. Rockets that Israelis assumed were meant to hit them. The revelation fueled domestic anger at Ben-Gurion’s pro-German policy—and helped bring down his government.

Still, the facts were clear. By the early 1960s, Germany was Israel’s lifeline. Economic. Diplomatic. And military.

A quiet Changing of the Guard: The Role of the USA 1962–1967

In 1962, Israel asked Washington for tanks. The Americans said no. Two years later, again, a refusal. But this time, the U.S. suggested a workaround: a triangular deal with West Germany. Bonn would deliver tanks from its own stock. Washington would pick up the tab. When news of the agreement leaked, Arab capitals reacted with fury.

By early 1965, Washington stepped in directly.

America would now deliver the tanks, and Bonn would foot the bill. This marked a decisive shift. From that moment, the United States began its transition to become Israel's main protector. Germany was quietly downgraded from Israel's closest ally to its "second-best friend."

This new hierarchy allowed Bonn some breathing room. Germany could tell Arab leaders that German arms deliveries were over. Well… more or less.

And in May 1965, the Federal Republic and Israel finally exchanged ambassadors.

The “second-best friend” still mattered. Two years later, during the 1967 Six-Day War, German tanks rolled across Sinai.

On June 12, just days after the ceasefire, Germany’s first ambassador to Israel, Rolf Pauls—a former Wehrmacht officer with an Iron Cross and little sympathy for Jews—sent a cable to Foreign Minister Willy Brandt. His message: “The modernized M48s we supplied proved outstandingly effective.” The war told the story in hardware. French Mirage jets destroyed Egypt’s air force. German tanks carried Israel across the desert.

Back in West Germany, the 1967 war split public opinion.

Magazines like Der Spiegel lionized Israel’s defense minister Moshe Dayan: “VICTORY! Dayan – The Rommel of Israel.” A jarring headline. But in the early 1960s, something new had taken hold: former antisemites morphing into passionate philosemites. News images of fit, blond, blue-eyed Israeli soldiers replaced old stereotypes. Germans could suddenly identify with them. And since many still clung to the myth of a “clean” Wehrmacht, the comparison with Rommel didn’t feel so strange.

And the clincher: they were winning with German weapons! As Spiegel’s Rudolf Augstein wrote proudly:

“A prerequisite for the lightning victory was a powerful tank force. The weapons for this force had been supplied by the Federal Republic two years earlier.”

Meanwhile, the New Left saw things differently. For them, Palestine became the cause to fight for. It was rebellion against the conservative CDU/CSU—and, in part, the work of East German intelligence, eager to stir unrest in the West.

Bonn tried to calm the storm with money. In September 1967, the cabinet approved 50 million Deutsche Marks in “special aid” for Palestinian refugees. The gesture was meant to show sympathy, soften Arab anger, and pave the way for restoring ties.

But there was a red line. The aid must not be read as Germany taking on a “special responsibility” for the Palestinian question. Humanitarian yes, political no.

Normalise! Normalise?

The 1970s. A new decade. And a new kind of power. Oil replaced coal as the most important energy source in Western Europe. The Arab countries, empowered after nationalizing production, discovered the leverage they held inside the OPEC cartel.

In this context, “normalizing” relations with Israel—and showing sympathy for the Palestinian cause—were not only diplomatic gestures. They were also energy politics.

And the man in charge of shaping this balance was Willy Brandt. He became Chancellor in 1969. His antifascist past gave him credibility to adopt a more nuanced approach than his predecessors. In 1971 he laid out his view:

“Israel, Brandt said, was a grand attempt to give a secure home to a people who had been homeless for too long. But, he added, its birth came at a price—new sacrifices, new suffering, especially for the Palestinian Arabs. And that misery, he insisted, could not be kept hidden” —and— “The roots of this tragedy lay in Europe, not the Middle East.”

But normalization was easier said than done. Because then came Munich.

The Olympic Games of 1972—the first in Germany since the infamous Nazi Games of 1936—were meant to present a new, peaceful image of the country. Security was kept deliberately light. And then, on September 5, it shattered.

Eight members of the Palestinian group “Black September” stormed the Olympic village. Two Israeli athletes were killed immediately. Nine more were taken hostage. The rescue operation was a disaster. By the end, all nine hostages were dead, along with a German policeman and five of the attackers.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict had arrived on German soil. In the most brutal way.

Germany now faced a dilemma. Three of the terrorists survived and were in German custody. But what to do with them? A trial would anger the Arab world. A release would outrage Israel. Bonn wanted no part in becoming referee of this conflict. And so, when another Palestinian group hijacked a Lufthansa jet in October to demand the release of the three prisoners, Germany gave in. The attackers were flown to Libya, where they received a hero’s welcome.

For Israel, it was a betrayal.

Golda Meir was furious. Willy Brandt, wounded, shot back: do not compare my Germany with Nazi Germany! But the reality was: in the new Federal Republic, Jews were still not safe.

Only months later, in June 1973, Brandt became the first sitting German Chancellor to visit Israel.

Facing him was Golda Meir—social democrat like him, but skeptical of his Ostpolitik. Still, she wanted something from Brandt: his channel to Moscow. For Israel, Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was a crucial matter. Economics mattered too. With France tilting toward the Arab world after 1967, Germany became Israel’s key partner in Europe.

Meir even asked Brandt to mediate with Egypt. Israel, she said, was willing to give up much of the Sinai captured in 1967. Not everything, not back to the 1948 lines. But still—a huge concession. Nothing came of it. A lost chance. Four months later, war broke out again: the Yom Kippur War.

The Yom Kippur War of 1973 and its aftermath

October 1973. Syria stormed the Golan Heights. Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and push into Sinai, then under Israeli control. For a few days, Israel teeters on the edge of disaster. Without U.S. military aid, flown in by airlift and shipped by sea, survival would have been doubtful.

Militarily, Egypt and Syria were defeated.
Politically, they claimed victory.

Israel paid a heavy price in lives and security. And yet — paradoxically — the war opened the door to peace. Six years later, Anwar Sadat signed a treaty with Israel. The war had given him just enough credibility at home to take the unpopular step. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt ended the state of war and moved closer to Washington. Israel’s southern flank was secured.

And Germany?

In 1973, more than 70 percent of its oil came from Arab countries. It could not afford to act as Israel’s protector. Here, Brandt’s cautious normalization paid off. While Saudi Arabia punished the U.S. and the Netherlands with an oil embargo, Germany was spared.

Beneath the surface, however, military ties between Israel and Germany remained special.

The two militaries worked together on weapons research and development. After the war, Israel captured Soviet T-62 tanks. It handed some of them to Germany. The Leopard 2 tank was designed with the T-62 in mind, armed with a new gun that NATO had lacked. Israeli engineers, in turn, looked to the Leopard when designing their Merkava-3.

And then came a secret joint project: CERBERUS. New electronic warfare systems that could blind enemy radar and anti-aircraft missiles. Germany poured in more than two billion Deutschmarks, off the books. The technology later appeared in both Israeli and European Tornado jets.

This invisible foundation of cooperation survived every diplomatic crisis. It still does.

The oil states had discovered their leverage, and with it, Europe discovered the "Palestinian question." In 1979, Willy Brandt met Yasser Arafat in Vienna alongside Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky — a Social-Democrat, Jewish, and anti-Zionist leader. While Brandt officially attended as a private citizen, the meeting unofficially represented a diplomatic victory for the PLO.

The Eighties: The Failure of Normalisation and the Seeds of German Memory Culture

From the 1980s onwards, the Germany–Israel relationship became inseparable from Germany’s own debate on memory.

This debate could no longer be controlled from above. Not by those who tried to protect Germans from collective guilt — like Chancellor Kohl and the CDU. Not by those who staged symbolic reconciliations — like Kohl and Mitterrand holding hands in Bitburg in 1985. And not even by President Weizsäcker, who in the same year reminded Germans that 1945 was a liberation, while insisting that most had still acted “in good faith.”

The ground was shifting. Books, studies, a new generation of historians — but also grassroots actions and new emotions. All this, amplified by the TV series Holocaust in 1979, demanded something more. To know. To discuss. To understand. West Germany in the 1980s lived in a permanent debate about its past. And a critical gaze at its present.

But politics was never far away.
And weapons did not disappear.

Until 1982, Germany was led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a cult figure of social democracy. Unlike Willy Brandt, however, he had neither been an anti-Nazi nor an exile. That made him uneasy ground for Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin — deeply hostile to Germany.

When Schmidt declared that German Middle East policy should “no longer be overshadowed by Auschwitz,” the shock was immediate. The plan to sell Leopard 2 tanks to Saudi Arabia made it worse. Begin lashed out, painting Schmidt as a Nazi who had never repented. German public opinion reacted sharply, too. In the end, the government dropped the sale. The matter was too explosive to handle.

The real explosion came with the Lebanon War of 1982 and the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila — carried out by Maronite militias with the silent consent of the Israeli army.

In Germany, history filtered everything. Comparisons rose fast. Who are the Nazis now? For many, Israel. But in Israel, too, history bent reality. For Begin, who had fought Germans, British and Palestinians, Yasser Arafat hiding in a Beirut bunker was nothing less than Hitler reborn in the last days of Berlin. There was little to normalise.

Germany and Israel were bound by an exceptional history that refused to become normal.

And still today we know — from how Putin hurls the word at his enemies — that “Nazi” is not just a word. It’s an emotional bomb. One that can motivate real bombs. But by the late 1980s, other things were moving. From Moscow came Mikhail Gorbachev, and with him, changes that would set Europe — and its history — in motion once again.

The Nineties: Germany’s Search for Identity, Middle East Hopes and Disappointments, and the Moral Evolution of Reason of State

German reunification was the most important geopolitical event since the Second World War. And it reshaped Europe’s economy. But more than that — it was a moral event.

Germans had to ask themselves: who are we now?

The answer couldn’t be: draw a line, forget the past. Too much had been buried, especially in the East. Excavation was necessary. Confrontation. Integration into values that could hold the nation together.

