THE WAR WAS NOT kind to Dresden: the bombers of the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force rained destruction on the Saxon capital, reducing much of the city to piles of rubble, and killing thousands upon thousands of innocent women and children in the process. One of the few buildings to survive the cataclysmic and morally reprehensible bombing campaign was the old garrison, which after the war was turned into a military museum.

Poland, whose unprovoked invasion by the Nazis sparked the Second World War, is exacting a curious revenge on neighbouring Germany, however. Daniel Libeskind, the controversial Polish starchitect, is building a monstrous addition to the Dresden Military History Museum that may not be a crime against humanity, but is undoubtedly a crime against architecture.

Libeskind’s addition to the museum takes the form of a jarring triangle, pointing in the direction from which the British and American bombers came to attack the city. “It is something like a lantern, a signal, a beacon that evokes the city itself,” Libeskind told the press. “It creates a question mark about the continuity of history and what it means. It gives people a point of reflection.”

Libeskind’s addition does not in fact include any significant increase in functioning exhibition space or working areas. It is more of a middle finger to the city.

“I cannot decide whether Libeskind has been brilliant or utterly appalling,” writes Simon Heffer of the Daily Telegraph. “I suspect he is the latter, though the mock-ups on his website of how the finished product will look are rather incredible: and there is a poetic justice about taking the only undamaged building from that night and allowing it to share in the proceeds of destruction in this way.”

The estimated cost of the project is €48,000,000, funded by the Federal Republic of Germany, which has chosen this institution to be the official military history museum of the country.

Up to this point, Dresden had become known for its commendable progress in rebuilding the historic structures destroyed during the war and left as rubble during the Communist period. The completion of the Frauenkirche (above, the Lutheran church of Our Lady) has been particularly applauded. But Libeskind attacks this progress, claiming that “sentimentality is not a foundation on which you can build a new city.” One is tempted to point out that Dresden is not a new city, having its origins in the late twelfth century, in a region that had been settled by the Linear Pottery tribes around 7500 B.C., but one suspects anything more than five minutes old is of little interest to Mr. Libeskind.

Rebuilding is not a policy of forgetting or ignoring the past but trying to recover it and safeguard it for future generations. While the Libeskinds of this world have no concept of relating to the past other than insulting it or erasing it, I hope cities the world over will, like Dresden, pursue a policy of coming to terms with the past instead.

Hoeveel kere het ek dit hoor sê? München, die Beierse hoofstad, is die mees bewoonbare stad in die wêreld volgens baie lyste deur talle mense saamgestel. Die meeste kenmerk hierdie status aan die unieke kombinasie van tradisie en moderniteit in die stad. Beiere het ’n balans getref, en die Beierse mense is baie trots op hul land — en tereg! Müncher weißwurst — bedien met mosterd en ’n krakeling — is my gunsteling wors. (Jammer, boerewors! Jou Duitse neef is tops.)

In elk geval, op die webtuis van Monocle tydskrif, Tyler Brûlé het ‘n blik op München en ondersoek waarom en ondersoek waarom het dit so ‘n goeie reputasie. Kliek hier om te kyk.

It is scandalous that in all my travels I’ve never been to any part of Germany, let alone Bavaria, considering how everyone raves about it unceasingly. Once I finally get myself to the other side of the pond permanently, it’s high up on the list of places to visit pronto (alongside the Netherlands and Finland). All in good time, all in good time…

AMIDST THE MEDIA’S attempts to sling mud at Pope Benedict XVI, one of the most prominent Catholic youth leaders in Germany has chimed in with lackluster words about the reigning pontiff. Dirk Tänzler, the head of the BDKJ, the umbrella group of German Catholic youth organizations, gave an interview to Der Spiegel, the prominent weekly news magazine with a circulation of over one million. Asked his verdict of the so-far five years of Pope Benedict’s reign, Tänzler responded with the word “ambivalent”. Contrasting Benedict XVI with John Paul II — a “showmaster” — the BDKJ head said that, despite some good points, “a lot of young people often simply don’t understand him”. “Most have a different idea of how to live their lives than the pope might imagine for them. There is no ‘Generation Benedict.’”

