“Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!” – those words are among the most iconic in Cold War history. They were uttered by the then US President Ronald Reagan as he stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on 12 June 1987 — almost to the day 39 years ago. Reagan had made his mark on history and on Berlin.

Much less known is the fact that this hadn’t been Reagan’s first visit to the divided city. His first trip as US President took place exactly 44 years ago today, on 11 June 1982, and four years earlier still, he had come as a private citizen. After his bid for the presidency in 1976 was defeated by Gerald Ford, he prepared intensively for the 1980 election – which took him to Berlin for the first time in 1978.

Now, for the first time, a publication by German historian Jens Schöne takes English-speaking readers along on Reagan’s Berlin travels, right up to his final visit in September 1990. It delivers fascinating insights into how Reagan’s movements were monitored by the Stasi, how he felt when he briefly visited East Berlin and how his view of communism was impacted by his trips.

And the best thing? This concise and engaging book available in full and entirely free online for anyone to read.

Naturally, I got very excited about this when I saw it on Jens Schöne’s social media feed (do follow him for more fascinating history on X if you can). So I have asked him to provide a teaser, exclusively for us here on ZEITGEIST.

The following excerpt from Ronald Reagan in Berlin. The President and the Divided City describes how it all began….

Excerpt from:

Ronald Reagan in Berlin.

The President and the Divided City.

By Jens Schöne

[…]

Reagan and his advisors had recognized that he had a major shortcoming as a candidate, and that this would need to be addressed before pursuing another presidential nomination: his lack of foreign policy experience. On the domestic front, Reagan’s governorship had earned him sufficient credentials, but in terms of foreign policy he was virtually unknown. Although he had not yet announced whether he would run again, he needed to be prepared. For this reason, two visits (each lasting several days) were planned for 1978: one to East Asia (Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) during the spring, and one to Europe at the end of the year. The primary aim of the trips was not to gather detailed knowledge about the countries and places visited, but rather to send a signal to potential voters. Carter had demonstrated his aptitude for foreign policy in Berlin to great public effect, and now Reagan was to follow suit.

After Great Britain and France, the Federal Republic of Germany was the final stop on Reagan’s European tour. On November 30, he spoke with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He then met with the Leader of the Opposition, Helmut Kohl, who later made a pointed remark about the meeting: “our discussions lasted longer than originally planned. It struck me that he knew practically nothing of Europe but that he possessed a skill that is rare among politicians – the ability to listen. He was very interested in the question of German division.” Further talks followed, including one with West Berlin’s Governing Mayor, Dietrich Stobbe, who was in the capital of Bonn as acting President of the Bundesrat. The same evening, Reagan, his wife Nancy, and their companions flew to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, settled in to Hotel Kempinski on Kurfürstendamm, and prepared for the eventful day ahead.

Reagan’s trip did not go unnoticed in East Berlin. More than a week before it began, it was the subject of top-secret documents within the Ministry for State Security. There, alongside his visit to Bonn (and subsequent flight to Munich), Reagan’s other travel plans were also noted: “[f]urthermore, this US citizen will be visiting WB on 12.01.78 [December 1, 1978].” The secret service regarded itself as prepared and intended to leave nothing to chance – which makes what happened next even more surprising.

December 1, 1978, a Friday, started out rainy. Dietrich Stobbe, who had in the meantime returned from Bonn to the divided city, invited Ronald and Nancy Reagan as well as several of their companions (including Reagan’s close advisors, Richard Allen and Peter Hannaford) on a private bus tour of the city. Around 10:30 in the morning, the group reached Checkpoint Charlie, the inner-city border crossing, just as John F. Kennedy had done 15 years previously. Wary eyes observed their movements from the eastern section of the city: “[a]t the same time, approx. 10 civilians arrived in another bus […]. One female and one male individual were filmed by the aforementioned camera team beneath the sector sign and right in front of the checkpoint building.” While the identities of the individuals are not explicitly stated here, the security services knew perfectly well who they were dealing with.

Another stop was made at the western side of the Brandenburg Gate. Kennedy had come here too, and hardly a decade after his first visit, Reagan would give his most famous speech on precisely the same spot. As his companions recalled, Reagan was deeply affected by the sight of the Wall, and expressed his hope that there must be a way to bring it down. Around midday, the group arrived at the US headquarters in Dahlem and dined with military personnel. In his brief address, Reagan made his position clear once more: “I hope you will never think of it [the Wall] as something permanent.”

