“And now for something completely different.” I don’t know if you know this classic Monty Python catchphrase. In the TV sketches, John Cleese used to sit somewhere ridiculous, like a forest or a beach, at a desk, in a dinner jacket and say that line in a serious BBC sort of way before the show would start and the audience be exposed to the first absurd sketch.

The phrase sprang to mind earlier this week when I sat in the front row of one of Germany’s oldest cinemas, UT Connewitz in Leipzig, which began life in 1912. On stage, a man said something like: “And now for a short film about a Leipzig bakery entitled ‘People will always eat food’”. The room went dark, and 1980s-style synth music began to play. Then we saw Trabant cars whizzing through Leipzig. Loaves of bread being put into an oven. A room being tiled. More loaves of bread. More Trabants.

The situation seemed a little bizarre, but I ended up rather enjoying myself. The film was from the early 1990s and documented an independent Leipzig bakery’s struggle to operate under socialism and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when supermarkets suddenly provided fierce competition.

It certainly was something completely different. That afternoon I’d been having coffee with some diplomats in Berlin who had questions about the Saxony-Anhalt election. A train and a tram ride later, I was sitting in an ancient cinema, watching a film about socialist buns.

When it had finished, it was time for the announcer to do it again. And now for something completely different. Here comes Katja Hoyer, all the way from England. She will tell us all about coffee plantations in Vietnam…

To give you some context: I was attending the opening of a week of events focusing on industrial culture. Leipzig has a long history as a hub of German industry in the East – one of the reasons it was heavily bombed in the Second World War – and currently there are some anxieties around deindustrialisation, even if Leipzig on the whole is thriving.

So my contribution to this event was to tell the story of how East German botanists, engineers and other specialists grew a highly successful coffee industry in Vietnam, which remains the world’s second-largest coffee producer today.

It’s a fascinating and undertold bit of history, and I was even more pleased to join a panel after my talk with two tropical plant experts who were in Vietnam in the 1980s to get the project going and one coffee merchant who sources his beans from Vietnam to this day. In fact, he was brewing coffee for us that evening, and the cinema smelled wonderful.

I won’t recount the full story here. There’s a whole chapter on it in Beyond the Wall if you’re interested, but in short:

The GDR always struggled to procure enough coffee for its population because, for climate reasons, it couldn’t grow its own and had to buy it on the world market. That not only cost money – in hard currency – but was also fraught with difficulty. For the first two post-war decades, West Germany attempted to isolate East Germany with the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which amounted to a pretty solid trade embargo. Countries trading with East Germany risked the ire of the much more powerful West Germany, which saw this as an “unfriendly act”.

So that only left socialist countries to source coffee from, but the Soviet Union had decided to stop its coffee exports to the GDR in 1954. So the GDR regime had to buy it wherever it could and whatever the cost, spending around 150 million West German marks a year to do so. They also relied on West Germans sending their eastern pals and relatives coffee, which covered around a fifth of demand. For a long time that worked sort of okay. Coffee wasn’t always easy to get hold of. You might have to visit several shops or draw on some connections to get hold of some, but it was still proper coffee and by and large available.

Then the coffee crisis of 1977 hit the world. Bad harvests in Brazil, combined with the oil crisis, created a perfect storm of global coffee shortages. Suddenly the GDR’s import costs more than quadrupled, and the situation was unsustainable. Famously, one solution was to offer the population terrible ersatz coffee made from 51 per cent coffee, 34 per cent rye-barley mix, 5 per cent chicory, 5 per cent sugar beet fibre and 5 per cent ground spelt. It was horrible, and people gave it all sorts of nicknames, including “Erich’s Brew” after leader Erich Honecker.

Given that the Vietnam War had ended and the last Americans left in 1975, leaving the country devastated but communist, there was an ideal opportunity here to grow real coffee in a “brother state”. Vietnam also desperately needed to rebuild and recover, and the GDR could help with that. A deal was struck in 1980.

