The weather can change incredibly fast on the island of Rügen. I arrived here earlier this week expecting autumnal gloom, with the forecast threatening intermittent showers building up to a violent thunderstorm. Instead, I woke to a golden sun rising above turquoise waves gently rolling in from the Baltic Sea. A few hours later, the picture changed again, and an iron sky hung over grey water.

There is something wild and timeless about Rügen, and it’s not just the weather. The jagged chalk cliffs of the Jasmund peninsula in the island's northeast became a famous motif for German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. There are swamps, lagoons, ancient beech forests and of course miles and miles of beautiful white sand beaches. Rügen has been a magical place for many Germans to escape to over the centuries. People have come here to paint, work and think.

I would like to come here to write, too. The idea of being the sort of author who rents a little cottage by the sea for a few months after the summer tourists leave, and lets the solitude and sea winds work their magic on focus and creativity, has a strong romantic allure. But the reality is that I’m not that kind of author. I’m a historian. I need to spend my time researching and being in places connected to my work. This is what I have come to Rügen for. To conduct research for my new book.

On my previous visits to the island and surrounding areas, I had already undertaken substantial field research. I worked in the local archives and managed to track down most of the files I was after. I spoke to historians, archivists and subject specialists about the matter. I also walked many of the sites, towns, villages and landscapes connected to it. This time, among other things, I’d arranged to meet an elderly man in a car park in the seaside village of Göhren.

Göhren is a beautiful place, if eerily quiet off-season. It stands exposed to the elements on Rügen's steep, wooded shores, high above the Baltic Sea. Its name comes from the Slavic word “gorna”, meaning “hilly hamlet”, and that’s what it once was. Well into the 19th century, it had only a few streets, lined with a curious mix of old cottages and elegant, white-fronted villas that crisscrossed one another and hugged the rugged grooves of the landscape. Then tourism boomed, and Göhren became an elegant seaside resort.

Like the rest of the island, the village fell under the Kingdom of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars, and Prussia, in turn, became the leading state of the German Empire, founded in 1871. Ever since, Rügen has been Germany’s largest island, and many say it’s also its most beautiful. Situated off the northern coast of the Reich, it was considered wild and remote by many Germans who began to flock here to reset and get away from increasingly crowded and polluted cities.

It was around this time, in the late 19th century, that the Grabbert family moved to Göhren, where father and husband Wilhelm first worked as a general labourer and then as a forester, running his own carting business and driving timber down from the local woods just outside the village boundaries for sale.

Then, in 1901, a terrible fate befell the family, one that shook the German public to the core far beyond the island. On the outskirts of Göhren, a murder so gruesome and unimaginable took place that the villagers would speak of it for generations to come.

“This is where it happened.” The elderly man I met in the car park in Göhren yesterday pointed to the ground. We were standing in a small clearing in the woodlands on the village outskirts. It had only taken us a few minutes to walk up.

I stared at the shrubs and trees as a sharp wind whipped around my head, blowing dense drizzle into my face. I didn’t know what to say. I’d come here to get a better picture of the geography of events, yet suddenly their full human tragedy hit me. There was nothing to say, and for a while we just stood there, each alone with their thoughts.

Then the man broke the silence. “My grandmother always told us children about what happened as a warning,” he said. His grandmother was born in 1888, he told me. That was the year Germany was ruled by three Kaisers in rapid succession. This meant she was 13 years old when the murder happened. “Then, one day, I think it was in 1963, she showed us grandchildren this spot.”

We were talking about a crime that took place 125 years ago. Yet here I was, standing in a forest above the Baltic Sea with a man whose own living memory connected him to it through previous generations. But he was more than someone with a lot of living knowledge. I hoped his extensive research as a local historian could also help me uncover exactly what happened here and why.

It’s sometimes said the work of a historian isn’t unlike that of a detective. I often find that analogy a bit laboured, but in this case it comes close to the truth. It’ll be difficult to put the many pieces of this murder together over a century later, but I strongly feel that it will be worth the effort.

I first came across the crime in question while researching for my book, Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, 1871-1918. I remember reading about it in a 1901 newspaper. I felt both the case itself and what it revealed about Germany at the turn of the 20th century were utterly intriguing. It’s never let me go.