The spectacular itinerary of the afternoon can only be reconstructed with the help of surviving eyewitness accounts, namely those of Allen and Hannaford. While the MfS kept its eye on Reagan, it certainly had not reckoned with one possibility: that he might enter East Berlin. It is likely that Reagan expressed this desire spontaneously at the US headquarters, before putting his money where his mouth was. Accompanied by his two advisors and their wives, he set off for the eastern part of the city in two cars with uniformed drivers, but the security agencies there paid them no further notice. The archival documents that have so far been found only record the border crossing. At 14:22 Reagan passed through Checkpoint Charlie, and by 15:18 he had returned to West Berlin, “without incident”.

If one believes Reagan’s companions, the trip had a lasting impact on him. The surviving reports may be contradictory and in some places unconvincing, but the basic details are clear: the entourage made its way through a bleak cityscape full of undeveloped plots of land and ruins from the Second World War to Alexanderplatz. Here, the group visited the department store, where the Americans were struck by the sparse range of goods on offer. While the women remained in the store, the men made their way into the Platz and observed a man being checked and harassed by heavily armed police, apparently without reason. According to the two advisors, this scene etched itself deep onto Reagan’s memory and strengthened his anti-communist engagement. He later referred to it several times.

After returning to West Berlin, Reagan had one last appointment that day, at the Axel Springer publishing house. Here, too, there was a vivid reminder of the division of the city and its sometimes barbaric consequences: the company’s headquarters, which stood almost directly on the Wall, overlooked the spot where 18-year-old Peter Fechter had been shot by East German border guards in August 1962. Peter had been attempting to cross the death strip between the two halves of the city when he was wounded by several shots. He subsequently bled to death, slowly and publicly, while making desperate pleas for help. The incident was described to Reagan late in the afternoon of December 1, 1978, and left a deep impression. […] Reagan could be satisfied; his visit to Berlin had been a profitable one. When he returned many years later, he did so under very different circumstances, with far-reaching consequences.

Jens Schöne, Ronald Reagan in Berlin. The President and the Divided City, Berlin 2026. A joint publication by the Ernst Reuter Archives Foundation and the Berlin Commissioner for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship.

Free download:

https://bebra-wissenschaft.de/vzgesamt/titel/ronald-reagan-in-berlin-2.html

Chancellor Heinrich Brüning must have felt the weight of history on his shoulders as he toured Germany in January 1931. The country was in the grip of the worst economic crisis in living memory. Unemployment was spiralling out of control. In 1930, over 3 million Germans had been looking for work. In 1931, that figure spiked to 4.5 million – ​­more than twice the pre-​­Wall Street Crash record of 2 million in 1926. People struggled to pay their bills and their mortgages, and they struggled to feed themselves and their families.

This was bad, and Brüning knew it. But what could he tell the German people? That things would soon get better? It would have been an obvious lie. There was no clear path out of this misery. As far as Brüning was concerned, the Great Depression was a logical consequence of the First World War. Germany had overspent and borrowed eyewatering sums of money – much of it from its own citizens in the form of war bonds – on the assumption that it would win the war and be in a position to extract reparations from the vanquished. It hadn’t turned out that way.

Brüning felt that honesty was the best policy. On 25th January, he took to the radio – then still a relatively new medium – and told the German people: “It is not only through reparations burdens that we have fallen into financial misfortune, but to a very large measure by letting ourselves imagine that despite a lost war, despite huge sacrifices in blood and treasure, both state and individuals could live better than in pre-war times.” In other words, the situation was what it was. Germany would enact strict fiscal discipline to find a way forward. His government implemented a hard and unpopular austerity programme.

When Brüning toured Germany in January 1931 to communicate his plan to the public and restore confidence, he realised just how much hostility it faced. He was greeted by scores of angry farmers in Silesia. In Breslau, he was booed by 40,000 Nazi activists. In Chemnitz, unemployed workers threw stones at his motorcade.

In parliament in Berlin, things weren’t much better. The political landscape was deeply fractured and polarised. A tide of extremism swept through the country. Brüning implored the deputies to respond by pulling themselves together in a show of strength and unity. But the Nazis and communists in parliament had no intention of shoring up democracy. The left and the right hated each other more than ever.

At the end of his tour, Brüning concluded that it was easier to believe in parliamentary democracy when things were going well.

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I recounted this story on German TV on Thursday because it is directly relevant to today’s situation. When the current German coalition under Chancellor Friedrich Merz began its work in 2025, some of its members regarded the newly-formed government as “the last shot for democracy”. The worry is that the party-political spectrum could become so splintered that the country would become ungovernable, and the AfD could become the largest party at the next election. All of this is happening amid an economic crisis as well as cultural and social tensions.

