DAY 246 - CHRISTMAS IN BERLIN - PART 1

2378 miles–5,101,001 steps

After the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdammer Platz, and remains of the Berlin Wall, there were three visits I wanted to make before leaving the city: the first was to the Holocaust Memorial, the second was to the Olympic Stadium constructed for the for Berlin  Games in 1936, and the third was the Hansa Recording Studios where U2 recorded the classic song ‘One’.  I had considered making the 30km trip out to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, which was used to train SS Officers in acts of mass killing that were then deployed to other camps, but to be quite frank with the carnage of Verdun and the devastation of the Battle of Berlin, I just didn’t have the strength to look into the face of such evil, especially on a Day of Hope.

One of the lessons of history is that Evil always overplays its hand and the Berlin Olympics and the Holocaust were proof of this:

In the morning I attended the Holocaust Memorial, which is unusual in that it is comprised of thousands of stone slabs of different heights and yet they carry no inscription. In the absence of words and symbols, the visitor is left to reflect on the greatest crime ever committed. This crime was not just against a race, the Jews, but against humanity as a whole. It is a memorial, but it is also a warning because if we think such unspeakable evil could never happen again then I believe we are dangerously wrong; times change, but the human heart does not. We therefore need to maintain eternal vigilance by reminding us, not the Germans, but all of us what we are capable of when power and prejudice are left unchecked by justice and empathy.

Given this fact, it seemed appropriate that I should arrive Memorial via Hannah Arendt Strasse; for few people have done more that Hannah Arendt to explore the nature of political power and violence, which as a Jewish intellectual she was to witness at first hand in Nazi, Berlin. Her essay ‘On Violence’ is a work which I would most like to be required reading for every despot, dictator, mobster or bully because it will explain to them why they are acting and thinking the way they are. Essentially violence becomes permissible when we consider that we are more and others are less than we are. When we no longer consider all humans to be equals, all manner of evil become possible and even justified. Religion, race, national borders and ideologies have been used through the ages to embody this belief in the superior and the inferiority of different peoples. However, in the case of monotheistic religion, often this is unintentionally so, but is logical consequence of a belief that there is one truth (theirs), one god (theirs), one church (theirs), one Heaven (theirs) and one Hell (not theirs), and they will be populated of respectively by the, ‘chosen’ and ‘not chosen’, ‘saved’ and ‘not saved’, ‘faithful’ and ‘infidel’. Once we convince ourselves that god has written off a country, a race or a people for eternal damnation, it ‘legitimises’ the actions of those looking for an excuse to send them there.

In contrast, where there is a belief in One God who is the creator and sustainer of all things and in whose image we have all been made, black or white, female or male, Muslim or Christian, capitalist or communist, rich or poor, gay or straight; a God who loves each of us unconditionally not because of our nationality but because of our humanity; a God whose only command is that we love and value each other as He loves and values us; then religion, at a stroke, becomes a means by which we celebrate what we are, rather than point out what others are not. Looking at the world in 2011 this is of course an ‘impossible dream’ for us, but not I suspect for God. Then again He always was an optimist, that is after all why He made us in the first place. Happy Christmas!

DAY 243 - BERLIN

22 December, 2011

2378 miles–5,101,001 steps

When I had embarked upon the walk back in April, the route I had mapped out was to take me up through Austria and Germany to Berlin and then across to Cologne and Brussels. At the same time, I had arranged to meet up with family for Christmas in Berlin. The route changed but the plans for Christmas didn’t, and I was glad because in attempting any explanation as to the nature of war and peace in modern Europe, then to visit and try to understand what went on in Berlin is as instructive to the enquirer as the visit Sarajevo or Verdun.

The British Embassy in Berlin had pulled together a short programme of visits and meetings on the Thursday morning. On arrival I was met by Astrid Ladd, who along with Julia Mueller, had done a great job of organising visits in Frankfurt, Bonn and Cologne a couple of weeks earlier. The Embassy in Berlin is very modern in design and impressive in terms of scale. It was unlike any other I had visited, which was explained by the fact that this Embassy was only built in 1998, as it was then that Berlin was re-designated as the capital of Germany following re-unification. The Embassy is rebuilt on the same site as the pre-war British Embassy, which was flattened, along with most of the rest of Berlin  by British and American bombers.

My first meeting was with a group of students and faculty from The Centre of British Studies at the Humboldt University. There are few joys in life greater than engaging in discussion with interested young people, because interested young people become interesting young people in the process of application. The experience of debate and discussion from informed positions helps to clarify understanding in open minds willing to learn. I was particularly honoured that Prof Jürgen Schlaeger, who had founded the Centre, was able to come along and as is often the case, you can get slightly embarrassed by how much more the students of Britain seem to know compared to the citizens of Britain.