And so the 1990s became a decade of memory.

Memorials, literature, museums. Families began to tell stories of victims and perpetrators — sometimes the same family held both. My generation looked at Germany with a kind of awe: this deep soul-searching never happened in my own Italy.

Myths collapsed. The “clean Wehrmacht” story dissolved.

By 1995, the public knew the truth: ordinary soldiers had committed war crimes. Germany became a nation in permanent self-examination.

At the same time, unified Germany needed to show a new face to the world.

Reassure its neighbors. Reassure Israel. Remember: Andreotti, Thatcher, even Israel itself had worried aloud about reunification. And deep down, Germany feared itself too. One symbolic step came even before reunification. In April 1990, the DDR’s first and last freely elected parliament asked Jews worldwide, and Israel in particular, for forgiveness. For hypocrisy. For hostility. For persecution that had continued even after 1945. It was an extraordinary moment.

But identity needed more than apologies.
The very idea of Reason of State had to change.

Born with Machiavelli five centuries ago, Staatsräson meant cold survival. State interest above all. By the 1990s, Germany had to rewrite it. Infuse it with morality. With memory. A nearly impossible task.

In this process reality intruded quickly.
The Gulf War of 1991 exposed —again— contradictions.

Pursuing “normalisation”, Germany had made business with Arab states. Now Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He fired missiles at Israel. The SCUD rockets raining down on Tel Aviv bore German fingerprints. There was more: German companies had helped Iraq develop also chemical weapons, including the ones used against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

Germany was tied to weapons used against Jews and Curds.
The Holocaust rushed back to the center of German-Israeli relations.

Foreign Minister Genscher flew to Israel with a cheque — 255 million Deutsche Marks in humanitarian aid. Germany delivered Israel with Patriot missile systems. And Israel… handed Berlin a military wish list: tanks, air defense, submarines (see later). Weapons became, once again, a twisted form of “proof of love.”

Yet in the same decade, another current grew stronger: the belief that redemption could come not from arms, but from diplomacy.

The Oslo peace process lit that hope. Germany gave money, support, enthusiasm. The dream ended in blood. Rabin was assassinated in 1995. Netanyahu rose in 1996. Suicide bombings had already undermined trust. By 2000, at Camp David, Arafat walked away. The promise of Oslo collapsed.

Germany tried to keep it alive.
It opened one of the first European offices in Ramallah.

It shifted aid away from Israel, toward the Palestinian Authority. From 1996 to 2022, Germany gave over 1.5 billion euros in bilateral aid — not counting UN contributions. The results? Less economic development than hoped. More corruption.

With Israel, another foundation was being laid.

Scientific cooperation. Youth exchanges. Student scholarships. Encounters aimed at reconciliation. A young minister visited Israel in 1991 as youth policy coordinator, supporting initiatives that continue to this day: her name was Angela Merkel.

Despite all the failures, the 1990s gave Germany a new way to define itself. Yes, Auschwitz remained the backdrop. But identity now extended to the present, and the future. Relations with Israel could no longer be only about memory. They had to be about what came next.

The Submarines of Staatsräson: How Germany's "Reason of State" Traveled Underwater. Yesterday and today.

Angela Merkel’s memoir runs over 700 pages. Only sixteen of them deal with Israel. But those sixteen—especially the five and a half focusing only on Staatsräson—matter.

In 2008, addressing the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding, Merkel stood before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Her relationship with Netanyahu would later be characterized by their frequent refrain: "we agree to disagree." But in 2008, she was laying down a principle that would transcend personal diplomacy.

After acknowledging the cultural and technological exchanges Germany had fostered since 1991, Merkel turned to the present reality:

"But all these projects do not take place in a vacuum. For while we have been deliberating, Israel is under threat. While we speak here, thousands of people live in fear and terror of rocket attacks and Hamas terrorism."6

She immediately balanced this with Germany's position on Palestinian statehood. She repeated her vision of two states. Israel and Palestine, secure, side by side. But she was clear: compromise would mean pain. Concessions on all sides.

Still, her greatest concern was Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president, denied the Holocaust, welcomed deniers and racists to Tehran, and openly threatened Israel’s destruction. And he sought nuclear weapons.

This was the moment Merkel brought Staatsräson to the Knesset:

"At this very point I say explicitly: Every federal government and every federal chancellor before me has been committed to Germany's special historical responsibility for Israel's security. This historical responsibility of Germany is part of my country's reason of state (Staatsräson). This means that Israel's security is never negotiable for me as German Chancellor. And if this is so, then these must not remain empty words in the hour of trial."7

Merkel was not the first to use this term. The German ambassador to Israel had already done so in 2005. She was well aware of the term's troubling history—from Machiavelli's amoral political philosophy to its use in the GDR, where "reason of state" justified the suppression of individual freedoms.

However, Merkel deliberately infused it with a new moral foundation. While working within an established tradition, she expanded its meaning and significance.

The Green Party soon followed suit, embracing the moral version of the Staatsräson with enthusiasm. In 2018, during celebrations marking 70 years since Israel's foundation, one of their leaders, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a theologian by training, linked Israel's security directly to Germany's existence as a democracy:

"Israel's existence is directly connected to the existence of our country as a free democracy and therefore our responsibility. We must be the guarantor of Israel as a state as Germans." and “Israel's right to exist is our own. Regardless of who arrives in our country, regardless of how long one has lived here, whether one comes from the far right or from anywhere else - the right of Israel to exist must be recognised as a matter of course by everyone who lives in this country, ladies and gentlemen.8

Back to 2008. While Merkel spoke in Jerusalem, expanding the meaning of the Staatsräson, she kept her feet firmly on the ground. Or, better, in the sea: there the real guarantee for Israel already floated in the form of U-Boats.

Since the late 1990s, German-built Dolphin-class submarines had been delivered to Israel. They could launch cruise missiles. Even nuclear ones. If Iran attacked, Israel could strike back—from beneath the waves. A nuclear second strike, paid for largely by German taxpayers.

The first three Dolphins were almost entirely funded by Kohl’s government under U.S. pressure after the Gulf War. They arrived in 1999 and 2000. Two more followed in 2005, approved by Schröder’s cabinet in one of its last acts—supported, notably, by Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer. In all, Berlin covered billions of euros.

These submarines embodied Staatsräson in steel. They made clear that Germany’s “special responsibility” was not just rhetoric.

But not everyone agreed. In 2012, Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass published his explosive poem What Must Be Said.

He accused Germany of hypocrisy: providing submarines that could potentially enable a preventive Israeli nuclear strike and cause a massacre, while concealing this behind moral rhetoric.

"Because it must be said / what even tomorrow may be too late; / also because we—as Germans with sufficient guilt on our shoulders— / could become suppliers of a foreseeable crime / and none of the usual excuses / would erase our complicity."9

It was an intellectual bomb.

Silence followed.

Submarines kept coming.

During Merkel's era, additional submarine purchases were approved, always from ThyssenKrupp, always with substantial German government funding of roughly 30 percent—amounting to about half a billion euros from taxpayers for the last three U-Boots.

This is where history becomes current affairs. Netanyahu's obsession with acquiring new submarines—both to expand the fleet and replace aging vessels—became entangled with corruption charges that continue in 2025. According to many Israeli military experts, having six "state-of-the-art" submarines wasn't truly a priority for Israel's security.

Netanyahu thought so. And German governments—of every color—kept saying yes. Supporting Israel’s deterrence. Supporting Germany’s own arms industry. Supporting Staatsräson.

From the German raison d'état perspective, selling submarines makes more sense than other weapons because they genuinely protect against existential threats.

They also keep ThyssenKrupp alive in a competitive global market. That, too, has always been part of raison d’état since the time of Adenauer.

This brings us to the present moment. Friedrich Merz distinguished—without naming specifics but knowing precisely what he's discussing—between weapons not directly applicable to the Gaza conflict (strategic systems that remain unquestioned) and those that can be suspended without contradicting the core Staatsräson. Not even Chancellor Merz—the aspiring change-maker, dreaming to dismantle Merkel's legacy—can change that.

Staatsräson, Raison d'État: Germany cannot step back from this principle without questioning its own identity, its place in the world, its consciousness.

Germany, for better or worse, will always see itself reflected in Israel—even if the mirror is distorted. The far-right AfD, which is—while I am writing this—the first political party in Germany, would gladly shatter that mirror. But breaking mirrors, even distorted ones, does not bring good luck.

This review demonstrates that Germany's Reason of State regarding Israel encompasses multiple dimensions - interest, necessity, win-win agreements, moral obligation, and almost religious commitment. Yet precisely because of this complexity, it must be handled with care and respected for what it is: a relationship that no other country has the right to judge.

Sources and deep dives

The most important source, available both in English and in German, is Daniel Marwecki "Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding" 2020, based on his PhD dissertation.

The work was released in Germany in 2024 under the title "Absolution? Israel und die deutsche Staatsräson". A special editon of this book has been republished by Bbb.de in 2024. This German version funded by the Federal Office for the Political Education is shorter, contains no footnotes, and is more accessible to readers.

On the Concept and Substance of German Reason of State Regarding Israel's Security

• DEU Free to read: Was bedeutet Staatsräson? Deutschlandfunk.de October 2024

• DEU Free to read: Israels Sicherheit und die deutsche Staatsräson, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, December 2023

• ENG Free to read: Staatsräson: Empty Signifier or Meaningful Norm?, Verfassungsblog, January 2024

• DEU Free to read: Die Idee der Staatsräson im neuesten deutschen Recht, Verfassungsblog, January 2025

• DEU Free to read, PDF: Ralf Michaels, Israels Sicherheit und Existenz zwischen Staatsräson und Rechtsstaatsprinzip, 2022

• DEU Free to read, PDF: Entstehung, Wandel und Entwicklung des Staatsräson-Begriffs in Deutschland, Deutscher Budestag, 2023

• DEU Free to read, PDF: Interview mit Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Grüne, Bundestagsvizepräsidentin, zu: Gaza im Gespräch mit Tobias Armbrüster, April 2024

On the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement:

• ENG Free to read: The Luxembourg Agreement: the mirage of reconciliation, K La Revue, September 2022

Angela Merkel:

• DEU/ENG Free to read: Speech by Federal Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel, 18 March 2008, Bundesregierung.de

• “Freiheit” “Freedom” 2024 - Merkel's Memoirs

U-boots:

• DEU Free to read: Korruption: Deutsche U-Boote für Israel, July 2025, NDR

This post is also available as a downloadable booklet for premium subscribers. See below at the bottom of the post.