There are certainly major differences between past and present that we cannot ignore. For one thing, there is the unique severity of the Great Depression after 1929 and the terrible levels of political violence the Weimar Republic suffered from the outset. But there are striking parallels to Brüning’s time, too. When he took over as Chancellor in 1930, he struggled to implement effective reform measures due to a highly divided parliament that couldn’t agree on the right way out of the crisis. While moderates bickered and argued, the political fringes benefited.

After just a few months into his term, the Social Democrats (SPD) barely tolerated Brüning (who was from the Catholic Centre Party) and did so only because they feared that new elections would make the Nazi Party even stronger (it had gained 18.3% in the 1930 elections, a huge increase from the 2.6% it got in 1928). Brüning, who, through President Hindenburg, passed more laws by presidential emergency decree in 1931 than by parliamentary vote, held on by a thread until forced out of office in May 1932. A few months later, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

Today, Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats are in an uneasy coalition with the SPD. All sides know that swift, drastic reforms are necessary to turn Germany’s economic crisis around, but they cannot agree on what to do. Meanwhile, the AfD is in first place in the polls. In some polls, it looks so bad that Merz’s conservatives would currently not even achieve a majority together with the SPD and the Greens. The phrase that you hear again and again in political conversation is that the ruling coalition now “has a duty to be successful”.

Interestingly, Brüning’s austerity course has often been regarded in the past as a cautionary tale. Indeed, he was seen as the “Hunger Chancellor” by many Germans at the time. I certainly saw in many diaries, while researching Weimar, that people just didn’t feel that what he was doing was working or leading them toward a better future. In recent years, Brüning’s time in office has often been evoked in the German media when commentators wanted to emphasise that austerity measures were not the way out of economic peril.

But there are historians who defend Brüning as the last man standing in the battle for Weimar Democracy. And it’s true that he achieved some remarkable successes that would later benefit Hitler on his path to economic stabilisation. In June 1931, Brüning met with British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, with whom he issued a joint statement that stressed “the difficulties of the existing position in Germany and the need for alleviation”. US President Herbert Hoover listened and proposed a one-​­year moratorium for all war debts – Germany’s to the Allies and the Allies’ to one another. This was a generous offer that was eventually accepted and practically marked the end of German repayments for the First World War. That was one weight off Germany’s shoulders.

But Chancellor Brüning and President Hindenburg soon fell out, marking the end of their cooperation in governing the country through emergency decrees while parliament remained paralysed. Two more chancellors and a lot of power-political game-playing followed before Hindenburg appointed Hitler.

So what’s the lesson from all of this? Well, I need to stress again that the situation wasn’t the same then for many reasons, not least the fact that Hitler had millions of rowdy SA troopers under his command, many of whom saw themselves as revolutionaries rather than election campaign supporters. There was not just the threat of a violent coup in the air but very real mass violence already unfolding on the streets of Germany with young people dying for the cause. There was a very different urgency to the political situation then than there is today. This also applies to the scale and severity of the Great Depression compared with the economic situation Germany faces today.

Nonetheless, I told Brüning’s tale on German TV for a reason. Where it does hold an urgent lesson for today is in the fact that Germans didn’t believe his measures would lead to a better future. He used the radio to tell people that their misery was inevitable.

Hitler used the same medium shortly after to ask people to give him four years to make things better. He promised he would alleviate unemployment and poverty speedily and visibly. In other words, he described a way out and a future that was worth holding out for. That had an incredibly powerful psychological effect on many Germans.

It’s remarkable how often I found references to those “four years” in the sources. Emmy Sonnemann, the Weimar actress who was to marry Hermann Goering, remembered how Hitler told her in a park in Weimar that “we won’t take more than three or four years and then there won’t be a single unemployed person in Germany any more.” The central person in my book, Carl Weirich, wrote in his diary: The “new Reich Chancellor demanded 4 years for reconstruction!” and was willing to give Hitler that time.

This isn’t, of course, a call for modern-day politicians to emulate Hitlerian propaganda methods. But democratically elected politicians have to find a way to ensure that voters trust them to build a better future. The moment that optimism, the conviction that your children and grandchildren will live in a better world than you, goes out the window is a dangerous one. People won’t keep voting for politicians that appear to have little to offer but more of the same and pessimism. That, to me, is a potent lesson from Brüning’s tragic political tale.

Brüning himself struggled for the rest of his life to make sense of his own legacy. He fled Germany in 1934. After the war, he began working on his memoirs, which sought to justify his failure to avert the Nazi catastrophe. They appeared only after his death in 1970 and are a clear and blatant attempt to change his place in the history books. In them, he claimed that he’d had a long-term plan all along to get Germany out of its malaise, but that it was cut short when he was pushed out of power.