There was really only one topic on that the students  wanted to explore and that was the exercising of the British veto at the European Council by David Cameron. I could see puzzled looks as they first tried to get their heads around a Conservative Party politician undertaking a walk for peace; then speaking with great feeling about visits to Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Verdun and the rationale for Europe and yet apparently supporting the use of the veto by David Cameron. Was I having an identity crisis? I don’t think so:

You see I don’t know where it was ever written that Conservatives should favour war. Conservatives favour freedom, minimum interference from the state in the lives of the law abiding citizen, a focus on opportunity rather than outcome, the sound management of the public finances, the encouragement enterprise through fair markets with low levels of taxation and regulation, the encouragement of international trade and the intrinsic value institutions be they the family, monarchy or the NHS. Now I just can’t see in some cases, not all, how these aims are strengthened by military intervention overseas.  When it comes to Europe, I do now see the point of Europe in a way which I had not seen it before, but the view from Britain is different.  As an island we are more independent, we do have a global network of relationships through the Commonwealth and with the United States which are in reality as important to us as our relationships with European neighbours. We should no more be required to sacrifice our national interests or international relationships than Germany, France or the countries of the Benelux. We should have mutual respect and recognise that the EU and NATO have guaranteed the peace in Europe for over seventy years and we want this to continue and to a strong economic and for those that seek it, political union. In my view, what David Cameron said ‘no’ to at the European Council was a deal which was first and foremost not good for Europe. As you can imagine this sparked a lively debate and I loved every minute of it because in the process of the debate, I was able to refine my thinking and better understand, chiefly, the German position.

After the meeting with the students, I had the privilege of meeting Simon McDonald with our hugely impressive and unstuffy ambassador to Berlin. I have had the opportunity to spend more time with British diplomats and officials over the past eight months of this walk, than I have in my eight years in Parliament. I knew before that they were all intellectually able and effective, what perhaps I hadn’t appreciated was (a) how hard they work, it really is more of a calling than a posting, and (b) how passionate they are about promoting Britain at every given opportunity. Simon was no exception. I had arrived in the midst of a diplomatic maelstrom caused by the consequences for Anglo-German relations following the European Council. Like the forbearing host of a wild party when the guests (ministers and entourage) fly out having had their rave, it is the diplomats who are left in country to discretely tidy up the mess, smooth the egos and rebuild the relationships. They do it all unseen without complaining, but we should value their service every bit as much as we value the service of all other servants of our nation, who selflessly serve overseas to defend and advance our interests.

After a very enjoyable meeting over tea, we even had time to have a walk up to the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate together. Simon explained some of the history and significance of this square mile where NATO and the Warsaw Pact squared up to each other during the Cold War when, in the nuclear arms race – where once cities were under threat, now civilisations were under threat. Fortunately we got through that stand-off by the skin of our teeth and for that reason Berlin represents the best example we have of what is possible when we choose peace over conflict. As someone who was born in the year that the Berlin Wall was erected, I walked through the Brandenburg Gate with the British Ambassador (pic) with the only military uniforms visible being worn by actors posing for photographs with tourists. We walked down a little way towards Potsdammer Platz and the Holocaust Memorial and then came back through the Gate where a large Hanukkah menorah was lit to celebrate the Jewish festival. We can sometimes get too wound up with the bad that we become blind to the good that we see all around us and Berlin has seen the extremes of both and has today chosen the better path.

As I stood by the Christmas tree and over the Hanukkah lights to the Brandenburg gate that are there and the Berlin Wall that now is not, that passage from John 1, 5 in the bible came forcibly to mind:” The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcomeit.”

DAY 240 - VERDUN

19 December, 2011

2378 miles–5,101,001 steps

I received an early Christmas present; I was bought a night in the very pleasant and historic Hotel Le Coq Hardi. I paid a ‘heavy’ price for the march down from Damvillers with my rucksack, as I had clearly aggravated the slowly healing shoulder and this resulted in a sleepless night, with relief only coming courtesy of one hot bath and two sleeping tablets.