In Dak Lak province, 600 metres above sea level, 10,000 hectares were cleared for coffee plants. Machinery was delivered, and roads, settlements and schools were built for the 10,000 people who migrated from the coast to the mountain areas to work on the plantations.

East Germany sent lorries, farm machinery and equipment to install complex irrigation systems. In Dray H’Linh, a hydropower plant was built, costing the equivalent of $20 million. In exchange for this enormous aid package, the GDR was to receive half of Vietnam’s coffee production for twenty years.

This project was hugely successful. Vietnam is now a leading coffee producer with only 6 per cent of the yield used internally, while the rest is exported at an estimated annual worth of $3 billion. East Germany stood to gain half of this – enough to satisfy its own demand and create additional revenue through exports – but coffee plants take years to mature and produce their beans. The first proper harvest of the East German coffee project in Vietnam only came in 1990 – too late for the GDR, which ceased to exist in the same year.

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I think it’s because of this that we don’t really tell this story. Do so, as I do in my book, and you get accused of glorifying the East German regime. So I found it fascinating to talk that evening in Leipzig to two of the experts who were there.

One of them, a highly specialised engineer, felt particularly aggrieved about how skills and the rigour of their research were treated with contempt after the fall of the Wall. He had by no means been a meek supporter of the regime, having been deemed “politically unreliable” in his youth, and his contempt for the East German leaders still came through strongly now. But he also said scientific research and education in the GDR were top-notch, at least in his field. That’s why they were able to build that coffee industry in Vietnam when others who had tried – for example, the French and the Soviets – had not been anywhere near this successful.

His colleague, also on the stage in Leipzig, still works in this field today despite being well over 70 years old. Private companies value his unique expertise. He’s worked in South America and more recently in Angola to help build and optimise coffee plantations there. I could have listened to him for hours as he explained the conditions the plants require, but also how you build a truly local industry by training workers and specialists in situ, creating a socially and economically sustainable model.

In Vietnam, this involved building things like schools, roads and housing alongside what’s strictly necessary to grow coffee. The third man on the stage confirmed that these things are all still up and running in Vietnam today, where he lives for much of the year while growing and importing coffee for his roastery in Leipzig.

All three men also told fascinating stories about their interactions with the Vietnamese population. Due to the huge losses among the male population in the Vietnam War, but also due to socialist ideology, there were far more female workers on the plantations than one might expect.

When I asked the men about that, all three stressed that women were regarded as equals. That could mean anything from moving heavy sacks of coffee beans the same as men to being highly trained and specialised as female engineers, botanists and plant managers. The guy who’s currently growing coffee in Vietnam said that this hasn’t changed. Many women still work in the field today. Equally, both the GDR and Vietnam tried to discourage relationships between their respective workers. If an East German was found to have entered into a relationship with a Vietnamese partner, they would be sent home.

There were plenty of fascinating anecdotes – too many to recount here. Suffice to say that I found them so fascinating that I carried on chatting long after the official talk had finished, only getting back to my hotel at 1 am in the morning.

Another aspect I hadn’t previously considered was that the GDR also grew and imported spices in partnership with Vietnam, especially black pepper, as part of the same 1980 trade agreement. When we got to the Q&A segment of the evening, a lady in the audience stood up and said she was also an East German botanist specialising in spice plants, and that she’d been sent to Vietnam to help with the pepper industry there. The same applied to black tea.

If I needed a reminder that history is always complicated, there are worse ways to learn it than with a cup of steaming Vietnamese coffee in a historical cinema in Leipzig, chatting with a group of people with fascinating stories to tell.

This is one of the many reasons why I’ve fought for a more open-minded approach to GDR history. If we step away for a minute from simply wanting to use that history for educational and political purposes, then we have a chance to discover the many rich and highly consequential things that happened in those forty years between 1949 and 1989. That isn’t relativising the inhumanity of the Berlin Wall or the oppression and surveillance of the Stasi. It’s a way to understand the world as it is today, in all its complexity.