What happened was this: In the summer of 1901, the idyllic Baltic island of Rügen was shattered by the murder of two young brothers, Franz and Hermann Grabbert, the sons of the timber worker Wilhelm Grabbert. He had simply dropped them in the forest on his way home to pick some blueberries. The boys never returned home and were found dead the next morning, brutally murdered not far from the edge of the village.

Police were out of their depth. Officer Schulz, who led the first response in Göhren, was new to the job. Yet, the Prussian authorities soon thought they had solved the case by arresting the travelling carpenter Ludwig Tessnow. What followed was one of the most remarkable criminal trials in modern European history.

Although strong evidence emerged that linked Tessnow to the murders, police struggled to place him at the crime scene definitively. Leading psychiatrists also became aware of the trial and began monitoring Tessnow as the investigation ran. They were convinced that he was suffering from severe mental illness and could not be held responsible for his actions even if he had committed the crime.

The landmark trial that followed introduced the world to cutting-edge science while also presenting pioneering ideas about forensic psychiatry and the causes of crime to a sceptical jury. Newspapers from Rostock to Munich fuelled fear while experts pleaded that criminal behaviour should be understood rather than punished. The courtroom became a battleground between new approaches to rehabilitation and older demands for retribution.

Set in the tumultuous decades before the First World War, this true story of a crime offers a fascinating window into Imperial Germany. This was still a young state then, barely three decades old and grappling with the chances and challenges of modernity. As it negotiates ways to deal with an unfathomable crime, the picture that emerges is one of a confident, rapidly modernising Germany, but also one full of dangerous ideas and intense anxieties.

Watch this space for what I hope will be a gripping story in the making, one about a murder on Rügen and about crime, insanity and justice in Imperial Germany.

“Was this the movie you had expected to see?” was the first question I faced on Tuesday, as the curtain fell in one of Britain’s oldest cinemas. From my seat in the third row of the Regent Street Cinema in central London, I had just watched the new film Fatherland and felt I needed a few days to digest it. It had somehow squeezed the enormity of Germany’s postwar identity crisis into 82 minutes. Now my brain seemed to buzz with thoughts and questions.

But there was no time to digest. Not yet. I wasn’t just there to watch the movie. I was part of the programme. The London Review of Books staged this preview screening ahead of the British cinema release on 23 October, and I was supposed to introduce the film and discuss it and its contents on stage afterwards. So I frantically tried to reassemble my thoughts as I got up and took my seat on stage.

Was this the film I had expected to see? I’m not sure what I had expected. Fatherland is set in post-war Germany in the summer of 1949. The West German state has just been created. In the Soviet Zone of occupation, they prepare for the official founding of an East German one. And we follow the famous German writer Thomas Mann crossing from one to the other in a shiny Buick cruiser.

While the film takes some artistic liberties, this really happened. Mann had spent the Nazi era and the war in exile. He and his family had left Germany in 1933. Eventually, his German citizenship was revoked by the Nazi regime. In 1938, he moved to the United States. Asked how he felt as a German writer who had lost his German homeland, he said: “It is hard to bear. But what makes it easier is the realisation of the poisoned atmosphere in Germany. That makes it easier because it’s actually no loss. Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me. I have contact with the world and I do not consider myself fallen.”

But like many German intellectuals in exile, he struggled to come to terms with the involuntary nature of having been uprooted. For writers, the difficulty of adapting to somewhere that doesn’t speak your mother tongue can be a particularly jarring and painful experience. Mann always wanted to believe that a “good Germany” still lay dormant in his fatherland and might be resurrected one day. He also believed he would have a role to play in this.

Meanwhile, his fame and reputation grew further. He was already a Nobel Prize laureate, having received the prestigious honour in Literature in 1929. Now, he acquired further fame in the Allied nations by writing more successful literature in his new home in California, becoming a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1944 and broadcasting anti-Nazi speeches in German to the German people via the BBC.

A well-respected writer, seen in many ways as a link to the “good Germany” before Nazism, Mann was immediately courted by both ideological systems that took root in Germany after the end of the Second World War. He would make the perfect cultural ambassador for either side – an intellectual of the highest calibre but uncompromisingly clean of Nazi ideology. There weren’t many like him.