1925: for many, the golden year of the Weimar Republic. Germany had just emerged from the nightmare of hyperinflation. The economy had stabilised. Politics, at least on the surface, seemed balanced. Extremes—right and left—held at bay. Unemployment was falling. Foreign money flowed back into the country. And Berlin. Berlin, then, was a kaleidoscope. A fever dream. Europe’s cultural laboratory: bold, modern, grotesque, defiant. No city in Europe moved faster, breathed more freely, or lived more intensely.

But under the surface a volcano was stirring. We often talk about those years as a time of dancing on a volcano— Images from Cabaret, or Babylon Berlin, come to mind. But you didn’t need a smoky nightclub to see the cracks. You just had to walk into a bookshop.

Because that summer—exactly one hundred years ago—books appeared that haunted the past… and warned of what was to come.

Thomas Mann’s Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung und frühes Leid) told of the psychic scars left by hyper-inflation— A bourgeois family adrift in a country still in shock. Trauma that had barely begun to settle into the nation's bones and never—never completely disappeared.

Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis imagined a city split in two: The rulers above the ground, the workers underground — Racing toward revolt. Fritz Lang would soon turn it into a masterpiece of silent cinema.

And in Berlin Without Jews (Berlin ohne Juden), Artur Landsberger pictured a Germany where a right-wing party takes power—And expels all its Jews. No one resists. Germany declines, economically and culturally, until—too late—the nation begs them to return.

In that same shopwindow display, you might have seen Hitler's Mein Kampf. Written during his imprisonment in 1923–24, it finally found a publisher in July 1925. Most people dismissed it at the time—a grave mistake they would come to regret.

But above them all—both in literary brilliance and popular success—stood one novel: Jud Süß, Jew Süss, by Lion Feuchtwanger.

A sweeping historical novel, over 500 pages long, first published in Munich with just 6,000 copies. Within a year, it had five print runs. Thirty-nine thousand copies. By 1931, it was translated into 17 languages. A global sensation. Feuchtwanger was already a known name—critic, playwright, intellectual. But in Jud Süß, he went back two centuries to shine a light on his present.

His subject was Joseph Süßkind Oppenheimer.

A Jewish financier at the court of Duke Karl Alexander in 18th-century Stuttgart— a time when Germany was still the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: not a country, but a chaotic patchwork of duchies, principalities, and free cities. Joseph Süßkind Oppenheimer was a brilliant outsider: powerful, envied, and eventually destroyed. After the Duke’s sudden death, he was arrested, tried, and executed in 1738. A scapegoat for everything Württemberg’s elites feared and loathed.

Feuchtwanger turned his story into a gripping portrait of ambition, betrayal, sex, power, money—and antisemitism. But also: of identity.

Of what it meant to be Jewish in a world teetering between pogroms and promises of emancipation. Jud Süß was a literary mirror reflecting the German soul, and a warning of what loomed on the horizon. And that alone would be reason enough to mark its 100th birthday.

But reading this book today is harder than it should be. Even dangerous.

Because Jud Süß, like its protagonist, suffered a second and a third death. It was burned by the Nazis in 1933. Then twisted. Hijacked and turned into one of the most poisonous propaganda films ever made. The 1940 Nazi film Jud Süß betrayed Feuchtwanger’s novel. It desecrated Joseph Süßkind Oppenheimer’s memory again. It turned a cry against antisemitism into its weapon.

This is the story I want to tell today. The story of a book, a man, and a lie. The story of a poison —antisemitism— that runs deep in all of us. It's embedded in our bones, lingering in our silences and infiltrating our thoughts.

A poison so potent that celebrating a 100-year-old literary masterpiece feels dangerous—and restoring dignity to an innocent man, executed 300 years ago, feels urgently necessary.

It is never too late.

The genesis of a masterpiece

Jud Süß is an extraordinary novel. And captivating. Once you start reading, it's hard to put down. You can read it as a political thriller. Or a psychological drama. A historical epic, a social study, a theological meditation. Whatever lens you choose, one thing is certain: It grabs you.

The novel takes us back to 18th-century Württemberg— To courts, conspiracies, power games, and the fragility of trust. There’s no dialogue—surprising, perhaps, given Feuchtwanger’s background as a playwright. But the narrative flows. Rhythmic, dense, yet clear. The characters feel alive—complex, visual, full of contradictions. You can lose yourself in the court intrigue. Or follow the rise of capital and power. You can trace Feuchtwanger’s meditations on Judaism, identity, morality. Whatever path you choose—You won’t want to skip a single page.

The interplay is masterful. Historical research meets socio-political analysis. Psychological observation meets theological reflection. And somehow, nothing outweighs the other. It’s a rare, almost miraculous balance.

But why Joseph Süß Oppenheimer? Why travel back two centuries to tell the story of a Jewish court banker in Stuttgart?

Feuchtwanger had long been fascinated by him. Back in 1916, during the First World War, he had already written a play about Oppenheimer’s rise and fall. But the play wasn’t enough. Too much had to be left out. Too many layers. His wife, Martha, encouraged him. Expand the play into a novel, she said. And the resulting novel was epic.

The show trial of Josef Süss Oppenheimer had long been a hidden trauma in German history.

The trial was so blatantly unjust. His role as scapegoat so evident. The original trial documents —30,000 pages of documents— kept in the Main State Archive in Stuttgart, remained secret until 1918. Only then did they become freely accessible. For his novel, Feuchtwanger drew from every possible source. But above all, he used the historical events as a backdrop.

A backdrop for a universal story. And for a reflection on his own Jewish identity.

One fact struck him more than any other: Oppenheimer was offered a deal. A lighter sentence, maybe even freedom—if he converted to Christianity. He refused. At the end of his life, facing death, he instead returned fully to his Jewish faith. It was his final act. His way of reclaiming himself. This moved Feuchtwanger deeply. The author had grown up in a strictly Orthodox household, Then distanced himself— Later embracing a more liberal, cultural form of Judaism. Oppenheimer’s refusal to betray his faith became a quiet, personal symbol.

While Feuchtwanger was already writing the novel, something else happened. In June 1922, German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was assassinated. Rathenau was an intellectual, a former businessman turned statesman, a reformer and economic rebuilder, and the negotiator of the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union. Rathenau was Jewish.

His death was a seismic event. The most violent political murder of the early Weimar Republic. And it was a shocking alarm about the new dimension antisemitism was taking. Feuchtwanger briefly considered writing about Rathenau. But portraying a living man—or one so recently killed—felt impossible. Ultimately, he decided that historical distance would allow for clearer analysis. So he came back to Oppenheimer. A story 200 years old, yet burning with relevance.

Joseph Süß Oppenheimer's dramatic rise and fall, as told by Feuchtwanger

Württemberg, 1730s. Duke Karl Alexander ruled from 1733 to 1737—a short reign, but one that turned the region upside down. Before becoming duke, Karl Alexander had served as a Field Marshal and Governor in Serbia. He converted to Catholicism—not for religious conviction, but for marriage. His bride was the Catholic Princess Marie Auguste of Thurn and Taxis.

Through an unexpected genealogical turn, he inherited the Duchy of Württemberg, a staunchly Protestant territory within the Holy Roman German Empire. Once in power, he wasted no time. Stripped the Protestant estates of their privileges. Imposed Catholicism across the land. And built a court modeled after absolutist France.

In 1732, Karl Alexander met someone who would help him to change everything. Joseph Süß Oppenheimer. Karl Alexander was always short on money—for his court, his army, his lifestyle.

Oppenheimer was born in Heidelberg around 1698. He was the son of a Jewish tax collector. Although he was religiously raised, he did not carry this with him. By the 1720s, he had established a career as a 'court Jew' — an unofficial title given to Jewish financiers who served German princes in the Holy Roman Empire.

When Karl Alexander took the throne, Oppenheimer became his right-hand man in financial matters. He rose swiftly to the influential position of “Cabinet Fiscal Officer and Privy Financial Adviser”.

He was a financial genius who enabled the Duke of Württemberg to indulge his love of luxury. Oppenheimer's position allowed him to amass considerable wealth, which he displayed through an opulent lifestyle. His affairs with several Christian mistresses fueled animosity among both his fellow courtiers and the general populace.

He wasn’t the kind of Jew people expected. Not a pious figure in a black caftan. More like a confident, sharp-talking financier out of New York, centuries ahead of his time.

Feuchtwanger draws this contrast sharply in Jud Süss, right from the first chapter. He places Süß alongside another Jewish banker: Isaac Landauer. Landauer is old-school. Observant, traditional, visibly Jewish. Süß hates being seen with him. The greasy curls. The caftan. The gurgling laugh. He compromised him with his foolish, old-fashioned Jewish behavior. Feuchtwanger described Oppenheimer's thoughts:

"He had money like hay, immeasurable credit, connections with all courts, trust from all princes... and such a man went around with that filthy skullcap, provoked mockery and spitting, was content to accumulate money that remained as paperwork in his offices. What was money for, if not to transform it into prestige, magnificence, houses, horses, splendid clothes, women?"

Süß was determined to rise. And rise he did. He lived outside the Frankfurt Ghetto—an enormous privilege. He owned a palace in Stuttgart, despite Jews being legally barred from residing there. He mingled at court, hosted lavish balls, and accumulated horses and extensive collections of jewels and luxury items.

Under Karl Alexander's rule, Oppenheimer initiated a genuine economic revolution. He sought to transform Württemberg from a feudal to a mercantilist economy by establishing ducal monopolies on essential goods—salt, leather, tobacco, and liquor—while also founding a bank and a porcelain factory.