Election fever has gripped Germany and spread well beyond its borders. My own experience certainly reflects that. In the last few days, media outlets around the world have asked for commentary, and I’ve also just spent some time in Germany, giving TV interviews with more events scheduled next week. I’ve never seen this much interest in a German state election.

What’s going on? Well, today the people of Saxony-Anhalt are heading to the polls to elect a new state parliament. Just to be clear, this is not a general election for the government in Berlin. This is only for one of Germany’s sixteen federal states to vote in new regional legislators. It’s an imperfect comparison for many reasons, but picture Wales going to the polls, or Ohio — and the world looking on to see what the outcome might be.

To be fair, such elections are never trivial in Germany because the individual states have quite a lot of power to do their own thing. There’s more at stake here than who collects people’s bins or which politicians get to cut ribbons when new buildings are being opened.

In Germany’s fairly devolved federal system, the states have control over areas like education, policing, transport and culture. But still, these elections aren’t usually of much interest beyond the affected state. For many years, they would barely make headline news in Germany — at best as a kind of barometer of the public mood. And they certainly wouldn’t have been reported on globally.

The Saxony-Anhalt elections are so closely watched this time because they are widely believed to be a potential watershed moment. The New York Times, for example, ran a story on Friday with the title “Something Alarming Is About to Happen in Germany”. The Atlantic expects a “breakthrough” for the AfD, and France’s Le Monde writes of “electrified crowds” attending election rallies.

The reason for the hightened anticipation is that polls have the AfD at 40% or more of the vote share, miles ahead of any other party. I offered a more detailed analysis in an earlier piece, which you can read here in case you missed it. What this all boils down to is that the AfD is closer to power than it’s ever been. Given Germany’s past and its present-day importance, many people want to know the outcome of this election and what it means.

As a historian, the question I’m getting a lot at the moment is: “Is this a ‘historic’ election?” In other words: Are we witnessing a historical moment this Sunday that future generations will point to as a milestone on the path to a different future? Interestingly, both sides of the political divide seem to think so.

AfD opponents fear that the vote in Saxony-Anhalt may mean a weakening or even the end of democracy itself. They worry that if the AfD gains absolute power there, it would replace civil servants with its own people and begin to dismantle public institutions such as they exist today.

They are also concerned that even if the AfD doesn’t gain an outright majority, its large vote share would cause the other parties — all of which have vowed not to enter into a coalition with it — to form a broad front against it, spanning the political spectrum from conservative to far-left. It would be a coalition that nobody voted for, which would, almost by default, be unable to please its very different voters.

It’s a dilemma that might also spread to Berlin. According to the latest polls, the conservatives, the centre-left SPD and the Greens would currently gain just 46 percent together, potentially not enough to form a parliamentary majority. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives have ruled out working with the AfD, which is in first place with 28 percent, or with the far-left Die Linke, which stands at 10 percent. So if parliament reflected the polls right now, it would be tricky to form any functioning majority. In a smaller and more extreme form, the Saxony-Anhalt dilemma is a German dilemma.

The AfD itself and its supporters also see the election as “historic”. “Let’s write history together” is a phrase one wouldn’t ordinarily associate with regional elections, which tend to be about local concerns rather than epochal change. Yet ahead of the upcoming vote, the slogan has become ubiquitous at AfD rallies. For them, this isn’t about regional power. They see it as the first step toward a radically different Germany.

To give you some examples of regional AfD policies that have national implications: Reintroducing Russian lessons and student exchanges with Russia at Saxony-Anhalt’s schools, for instance, is a mini version of the much closer relations between Germany and Russia that the AfD is calling for overall. “Remigration” of immigrants from Saxony-Anhalt (a term that is mentioned 17 times in the manifesto) would be seen as the first step towards the “remigration of millions” that AfD groups, especially their youth wing, are demanding at the national level.