So when the 200th anniversary of the birthday of the most famous German poet of them all, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, came along in August 1949, two German cities associated with Goethe took the chance to invite Mann to speak and receive honours. Frankfurt am Main, where Goethe was born, awarded the exiled writer the Goethe Prize. Weimar, where Goethe lived most of his life and where he died and was buried, bestowed on him the Goethe National Prize. Frankfurt was in the West, Weimar in the East. Mann said he didn’t care about that. It was the first time he returned to Germany since 1933, and his visit was to Germany, not to occupation zones.

He was not universally welcomed back in his fatherland. Some people saw him as a traitor for leaving the country. Others resented Mann’s view that people who had stayed in Germany were morally complicit and that the bombings were a price paid for the war. Many German intellectuals had gone into what they called “inner emigration”. They had stayed in Germany but opted out, mentally and intellectually, from the world around them. They had often been targeted by the regime for that and accused Mann of taking the easy way out, sitting out the regime and the war in a comfortable home in California. Mann and other exiles rejected this and argued in turn that nobody can produce art in a dictatorship without making themselves complicit. It’s just one of many themes the movie picks up.

Fatherland is a beautifully shot road movie that takes us from Frankfurt to Weimar in Mann’s shiny black Buick, as this symbol of American might and prosperity makes its way through a ravaged and ruined German post-war landscape and across the ideological fault line of the emerging Cold War.

As if a famous exiled writer returning to his morally bankrupt homeland wasn’t enough to set this historian’s brain on fire, a range of real-world characters each face their own demons. First and foremost, there is Erika Mann, the writer’s daughter, brilliantly played by Sandra Hüller. Hüller was herself born in Thuringia in East Germany, the state of which Weimar was once the capital. In reality, Mann was accompanied on this journey by his wife Katia rather than his daughter Erika, but I can see why this choice was made for the movie.

Erika is a fascinating character in her own right. Unlike her father, she found it difficult to believe in the idea of a “good Germany” after everything that had happened. She got out of being stateless after Nazi Germany had revoked her citizenship by marrying the poet W. H. Auden, purely to obtain a British passport. Auden, being gay, was happy to agree to this marriage of convenience. In a previous marriage, Erika had been the wife of actor Gustaf Gründgens, who was also widely known to be gay. He stayed in Nazi Germany, where he became a favoured theatre director and a close friend of Hermann and Emmy Göring. In the film, Erika meets Gründgens again in Frankfurt and slaps him for that.

So the film packs the complexities of messy post-war Germany into a comparatively short runtime, making it an intense and stimulating watch. The Manns had never really fully felt they belonged in America, despite it becoming an enthusiastic and welcoming home for them. This is encapsulated quite well at the beginning of Fatherland when Erika’s brother Klaus, with whom she was incredibly close, tells her on the phone that he feels the Manns’ choice is now between “Stalin and Mickey Mouse” – neither ideological superpower providing a satisfying intellectual environment for those German literary giants. But the Germany they ached for no longer existed and never would again.

For his father Thomas Mann, his visit to Weimar must have been particularly stark. The last time he visited the town, this shrine to Goethe, was in 1932, during the centenary of the poet’s death. This was before Hitler became chancellor of Germany a few months later, but the town was already bedecked in swastikas as local Nazi activists had called on sympathisers to hang flags from their windows. Mann, who was awarded a Goethe Medal in Weimar, wrote that he found the town’s “mix of Hitlerism and Goethe” deeply disturbing. “Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom,’ he observed, adding that “the type of young person who roams the town with unguided certainty and greets one another with the Roman salute dominates the town”.

When he returned in 1949, he found this beautiful place of culture reduced to rubble by bombing. Rebuilding had begun. The famous German National Theatre, for instance, had already been rebuilt. The young people he saw now performed different salutes. He no longer saw the uniforms of the various Nazi organisations but those of the Red Army. He moved into the Hotel Kaiserin Augusta opposite the train station, which overlooked the large square where just a few years earlier thousands of Jews were disembarking from trains to be beaten onto lorries and taken up the hill to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Johannes R. Becher, a fellow writer who had also spent the Nazi years in exile, personally received the Manns. For his refuge, Becher had chosen the Soviet Union, not California. He was to write the lyrics for the East German national anthem and would become the GDR's culture minister.