The old system had no room for someone like him. But he made space anyway. Yet acceptance was never total. People admired him, feared him, envied him—and loathed him.

Feuchtwanger captures that blend perfectly through one of the court ladies:

"It was amusing to have such a Jew around, who resembled the most gallant gentleman of Versailles and concealed his wicked Jewish heart, which was certainly full of all manner of wickedness and poisonous worms, behind such a fine jacket, in deer-brown color."

Meanwhile, among his rivals at court and particularly within the population—overwhelmed by taxation and unprepared for the shift toward mercantilism—resentment was steadily mounting. Rumors spread. Nicknames too.

“Under the previous duke a prostitute ruled. Under the current one, a Jew.”

But nothing seemed to touch Süß. He despised the contempt of others. He felt protected by his money and his power:

"With dilated nostrils, Süß voluptuously inhaled the air of power in which he now lived... He had become the true sovereign in the duchy. He stood very high, close to the summit, feeling a sensation like warm water flowing down his back whenever he looked below, where everyone swarmed and scrambled to climb upward."

In Feuchtwanger's prose, Josef Süß Oppenheimer emerges as a complex and ambiguous hero. A handsome opportunist who deftly navigates his Jewish heritage while orchestrating political machinations to amass wealth and influence.

The portrayal isn't driven by any form of internalized antisemitism. Though Feuchtwanger employs various Jewish tropes throughout the novel and depicts the widespread antisemitism of both past and present. Rather, in his characterization of Jud Süß, Feuchtwanger also expresses his personal critique of capitalism.

In Jud Süß, Feuchtwanger portrays a proto-capitalist who betrays his own soul —not out of malice, but out of ambition. He wants to belong. But in serving the Duke’s absolutist dreams, he forgets the deeper wisdom of his ancestors. The deep understanding that worldly authority is transient. And power is merely an illusion.

At the start of the novel’s third part, Feuchtwanger zooms out. He offers a sweeping, poetic reflection on Jewish history:

"In the cities of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, the Jews sat great and powerful... But in Germany they were small and wretched. In the fourteenth century they were massacred, drowned, burned, impaled, strangled, buried alive in more than three hundred and fifty communities."

And yet, they adapted. They saw that birth and blood no longer ruled the world—money did.

“They had learned: in insecurity, in illegality, in danger there was only one shield... money."

But there was something deeper. Something the dense mass of the oppressed knew:

"The deep, secret, certain awareness of the senselessness, the changeability, the worthlessness of power... It was this secret knowledge that suddenly put upon” their lips that mysterious, gentle, superior smile, which doubly irritated their enemies... It was this secret knowledge that united and fused the Jews together, nothing else. Because this secret knowledge was the meaning of the Book."

And Süß had forgotten it. The figure of Jud Süß stands against this immense backdrop. An exception. An outsider. Where is his soul?

To find it and to construct the dramatic arc that leads Jud Süß to both an unjust death and his redemption as a Jew, Feuchtwanger introduces a fictional character. His secret daughter Naemi.

His soul. Sheltered in the countryside, away from the rot of court life, Naemi was everything Süß still believed in—perhaps the only thing. Pure, untouched, and deeply loved. Tragically, the whereabouts of this beautiful girl were reported to the Duke. A womanizer of the crudest nature. During Karl Alexander's attempt to rape Naemi, the young girl took her own life. By leaping from the roof of the house.

That moment breaks the novel in two. Breaks Süß. Breaks the spell of ambition. He doesn’t recover.

From that point on, he seeks not power—but revenge. And, maybe, something like redemption. He manipulates the Duke into plotting a coup to overthrow of the Parliament. Then leaks the plan to his enemies.

March 12, 1737. Karl Alexander dies of a stroke during a confrontation with the Estates.

Süß knows what’s coming. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t resist. He barely reacts. Nothing can bring back Naemi. Not money. Not influence. Not power. His final hope is reunion. With her. And with himself.

Oppenheimer was immediately arrested by the local Estates and placed under house arrest. Then moved to various fortresses. His entire staff was arrested. His apartment sealed. His property confiscated even before his conviction.

He faced a litany of accusations. High treason. Embezzlement. Fraud. Corruption. Debasement of coins. And sexual transgressions. Notably, the charge of "lechery" was eventually dropped. Reportedly to protect the reputations of "reputable women" involved. And above all: being a Jew who had risen too high.

Feuchtwanger details the trial meticulously.

607 people interrogated. 30,000 pages of testimony, but no concrete evidence for the charges could be substantiated. On the contrary, modern historians agree: Süß had actually improved Württemberg’s finances. But the truth didn’t matter. This was a Schauprozess—a show trial. A way to wipe the slate clean, to bury absolutism and to restore Protestant order.

At the end, a scapegoat was welcome to close the absolutist chapter of Württemberg. The Jewish financier was the perfect scapegoat.

Feuchtwanger doesn’t shout his outrage. He lets the absurdity speak for itself. A man who had legal immunity under the Duke—a formal “absolutorium” absolving him of any personal responsibility—was now being tried for doing exactly what he was ordered to do. Even his arrest had no legal basis, but none of that mattered. The outcome was never in doubt.

The last pages of Jud Süß are all about his execution. Almost nothing is invented about that day. The details are appalling.

Süß had once said during his trial that he could not be hanged higher than the gallows. They took him at his word. And they chose the most dramatic structure available: a thirty-five-foot iron gallows, built in 1596—originally made to execute a fraudulent alchemist who tried to turn lead into gold. The symbolism wasn’t subtle.

“It was a very expensive gallows,” writes Feuchtwanger. “Painted red. Decorated with gold.”

The entire city turned out to witness the spectacle. Vendors erected beer stands. Poets hawked mocking verses. Children darted alongside the cart bearing the condemned man. According to estimates, 10,000 to 20,000 people gathered in Stuttgart that day—exceeding the city's entire population. The date was February 4, 1738. The authorities had declared it a holiday.

This is the text of one of the pieces of merchandise distributed at the site of the execution. Many are still in the State Archive of Stuttgart. Spottmünzen (mockery coins) were circulated. Bearing a message reflecting his downfall. Prints with the place and the execution details. Poems and ballads. Even pieces of the cage were sold as souvenirs.

Feuchtwanger describes the last moments of Jud Süß in his cell. Surrounded by pious rabbis. Having a last meal with them. And then the procession through the city toward the execution hill. There, Oppenheimer is put into the cage and raised twelve meters high. Exposed to all. With the rope around his neck:

"There he stood. Heard the gentle wind, the breath of the crowd, the scraping hooves of the horses, the cleric's scolding. Was this the last thing he would hear on earth? He thirsted for something else... Then, through the empty, cruel sounds came another tone, shrill, gurgling voices, screaming: 'One and eternal is the Being, the Transcendent, the God of Israel, Yahweh, Adonai.' It is the Jews, the small Jaakob Josua Falk, the fat Rabbi of Fürth, the greasy Isaak Landauer. They stand, wrapped in their prayer shawls... they sway their bodies vigorously, stand and shout, yell, gurgle the death prayers, across the wide square: 'Hear, O Israel, one and eternal is Adonai.' And he opens his mouth and shouts back: 'One and eternal is Adonai.'"

After the execution, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was placed in the red-painted iron gibbet and suspended on the gallows hill just outside Stuttgart. There he hung—winter and summer, year after year. Only in 1744 did the new Duke order the gibbet removed. What was left of Süß was quietly buried at the edge of a cemetery, with no grave and no name. The cage was melted down and refashioned into a balustrade.

But Feuchtwanger imagines a different fictional ending for Josef Süß Oppenheimer.

He invents a night-time scene. A gaunt gentleman comes to the gallows with two helpers to search for something. Presumably the valuable solitaire diamond that Oppenheimer had on his finger until the end. There they discover that Oppenheimer's body has disappeared. The Duke-Administrator Karl Rudolf hears of this and shrugs. Let the Jews have their secret, he says. He won’t chase ghosts.

In the novel, the body is secretly transported to Fürth. Washed and placed in a coffin with the solitaire remaining on the dead man's finger. His fingers are put to form the letter Shin of the mystic name of God Shaddai. In Fürth, Oppenheimer is buried according to Jewish ritual. With Rabbi Gabriel conducting the ceremony. The burial takes place under the pretense that it is an unknown Jew from Frankfurt.

Born as a Jew.
Lived as a secular prince.
Died and was buried—again—as a Jew.

A tale retold and twisted: the 1940 film "Jud Süß"—the most poisonous film of the twentieth century

Lion Feuchtwanger wasn't the first to write about Joseph Süß Oppenheimer. In the 1800s, novellas and plays had already explored the story.

But Jud Süß, Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel, hit like lightning. It sparked new adaptations. In 1929, it was taken to the British stage. In 1930, it was staged it in Berlin. By 1933, a Hebrew version premiered in Tel Aviv. As Feuchtwanger's story gained new life, his own was being torn apart.

That same year—1933—the Nazis seized power. Feuchtwanger's books were banned and his name blacklisted. His work was burned in public during the Nazi book burnings held across Germany in May 1933. He fled Germany, first to France, then to the U.S. His novel, however, continued to be published. Exile publishers kept it alive in Amsterdam and Stockholm. And in 1934, the UK released a film version—a direct challenge to Hitler’s Reich.

The response came six years later. Joseph Goebbels wanted the tale of Jud Süß—but rewritten to serve the Nazi cause. The goal was to turn Feuchtwanger's human drama into racial propaganda.

Where Feuchtwanger's novel portrayed a flawed but fascinating man caught in the machinery of power and antisemitism, Goebbels wanted a monster. He was still disappointed that the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 had failed to spark the expected surge of public antisemitism in Germany.

Something more effective was needed—more pervasive and emotionally powerful. A new film version of Jud Süß with a clear racial antisemitic profile would serve this purpose. Goebbels firmly believed in the power of film to shape public opinion better than any other medium.