Brüning claimed that, following the suspension of reparations payments, he would have worked towards a restoration of Germany’s military status and the monarchy, and that this would have appeased conservatives and the wider population enough to take the wind out of Hitler’s sails. Most historians have dismissed those claims since there is no real evidence for them from Brüning’s actual time in office.

Ultimately, Brüning will remain a controversial figure in German history. But I have no doubt that his story will be rediscovered and discussed again more closely in the months and years to come.

Picture a couple, say, a middle-aged man and woman. It’s the late 1970s. They are sitting on beach towels by the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary, looking out over the flat, wide expanse of water as they apply sun cream and engage in idle chatter. That’s not how we usually picture Stasi agents, members of the East German Ministry for State Security.

Say “Stasi”, and what springs to mind are images of serious-looking men in horn-rimmed glasses operating out of grey rooms that are both window- and soulless as they eavesdrop on the lives of others. Indeed, surveying and controlling the East German population at home in the GDR was the Stasi’s core task. But there was a lesser-known branch, too, which spied on people where they felt most free: on holiday.

I wasn’t expecting to think about sunbathing spooks this week. After all, my head is currently firmly stuck in the interwar period, a time when the future Stasi leader Erich Mielke was still a young man, if already an extremist willing to commit acts of murder and terrorism in the name of his ideology. I’m still on a manic WEIMAR tour. Indeed, I’m writing this from my seat tens of thousands of feet above European soil on a plane from London to Hamburg, where I’ve been invited to talk about the book on one of Germany’s biggest TV talk shows: Markus Lanz.

Yet on Tuesday morning, I found myself in a wonderfully evocative “mid-century” building in Peckham, South London, filming for a documentary about the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Tell me about Stasi operations in Hungary,” said the director, and as I sat on my 1970s chair, surrounded by plywood-pannelled walls, images of East German agents in swimming trunks flooded my mind. Let me share some of those with you.

The fact that East Germans couldn’t freely travel to West Germany or anywhere else beyond the Iron Curtain is well known. But there were places within the Eastern Bloc one could go to experience different cultures, languages, currencies and cuisines. And one of the most appealing for East Germans was Hungary. For hundreds of thousands of tourists from the GDR, a summer trip to the capital, Budapest, or to Lake Balaton offered a sense of freedom and adventure.

There were several reasons why Hungary was a firm favourite. For one thing, the country’s longstanding connection to Austria, and therefore to the German-speaking lands, allowed for a great mix of familiarity and exotic appeal. Goulash, a national dish of Hungary, for instance, is also an all-time favourite in Germany.

In addition, by the 1970s and 80s, Hungary had gained a reputation for being one of the more liberal countries in the Eastern Bloc. The term “Goulash Communism” is often applied to the period following the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 by Soviet troops and tanks. This may sound a little counter-intuitive, but the regime attempted to avoid a repeat of unrest and implemented reforms to raise living standards and improve personal freedoms. Those reforms worked and earned Hungary a reputation as the “merriest barrack in the socialist camp”.

If you’re interested in learning more about that, you could listen to my interview with the Hungarian-born Nobel Prize laureate Katalin Karikó about growing up in a state that offered excellent education and childcare as well as brutal oppression and secret police surveillance.

For our purposes here, the important thing is that those Hungarian freedoms included a more porous membrane between East and West. There was economic trade between Hungary and Western Europe. Restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles were in place, but generally speaking, Hungarians also found it easier to travel to Western countries than East Germans did.

A key factor here was that Hungarians were more reluctant to leave permanently. For East Germans, there was another Germany on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but there was only one Hungary. Kati Karikó moved to the US during the Cold War and found that she never lost her love for her home country, sending her young daughter back there on her own for weeks and months each summer so that she would retain her Hungarian heritage and stay in touch with her roots.

This relative opening also meant that Hungary hosted many Western visitors during the holiday season. As a result, it was a great place for East and West Germans to meet. That aunt from Hamburg you rarely got to see if you lived in Dresden because the GDR regime didn’t trust you to come back? Well, you could hang around with her on the shores of Lake Balaton to catch up.

Hungary was a unique meeting place across the Iron Curtain, and therefore invariably a source of deep anxiety for rulers in East Berlin. So they did in Hungary what they did at home: spy on people. A Stasi “Balaton-Brigade” was established. Its mission in Hungary was to monitor East German holidaymakers, uncover contacts with West Germans, prevent potential defections and report home at regular intervals.

Initially, operations were seasonal. During the summer months, Stasi personnel were deployed to Hungary to keep watch over the growing number of East German tourists. Between 1970 and 1980, around one million people visited Hungary every year – a huge proportion of them from the GDR. As travel increased, so did the security apparatus. From 1975 onwards, the Stasi established a permanent presence in Hungary, with key centres of activity in Budapest and around Lake Balaton.