In real life and in the film, Mann talked animatedly with Major General Sergei Ivanovich Tiulpanov, director of the Propaganda Administration of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany which governed eastern Germany from 1945–1949. According to one witness, he spoke much more highly of Weimar than Frankfurt to the Soviet intellectual and military man, who spoke fluent German. Mann is also said to have enjoyed the enormous fanfare with which he was escorted out of Weimar at the end of his visit. We’ll never fully know, and the film makes no obvious judgement on Mann’s thoughts either, leaving viewers to ponder how he might have felt.

So there I was with all these thoughts and many more running through my head as the lights in the Regent Street Cinema came back on, and I was asked to return to the stage. Was Fatherland the movie I had expected to see? No, I don’t think it was. That’s because I had had no idea what to expect, could not envision how anyone could press all those complexities of themes like exile, guilt, family, history, home, language, literature, morality, politics and disorientation into 82 minutes.

Hats off to Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, who knows a thing or two about these themes, for pulling it off in style. Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw in 1957, that is to say in a city destroyed by Nazis and ruled by communists. His Jewish grandmother had been murdered in Auschwitz, a German concentration and death camp on Polish soil. As a teenager, he moved to London and into exile. He also spent time in West Germany, married a Russian, speaks six languages and has now moved back to Warsaw. If anyone understands what history and dislocation can do to families and identities like those of the Manns, it’s Pawlikowski.

Fatherland is well worth your time if you’re interested in the German post-war mess and the wider themes interwoven with it. It’s a subtle, elegant, and intense film that will keep your mind reeling long after you leave the cinema.

When I moved from Germany to Britain more than 15 years ago, I soon realised how large the two World Wars still loomed in the public imagination. My new friends, neighbours and colleagues quipped ‘Don’t mention the war’ and gave me boxes of tissues on VE Day.

It was all done in good spirit but sprang from a cultural backdrop I struggled to understand – until I’d caught up with enough episodes of Fawlty Towers, Blackadder and Dad’s Army to get a sense of what the British-German journalist Matt Frei once called ‘the British obsession with the Krauts’.

While often concerned with the Second World War, that preoccupation is actually much older; and it is mutual. In the 19th century, the exiles Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels simultaneously admired the political freedom they enjoyed in Britain while criticising the excesses of commercial freedom, as evident in ‘Manchester capitalism’. Both conditions struck them as compellingly different from German-speaking Europe.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel tapped into similar ideas when she lamented that ‘we still have a strongly Anglo-Saxon-dominated system’, while a few years later expressing deep regret over Brexit.

So Germans, too, have a special obsession with the British. And no wonder. Over the centuries, the two nations have been friends, rivals, partners and mortal enemies. Now a new history, Great Powers, re-examines that complex relationship, arguing that there was nothing inevitable about how it unfolded. At each stage, specific decisions determined war and peace, argues Jan Rüger, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Therefore, he says, it is also in our hands today what happens next.

The author of previous British-German histories, Rüger now sets out to explain what he calls the ‘Anglo-German paradox: that two nations so closely enmeshed could simultaneously be each other’s most formidable enemies’. Great Powers is extremely ambitious in scope, aiming to tell a story that spans more than three centuries, beginning with the assumption of the throne of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714 by George I, Prince-Elector of Hanover, and ending with Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz and the geopolitical challenges of the mid-2020s. Rüger pulls off this remarkable feat with panache, somehow squeezing a wealth of masterful research into an eminently readable book.

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I found the first third particularly enjoyable, which covers a phase in the German-British relationship that receives significantly less attention than the wars of the 20th century. Here Rüger outlines the fruitful, if ambiguous, connection between Britain and Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries through many fascinating vignettes.

We learn, for instance, that George I was ridiculed almost continually by his British subjects. His ‘Germanness did wonders for the work of the satirists’, Rüger notes dryly. They lampooned him for his accent, dress, looks and entourage. They called him the ‘turnip king’, round, pale and purple, and there was also intense sexual mockery of his philandering wife. But there was a serious dimension to all this – namely the question of royal legitimacy, for which the foreignness of the new monarch provided a convenient vehicle. ‘King George has no more right to the Crowne than my Arse,’ one attorney pronounced in public.

From the lofty heights of court politics, Rüger frequently descends to street level, where interactions shaped how the two nations regarded one another. Well into the 19th century, he tells us, this relationship was asymmetrical. Plenty of Germans came to Britain, drawn by the opportunities of empire, the scale of London and by what they saw as a specifically English form of artistic and commercial freedom, soon dubbed Englische Freiheit.