Goebbels cast himself as executive producer.

He chose the director: Veit Harlan. He chose the lead actor: Ferdinand Marian. Marian wasn’t a Nazi: in rehearsals, he tried to play Süß with empathy. Goebbels stepped in personally. He knew how to make people obey. He also reviewed the script line by line.

Production began in January 1940. By August, the film was complete. No one cared about the truth. No one consulted the archives. Feuchtwanger's novel wasn't a source—it was the enemy. What emerged was a caricature—Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was depicted as a grotesque, greedy, deceitful, and sexually predatory figure. He embodied numerous Jewish stereotypes.

Unfortunately, the whole operation was masterfully executed. The film was technically impressive for its era—stunning visuals, powerful music, and sharp editing.

That's precisely what made it so dangerous. It didn't look like propaganda. It looked like art. It felt like authentic history unfolding on screen. Jews were portrayed as grotesque Ostjuden with exaggerated Yiddish accents. Never mind that Eastern European Jews didn't live in southwestern Germany in the 1700s. Historical accuracy was irrelevant.

For added "realism," the Nazis used real Jews.

In February 1940, Harlan's team went to the Lublin Ghetto, then to occupied Prague. They forcefully recruited over 120 Jewish extras. These people were already emaciated. Yet they were forced to perform joyful synagogue scenes—dancing, laughing, and celebrating Purim. The scenes were repeated for three days because Harlan insisted, "It's not convincing enough." From post-war trial testimony: "Make the hooked noses as strong as possible," he told the makeup artists. And if someone didn't have one? They simply glued one on.

The soundtrack was meticulously calculated.

The opening scene layers two contrasting musical elements: A rabbi chanting in Hebrew. A German folk song: "All meine Gedanken." The deliberate dissonance delivered a clear message: these cultures cannot coexist. This musical tension establishes the film's antagonistic tone from the very beginning.

The main actor, Ferdinand Marian, deployed his full range of acting skills—gestures, glares, smirks. Having previously portrayed womanizers and villains, he surpassed himself in this role.

To provide the perfect showcase for his talent and present the audience with the most damning portrayal of Süß, the script made a crucial change.

It replaced the fictional Süß's daughter Naemi with another fictional character: Dorothea Sturm, the beautiful Christian daughter of the chief minister of Duke Alexander. Süß lusts after her. She resists. He imprisons her fiancé and rapes her. Overwhelmed by shame and despair, she drowns herself. The people revolt. Süß is tried and hanged. The Jews are expelled. The film ends with triumphant cheers—a horror show packaged as national cleansing.

August 18, 1940: Goebbels watches the final cut. He writes in his diary: “An anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for.”

Three weeks later, Jud Süß premiered on September 5, 1940, at the Venice Film Festival, receiving enthusiastic reviews… and the Golden Lion award.

Even young Michelangelo Antonioni was impressed. He wrote: "If this is propaganda, we welcome propaganda. This is a convincing, concise, extraordinary [film]."

September 24: The German premiere in Berlin.

The screening at the prestigious UFA Palast am Zoo was transformed into a state occasion. Newspapers, previously instructed, exploded with praise the next morning: "Jud Süss — the film about the eternal Jew" and "Powerful effect of 'Jud Süss'" and so on. Goebbels reported that Hitler loved the film. So did Himmler. He ordered all SS and police to watch it that winter.

4,700 copies were distributed across Germany and occupied Europe. By 1943, over 40 million people had seen it.

The film incited real-world violence. In Berlin, crowds screamed, "Throw the last Jews out!" Before mass shootings in the East, Einsatzgruppen were shown the film. In Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück—it played regularly. After screenings, the beatings got worse.

After World War II, Jud Süß was immediately banned by the Allied Military Occupation in 1945.

West German courts ordered the destruction of the original negative and all copies in 1954. It was an impossible effort: black-market tapes and secret screenings ensured the film never fully disappeared.

As the true nature of the Holocaust became known, a new question emerged: Can a film be guilty? And if so—who bears that guilt?

In 1949 and 1950, film director Veit Harlan was tried for Crimes Against Humanity. His defense? “I was just doing my job.” “I’m not antisemitic.” “I portrayed Süß with sympathy.” Both trials in 1949 and 1950 ended in acquittal. Some of the judges had Nazi pasts. Outside the courtrooms, Harlan´s fans shouted: “Jewish mercenaries!” “Beat the Jewish scum!” The police didn’t intervene. Later, Harlan wrote letters to German politicians claiming victimhood. He played the martyr.

Ferdinand Marian, the lead actor, was blacklisted (Arbeitsverbot), preventing him from working as an actor again. He died in a car crash in 1946—possibly suicide. Feuchtwanger watched all of this from exile, disgusted. His novel had been poisoned—his story turned inside out. He died in 1958, in Los Angeles.

The poison continued to flow

Even today, Jud Süß remains a Vorbehaltsfilm in Germany. A restricted film. It can’t be screened publicly unless it’s part of a tightly controlled educational setting. Not without permission, and not without context.

The government's plan to restrict all copies to German state control and eventually destroy most of them never succeeded.

Instead, the film slipped into a murky underground— where East German agents, Swiss merchants, Nazi heirs, and shady middlemen traded it for large sums.

Arab countries joined the trade.

Throughout the 1950s, the film played in cinemas across the region. Israel tried to intervene— They asked Germany to help stop the circulation, even tried to buy and destroy the remaining copies. Berlin didn’t listen. In 1957, Saudi Prince Sultan visited Hamburg. He watched parts of Jud Süß and was so impressed that he ordered a full copy. The film was shipped as a diplomatic package to Beirut.

It screened at the Prince’s court in May 1958. By that summer, Cairo had made its own negative. The film continued to screen across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq—well into the 1970s. In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat acquired copies and distributed them across the Middle East as propaganda to support the Palestinian cause. Other Nazi films—The Eternal Jew, The Rothschilds—followed the same path through the PLO.

Toxic cinema, weaponised once again. As this poison continued to circulate, Feuchtwanger's novel—the real Jud Süß—struggled for proper recognition.

Every attempt to restore Joseph Süß Oppenheimer's dignity or reclaim Feuchtwanger's literary legacy has been drowned out by the 1940 propaganda film.

Another attempt came in 2010. The German film Jud Süß – Film ohne Gewissen (translated as Jew Suss: Rise and Fall) depicted the story behind the 1940 production. It focused on Veit Harlan, the director, and Ferdinand Marian, the actor who portrayed Süß. Unfortunately, the film overreached. It misrepresented history by portraying Marian as a potential "Jew-saver." Critics rejected this revisionist approach. The film received boos during its Berlinale premiere and became a commercial failure.

And then there's Italy. My Italy. Always ready to forget.

In 2021, the 1940 Nazi film surfaced—not in an academic archive, not in a warning-labeled historical collection—but in the promotional catalogue of a small publisher. From there, it made its way to online shops. After protests and press coverage, it was quietly withdrawn. Mild apologies were issued. Yet that same year, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was still being sold at newsstands. Meanwhile, Feuchtwanger's Jud Süß hasn't been reprinted in Italian since 1995. Yes—1995!

Propaganda and lies continue to circulate while truths and great literature languish. The poison flows on.

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Berlin's rubble-strewn wasteland, the largest necropolis in Europe, defies description in its gruesome uniqueness. Only someone with strong nerves could witness all this and begin to comprehend what happened here. [...] Rubble, hunger, shards and poverty – that is Berlin.— From the diary of Karl Deutmann: “Destroyed Berlin 1945”, 11 July 1945

In July 1945, the German capital lay in ruins. Buildings stood like skeletons. Bodies still lined the sidewalks. Berlin had become an urban cemetery. Some graves had crosses and names. Others just helmets on wooden stakes.

Karl Deutmann, a resident of the Adlershof suburb, ventured into the city with his wife. What he witnessed seemed beyond comprehension. "Ghostly forms of former houses," he recorded in his diary. "Ghostly streets. Ghostly districts."

But these weren't ghosts wandering through Berlin. They were people. Hungry, desperate people digging through rubble. Scavenging for food, for wood, for anything to sell. Many were forced by Soviet soldiers to clear the streets, making them passable again. Others, especially women, spent their days searching for water or doing laundry wherever possible, sometimes using only street hydrants.

The sanitary conditions were appalling. The air was thick with the stench of decay. Warning posters appeared everywhere: "Do not drink unboiled water!" "Cook all meat thoroughly!" Contamination threatened from all sides. Rats bred at an alarming rate. Medicine remained in short supply. Alcohol was harder to find.

Food came only through strict rationing. People stood in lines for hours just to receive a loaf of bread or a simple bowl of soup. The black market flourished. Cigarettes became more valuable than currency. Desperate city residents gathered whatever valuables they had and traveled to rural areas, hoping to exchange them for potatoes or eggs. They named these desperate journeys Hamsterfahrten — hamster trips.

Berlin wasn't divided yet. The city was fully under Soviet control. Slowly, they began restoring basic services. Trams and buses creaked back to life. Some water returned. Lights flickered on in certain areas. Through this broken city flowed an endless stream of refugees. Hundreds of thousands—sometimes over half a million in July alone. They couldn't stay; there was no room. So they kept moving, like human water through a shattered pipe.

The violence persisted. Soviet soldiers continued to rape German women—at least one hundred thousand victims. Hospitals documented a surge of unwanted pregnancies that August. This was Berlin. This was the defeated heart of Nazi Germany, where the world's victors were supposed to meet to redraw maps and determine fates.

A More Suitable Venue

Even for propaganda’s sake, it was impossible. So the Soviets picked another place. Potsdam — quieter, safer, less destroyed.

Potsdam was the former royal seat of Prussia. There, in the Neuer Garten district, stood a peculiar residence — built in Tudor style in 1912. It was commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II: The German Emperor was a Grandson of Queen Victoria. He built it as a gift for his son. Today, we know it as Cecilienhof. British architecture. German royalty. Soviet security.

Two images are forever tied to the Potsdam Conference.