So is the state election in Saxony-Anhalt today “historic”? In my interviews this week, I’ve answered this question with a cautious “yes”. Here is why:

Whatever the exact outcome of today’s election, it signifies a permanent shift in Germany’s post-war political landscape. When West Germany was founded in 1949, it was acutely aware of the fact that it had inherited a population that had been deeply nazified, affecting younger people especially, who had known nothing but Hitler’s ideas. With that in mind, the watchful eyes of the Western Allies on all their doings and the experience of the collapse of Weimar democracy in vivid living memory, it set out to tolerate only political parties that were within the moderate spectrum.

The first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, applied a whole range of methods to achieve this. He banned a Nazi successor party and the Communist Party in the 1950s. He integrated former Nazis into his own government, as well as the civil service and society more widely. And he built a domestic security service to monitor and potentially ban other political organisations if they were deemed to sit outside the constitutional boundaries.

Effectively, this meant that Adenauer’s own conservatives (CDU/CSU) were as right-wing as Germans were supposed to go and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) covered the other side of the political spectrum. The liberal FDP became the kingmaker when government switched from one side to the other. Germans largely stuck to this for many many years because it worked out well for them. For the most part, that includes East Germans after 1990, by the way. Brandenburg, the state where I grew up, has been run by the SPD ever since reunification.

Being “right-wing” or being “left-wing” meant voting Christian-conservative or Social Democrat for much of the post-war era. There were fringe parties and also the Greens emerged in the 1980s, but fundamentally the two big parties were seen as “Volksparteien” or “People’s Parties” because they covered much of the voteshare between them — often over 80 per cent.

When the anti-immigration party The Republicans emerged in West Germany in the 1980s, the prominent Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauß (a staunch conservative and Cold Warrior) insisted that “There must not be a legitimate democratic party right of the CDU/CSU”.

And that is exactly where the big “historic” shift is that we’re seeing right now. For a long time, the AfD was treated as though it was another version of The Republicans or other far-right parties like the NPD and DVU, which made inroads especially in eastern Germany for a while. In other words, the AfD was treated as a fringe party with regional support. It would never get anywhere near power, people thought, because the “firewall” of the other parties would mean that it would never get anywhere near power.

Now the AfD is not only hovering around the 40%-mark across eastern states, but it’s also leading in the national polls. In other words, its voteshare is now so large that it becomes difficult to ignore. There are calls to ban the AfD, but many other people — including ardent centrists — are now going down a different route. Some think that perhaps the AfD could be encouraged to moderate its course, much like Giorgia Meloni has done in Italy. Others have called for “red lines” rather than a “firewall”, whereby cooperation between the AfD and the conservatives becomes possible under certain set boundaries, for example, if the AfD was willing to change its Russia-friendly outlook.

Such discussions differ widely in aim and tone but they all stem from the realisation that the AfD is here to stay, and not just as a fringe party but as a major political player. This is something the party has also realised itself, beginning to build personnel that can take over government and administration, for instance.

Whatever the outcome of the Saxony-Anhalt election today, the political landscape in Germany appears to have shifted irrevocably. Calling that a “historic” moment seems fair enough to this historian.

***

If you’d like to see, watch or hear any of my other recent commentary, here’s a selection:

Deutsche Welle: “Amid far right’s rise, is Germany at a breaking point?” (TV, English)

Bloomberg: “Germany’s Far-Right ‘Firewall’ is Facing a Historic Threat” (Op-Ed, English)

ABC: “From the Nazis to the Stasi, how ordinary citizens live through extraordinary times” (Radio, English)

Phoenix Persönlich: “Weimar, East Germany and Current-Day Challenges” (TV, German)

SternTV: “42 percent for the AfD? Historian explains the mood in Saxony-Anhalt” (TV, German)

If you’d like to come to any events where I’m discussing this, the next few are:

9.9. Weimar, Ettersburg: “The East or How the Trust was Lost” with Dieter Althaus, former governor of Thuringia (in-person, German)

13.9. Gloucester History Festival: “The Rise of Populism and the Right” with jounralist John Sweeney (in-person and live-streamed online, English)