But are Tänzler’s thoughts an accurate reflection of the state of Catholic youth in Germany or elsewhere? Over a million young people travelled to Cologne to experience World Youth Day with the new pontiff in 2005. (The following WYD held in Sydney in 2008, unfortunately offers little comparison given the relative isolation of Australia). Everywhere the Pope has travelled, such as to the Czech Republic last year, or France and the United States in 2008, vast multitudes of youth have greeted him, often waiting hours for the privilege.

Significantly, young people in Western countries have proved responsive to the Pope’s message in defiance of the collective anti-Christian persuasion of the dominant cultural forces in their lands. The permanent and vituperative media campaign against Pope Benedict has proved counter-productive: younger people have long ceased to place their trust in the princes of the press and instead take part in more diffused information-gathering networks via the internet. This may have escaped Herr Tänzler who, despite being the head of an umbrella group of Catholic youth, is in his early 40s.

Tänzler’s claims have not gone unchallenged, particularly as there is actually an organization of German Catholics which has taken the name ‘Generation Benedict’. One German blogger cited a note from a friend, who is “shocked” about the BDKJ’s claim to speak for all Catholic youth in Germany (if my interpretation of Google’s rather muddled German translation has any accuracy whatsoever). “Apparently those outside of these groups [who make up the BDKJ] are not Catholics,” Benedict-fan Ulrich writes, quipping “Outside the BDKJ, there is no salvation.”

When asked by Der Speigel if he had considered leaving the Church, Tänzler said he had “never even toyed with this idea” but gave as the reason for his certitude not a confidence in the truth of the Church’s claims but instead the rather paltry reason that he is “convinced that the Church and faith are good for society”.

The BDKJ leader did offer some complimentary words in his interview. Tänzler cited Benedict’s “significant contribution” to the Copenhagen climate change conference and the emphasis on justice and love in the social encyclical Caritas in Veritate, and also complimented the Vatican’s efforts to make use of new social media like YouTube and Twitter.

One might suggest that, having reached his forty-first year of age, it might be time Herr Tänzler finally put away the things of a child — except that an enthusiasm for the Holy Father is today a more reliable sign of youth rather than age.

Nestled in rustic style buildings amidst the hills of the Odenwald mountains, Germany’s most prominent progressive boarding school has become embroiled in the latest revelation of abuse in German schools. Almost the entire governing board of the Odenwaldschule has resigned after it was revealed that a culture of permissive abuse of schoolchildren was tolerated from 1966 to 1991, involving at least thirty-three victims and eight teachers, and perhaps more. The details of the case are too lurid for reproduction here, but involve the abuse of students by teachers and even a headmaster, as well as tolerating and sometimes encouraging the abuse of students by other students.

The Odenwaldschule was founded in 1910 by Paul and Edith Geheeb as one of the first schools devoted to “progressive education” in Germany. Amongst other novelties of the school, students were divided into “families” that spanned age groups and were headed by a teacher known as the “mother” or “father” of the “family”. Shut down during the Nazi period, it reopened after the war, and became a UNESCO model school in the 1960s. Among its former students is the Green MEP & former student radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who admitted in the 1970s to inappropriate contact with kindergarten students before backtracking after his previous comments were brought to light last year. The school’s progressive “holistic” ethos, emphasizing freedom over discipline, continues to this day. For the current 225 students, the cost of a year’s education at the Odenwaldschule is over $27,000, or £17,000.

The revelations are only the latest among many surrounding Catholic, Protestant, secular schools, as well as the schools of Communist East Germany. Outside Germany, however, the mainstream media have only taken an interest in whichever scandals or stories they can link back to Pope Benedict XVI, or, failing that, his brother Fr. Georg Ratzinger. No English-language media from outside Germany have bothered to report on the Odenwaldschule affair, except for the tiniest of mentions in the Guardian on 17 March.