The Balaton Brigade consisted of professional intelligence officers, temporary operatives, civilian collaborators, and citizen spies known as unofficial informants (IMs). They were to mingle with the holiday makers while monitoring relationships between East and West German tourists. Who knew whether the aunt from Hamburg had brought more than coffee and hard currency for her eastern relations? What may look like an innocent campfire chat in the evening could be the sign of an escape plan being hatched.

Scenes like the one I described above were commonplace and the methods of the Stasi often remarkably mundane. Agents posed as holidaymakers, often travelling as married couples to avoid attracting attention. They stayed in hotels, campsites and holiday resorts, mingling with tourists while gathering information.

Because this was a pretty cushy posting, Stasi officials themselves referred to these assignments as a form of “operative holiday.” The agency even covered the travel expenses of both the operative and their partner, recognising that a convincing disguise was essential to successful surveillance. The more it felt like a real holiday, the more naturally the spies would blend in.

By the second half of the 1980s, the operation had grown considerably. During a typical summer season, between 50 and 60 agents and collaborators worked around Lake Balaton alone, accounting for more than half of the Stasi’s activities in Hungary. Yet despite this effort, the operation often struggled to achieve meaningful results.

Strangely enough, many East Germans were doing exactly what they said they were doing: being on holiday. Reports were compiled and sent home, but they often focused on regular tourists whose only suspicious behaviour was returning to Hungary in the summer.

But then the winds of change began to sweep across the Eastern Bloc. In Hungary, much of this change came from within as the ruling party began to open up and reform itself. Following a regime change in 1988, Hungary began making it easier for its citizens to travel to the West, aiming to break down its border with Austria, both physically and diplomatically, one step at a time. So what to do with the tens of thousands of East Germans who might want to use this route to get to Austria and then on to West Germany?

In 1989, Hungary became the centre of a growing refugee crisis. The pivotal moment came on 19 August 1989 when a so-called “Pan-European Picnic” was held near Sopron, close to the Austrian border. It was intended as a test to see if Hungary could open its borders to Austria without Soviet interference. Organised by Hungarian reformers, the event briefly opened a border gate between Hungary and Austria.

Hundreds of East German citizens seized the opportunity to cross into Austria, creating one of the most dramatic breaches of the Iron Curtain. The Picnic by Matthew Longo is worth reading if you’re interested in this incident.

As political reforms accelerated across Eastern Europe, thousands of East Germans travelled to Hungary hoping to find a route to the West. The Stasi responded by escalating its operations to an unprecedented level. Agents were inserted into refugee communities and camps with instructions to identify would-be escapees and determine who was organising or encouraging departures. They even tried to track down the owners of the many Trabant cars abandoned in Hungary as their drivers escaped. When they couldn’t, they had to organise their transfer back to the GDR. This was code-named Aktion “Sopron”.

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Even as the Stasi intensified its efforts, the scale of the crisis overwhelmed its capacity to control events. The number of East Germans seeking to leave the GDR was simply too large. The Stasi had information about what was going on but not a clue what to do about it. The same applied to the political earthquake going through Hungary.

Stasi operatives had tracked reform movements, opposition groups, demonstrations and increasingly critical media coverage. They produced detailed reports, which were compiled at the East German embassy and forwarded to Berlin. They had titles such as “The Activities of Anti-Socialist Forces in Hungary” and “Alternative Political Forces and Groups in Hungary.” They reported on the collapse of socialist authority but remained unable to halt it.

By the summer of 1989, Hungary decided that it no longer wanted or needed to placate the GDR regime by allowing its own citizens to travel to Austria but not East Germans. It unilaterally ended the long-standing cooperation between Hungarian and East German security services. The consequences of the picnic were profound. What was the point in the Berlin Wall if East Germans could simply walk around it through Hungary and Austria? The refugee exodus was a key link in the chain of events that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

The story of the Stasi in Hungary captures the inherent contradiction of dictatorships. No matter how far-reaching and extensive its surveillance network may be, it will never be enough to stem the tides of change once they have gathered enough force. The system could identify individuals and file reports, but it couldn’t suppress the desire for freedom.

So what happened to the Balaton Brigade? Well, it survived surprisingly long. The Stasi headquarters in East Berlin was stormed by people in January 1990. Only a month later, in February 1990, the Stasi’s operational group in Hungary was finally dissolved. Today, Hungary is visited by over 20 million people a year. The largest single group still comes from Germany.

I flinched a little on the inside as my lame attempt at bantering the ticket lady at St Andrews Castle failed completely. I’d come to the famous Scottish university town of St Andrews to talk about WEIMAR rather than for sightseeing. But the journey up here had been arduous and disrupted. The next morning, I needed a break. And who doesn’t like a castle?