One: the palace itself, with a bright red star made of geraniums planted by Stalin’s security chief. A Soviet signature, subtle as a brick through a window.

Image two: the round table where three men, plus counselors, military attendants, ambassadors, would reshape the world. Round, of course - no one gets the head seat at a round table. But this table also had its Soviet signature: The photos appear black and white, but that table was blood red.

Stalin knew theater. For several days, he wore a dazzling white uniform for the cameras. While Truman and Churchill wore gray and beige, Stalin stood out like a spotlight in the dark.

But there's a third image rarely connected to Potsdam: the shadow of a mushroom cloud. During these very days, the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was taking shape.

This is the story of those seventeen days that reshaped the world. And of a ruined Berlin watching from a distance as three countries and a handful of men redrew its destiny.

The Men at the Table

Three men sat down to divide the world. One was a veteran. Two were rookies.

Joseph Stalin had been in power for 23 years and 3 months. He'd orchestrated purges, engineered famines, and weathered the greatest war in human history. He knew exactly how this geopolitical game worked. He also knew exactly what he wanted.

Harry S. Truman had been president for just three months. He'd stepped in suddenly after Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Poor Harry had been kept completely in the dark about everything. The Yalta agreements? News to him. He'd stumbled across whispers of something called the "Manhattan Project" as a senator. But only after becoming president did Henry Stimson sit him down for the full briefing. No wonder he tried to delay the Potsdam Conference as long as possible. He needed time to catch up.

Winston Churchill showed up for the opening act. But democracy had other plans. On July 28th, halfway through the conference, he was gone. The British people had spoken. They wanted change. The Labour Party had won the general election. So Clement Attlee took his place. New prime minister. Quiet, modest, precise. No fireworks—but no change in policy either.

France? Not invited. Poland? The country they were all discussing? Also not invited. Truman dismissed Charles de Gaulle as the head of a "minor power." France would later accept the conference's decisions—grudgingly.

Each leader arrived with their own pressing concerns.

Britain was fighting for economic survival. The war had nearly bankrupted them. They needed financial aid, not lectures about democracy. America wanted to end the Pacific war quickly, then focus on rebuilding Europe while preventing Soviet expansion west of Moscow. The Soviet Union craved security above all. They'd been invaded twice in 30 years and were determined: never again. They demanded buffer states with friendly governments firmly under their control. Germany had reduced Soviet cities to rubble. Now Stalin wanted compensation—he took everything: machinery, materials, even furniture. Entire Soviet army divisions became demolition crews, stripping buildings down to the light bulbs.

Despite these tensions, how did the conference actually begin? Surprisingly, with optimism. With true smiles. Toasts. Group photos.

They had just defeated Nazi Germany. The ultimate evil was vanquished. They were the victors who had saved the world together. Surely they could work out how to divide the spoils peacefully. None of them realized they were laying the groundwork for the Cold War.

How tragically mistaken they were.

Ghosts at the Table: Versailles 1919 and Munich 1938

Potsdam began with smiles. But two ghosts were already in the room: Versailles, 1919 and Munich, 1938.

The first ghost — Versailles — haunted everyone. The treaty that was supposed to make the world safer had instead paved the road to World War II.

John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, knew it. James Byrnes, now U.S. Secretary of State, knew it too. They were there in 1919. Both warned: don't repeat the mistakes.

The reparations had been insane. Germany couldn't pay them. The attempt had destroyed their economy, crashed all of Europe's economy, and forced the U.S. to pour in money. Worse, it fed a dangerous narrative — that Germany was unfairly treated.

The borders made no sense. They'd created countries like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia that were either economically doomed or ethnically explosive. Sometimes both.

Stalin had his own take on Versailles. His problem? Too many small countries got a say. "Small states aren't virtuous just because they're small," he argued. Only the big powers should decide the world's fate.

And then there was the narrative problem. After World War I, German generals could claim they'd never really lost. "We were stabbed in the back at home!" Perfect fuel for revenge fantasies. At least that wouldn't happen this time. Berlin was a pile of rubble. Nobody could claim the Wehrmacht was "undefeated in the field."

But that second ghost — Munich, 1938 — brought even more tension.

Back then, Britain and France tried to appease Hitler. Chamberlain waving his piece of paper. "Peace for our time!" It was the great betrayal. They gave Hitler the Sudetenland. In return, he gave them war.

Potsdam's leaders didn't forget. They weren't about to appease another aggressive power. And in 1945, the fear wasn't Germany anymore. It was Stalin. They were terrified of appeasing another expansionist dictator. The West wanted to stop him from gaining too much. From turning Europe red — without firing a shot. So Potsdam became a balancing act.

How to contain Soviet power without breaking the fragile alliance that had just defeated Hitler? The fear of both ghosts shaped every decision, starting with reparations.

Each power would take them from its own occupied zone. No Versailles-style punishments across Germany. No chance for Stalin to drain the whole country. It made financial sense—but it had an unintended consequence. It split Germany economically. And economic divisions quickly become political ones.

Poland was another flashpoint. The Red Army was already there. The West pushed for free elections but failed. Truman was furious about the forced expulsions of Germans from territories that suddenly became Polish. Truman understood the reality: "Forcing Soviet compliance would require military action. That's not in the cards."

During this period, a quiet strategy began to form: containment. George Kennan, a brilliant U.S. diplomat, argued that the Soviet system would eventually collapse—not from external force, but from within. The West simply needed patience. The strategy was clear: Build up Western Europe. Make it strong, prosperous, and free. Prevent Stalin from expanding his influence. Then watch the USSR crumble under its own contradictions. It would only take... forty-five years.

But even among the Western Allies, divisions emerged. The U.S. and U.K. had different goals.

Truman didn't want a permanent American presence in Europe. He planned to help rebuild, then withdraw. Do the job, hand over responsibility, and go home. Churchill was horrified. Without American troops, Europe would lie defenseless against Soviet forces. He could almost visualize them advancing to the English Channel.

Economic issues compounded the tension. The U.S. had established Bretton Woods, shifting global finance from London to New York. Keynes called it a swindle—to him, it signaled the end of Britain's empire and America's ascension.

Truman and Churchill also clashed over France. Truman dismissed De Gaulle as representing a "minor power." Churchill disagreed, having collaborated with the French and believing they deserved representation.

Even media strategy divided them. Churchill favored transparency with the 180 journalists stationed outside Cecilienhof. Truman aligned with Stalin's preference for secrecy. Despite the tensions, Truman personally liked Stalin. He found him charming—"Uncle Joe" seemed reasonable face-to-face.

But personal rapport couldn't overcome geopolitical realities. The forces driving these three powers apart proved stronger than any handshake. Those seventeen days were compromised from the beginning. Not because the participants were malicious, but because they were constrained by history.

The ghosts of Versailles and Munich prevented genuine peace. They could only establish a new kind of conflict: cold, but equally challenging. And enduring. The Cold War was born in Potsdam.

July 15, 1945: Arrival

“The requisitioning continues. Apartments in Dahlem, apartments in Wannsee. Entire districts. Evacuation within hours… It doesn’t matter who you are — Nazi friend or Nazi opponent — if you have to go, you go.” — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin, July 15, 1945 “Schauplatz Berlin: 1945-1948”

In Berlin, the war was over. But the chaos persisted. The Soviets continued evicting civilians at will—clearing out apartments, villas, and entire neighborhoods. Doors slammed shut on families with only minutes' notice. Rich or poor, guilty or innocent—no one was spared. As resistance heroine Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary, people consoled themselves that this was merely the aftershock of war. The looting, rapes, and evictions would surely end soon:

"This evening, the radio announced that Stalin, Truman, and Churchill have arrived in Berlin for a joint conference. While this doesn't change anything about the requisitioning, it does help lessen our disappointment. We must view everything that has happened until now—the rapes, the looting, the requisitioning—as aftereffects of the war. The meeting of the Big Three will establish order. It will prepare the ground on which good things can flourish." — ibidem

Before the Potsdam Conference began, the Red Army systematically cleared Potsdam of almost all German inhabitants. Families who'd lived there for generations received just hours' notice. Pack what you can carry. Leave the rest. Make room for the Allies. They divided Potsdam and neighboring Babelsberg into American, British, and Soviet sectors. Seized the villas. Refurnished them. And of course, wired them with hundreds of hidden listening devices.

Truman and Churchill arrived two days ahead of schedule—just enough time to settle in.

Truman had journeyed aboard the USS Augusta before flying in from Belgium. He landed at Gatow Airfield in Berlin's western outskirts, where he was greeted with honor guards and meticulously planned ceremony. The U.S. President’s Logbook reads like a real estate brochure:

“Babelsberg lies along winding Griebnitz Lake… a pleasant climate in July… The house at No. 2 Kaiserstrasse — now the ‘Little White House’ — sits by the lake, surrounded by trees. Beautiful gardens reaching down to the lake. Formerly occupied by the head of the German movie colony, who is now with a labor battalion somewhere in Russia." — Log of President Harry S. Truman's Trip to the Berlin Conference, Diary Notes and Letters, Harry Truman Library

The entry ends with a couple of complaints. Nice enough place, but:

“…like most European homes, the bathroom and bathing facilities were wholly inadequate. Nor was it screened, so the mosquitoes gave us a "working over" during our first few nights there until the weather had cooled somewhat." — ibidem

But the logbook omitted an ugly story. The hoise belonged to the Müller-Grote family. In May 1945, Soviet soldiers didn't knock politely and ask for the keys. They broke down the door. They plundered everything. They raped several women in the family—in front of their parents and children. They beat the elderly parents. The family's belongings were smashed, looted, tossed into the forest, or used to fill bomb craters. The Soviets, assuming Truman would bring his own furniture, destroyed everything.

Only later did they panic and refurnish the house—quickly. Truman's staff never knew the truth. And in his memoir, the President even repeated the lie that the villa's former owner had been "sent to Siberia." In 1956, Dietrich Müller-Grote—the son of the owners—wrote to Truman, gently correcting the record. The family, he explained, had been living just half a kilometer away. In squalor.

