My family escaped from the Nazis, but I know it's time for Germany to escape the shadow of its past

Telegraph

18-02-2025

My grandfather served four years in the trenches of Belgium and France fighting the 'Tommies', as he would have called them. Although a cavalry officer, he didn't spend much of his time during the First World War on a horse.
Grateful as a Jew to escape his German homeland twenty years after the war's end, it was still a shock to him the first time he saw my father, born Heinz Ludwig Merlaender, in British uniform. Like most German Jews, the family were interned at the outbreak of war on the Isle of Man, but as soon as my father could join up he did, first in the Pioneer Corps (the distrusted German refugees could do little harm digging ditches), then in the Intelligence Corps (how could you waste the talents of the German speakers if you were going to occupy and administer the country?).
My family's roots go back a long way in Germany. When the Nazis came to power all the boys in my father's class had to examine their origins and it was to father's great pride that as far back as he could go, they were all Germans. They came from small provincial places in the north like Dassel and Lemgo and moved to larger towns like Essen and Offenbach.
They were deeply proud of their nation and its achievements. My great aunt studied at the Frankfurt Conservatory alongside Hindemith and under the tutorship of one of Robert Schumann's daughters. The men of the family did their duty in 1870 and 1914. Being Jewish was with each generation increasingly incidental, making them, in their own eyes, no less German than their Catholic and Protestant neighbours.
Even after the horrors of the early years of Third Reich, from which most of my family escaped, they still remembered the positives. My maternal grandmother, cowering at home with two small children during the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, recalled a ring on the bell and when she opened the door a slit, the policeman shouting out to his colleagues ' Niemand zu Hause ' (nobody home).
My father spoke fondly of how his school mates supported him against Nazi teachers and how the whole school atmosphere was helped by a devoutly Catholic and quietly anti-Nazi headmaster.
And the centrality of German culture, particularly music, was passed down. My paternal grandmother took me from an early age to concerts featuring Beethoven and Bach. When I started learning German with my father, we turned to volumes of Schiller he had received as a bar mitzvah present (far too difficult) and Schnitzler short stories (much more accessible).
The political sentiments of patriotism and affiliation to the nation were unquestioningly transferred to Britain, the beloved land of refuge, but the culture of the old country was never forsaken.
And the links continue. I took German nationality years before Brexit and each of my children has associated in their own way.
My oldest and her Zurich-born husband are attempting to bring up their first child to speak German. My second studied German at University and spent a year in quiet, tidy, backwoods Fulda. My third on marriage changed his name back to the one which his grandfather was advised to abandon on going to fight in France in 1944, lest he be captured and treated as a traitor rather than as a prisoner of war.
On Sunday, Germany will go to the polls in what might be the most momentous election since the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949. Although a German citizen, I do not have a vote, never actually having lived in the country (but with characteristic national humility, an official at the embassy told me when I received my certificate of nationality that I could challenge that in the courts).
In an extraordinarily short period of time, Germany has changed from being the engine of the European economy and the steady centre of the continent's political sanity to a land that seems to be falling apart. The railways, which ran with clockwork efficiency when I travelled extensively across the country twenty years ago, are now an embarrassment of delays and confusion.
Expensive energy, Chinese competition and a resistance to technological innovation are rendering the German economy obsolete and threatening the prosperity achieved since the near-miraculous phoenix-like reconstruction after the Second World War. Leaders seem incapacitated, operating out of coalition mantels of ever-more clashing and incoherent political colours.
But at the heart of the problem, it seems to me, lies a deep cultural malaise. My grandparents would be horrified at the shoddy, litter-strewn centres of German cities. They would be depressed to find out that, lacking confidence and pride, Germans have not been having enough children to replace themselves for more than half a century.
They would find it deeply worrying that synagogues in Germany continue to be attacked and anti-Semitic slogans daubed on community buildings. They would be honest enough to see that the threat to Germany's small and vulnerable Jewish communities, remnants risen from the ashes, comes from a new direction.
One friend told me of anti-Israel demonstrations at which Islamist participants shouted 'Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas' while their Left-wing allies shifted about uncomfortably but said nothing.
The threat of a revival of anti-Semitism is Germany is real but it is far from the only problem Germany faces as it struggles to absorb the vast inflow of Middle Eastern immigrants it has received in the last decade.
Germany must be ever-mindful of its past, and indeed its contrition for the Holocaust has been sincere, long lasting and exemplary. But it must also take responsibility for its future. It cannot do this if it is forever hobbled by a cultural guilt that prevents an honest and open discussion of what ails the country. It is not for me to tell German how to vote. But I hope they do so with an urgent desire to fix their country and an understanding that their history and culture should not just be a matter of shame but also pride which, despite it all, was instilled in me by my forebears.