14.9. Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution: “Lessons from Weimar: Democracy in East Germany” (in-person and live-streamed online, English)

27.9. Dublin History Festival Big Weekend: “Weimar” with Professor Robert Gerwarth. (in-person, English)

Greetings from Cologne. I’m right in the middle of this ancient German metropolis. I’ve come here to talk on German TV about the upcoming elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt (more on that here if you’ve missed my earlier explainer). But now that that’s done and I’m looking out of the window of my rather agreeable hotel room, my thoughts are drifting off in a slightly different direction…

I recently heard on a German podcast another inventive explanation for why East Germans vote in higher numbers for the AfD than West Germans. This time, the reason given was that they see history differently. East Germans apparently draw a direct transition from Bismarck (who was East German) and Prussia (which had its power base in East Germany) through the Nazis (which …err… also ruled over eastern parts of Germany) and the GDR (which was East Germany) to the present.

Well… perhaps that explains, then, why I’m looking at Cologne Cathedral right now, and my East German mind immediately goes: “Prussia built that.” East German thought or not, it happens to be true. Well, sort of. The origin story of Cologne Cathedral is certainly remarkable — a seat and symbol of Catholic power completed only when Protestant Prussia took over. Come with me as I delve into the *ahem* tall tale of Cologne Cathedral. It’s worth it. Much of German history is tied up with it one way or another.

Let me start by trying to put into words how huge and special this place is. The world-famous Cologne Cathedral looms over the city like a beacon. Only the TV tower is higher up in the skyline. If I go all the way up to the roof terrace of my hotel (which I may or may not have done last night for a cheeky glass of Kölsch beer), it’s still looming over me. It feels like you’re not even halfway up. The thing is absolutely enormous, a real feat of human ingenuity over 600 years in the making.

The story of how Germany itself emerged as a nation-state is etched into its Gothic swirls and arches. Even in this secular age — and even in my East German, atheist mind — Cologne Cathedral still has the power to impress, amaze and enchant. It’s Germany’s most visited landmark and rightly so. Let me take you inside…

If you can bear it, the best time to go would be right now, at roughly the time this dispatch would have landed in your inbox. The Cathedral opens its gates at 6 o’clock in the morning, and this early you stand a good chance of having its mind-boggling grandeur to yourself.

I’ve tried to capture the interior in pictures before, but it’s impossible. My camera doesn’t know what to do with the dimensions. I read somewhere that, floor to ceiling, the nave is so tall that the Statue of Liberty would fit in there — upright! It’s the tallest Cathedral in the world, and the mind really struggles to comprehend the dimensions even when you’re standing in it.

Being a Catholic church, it also doesn’t hold back on design. This is full-fat ecclesiastical architecture, complete with huge vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, beautifully carved stalls, a black marble altar and the golden, shiny Shrine of the Three Kings, believed to contain the bones of the Biblical Magi. It really is mindblowing to think that humanity was once able to build such things, and now we appear to be struggling to fill potholes.

Then again, it took well over six centuries to complete Cologne Cathedral, so that puts things into perspective somewhat. When work on it began in 1248, wearable reading glasses had not yet been invented. By the time it was finished in 1880, the first cars, trams and light bulbs were about to change our lives forever. The construction of Cologne Cathedral spans centuries of European, and especially German, history. Its completion in the 19th century was suddenly regarded as an all-German effort — a new sentiment that finished this magnificent cathedral but also the process of forming Germany itself.

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In short, what happened was this:

There’s thought to have been a place of Christian worship on the site of today’s cathedral since around the 3rd century when Cologne was within the Roman Empire. As the Christian community grew in size and power while Roman rule began to disintegrate, the first formal church was built in the 6th century in the same place where we see it today.