While staying at the villa, Truman had hundreds of pages to read. Briefings on tactics. Meetings with advisors haunted by Versailles and Munich. He wrote to his mother with brutal honesty: "I'd prefer not to go at all, but I have to."

Winston Churchill arrived the same day. His mood was equally dark. The British election was in its final stages. The polls looked grim. He could feel power slipping through his fingers. This might be his last performance on the world stage. And he knew it.

Stalin kept them waiting. Of course he did. He arrived 24 hours late on July 16th. "Delayed by the Chinese," he claimed—a move to remind the others who controlled the stage. He traveled in an armored train with bulletproof windows. Fifteen thousand NKVD soldiers protected the rail network—twelve to fourteen men per kilometer. When he finally reached Cecilienhof Palace, he set up his office in the eastern wing. It was clear, before a single word had been spoken: this house belonged to Stalin.

July 16, 1945: A destroyed capital in Europe, the promise of worse destruction tested in America

Babelsberg. A leafy, quiet suburb between Potsdam and Berlin. It was peaceful then, just as it is now. President Truman, ever the early bird, started his day with a walk. Breakfast at 8, like clockwork.

At 11 AM, Winston Churchill knocked on the door. He brought his daughter Mary, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, and Sir Alexander Cadogan. They met for the first time in the “Little White House”. Afterwards, they shared lunch. Stalin hadn’t yet reached Potsdam. The official talks were pushed to the next day.

So Truman used the afternoon to take a drive through Berlin. At 4:57 PM, the motorcade moved along Wilhelmstrasse, past the wreckage of the Nazi regime main sites. The balcony of the New Reich Chancellery — where Hitler once roared at crowds — was now broken stone. Truman stood there for a few minutes. Taking it in.

“It is just a demonstration of what can happen when a man overreaches himself.” […] “I never saw such destruction… I don’t know whether they learned anything from it or not.” — Truman’s Diary, July 16, 1945

The drive continued. Ruins everywhere. The Tiergarten. The Reichstag. The Adlon Hotel. The Brandenburg Gate. The Foreign Office. The Olympic Stadium. The Funkturm. The Victory Column. Once icons of a great capital. From the Presidential logbook: "Every building we saw was either badly damaged or completely destroyed."

This was Berlin. Capital of the Thousand Year Reich. Four and a quarter million people used to live here.

“This once beautiful city… now wrecked beyond repair.” […] “A distressing example of what happens when people lose their moral compass—and follow false prophets.”

But the buildings weren't the worst part.

"More moving than the destroyed buildings was the long, never-ending procession of old men, women and children".

They drove along the autobahn. Along country roads. "Wandering aimlessly and probably without hope." Small children in their arms. Meager belongings in pushcarts. Everything they owned in the world.

“In two hours, we saw evidence of a great world tragedy — the disintegration of a highly cultured and proud people.” — Truman’s Diary, July 16, 1945

Later that day, Churchill also drove through Berlin. Their motorcades crossed briefly under the linden trees.

Thousands of kilometers away, in the New Mexico desert, the first nuclear bomb had just been tested. It exploded at 5:29 AM local time. Truman got word — a coded message: the Trinity test was successful. Truman and Churchill made a decision. They would tell Stalin about their "new super weapon." But carefully. Casually. Without using the word "atomic." They had no idea Stalin already knew. Soviet spies had been watching the Manhattan Project from the beginning.

The Conference Begins: Handshakes and Hard Truths, July 17-21

“A few minutes before noon, I looked up from my desk and saw Stalin standing at the gate.” […] “He extended his hand and smiled. I did the same.” — Truman’s Diary, July 17, 1945

Truman met Stalin for the first time in the garden of the Little White House. They shook hands and sat down. Truman admitted he liked Stalin:

“He knows what he wants. He’ll compromise if he must. He looked me in the eyes.” […] “I was impressed. He was extremely polite.” But years later, Truman saw it differently: “I was an innocent idealist.” […] “He was an unscrupulous Russian dictator. But I liked the little son of a bitch.”

Maybe he should’ve listened more closely. When an American ambassador praised the Red Army for taking Berlin, Stalin simply replied: “Tsar Alexander made it all the way to Paris.” A subtle warning and a reminder. Russia plays the long game.

5:10 PM, 17 July 1945. The Berlin Conference officially opened. At Stalin’s suggestion, Truman was named chairman.

Truman came prepared. He'd studied hundreds of pages. Consulted experienced staff. His first priority: avoid "the mistakes of their predecessors 25 years earlier" in Paris. No more Versailles disasters. This time would be different. Truman’s first proposal: a new Council of Foreign Ministers — with the UK, USA, USSR, China, and France — to draft postwar treaties. Stalin raised an eyebrow: “But these are European problems. What’s China got to do with it?”

Germany came next, with a foundational question: What exactly was Germany now? Where did it begin? Where did it end?

The Allies agreed to use 1937 borders as a starting point — but just that. A starting point. Defining Germany in 1945 was like trying to draw a blueprint after an earthquake. Each of the Big Three had a different vision. The house was broken, and no one could agree on how to rebuild it — or even where.

Out of this chaos came the famous “Four Ds” — the basic pillars of the plan: Demilitarization: No more Wehrmacht. No more weapons factories. No more military anything. Germany would never threaten peace again. Denazification: Erase the Nazi Party. Re-educate the people. Bring war criminals to justice. Democratization: Transform Germany into a proper democracy. Political parties. Free elections. The whole democratic toolkit. At least for one side of it. Decentralization: Break up the monopolies. Smash the cartels. Power to the Länder, not a strong central government.

What about the map? Germany was sliced into four zones — American, British, Soviet, and French. Even Berlin, deep in Soviet territory, was divided into four sectors. In theory, Germany would remain a single unit — run jointly by the Allies. In practice? The cracks were already forming.

One of the biggest cracks was the eastern border. The Allies provisionally recognized the Oder–Neisse Line as Poland’s new western edge. This meant huge chunks of former German territory — Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia — were handed over to Poland and the USSR. Poland itself had been pushed west, its eastern lands swallowed by the Soviet Union. A whole country had shifted sideways on the map.

And with that came one of the largest forced migrations in human history. The official language was cold: “The orderly and humane transfer of German populations.” The reality was ethnic cleansing: over 14 million people uprooted from their homes. Centuries of life erased.

Then came the elephant in the room: reparations. The Soviets wanted a lot. They’d lost more than 20 million people. Their cities were in ruins. But Truman had no intention of bankrupting Germany again — like after World War I.

The compromise: each country would take reparations from its own occupation zone. The Soviets would also get extra industrial equipment from the Western zones — in exchange for goods like coal and oil. But this approach only deepened the East–West divide. One American noted the Soviets were “taking everything they could get their hands on.”

On July 19, Churchill brought up Yugoslavia. Tito’s government had no free elections, no free press.: “It’s starting to look like a fascist regime,” Stalin brushed it off: “Let the Yugoslavs explain themselves”.

But if the talks were tense, the evenings were another matter. Dinner diplomacy had its own rhythm.

On July 20, it was Truman’s turn to host. He sat between Churchill and Stalin. And a house concert for them. Sergeant Eugene List played a Tchaikovsky arrangement for Stalin. Stalin stood up, shook his hand, toasted him. Then he asked for more. Later, List played the Missouri Waltz for Truman. Home sweet home. Wine bottles exchanged for vodka bottles. Toasts all around. Civilized men solving the world's problems over good music and strong drinks.

Meanwhile, just miles away in Berlin — the hunger was unbearable.

“Our neighbor, whose husband was taken away in May and who was left alone with five children, lies in bed and doesn't get up again. 'Because of hunger,' she whispers weakly." […] “What does a mother do when she receives only three hundred grams of bread per day? She divides it among her children and satisfies herself by watching them eat.” […] ”In Potsdam, the conference of the Big Three is in session. The entire area is cordoned off. No German may set foot in the sacred negotiation districts. May the grass grow in them—may it grow before the cows have perished.” — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin Diaries, July 19, 1945

July 22–29: Redrawing Europe. Deciding Japan’s Fate. A New PM Walks In.

On July 22, Stalin made an announcement: Soviet troops had started pulling out of Austria. The country, too, was to be divided in four occupation zones, as its capital Vienna. Truman and Churchill welcomed the move with relief. ut while Stalin was being cooperative in Austria, things were getting messy elsewhere.

The Big Three kept talking about the Yalta Declaration, which was a promise about free elections and press freedom in liberated countries. But the Soviets pushed back — proposing their own rules for Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Also for Italy. The Soviet sphere of influence was starting to take shape — one memorandum at a time.

The hottest issue was still Poland. Not just where the borders should fall — but who should govern. In London, the Polish government-in-exile was still hoping for a role. The West wanted free elections. The Soviets wanted something else. But while the big guys talked in Potsdam, Stalin was busy making facts on the ground. American diplomats were getting reports. Civil liberties crushed. Mass arrests by Soviet secret police. What could they do? Risk a major confrontation with the Soviets? Not likely. Poland was abandoned. Again.

"[...] I wish that instead of mumbling words of official optimism we had had the judgment and the good taste to bow our heads in silence before the tragedy of a people who have been our allies, whom we have helped to save from our enemies and whom we cannot save from our friends." - George Kennan, the US chargé d'affaires in Moscow

July 23rd sealed another fate: Königsberg - the old capital of East Prussia, birthplace of Immanuel Kant - was handed over to the Soviet Union. For Stalin, this was gold. A strategic Baltic port that didn't freeze half the year like others. Perfect for military and commercial ships. Today? It's the most dangerous border Europe shares with Russia. History has a way of coming back to haunt us.

July 24th Truman told Stalin about America's "new super weapon." The atomic bomb, fresh from testing. Stalin played it cool. "That's good," he said. "We'll use it against Japan." Stalin already knew. Soviet spies had been busy. His casual response was pure theater. Stalin saw this as atomic blackmail. His paranoia went through the roof.