I was supposed to set off early the next day for Ste-Menehould, but I just couldn’t.  I then got to ask my favourite question when faced with an unexpected problem, “What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” The answer I came up with was to try and understand what had happened here in 1916 and why. One of the great joys of my couple of years embarking on a research degree at Durham, was to be able to be in the library exploring and reading various texts to try and answer a research question. Normally if I have a day off, then it is consumed immediately by responding to the backlog of emails and blogs, but this day I decided to devote it to trying to understand what sequence of events could lead, apparently rationale human beings, to embark on such a systematic bloodbath as was the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

I downloaded two books onto my Kindle: ‘The Price of Glory’ by Alistair Horne and ‘The First World War’ by A J P Taylor and began to read.  ‘The Price of Glory’ was an exhaustive and detailed account of the build up to the battle with numerous human level insights from personal papers of participants, but it didn’t scratch where I itched; I wanted outrage, a polemic against the foolishness and waste of the first industrial war and I didn’t get it, well not by p 148 anyway.  So I switched to A J P Taylor and this helped by almost mocking the ruling elites and the generals who planned outdated tactics of waging cavalry against tanks and infantry against machine guns.

Through my morning of reading I was getting closer to understanding what had happened, but I was nowhere closer to understanding why it had happened.  The most revealing insight came through Horne’s astute observation, that the notebooks of generals on both sides of the Battle of Verdun logged in great detail ammunition supplies, but there were no personal records kept of casualties as a result of deployment of the munitions on the battlefield. It was as if there were three ingredients in the battle, shells, bullets and bodies, but only the first two were valued sufficiently to be counted.

I decided to take a walk, beginning at tourist information where I explained the purpose of my visit and where they were able to recommend a walking tour around the city that took in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, The World Peace Centre, The Victory Monument and The Underground Fortress.

I discovered three new things on that tour:

The first was that the city had been used as a place for holding British prisoners of war following the Napoleonic war between France and Prussia;

The second was that the entire tone and feel of the museum and memorials was on the military victory by the French, rather than on the price that was paid;

That the military brain behind ‘France’s greatest military victory’ was none other than Marshal Pétain, who had a young protégé in the Battle of Verdun by the name of Charles De Gaulle. There was no sign at Verdun of Pétain’s later decision to acquiesce in the face of the invading German forces, as he famously declared “They shall not pass!” and they didn’t, but then again that was never their objective. I may be on very dangerous ground here, but I just wondered whether the reflection on the human cost of the Battle of Verdun caused the 84 year old French military hero in 1940 to ponder whether the ‘price’ France would be required to pay again, was worth the glory.

Whilst Pétain stayed on as a ‘puppet’ Head of State of the French State/ Vichy Regime, following defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, his erstwhile protégé de Gaulle fled to London to command the Free French Forces. Following the end of World War II, Pétain was put on trial by De Gaulle for treason, was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out and instead commuted to life imprisonment by De Gaulle. History is written by the victors and there Pétain’s role in the Battle of Verdun is ‘airbrushed’ Soviet style, and his memory is sealed as a weak collaborator who dishonoured France rather than the military leader who ‘saved’ France at the Battle of Verdun.

In September 1938 Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich having reached a deal with Hitler, which he believed would give us ‘peace in our time’.  He was mobbed by adoring crowds at the airport on his return, who hailed him as our greatest ever prime minister.  The crowds who had gathered in their hundreds of thousands outside Buckingham Palace to hear King George say of Neville Chamberlain, “After the magnificent efforts of the Prime Minister in the cause of peace, it is my fervent hope that a new era of friendship and prosperity may be dawning among the peoples of the world,” quickly forgot they were there. The newspapers whose headlines echoed the royal tribute and national mood of the ‘saviour of the nation’ had that most familiar of journalistic diseases, selective amnesia. Instead we choose only to remember the indefatigable spirit of ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches.” Plus ça change.

We want to believe that our heroes are super human, courageous to the last, incapable of error and smirking in the face of death. When we see leaders fail or events undo their work, we would rather preserve the myth of the super hero than accept the fine line that we all tread every day between victory and villainy, between triumph and defeat, between hero and zero.

In this theme, I concluded my walk with a visit to the World Peace Centre.  Whereas at the war monuments and the underground fortress, there had been many fellow visitors, I was the solitary visitor to the World Peace Centre and the adjacent Notre-Dame Cathedral. As I walked through the peace centre exhibition, I saw a photograph that was to inject a moment of humanity and hope into the carnage cloaked in respectability on the battlefield. The photograph was of Francois Mitterrand, then president of France and Helmut Kohl, then Chancellor of Germany, who met in Verdun to lay a wreath jointly to the fallen on both sides in 1984, to mark seventy years since the beginning of the First World War. As they paused after laying the wreath they held hands in a gesture that was to bring hope and healing to both nations. Mitterrand had served as a minister in the Vichy Regime under Pétain and it seemed somehow appropriate that my camera flash against the glossy photo (see pic) created a ‘moment of creation’ image (after the Sistine Chapel) in which there was encapsulated the hopes of a past being laid to rest and a new beginning being commenced.