The first proper cathedral was consecrated in 870 and is still remembered as the Hildebold Cathedral — after Bishop Hildebold, advisor to Charlemagne, who’d supported the project. It was a visible manifestation of Carolingian power and, of course, intended to symbolise the ruling house’s direct connection to God. While smaller than today’s version, even this old Cologne Cathedral didn’t lack in size or confidence. It was one of the largest churches built at the time and took its cue directly from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Some even regarded it as the “St. Peter’s of the North”.

In the 12th century, the aforementioned bones of the Three Wise Men arrived, and the significant shrine you can still see today was made for them shortly after. Cologne became a pilgrimage destination for people from all over Europe. That and the fact that it served as a Catholic power hub, with the Holy Roman Emperor himself worshipping there, meant that Cologne needed a suitably grand building.

The decision was made to build a giant Gothic cathedral on the same site, gradually replacing the old Hildebold version. Fire inadvertently sped up the demolition work, though luckily the magnificent shrine could be rescued from the flames.

From 1248, Cologne Cathedral was being constructed by generation after generation of workers, architects and engineers until the work finally stalled in the 15th century and came to a complete halt in the 16th century. Remarkably, the giant crane that had been used for the building work just stayed there and became part of the skyline of Cologne… for four hundred years.

Again, perhaps that puts into perspective all the frustrations present-day people may have with railway stations or airports taking so long to be constructed and costing much more than expected. Cologne Cathedral may be an awesome building today, but for hundreds of years — hundreds — it didn’t look like it would ever be finished.

This is where the Prussians come in. Various things happened in rapid succession in the 19th century. For one thing, Napoleon was beaten and Prussia, as one of the victorious powers, gained territory in the western German lands as a result. This included Cologne.

So this ancient powerhouse of politics and Catholicism was now within Protestant Prussia’s domain. This was spectacularly unpopular for decades. If you’re interested, check out our Reichs & Republics podcast episode on Konrad Adenauer, the first West German post-war chancellor and passionate native of Cologne, man and boy. Like many of his fellow Rhinelanders, he considered himself a “Musspreuße” — a “Have-to-be-Prussian”, part of a territory that was forced into the Prussian realm against its will.

But Prussian rule came with perks too. In the context of the clamour for a German nation-state, the completion of Cologne Cathedral suddenly became a symbol of German unity and strength. Of course it was also a way of appeasing unhappy Catholics who felt they’d come under a Protestant yoke. But in general, the spirit was: let’s achieve this together. The enormous funds needed were raised through donations organised by civic associations and the Prussian state.

By 1842, the work could resume. The combination of medieval design and modern building techniques was potent. Something that was both beautiful and achievable was raised from the old walls — which had been left for so long previously that trees and shrubs had begun to grow through them.

In 1880, 632 years after construction had first begun, it was done. Cologne had its Cathedral. By now, Germany was a nation-state and could celebrate this as a national effort. Emperor Wilhelm I came for the ceremony — and no wonder, the thing was a marvel, the tallest building in the world at the time.

In case you’re wondering why I’m still able to gaze at it right now when much of Cologne was reduced to rubble in the Second World War, the answer is that it survived the bombing — if hit several times and badly damaged. But the tall spires were useful target markers, which aided its chances of survival. It was carefully repaired after the war, and restoration is ongoing pretty much continuously to ensure future generations get to enjoy it too.

And what a sight it remains today. The city has agreed not to block the view of it by refraining from allowing any high-rise buildings to be erected nearby. So you get to see it from almost every angle from different parts of the city. The views from the top are amazing, too, well worth the intense climb in my view. So if you’re ever in Cologne, do yourself a favour and visit the splendid Cathedral and its many treasures.

It’s particularly good to have awe-inspiring places like Cologne Cathedral in times such as ours when cynicism, pessimism and anxiety seem to permeate much of public discourse. I’ve found that a stark realisation myself during my visit here in the city. In the TV studio, both on and off the stage, I was asked questions that spoke of worry and anticipation in light of the upcoming elections. A couple of hours later, I’m gazing at a monument that took humans centuries to make and care for. As I say, contemplating Cologne Cathedral puts things into perspective, perhaps even including the very concept of the word “historical.”