‘England is, and remains, the world market,’ Wilhelm Siemens told his brother Werner in 1860. While Werner launched what was to become Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate from Berlin, his brother followed a similar path in Britain. Both Siemens companies cooperated, laying submarine cables that connected Britain with the world, including the first transatlantic line to the US and Canada as well as the first cable from Britain to India. But Britain’s commercial Freiheit was also often seen as machine-like coldness by German observers. This stereotype runs through the relationship on both sides.

Take the writer Heinrich Heine, who moved to Britain in 1827. He enjoyed the absence of the tight censorship he had experienced in the German lands. But London both awed and appalled him: ‘This stone forest of houses and, in between, the stream of living human faces, with all their colourful passions, with all their horrendous haste caused by love, hunger and hatred.’

The dizzying haste, Heine thought, came from the need to fund the city’s lavish excesses: ‘That is why John Bull has to work day and night; he has to accumulate the money that will cover these expenses.’ Germany seemed provincial, backward, bucolic and innocent by comparison.

That image flipped in the 20th century. After German unification in 1871 and the subsequent economic boom, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s country began to overtake Britain in some industrial sectors around the turn of the century. Suddenly British critics were inclined to use very similar language to the earlier tropes about machine-like Britain to describe the German Empire as a nation of ruthlessly efficient, servile subjects.

Rüger quotes from the Daily Mail’s article ‘Our German Cousins’, published in 1909, which claimed that the population of Germany was a ‘machine’ in which every person was, ‘by upbringing and by conviction, but a unit of the great whole … exactly defined by the State’. Britain, by contrast, began to cultivate a sort of Hugh Grant-esque self-image of a nation of amateurish, gentlemanly charmers.

The horrendous conflicts of the past century between the two countries compounded this idea. So kudos to Rüger for covering these complex and highly contested areas of research with restrained clarity – from the causes of the First World War to the Treaty of Versailles and the debates around appeasement. Where Great Powers is particularly compelling and original is on the longue durée.

Rüger emphasises that Adolf Hitler’s long-held conviction that Britain and Germany were destined to enter into an alliance, which would allow the former to pursue a global empire and the latter continental hegemony, came on the back of Germans arguing similar things for centuries. The problem was that the notion never appealed to Britain, which sought a balance of power on the continent. Neither Kaiser nor Führer understood that.

In the Second World War section, a well-trodden field in both academic and popular history, Rüger delivers fresh material and perspectives. These notably discuss what it was like for British-German families to live through the conflict and the surprising extent of prewar collaboration between MI5 and the Nazi authorities to identify communists.

Despite the book’s length, it’s worth reading from cover to cover. There is something rewarding to discover in every chapter, as Rüger moves between high politics, battlefield action and the daily lives of citizens. The final third, which focuses on British-German reconciliation in the postwar era and how both nations moved into the present century, is potentially controversial. As he shifts from history to current affairs, Rüger occasionally abandons his carefully neutral stance and lets his views on ‘the strategic folly of Brexit’ show.

This is where the book’s thesis – that the destruction of the British-German relationship was ‘the result of decisions taken by specific politicians in specific circumstances’ rather than the logical outcome of the rise and fall of great powers – turns into a call to action. Rüger argues that if war was a choice, it follows that peace and reconciliation are too. To him, the ‘crises of recent years are a reminder of how foolish it would be to take any of that for granted’. It’s a compelling note on which to end an important book.

Great Powers should be read far and wide – on both sides of the North Sea.

***

My review of Great Powers: A History of Britain and Germany by Jan Rüger (Allen Lane, pp. 736, £40) was first published in The Spectator.

When I first received an invitation to attend the 48th International Book Fair here in Uruguay this October, I was very excited. Uruguay … that sounded like football, palm trees, and South American adventures. Then followed a sense of trepidation. October? Wasn’t that when I was supposed to be in California? It was. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’m sure I can squeeze that in.” It was a chance to go somewhere I’d be unlikely to end up twice by chance. And after all, I was in the Western Hemisphere anyway. How far could it be from San Francisco to Montevideo…

…Very far, as it turned out. When you’re from Europe and used to the idea that an hour on a plane can get you to a place with a different language, culture and history altogether, it’s hard to conceptualise just how large the Americas are. I ended up flying seven hours to Panama alone, disembarking the plane without even being halfway to my destination.