THE OLD STADTSCHLOSS of Potsdam, destroyed by aerial bombing during the Second World War, will rise again next to the Old Market in the Brandenburg capital. The provincial government has decided to rebuild the old Stadtschloss to serve as a home for the Landtag, Brandenburg’s provincial parliament. While it was first conceived of building a modern building on the site, or having some reconstructed façades and others modern, a €20-million donation from the software entrepreneur Hasso Plattner has ensured the façades and massing of the building will follow the outline of the old stadtschloss. The interiors will be simple and modern, and to keep the costs down, much of the finer Baroque detailing of the façades will not be included. “I hope,” Herr Plattner said, “that the necessary compromises do not diminish the great impression overall.”

The original Potsdamer Stadtschloss was constructed for Prussia’s Frederick the Great to a design by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff; building work started in 1744 and was completed in 1752. The building was destroyed during an American bombing raid in April 1945, but the ruins survived until 1960, when the Communist rulers of East Germany decided to demolish and remove the remaining debris. (The stable block, which remained standing, was turned into a film museum).

The palace’s absense left a formless void in the middle of Potsdam’s city center. In the mid 1990s, the Prince of Wales put together an Urban Task Force to study the city in terms of traditional urban design and architecture and recommended rebuilding much of the lost structures of the Old Market. This included constructing a new stadtschloss on the outline of the old one, but to a new design in a traditional style. While the proposals of the Prince of Wales’s Urban Task Force initiated much debate and discussion, the old palace’s Fortuna Gate was restored in 2000-2001 with funds donated by the television host Günter Jauch (of the old Hanseatic family of Jauch). Last year, the Brandenburg parliament finally decided to commit to rebuilding the palace, and construction work began last month. The decision to restore the old palace has inspired similar plans to reconstruct the old Barberini Palace next door.

The reconstruction of the Potsdamer Stadtschloss is not a singular incident but part of a larger trend in the reunited Germany of the past two decades. (C.f. Berlin’s decision to rebuild its city palace). “In particular, the architects are to blame,” the journalist and conservative former politician Alexander Gauland writes. “After they squandered the Bauhaus legacy in soulless box architecture in the West and no-less-soulless Eastern-bloc slab construction, everyone is pressing for reconstruction. From the historic Zeil in Frankfurt to the Dresden Frauenkirche, to the Berlin & Potsdam city-palaces, citizens are calling for the restoration of the old, since the modern cannot provide a sense of home.”

The Potsdam plans are superior to the Berlin concept in that the modern is left to the interior while the exterior will show the traditional style and form. Herr Gauland, voicing the opinion of many other Potsdam inhabitants, nonetheless attacks the design as “a lazy architectural compromise: neither fish nor meat, not Knobelsdorff but instead really new”. Despite these reservations, we trust the overall idea is one to be commended and welcomed.

The view across the courtyard towards Schinkel’s Church of St. Nicholas.

The courtyard.

One early plan called for a modern structure to be built in the courtyard to house the Brandenburg provincial parliament.

However, it was decided to house the legislature in the center of the main wing of the palace itself.

The interiors will be in a clean, bare modern style in contrast to the building’s exterior.

Some parts of the interior, such as the entry staircase, will be restored to a pared-down classical version of their former Baroque exuberance.

At the beginning of Hitler’s rule, many patriotic German anti-Hitlerites fled to the Saarland, which was Germany but still under French occupation. In a bizarre state of internal exile, anti-Nazi publications, be they Christian, Nationalist, Communist, or Jewish flourished for a very brief period. One of these journals was Das Reich, founded by Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, who (if I recall my personal studies from St Andrews years properly) was a bit of a rogue in his own way, sympathizing with the Red forces during the Spanish Civil War.