A German journalist once wrote about me that, as a “Brit-by-choice”, I must be “so far removed from the entrenched East-West debates” in Germany that I’m better able to endure their inherent contradictions. I don’t know if that’s true, but what I can say is that when I encounter them face-to-face, conflicts between East and West Germans often take me by surprise in their acerbic intensity.

Let me give you an example. In the autumn of 2024, I was invited to a lecture at Cambridge University. The speaker was Dirk Oschmann, a literature professor at the University of Leipzig and author of the 2023 bestseller The East: A West German Invention, an angry treatise about how former East Germans have been treated since 1990. There were many Germans in the audience. Everyone listened to him politely and applauded.

But at the drinks reception afterwards, a German businessman told me angrily that he couldn’t stand all the “whingeing from the East” any longer. He said he had invested a lot of money in the “new German states” (a phrase still often used for the former East German territories), yet felt the employees there were permanently ungrateful. To this day, he added, productivity in eastern Germany remained inadequate. The laziness and arrogance of the “Ossis” were unacceptable. They should work as hard as Westerners before demanding equal pay. Some in the group we were standing in nodded in agreement. Others stared at their shoes.

It is true that productivity in the East remains around 20 per cent lower than in the West. But not only has this gap been closing since 1990, but studies by the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research and others have also shown that the difference has complex causes and certainly does not mean “that East Germans are less talented or motivated.” You find similar gaps for the North of England as well, by the way.

But I didn’t get very far with such arguments that evening. It soon became clear that this outburst of anger was less about specific facts than about a vague notion that East Germans had not only failed to contribute anything positive to the “old” Federal Republic, i.e. West Germany, but had even damaged it.

It’s a sentiment, I hear and read often these days. Like the businessman in Cambridge, others too seem to project their general frustration onto East Germans. The line of thinking goes something like this: Before 1990, West Germany had strong mainstream political parties, a successful economic model and broad social consensus. Today, old certainties are crumbling. What’s changed? The East Germans joined. Instead of integrating gratefully and quietly, they wanted a say in matters and, on top of that, to be allowed to remember their own past.

Nearly 36 years after reunification, a significant number of people seem to believe that reunification is a root cause of the current German malaise, or at least a contributing factor. Or to put it another way: eastern Germany becomes a kind of scapegoat for Germany’s many problems.

Perhaps this need for a scapegoat lies behind a wave of West German frustration currently sweeping through the media. For example, a column in the newspaper FAZ recently bemoaned what it saw as an “East German sense of exceptionalism” which, unlike “the largely self-referencing regional identities of the people of Hesse, Saarland or Lower Saxony [all West German states]”, is based on “rejection, rebellion and envy of West Germany”. You really have to let that sink in: according to this view, West Germans have genuine local pride, whilst East German identity is rooted in hatred of the West.

Furthermore, according to the FAZ article, the East-West debate to date has “politely glossed over” the fact “that some of the problems facing Germany as a whole – with infrastructure, debt and shortfalls in welfare funding – are linked to the massive financial transfers to the new states [i.e. East Germany].” Blaming the East for these general challenges is a bit much. After all, bridges collapse in Dresden too, and as for high public spending, nearly half of all welfare claimants are currently non-Germans, and pensions face the enormous challenge of an ageing population. These costs are driven by nationwide developments and the East actually helps shoulder them.

Meanwhile, another magazine, Focus, has taken issue with the fact that three conservative politicians from the East – which it belittled as “the three East German musketeers” – had spoken out against the government’s planned pension reforms (always a very sensitive issue in the East). Of course one can criticise this, but portraying it as specifically East German obstinacy is wide of the mark, as a large majority of German citizens also reject the reforms according to recent surveys – including over two-thirds of conservative voters. Yet such a “blatant refusal to show loyalty to the federal party” apparently carries particular weight among politicians from the East, according to the Focus, which bemoans a “gratefulness gap” between East and West.