On July 25, the U.S. issued a formal order: Prepare the atomic bombings of Japan. The war needed to end quickly. Avoid a bloody invasion of the home islands.

July 26th brought the Potsdam Declaration. Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek (joining by radio from China) delivered Japan's ultimatum. Surrender unconditionally. Or face complete destruction. They didn't mince words. Look at Germany, they said. See what happened with their "senseless resistance"? Don't make the same mistake. The message went out everywhere. Shortwave radio. Medium-wave transmitters. Millions of leaflets dropped over Japan. The whole world was watching.

On July 27, Japan answered with a single word: “Mokusatsu” — “to kill with silence”. The word carried layers of meaning. Ambiguous. Noncommittal. But the U.S. translated it as one thing: Rejection. Truman took it personally. “They told me I could go to hell,” he recalled later. That single word sealed Japan's fate

While all this drama unfolded, the Potsdam Conference hit a snag. Churchill had to leave. British voters had spoken. His Conservative Party lost the election. Out went the great wartime leader. In came Labour's Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. New faces at the table. Same problems to solve.

Truman wrote he felt sorry for Churchill…but not too sorry. He believed it might be easier to deal with Stalin without him. Stalin, on the other hand, was shaken. He respected Churchill — he knew how to read him. Now he had to face strangers. He reportedly muttered about “rotten democracies”. Molotov reportedly added: “That is the problem with elections. One never knows how they’ll turn out.”

In Berlin, even civilians felt the shift:

“While I'm busy with pots, poker, and cooking spoon, Heike (a friend of Ruth) comes running in. "They've ousted Churchill," she says. "And Eden. Attlee is supposed to have become Prime Minister." I drop the cooking spoon. All this in the middle of the conference? "Bottomless ingratitude!" "Not ingratitude at all," Andrik (Ruth partner) chimes in from inside. "Just proof of how objectively the English conduct politics. For the war, Churchill was their best man. For peace, especially if it's to be an allied peace, the Conservative Churchill has his dark sides. Attlee is a Labour man." — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin Diaries, July 29, 1945

Toward the End — and a New Beginning

Maybe losing Churchill was too much for Stalin. Who knows? But the Soviet leader fell ill for a couple of days. The Big Three table sat half-empty. Main sessions were paused. But the work didn’t stop. Behind closed doors, the delegates kept hammering out details.

Germany. Poland. Greece, Spain, and Portugal with their neutral dictatorships. International waterways across the Black Sea, the Danube, the Rhine. The Kiel Canal. The international status of Tangier. Discussions about Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania dragged on.

Some chapters were closed. Many left hanging. But the clock was ticking. The world could wait no longer. The war in the Pacific had to end — fast.

July 29th. Stalin was still down sick. But big news came from across the Atlantic. The US Senate had ratified the United Nations Charter. Almost unanimously. A critical brick in the new world order.

Monday, July 30th. President Truman greeted military officials. Posed for photographers. Had another dinner with music. This time, Chopin selections. The President's favorites. A tribute to Poland. In the absence of the man who was occupying it - Stalin, still indisposed. But Truman was itching to leave. He wrote in his diary:

“Conference is delayed. Stalin and Molotov—he is sick. No Big Three meeting today. Sent Churchill a note of consolation. Regretted his failure to return. Wished him a long and happy life.”

He also knew big issues were still stuck:

“We’re at an impasse on Poland and its boundary… Russia and Poland agreed on the Oder and Western Neisse — a unilateral arrangement. I don’t like it… Roosevelt let Russia have twenty billion in reparations… experts say no such sum exists. I made it plain: the U.S. doesn’t intend to pay reparations. If the Russians strip the country and starve the people, we get nothing.” — Harry S. Truman, July 30, 1945

In these final days, Truman leaned heavily on General George C. Marshall. The Supreme Commander of US Armed Forces. The man Truman credited most for winning the war. Their conversations laid the groundwork for what would become the Marshall Plan.

The situation in Western Europe was dire. War had weakened everything. The political consequences were scary. Officials at the Little White House understood the stakes. Economic collapse in Western Europe meant communist influence spreading westward. Europe's new dominant power - the Soviet Union - would exploit the chaos. Great Britain was nearly bankrupt. France was hanging by a thread. The US Ambassador in Paris warned: without American coal and heating oil, France would fall to communism. Or maybe anarchy.

Flooding Western Europe with reconstruction money wasn't generosity. It was a geopolitical firewall against the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Berlin was drowning. Not in money - in people: soldiers, former forced laborers, KZ survivors, refugees. So many that Soviet authorities had to issue a "no entry" order. The city was literally imploding. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich witnessed the horror:

“Among the smart American uniforms, the first German soldiers appear — ragged and emaciated [...] Like walking ruins they stagger along. [...] Sometimes you see only torsos. Amputated almost to the hips… pushing themselves in margarine boxes on wheels. [...] ‘Heil Hitler!’ one wants to curse in furious compassion.” — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, July 30, 1945

July 31st and August 1st. The final sessions at Cecilienhof were the longest yet.

Still so much to cover. Major topics. Minor ones. Even Middle East issues. Everything had to go into the final declaration. Wednesday, August 1st, 10:30 PM. The thirteenth meeting of the Berlin Conference convened. Almost entirely devoted to studying and approving the final communiqué. Agreement came shortly after midnight.

At 12:30 AM, August 2, the Potsdam Conference was over.

That morning, Truman had a quick breakfast. At 8:15, he flew out of Berlin-Gatow airfield. The war was still on — but the diplomacy was done. In Berlin, the press celebrated.

“Big headlines in all newspapers. "The Potsdam Final Agreement. Common policy in all occupation zones. Agreement on the peace order in Europe." A weight lifts from our hearts. So no new war.” [...] “I can already see the dove of peace.”

"Don't see it too early," warns Frank. "Not everything in these resolutions will turn out as rosy as it appears in print. And regarding the article on reparations, territorial cessions, and the Russian western border, not to mention the repatriation of German minorities—meaning refugees from the ceded territories—I shudder when I think of their consequences.” [...]

“If this madness is implemented! Repatriation of German minorities from Poland! That means [...] eviction of millions of Germans. [...] – I remain silent, depressed. I hadn't imagined things this way. The Potsdam Agreement is beginning to seem sinister to me.” — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin Diaries, August 4, 1945

August 6, 1945: The first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich processed the news:

“There we have it. Those who choose war will be destroyed by war. Not invasion, but atomic bomb. That terrible weapon, which has been rumored for weeks, was used yesterday against Japan. On the city of Hiroshima. With an explosive force two thousand times greater than the English ten-thousand-kilo bombs. It must have pulverized the city and its inhabitants. If Hitler had succeeded in creating such an instrument of destruction. Retribution weapon Number X. Unimaginable! But the grotesque thing about it is: three of the scientists who contributed to the invention are German emigrants. He could have played this murderous trump card if he hadn't—oh meaningful avenging Nemesis—blocked his own path through his racial hatred. New proof that dictators, at the decisive moment, destroy themselves through their own measures. Hiroshima is a pile of rubble. Perhaps tomorrow all of Japan will be.” — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin Diaries, August 8, 1945

August 8, 1945: The Soviet Union declared war on Japan. August 9, 1945: The second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. August 14, 1945: Japan accepted unconditional surrender.

“The war in Japan is over” [...] Yesterday at two in the morning, the end of the war was announced [...]. The Japanese news agency reports that the War Minister, Korechika Anami, committed hara-kiri "to atone for his failures in fulfilling his duties as Minister of His Majesty." When will we finally begin to see heroism not in the destruction of life, but in its preservation.” — Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin Diaries, August 16, 1945

September 2, 1945 — World War II officially ends.

But a new war was starting. A cold one. We thought the atomic threat would at least end the hot wars. It didn't. The Cold War didn't stop in 1989 either. Some wars never really end. They just change temperature.

Sources1

Everyone, age permitting, remembers where they were on September 11, 2001, the day of the Twin Towers. Me too. But who remembers July 11, 1995, the day of the Srebrenica massacre?

I do. I remember those days well. I was tearing up my master thesis. Deciding to rewrite it from scratch. Extending my university life by a whole year. I was confused. And also very, very angry.

Angry with my fellow university students in Milan. Angry at the indifferent Italians. Angry at Europe — where I had placed all my adolescent hopes since 1989. I was angry about what was happening in Bosnia, just seven hundred kilometers from my hometown in the extreme Northeast of Italy, bordering with former Yugoslavia.

Yes, the UN was there. With its resolutions. Useless then. Useless today. Yes, the peacekeepers were there. But they didn’t keep the peace. In the case of Srebrenica, they became part of the problem. Even NATO airplanes was there. In theory, enforcing a no-fly zone. In reality, just circling in the sky.

On July 11, 1995, they flew right over Srebrenica. They saw it all from above. People running, screaming, Looking up at the sky, hoping for help. But help never came. The Bosnian Serbs had taken UN troops hostage — Dutch and French soldiers. And they threatened to kill them. So the Blue Helmets did nothing. And the massacre began.

Where were we all?

Not just physically — but mentally.

Intoxicated by the fabulous eighties. Deluded that with the fall of the Wall, history was ending. We didn't notice that another history was beginning again. From the East.

When the Bosnian war broke out in April 1992, many were caught completely off guard. We had been lulled. By the dream of “Europe as a peace project”. We thought Europe meant Berlin, Paris, maybe Brussels. We forgot that Europe was also Belgrade. Zagreb. Sarajevo. Chisinau. Tallinn. Odessa. The Donbas. And in that Europe, the old ghosts were waking up. Yet someone already saw those ghosts. In the days following the fall of the Wall. And tried to warn us.

Ian McEwan, one of Britain’s great postwar writers, spoke at a conference in Milan in May 1990. And what he said still gives me chills:

“If the angel of democracy and self-determination has been set free, the demon of national differentiation is now also free… dragging behind it all the border struggleslong kept hidden and controlled by Moscow.”

He was clear. History hadn’t ended. It had only been unpaused.

“In 1989 not only countries were liberated: our past was also liberated.”