The climate difference there highlighted how far I’d already travelled. I’d entered the plane in the mild pleasantness of the California autumn. I exited it walking into a wall of tropical heat and having been informed that a world inhabited by friendly locals and furry sloths was to await me if I might be tempted to leave the airport.

There had been an earthquake in Panama – also something not often on my Western European radar – which caused significant delays and meant hanging around with thousands of hot and grumpy fellow passengers stuck in transit like me. Then another 8 hours or so on the plane before we landed in Montevideo, where it was springtime, featuring the equivalent of English April weather.

When I finally arrived at my hotel, my window overlooking the Río de la Plata, it felt like I had travelled to the end of the world. But history has a way of finding its way even to the most far-flung places…

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I didn’t know driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in a convertible BMW sports car was on my bucket list. But if I’d known how much fun it would be, I’d definitely have scribbled it on there….

The car belongs to a friend who is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and happened to be in town when I arrived in San Francisco or, as locals like him call it, “The City”. He kindly offered to show me around — in style.

We spent the evening walking around the waterfront area of Fisherman’s Wharf, had some pasta with a friend of his in North Beach, San Francisco’s historic Little Italy and visited the iconic City Lights Bookstore, famous for being the first all-paperback bookseller in the United States and a cornerstone of the Beat Generation literary movement.

Between bookshelves labelled “Muckraking”, “Anarchism” and “Class war”, we found my books Beyond the Wall and Weimar. Like any author, I’m always pleased to see my work in the wild, but finding it here, at the other end of the world, was quite something.

I also learnt much about San Francisco's swimming culture, where doing “an Alcatraz” is a thing, as in swimming the 1.25 miles out to the famous prison island. In the morning, we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and back before heading to Stanford University, whose German motto, a quote from the knight and poet Ulrich von Hutten, is: “Die Luft der Freiheit weht.” – “The wind of freedom blows.” That seemed entirely appropriate as I closed my eyes on the highway, enjoying the warm Californian sun on my face and the wind in my hair.

Stanford, or rather the Hoover Institution housed on its vast and beautiful campus, is what I had come here for. It’s where the “Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group” holds its regular meetings to discuss … well … the role of military history in contemporary conflicts.

Unsurprisingly, the focus was Ukraine, Iran and the Middle East. I hadn’t expected to hear quite so much mention of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Nor the Ludendorff Offensive, Germany’s last-ditch effort in 1918 to win the First World War. Nor about the lessons on tank production that Germany drew from that conflict and applied to great effect in the Second World War.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Prussia’s and Germany’s aggressive expansion efforts in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries should still be called upon for lessons on current military conflicts, but it seemed a little jarring after the incredibly chilled atmosphere of San Francisco.

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One of the most interesting contributions came from Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, who offered some reflections on the effect that military conflict has on political decision-making. She was National Security Advisor when 9/11 happened.

In this room of dozens of American military experts and historians, I also hadn’t quite expected to be talking about the Stasi, East Germany’s infamous secret police and intelligence agency. But the Hoover Institution Library & Archives holds many interesting sources on this history, the most exciting being the collection of Markus Wolf, who headed the Stasi's foreign intelligence department.

As a spymaster, Wolf was a powerful and elusive figure within the Stasi, cultivating a mysterious aura. For a long time, the West had no photograph of him and no idea what he actually looked like, so he acquired the nickname “man without a face”. The HVA, the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm led by him, was more or less allowed to dissolve itself when the Berlin Wall fell, which led to the destruction of many of its files.

Wolf, who had retired in 1986, reinvented himself as a reformer, speaking at the huge November 1989 Alexanderplatz demonstration for which he received both scorn and applause on the day.

Wolf claimed the CIA offered him money, plastic surgery to change his face, as well as a pleasant and anonymous life in California if he’d collaborated with them on identifying moles in its own ranks and if he shared his extensive knowledge of Cold War activities with them. He said he politely declined, facing a trial and conviction for treason in Germany instead. This, by the way, included the Guillaume Affair, which we recently covered on the Reichs & Republics podcast.

Interestingly, the German constitutional court later overturned the verdict. Wolf couldn’t have committed treason against the Federal Republic of Germany since he worked for a different German state that no longer existed. Other convictions followed for deeds that were illegal in both German states: detention, coercion and bodily harm. He received a suspended prison sentence for those in 1996. He died in 2006 and was buried, alongside many other famous communists and socialists, in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery.