As I strolled through the historic town centre, learnt more about St Andrews’s place in the long and bloody history of conflict between England and Scotland. I also found a striking memorial to both World Wars, dedicated to “the men of St Andrews who with courage and faith at their country’s call laid down their lives that we who remain might live in freedom and peace.”

Over the centuries, people here had fought tooth and nail to defend this place against the English and the Germans. And here was the current-day gatekeeper at St Andrews Castle admitting a modern-day German on the strength of her holding an English Heritage membership card. I couldn’t help myself. I made a silly joke and regretted it instantly.

I daresay, the ticket lady had heard it all before. She just gave me a look and informed me that English Heritage and Historic Environment Scotland had a reciprocal relationship, with members free to visit each other’s sites. Well, if that isn’t a wonderful symbol of how times have changed…

Nonetheless, it’s impossible to forget history when standing among the ruins of St Andrews Castle and looking out across the North Sea… towards Germany. You can’t quite see my birth country from here, but the shadow of a certain German monk still hangs over everything.

People were burnt, imprisoned, murdered and martyred here because of a battle over belief systems that the ideas of Martin Luther had unleashed. The story of the Scottish Reformation cannot be told without understanding the German Reformation.

That story takes us to a place over 1,000 kilometres and half a millennium away. In October 1517, Martin Luther, then a professor and Augustinian friar in the German town of Wittenberg, challenged the sale of indulgences and other practices within the Catholic Church. Whether or not he physically nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door, the effect was incendiary.

Fuelled by the application of the then still relatively new invention of the printing press, Luther’s ideas spread like wildfire across central Europe and beyond. They launched a movement that transformed religion, politics, education and society throughout the continent and also here in Britain. The North Sea served as a link rather than a barrier in this process.

Scotland was one of the places where Luther’s ideas found an audience, and now I found myself right in the heart of that story. I pressed a button in the castle museum to watch a short film explaining that St Andrews was once the centre of religious authority in Scotland. “Ah, c’est la capitale religieuse!” whispered the older French lady who was sitting next to me to her husband.

I must admit that until I came here and learnt more about it, I hadn’t fully realised what a crucial role St Andrews played in the Scottish Reformation. That’s one of the things I love about travelling: all the little “ahhh” moments when you learn something that is new to you, but common knowledge for the locals and a lot of other people. It’s like being a child again, discovering an aspect of the world that others take for granted.

I learnt that the castle was used to defend Scottish Catholicism against the onslaught of Luther’s revolutionary ideas arriving from the continent. Naturally, what was happening in the German-speaking world hadn’t bypassed the authorities here. Luther’s writings were considered dangerous, and brutal censorial efforts were made to prevent their circulation.

One of the most important figures in this story was Patrick Hamilton. Born into a Scottish noble family, he spent a fair bit of time abroad, where he encountered the new religious ideas emerging from continental Europe. When he returned to Scotland, he was still a pretty isolated voice as he began preaching Lutheran doctrines that church authorities regarded as heretical.

Unlike Luther in the German lands, Hamilton had no powerful allies to protect him. In 1528, he was tried and condemned in St Andrews, where he’d originally been invited by Archbishop James Beaton. It was also Beaton who presided over the tribunal that sentenced Hamilton to death. He was burned at the stake right here in the town.

If Hamilton’s execution was intended to quell the flood of Lutheran ideas into Scotland, it had the opposite effect. He is said to have stood his ground during the trial with a calm and determined demeanour that impressed onlookers. The word of this spread quickly through the printing press, and he became a martyr. There are still traces of him everywhere in St Andrews, including a set of cobbles with his initials marking the spot where he was executed. Apparently, students of the university avoid stepping on them to this day.

The Reformation was about power, authority and competing visions of society as much as it was about theology. Much was at stake. That was true on the continent, and it was equally true here in Scotland, where St Andrews Castle became one of the central stages of these conflicts.

In 1546, reformers assassinated Cardinal David Beaton, nephew and successor of the aforementioned James Beaton, and one of the leading defenders of Catholicism in Scotland, inside the castle. Beaton had himself imprisoned and executed people here, like the Protestant preacher George Wishart, who was burnt at the stake in front of the outer walls. When Beaton was murdered in turn, his body was hung from a castle window.

Luther was aware that his preachings had the potential to set Europe ablaze with violence. He had written around 25 years earlier, in 1520: “If you think properly of the Gospel, please don’t imagine that its cause can be advanced without tumult, offence and sedition... The word of God is a sword, it’s war, ruin, offence, perdition and poison.”

