Opinion

Britain and unionists could learn from Berlin experience

<span style="color: rgb(38, 34, 35); font-family: utopia-std, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, serif; ">Berlin is an open-air museum. There is no attempt to hide its history and, therefore, Germany&rsquo;s history. Berlin is its capital</span>&nbsp;
Berlin is an open-air museum. There is no attempt to hide its history and, therefore, Germany’s history. Berlin is its capital Berlin is an open-air museum. There is no attempt to hide its history and, therefore, Germany’s history. Berlin is its capital 

STANDING beside the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin to the six million Jews annihilated across Europe by the Nazis, I got for the first time the importance of the European Union: beyond it being how republicans view it - a ‘rich man’s club’.

A friend with me put it succinctly when he said the EU had ‘kept the peace in Europe’.

That thought travelled with me as we immersed ourselves fleetingly in Berlin’s history over the last 100 years.

Although keeping the peace in Europe since the end of WWII did not stop imperialist powers like Britain and France from prosecuting wars - Ireland and Algeria come to mind - nonetheless my friend’s point was well-made when it came to the scale of deaths and destruction caused by the First and Second World Wars. And Germany was central to both.

Germany’s history as I read it on the streets and museums of Berlin reflects a period of volatility in the world order – with superpowers vying with each other for world-domination: Germany, Britain, the US, the USSR and less so China.

At the core of this domination was a struggle between capitalism and communism as both were defined at that time with fascism an extreme product of capitalism in meltdown.

And while the EU has many faults, not least of which is the centralisation of political and economic power, and its dictatorial economic policies which caused so much misery for the people of the south of Ireland and Greece, to the EU’s credit west European powers now have a political forum to resolve their difficulties instead of a battlefield.

And this is important when we consider the horror of the Syrian war and the instability in the Ukraine and the growth of right wing groups across Europe. While we were in Berlin Angela Merkel’s party lost out in elections to right wing parties because of her government’s humanitarian immigration policies.

Hitler’s growth was based on his opposition to non-Germans as he saw them.

Walking around Berlin, and we walked over thirty miles in a few days, I got a sense of being a European. I have visited several European cities but that feeling of actually being European I have never felt before nor felt the need to feel it either.

I think this feeling has been triggered by the British government’s intention to leave the EU and the history - horrific and heroic – we picked up on the streets and museums of Berlin.

Berlin is an open-air museum. There is no attempt to hide its history and, therefore, Germany’s history. Berlin is its capital.

It wears its historical heart on its sleeve. And it is not an easy history to read because it is about the killing of vulnerable people on an industrial scale during WWII: Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, socialists, trade unionists, social democrats and ordinary Germans.

And it is also about the negative impact of communism as practised by the Soviet Union and the East German communist party in partitioning Germany, building the Berlin Wall and suffocating East Germany’s society, including Berlin with its state terror and all-embracing network of spies and informers.

And I say that in the knowledge that the people of Russia suffered horrendously at the hands of the Germans. They lost twenty million people during WWII. But the ideals of communism were lost in the midst of this battle to survive.

More difficult to find but it is there recorded in the general commentary, is the heroic resistance to the Nazis and the communists by ordinary people who paid with their lives in the gas chambers and concentration camps and torture centres and prisons of the Stasi, the state security police.

I constantly made comparisons between Berlin and Belfast: occupation; partition; the paraphernalia of war – tanks, armed soldiers, barricades, walls.

In both cities the people resisted and died and fought on against the odds – and rightly so.

In both cities the brutal power of the state was used in the killing of civilians; in the detention centres and in the prisons.

But Berliners are telling their story. Openly and honestly. And its young people are learning it.

It is long past the time for the British and unionists to do likewise here.