Quite how all his papers and documents ended up here at the Hoover Institute, I haven’t been able to establish, but it’s an exciting prospect that both the original documents, covering his life from around 1930, when he was just 7 years old, to 1999, are here alongside materials gathered for his memoir, The Troika. I must return to look at those. During the lunch break at the Military History gathering, I was told that restrictions on their accessibility will be lifted very soon.

The Troika was originally published in both East and West Germany in 1989 — after Wolf’s retirement but before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It caused an absolute sensation. Now, The Hoover Institution Press is publishing The Troika in English for the first time — with a foreword by Condoleezza Rice.

You can find a fascinating excerpt from the book here. It’s edited by Katharina Friedla and Christian F. Ostermann. I used Ostermann’s fascinating research on the 1953 uprising in East Germany for Beyond the Wall and also consulted him directly on some of his findings.

And then there were the personal stories from some of the historians at the conference. One of them, an expert on Eastern European history, told me about his frequent visits to the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s. As an American, he found it easy to cross over into East Berlin frequently, but he also travelled to archives around the country for information. Naturally, this was closely watched by the Stasi. “Did you ever ask to see your file?” I asked him over dinner.

I always find this aspect particularly fascinating. Anyone who thinks the Stasi may have monitored them can apply to have their file found. The responses vary hugely. Some people are appalled to find out exactly which neighbour, friend or colleague betrayed their trust. Other names are redacted due to data protection, but it’s often possible to work out who passed the information to the Stasi. For that reason, many East Germans have chosen not to look, afraid of tainting or breaking friendships.

Among many Westerners, on the other hand, there is a thing I’ve heard described as “file envy”. I found the concept entirely alien at first. Imagine being an eminent historian from Britain or the US and remembering yourself as a daring, adventurous researcher who ventured deep into Cold War East Germany as a class enemy.

Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you apply for your Stasi file, expecting to be sent a thick folder filled with hastily snapped images of your younger self at train stations or in hotel bars. You’re excited to read about yourself as a dangerous agent of foreign powers, on the right side of history. Instead, you get a curt message: Sorry, no file found. “I was devastated to find that I clearly wasn’t seen as important enough by the Stasi”, one hurt historian once told me.

But others were watched. The well-known British historian Timothy Garton Ash even wrote about it in his book The File. Here at Stanford, the American historian I was talking to at dinner said he also received his file. “It was quite bizarre,” he said, “because the accounts varied so widely”. They’d clearly received them from different sources. “One time, I was a ‘tall and handsome young American of neat appearance’. The next time I was described as ‘dishevelled and unkempt, tie hanging loosely off the neck.’”

So in a strange way, my visit to California has come full circle. I expected to come here and find sunshine, hippie culture, jeans, Silicon Valley, and military history — and I did. But I also found a lot of fascinating German history, including the elusive “man without a face”. In 1996, the spymaster himself was denied a visa to the US for being an “unreconstructed communist”. Two decades later, his writings are published here, of all places, in one of the most iconic heartlands of capitalism.

I’m on a brutally early train to London Heathrow Airport as I type. A few tired-looking commuters sit around me. Some wear headphones or stare at their phones. One snore…

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It’s not every day that I get to report to you from a five-star hotel. But today is one such day. I’m sitting at my rather neat desk at the Hotel Elephant …

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Well, here I am, back at work. After my lovely holiday in Italy, I was right back in the swing of things, flying …

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“That’s the pleasant thing about travelling,” wrote the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his…

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I know, I know… I was supposed to spend time in Italy *not* thinking about Weimar. To be fair, Goethe didn’t manage either. He may have escaped on his Italian Journey almost exactly 240 years ago, in September 1786. But he knew he’d always return to Weimar and kept sending letters back.

So I reckon one small letter of sorts to you ZEITGEISTERS won’t do any harm to my recuperation efforts in northern Italy. Besides, there’s a very stark Italian connection I meant to tell you about: the “Florence-Weimar Axis”.

I came across the peculiar relationship between Weimar and Florence under fascism while researching for my book at the Weimar Town Archive. There’s an entire file with documents on how the two cities sought to create a small-town version of the “Rome–Berlin Axis”, as the collaboration between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was termed since Benito Mussolini officially used the phrase in 1936. Local Nazis – ever keen to cement Weimar’s role as a “Nazi Model Town” – wanted to translate this new Axis down to the municipal level. So they pushed the idea of a “Florence-Weimar Axis.”