At St Andrews, the story didn’t end with the murder of Beaton. The Protestants took over and were in turn besieged the following year, a time that left remarkable mine (dug by the attackers) and countermine (dug by the defenders) tunnels beneath the walls that remain today.

Scottish reformers soon also looked not only to Luther but also to other Protestant thinkers. John Knox, perhaps the most famous leader of the Scottish Reformation, spent time in continental Europe and was strongly influenced by John Calvin’s ideas. As a result, the Church of Scotland ended up developing along a more Calvinist path.

Knox also left his traces at St Andrews Castle, which he entered during an armistice period while the siege was still underway. He was particularly appalled by the infamous “bottle dungeon”, which, having stared down this dark, terrible rock-cut pit in claustrophobic horror, I can entirely understand. It’s incredibly narrow and, as the name suggests, bottle-shaped. Apparently, Beaton’s body was kept down there during the siege, pickled in a box of salt to keep it from smelling. “Many of God’s Children were imprisoned here,” wrote Knox.

As a German visitor, I found this connection fascinating. We often study the Reformation through a national lens. While where I grew up in Germany is now majority atheist due to four decades of East German socialism, it was in the former Protestant heartlands of Prussia. Reformation Day (31 October) is a public holiday in 9 of 16 German states (obviously not in the majority-Catholic ones). And Luther is considered a seminal figure in the long process of German unification due to the impact of his work, particularly his translation of the Bible into German. Even the GDR celebrated this legacy.

In Germany, we focus on Luther as a German figure. But standing in St Andrews, I’m reminded that the Reformation was an international phenomenon, crossing linguistic, physical and political boundaries. It drove people who had never met Luther and would never visit Germany. St Andrews is a perfect example of how interconnected Europe has been for centuries.

Perhaps, then, I should not have been surprised that so many people turned up for my talk about Weimar and the German interwar period, and that they felt it was worth waiting for when I was delayed by almost an hour. Ultimately, history affects us all, and it rarely sticks to national boundaries.

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When this article lands in your inbox, I will be fast asleep in a hotel room in central Berlin. My head will be filled with German thoughts and perhaps the lingering fumes of a beer or two… My German…

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There is an old and terrible joke that Austria’s gre…

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I was on the BBC’s Start the Week on Monday, and while it was early in the morning and I was desperately focusing my mind on what I was going to say about my own book, I found myself transfixed by another participant’s contribution. Art historian John-Paul Stonard was describing a painting called The Trench by the German artist Otto Dix. Sadly, the painting was lost, and we only have black and white photographs of it, but John-Paul described the horrors of war that it depicts in vivid colour:

“It’s a gun emplacement in Flanders which has been blown apart by a shell…Otto Dox puts you right in there…you’re surrounded by bodies which had been blown apart by bombs…Some are rotting, and maggots are spilling out of them…It looks like a Dance of Death…the colours were described as being putrid. It was a painting of pure horror.”

His words and the image they created in my mind were a powerful reminder that war is an ugly thing. We talk about it often in abstract terms. We recount casualty statistics, shifting borders, political outcomes. But for people at the time, the main consequence was that war destroys lives both directly in combat and indirectly on the home front.

The First World War did this on a scale that had simply been unimaginable before 1914. It is worth recalling how that came about and what it did to individuals and societies, even if Germany doesn’t always find it easy to do so today.

Few foresaw it at the time, but the economic developments preceding the First World War caused its immense deadliness. Over the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution brought forth the means of mass production. Now bullets, shells and machinery could be made at speed. Vast amounts of raw materials, such as coal and iron, were unearthed to feed the rapacious war machine.

Farming, too, had been catapulted into a modern age of mass production. Between 1873 and 1913, German wheat production grew by over 50 per cent, and the number of pigs reared for slaughter increased from 7 million to 25 million, chiefly due to the introduction of sodium nitrate as fertiliser and steam-driven machinery.

Stable food supplies contributed to a population boom. In 1871, Germany had 41 million citizens. By 1910, it had 65 million. So in 1914, we find a huge generation of young people who had never seen what industrial warfare does marching into what was to become the deadliest conflict in human history up to that point.

While poignantly remembered as national traumas in Britain and France, the horrors that unfolded between 1914 and 1918 are overshadowed in German memory by the even more horrific Second World War. There is also a degree of unease about the idea of commemorating the German victims of a war that has no ready-made place in a national narrative.

From a memory perspective, the First World War is complicated for Germany. The country played a significant role in causing the conflict in the first place, and after 1945, German historians, most notably Fritz Fischer, emphasised this and drew lines of continuity between the First and the Second World War. It was also a lost war the enormous sacrifices for which seemed almost unbearingly futile to many contemporaries. The upshot of this complex memory conundrum is that the First World War is now often regarded as a kind of prelude to the Second.