Here, too, East Germans are blamed for general problems – in this case, divisions within the conservative party. In truth, the conservative Chancellor’s approval ratings have plummeted to a new low this week, without any specific input from East Germans, and the disaffection within his party now extends far into the ranks of his own supporters. It may be frustrating that the mainstream parties are losing trust among voters and their own grassroots. But the East is hardly to blame.

Elsewhere, the political magazine Der Spiegel reported that “patience is running out” in “West German circles”. In the run-up to the elections in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is aiming for an absolute majority, those circles are reportedly whispering “behind closed doors” things like: “If it comes to that: best to put a fence round it and sell it to Kazakhstan.” Nice.

But there’s more. The real question, the column argues, is: “Which is the better Germany? The new blue East or the old West?” Blue is the colour of the AfD. So the picture painted here is one of the AfD as a creature of the East. By feeding it, easterners are ruining the good old West. That “old West Germany”, the author defiantly claims, is “still alive, albeit already a bit tinted blue.” A bit? In the latest poll, the AfD is in first place nationwide, this week with a new record high of 29 per cent. Bearing in mind that the East is only a fifth of the population, there are rather a lot of West German AfD voters even if the party is significantly more popular in the East.

It’s worth remembering that right-wing populist parties are also enjoying strong momentum in neighbouring countries. In Austria, the FPÖ stands at 38 per cent. In France, the Rassemblement National leads with 35 per cent. And in Italy, the party Fratelli d’Italia, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and classified as post-fascist, continues to lead in the polls. I don’t know how many more times this needs to be explained: East Germany is not an anomaly, and certainly not one that drags West Germany along against its will.

Neither an imaginary fence nor fantasies of selling off eastern Germany to Kazakhstan can turn back the clock. Such bitter jokes say more about the helplessness of those who vent their frustration on eastern Germany than about actual problems. It achieves absolutely nothing to offload all the problems — from crumbling infrastructure and soaring welfare spending to the crisis of centrism — on former GDR citizens and their descendants. This is not only pointless and unfair, but it also unnecessarily divisive.

Fundamentally, I think most Germans, East and West, want the same thing: a safe, free and prosperous Germany, in which the state creates sensible conditions under which people can build a good life for themselves. To achieve this, we should look ahead and aim to build a better future, rather than clinging to a past that no longer exists. The “old West Germany” cannot be brought back. Not even through Ossi-bashing.

*

This is a translated and slightly shortened version of my column in the Berliner Zeitung this weekend.

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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If I said the word “Dortmund” to you, what would spring to mind? For me, it would probably be: football, beer, steel and coal. In that order. Until this week, however, I had no mental image of Dortmund’s cityscape in my mind at all. Okay, this visit would be my first, but I’ve never been to San Francisco or Tokyo or Sydney either, yet I have some notion of what they look like. As I thought of Dortmund when I was on my way here on Monday, I drew a blank.

That’s strange for a number of reasons. I mean, Dortmund isn’t exactly insignificant. It’s the largest city of the Ruhr region in western Germany, which is in turn one of the largest urban areas in Europe and a former industrial powerhouse so central to German history that I write about it often in contexts ranging from the Kingdom of Prussia all the way to West Germany’s “economic miracle” after the Second World War. So why was there a white spot on my mental map of Germany where Dortmund should be?

I was determined to find that out and change it this week. I was in Dortmund with a radio producer to make a BBC documentary on how deindustrialisation has changed the city and how the city is responding to this. It’s been a fascinating journey in which I finally formed a view on Dortmund only to have it dispelled immediately. Let me take you with me on a journey deep into Germany’s old industrial heart.

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When I woke up on Monday, I had no idea where I was. I sat bolt upright in bed, worried that I’d overslept and missed something important. But what? A flight? A lecture? An interview? And what time was it anyway?

As I came to, I looked around and found that I was in a large, loft-style room with exposed brick walls and huge double-aspect windows. Everything looked effortlessly stylish. Of course, it came back to me, I was in Hamburg.

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