Weimar’s town archivist, Dr. Jens Riederer, told me about this Nazi town twinning on one of my frequent visits to his marvellous treasure trove of historical sources. He’s also written — as far as I know — the only substantial essay on this project himself. It’s called “The ‘Town Axis’ Weimar-Florence” and covers the events of 1937-1942. The following is based on his findings and the sources I studied at the archive.

It’s a story that unfortunately didn’t make it into my book because Weimar ends in 1939 with the onset of war. But I agree with Jens Riederer that the “Weimar-Florence Axis” deserves attention — not least because it was so disturbingly ambitious, going way beyond culture and involving sinister ideas on race, eugenics and ethnic superiority.

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I must admit that after months of talking and writing about Weimar and the state of German politic…

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We historians are supposed to be hard-nosed analysts. Well… or at least fact-minded academics with our emotions about the subject m…

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“Do you like plum cake?” the lady who had invited me to her home asked me as she pressed a button on a machine, which whirred to life and began to fill a large mug with coffee. “Of course,” I said, – who doesn’t? In Germany, this is usually a traybake affair with crumble on top and fresh plums that sink into the dough as it bakes. She put a generous slice in front of me and held out a bowl with whipped cream.

The whole situation was so pleasantly nostalgic that I immediately felt transported back in time. And that was just as well – I’d come to this place in the town of Weimar in central Germany to talk about the past. Around me on the table lay faded photographs, handwritten letters, a faded German Imperial naval flag and cardboard folders full of documents and memories. “Shall we begin?” my host asked. “Let’s,” I mumbled through a mouthful of cake.

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“And now for something completely different.” I don’t kn…

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Election fever has gripped Germany and spread well beyond its borders. My own experience certai…

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Greetings from Cologne. I’m right in the middle of this ancient German metropolis. I’ve come here to talk on German…

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A German journalist once wrote about me that, as a “Brit-by-choice”, I must be “so far removed from the entre…

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I returned to Edinburgh this week for the International Book Festival. I love visiting the Scottish capital. Not only is it beautiful – they don’t call it the “Athens of the North” for nothing – but it’s also incredibly vibrant and bustly. The moment I stepped out of the vast Edinburgh Waverley train station, I was surrounded by people, chatter and noise. Strolling up the Royal Mile, I was handed leaflets for stand-up comedy, serenaded by buskers and asked to take photographs of tourists.

But my thoughts soon turned to the dark question I was supposed to answer on stage that evening: “What Would You Do?”, billed as a discussion of “what we’re all capable of when faced with catastrophe”. It’s a question that clearly occupies many people’s minds since the event had sold out incredibly quickly. And it was a question I began to ponder as I was making my way through Ediborough’s cheerful hive of human activity.

How do ordinary people end up doing evil things? Would that couple I had just photographed be capable of shooting civilians if put in a uniform and exposed to other wartime atrocities for long enough? Would that builder restoring an old church on the corner help construct a concentration camp if ordered to or paid well enough? Would that officer coming out of St Leonard’s Police Station round up ethnic minorities if her superiors asked her to? What would I do?

There are plenty of case studies in my Weimar book to explore this question. But I was also intrigued by my co-panellist’s contribution. The writer and lecturer Angharad Hampshire would be on stage with me to present her new book The Mare, a fictionalised portrait of Hermine Braunsteiner. Braunsteiner’s true story is a particularly extreme example of an ordinary person doing evil things.

A young, working-class woman from Vienna, history would probably not have taken much note of her had she been born a few decades earlier or later. But that’s not how things happened. By the time the war ended, Braunsteiner was notorious, having acquired a reputation for exceptional cruelty as one of the most violent guards in the concentration camp system. Prisoners called her the ‘Stomping Mare’ for kicking prisoners with steel-capped boots.

But let me recount her story in a bit more detail. Hermine Braunsteiner really is a chilling case study in the choices ordinary people are capable of making in extreme circumstances.

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A strange article made the rounds on social media this week. Published under the title “65 years since the construction of the…

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I loved the SEZ, East Berlin’s iconic sports and recreation centre. Opene…

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