Of course, Germans who lived through the 1920s and 1930s had no idea that another war, even more horrendous, destructive and deadly than what they called the Great War, awaited them. And there was nothing inevitable about that either.

I felt I needed to capture the atmosphere of that post-WWI world somehow in my book Weimar. I wanted it to convey the sense of trauma, shock and loss that laced German society from 1918, but also the earnest and genuine hope that something like this would never happen again, that the catastrophe had created a positive tabula rasa moment, too.

I strongly felt that this could only work if I took readers to the battlefields of the Eastern and Western fronts, following soldiers from Weimar. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I got a bit carried away in this endeavour. How could I not? Engaging with the human experience of the First World War is one of the most harrowing things you can do as a historian of modern history.

Sitting in the Weimar branch of the Thuringian State Archive, I looked through box after box of letters and postcards young men had sent back to their wives and mothers from the front lines. I’d like to share some of the findings from that here.

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“Isn’t it strange how many Germans still refer to the ‘former’ GDR?” asked the historian Richard J. Evans as w…

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Carl Weirich stared at the crematorium ovens. Six gaping holes framed by iron and brick. Their heavy doors stood open, revealing ca…

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“What about the Treaty of Versailles? How did ordinary Germans really feel about it?” Questions along those lines ha…

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Something re…

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When people think of German history, the German colonial empire is not typically the first thing that springs to mind. I think that applies to most Germans, too. When I think back to my own school days, I can’t remember having been taught much about it. We learnt about the British, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch empires in passing. I also remember reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and finding it an intense and harrowing introduction to the idea of Belgian colonialism. But I very rarely came across mentions of German colonialism, fictionalised or otherwise. That’s despite the fact that, at its largest extent, Germany had built the third-largest colonial empire in the world after Britain's and France's.

Awareness of this history has changed massively in recent years and decades – or at least it has in academia. There’s been a flurry of research activity, especially looking into the structures and experiences of the German colonisers and the people they colonised. This is a very sensitive field charged with present-day debates over what we should remember and how.

To name but one example: fierce arguments have broken out over how to describe the genocidal policies enacted against the Herero and Nama people in German South West Africa between 1904 and 1908, in which around 80% and 50% respectively of their pre-war populations died. Germany recognised this as genocide in 2015 and agreed to pay reparations. Some historians have compared the racialised violence and genocidal intentions to the Holocaust, while others have pushed back hard against drawing a direct line between the two historical events.

I found myself deeply immersed in this history and the attendant debates while discussing with my podcasting partner, Chris Dillon, how to approach this subject in a future episode of Reichs and Republics. The complexity of the matter, the vast amount of fresh research and the sensitive nature of this field of scholarship make this an incredibly challenging topic to address in a compact and accessible format. There are just so many angles to it as well, and all are morally and historically complex.

Take the Askaris. These were African soldiers who served in Germany’s colonial army, mainly in German East Africa, before and during the First World War. Their story exemplifies the sheer length of the German colonial empire's afterlife. So let’s look at it back to front.

In 1964, half a century after the start of the First World War, a small group of elderly men, all former Askaris, gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They wore simple clothes. Some were leaning on sticks. They wanted due recognition and their pensions. They had come to prove they had once been soldiers of the German Empire.

This proved tricky. There were few uniforms left, even less official documentation of any kind. That was lost a long time ago, nearly five decades earlier, when Germany lost its colonies. There was only one way for the men to prove that they had once been Askaris, and that was to act in a way that only they could. So the men were asked to perform drill commands. This involved marching, presenting arms and responding to orders barked in German. They could all still do it. And that was enough to prove they had once fought for Germany.

The story of the Askaris is intricately interwoven with Germany’s colonial ambitions.

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Wednesday was a long day for me. I had woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning in a dodgy hotel in East…

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I was in Berlin yesterday and on my way to a recording studio to give …

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“And so it begins”, my brain whispered a tad overdramatically as I was giving the first pre-recorded interview…

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Countries by and large don’t like being occupied. The idea that foreign soldiers are stationed on one’s own soil for control and regulation stands in direct contrast to national sovereignty and independence. Yet Germany’s case is unique.

At the end of the Second World War, Germany was a vanquished country that had lost the political, economic, social and moral capacity to govern itself. The victorious Allies took on a curious hybrid role as occupiers and re-builders — with far-reaching ramifications that continue to have a huge impact today.

The story of the Red Army in the GDR is particularly complex and full of contradictions. It’s also a story that my own family has experienced.

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I have visitors over from Germany this Easter, and it’s been great fun to show them around. We travelled the length and …

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