A plebiscite on rejoining the Saarland with Germany proper had been scheduled before Hitler’s rise to power (just like the lamentable award of the 1936 Olympics to Berlin, though they turned out to be some of the most influential and well-run games to date) and, while the inhabitants were no keen Hitlerites, they had naturally tired of French occupation and duly voted to kick the French out. Right result, but very poor timing.

The anti-Hitlerites had to flee further, to Paris (where Pariser Tageblatt and later Pariser Tageszeitung were founded), London, and New York. German Jews sometimes fled as far as Shanghai where the English-language Shanghai Jewish Chronicle began a German edition in response to the influx. (There are some interesting stories about Shanghai Jews, and of course the famous newspaper-owning family of Jewish converts to Catholicism in Shanghai, but they’ll have to wait for another day).

On the night of the Horst Wessel commemoration Hitler speaks in the Berlin Sportpalast. People who have neither seen nor heard him will perhaps never fully understand the significance of the profoundly ominous mind-set that has developed in Germany since the war. The reality — Hitler’s version of reality and its full implications — goes far beyond anything you might read in the newspapers, or imagine. Here is that reality, drawn from the life.

Hitler rarely speaks in Berlin: it is Goebbels’ hunting ground. (Goebbels, moreover, like almost all of the leadership, suffers from serious paranoia, refusing, for example, to speak outside the capital unless the local party officials guarantee him an audience of appropriate size, with fee to match.) The Sportpalast holds twenty-five thousand people. A ticket costs one mark. The event is sold out days in advance.

At three in the afternoon of the meeting advertised for eight, the migration towards the horrific concrete sheep-pen is under way. For hours on end the Bülow Strasse underground pours uniformed Nazis and members of their families onto the street. The doors are supposed to open at six, but by then the faithful have somehow managed to occupy the floor and all the gallery seating. Arrangements are in place for surviving the long wait ahead, mothers of families have prepared sandwiches and thermos flasks of coffee, and the crowd sits, hour after hour, patiently munching away. At six, groups of Nazis parade into the hall. Today’s will be a great, truly representative meeting: every single Nazi regiment has sent its chosen delegates, and now four thousand, I am told, of the 226 SA, the Sturm Abteilung, come marching in, in full uniform. This uniform — leggings, riding breeches, brown shirt, with unit number and emblem on the lapel and peaked brown cap with chinstrap — is by every impartial canon of taste the ugliest and most repulsive garb that any fanatical militarist ever dreamed up, or more precisely, stole from the dress code of foreign armies. But in Berlin, where even newspaper sellers like to kit themselves out as war veterans, it is admired.

A detachment of storm troopers is now stationed around the huge podium. On it stands a long table, covered by a white cloth on which a forest of laurel wreaths and huge, many-branched candelabras await the party leadership. Other troops are positioned around the walls to cordon off the hall, and one especially prestigious unit forms a double line at the entrance, creating a long, narrow path to the podium. I think of William Tell — “Durch diese hohle Gasse muss. Er kommt” — and know how he felt.

Outside the Sportpalast the arrangements have a warlike character. An area half a kilometre long has been sealed off by the Schupo, the green-uniformed Schutzpolizei (Security Police), using armoured cars, and two-man patrols with rifles and other weapons, are busy checking the identity of arrivals. Only those with tickets, and the press, are allowed in. To foreign journalists the Nazis are stiffly polite. I show my credentials, more storm trooper types clear a path for me through the crowd, and I am seated in front of the podium, where, for good measure, one of the faithful is placed beside me to explain anything I might not understand. (This is the “ordinary Nazi”, in civilian life a barman in a beer-cellar on the Olivaerplatz, whom I sought out the next day and interviewed. More of this at another time.) The Nazis in the hall are on the whole very polite. It’s always like this, with these sort of people. If they’re not actually murdering you, they’re almost pleasant. You just have to choose the right moment to meet them.

At eight, news arrives — signalled by notes on a horn — that the cars carrying Hitler and the rest of the leadership have left the Kaiserhof Hotel. They are still a long way off, but the Nazi units stiffen to attention, the audience — all twenty-five thousand people — leap to their feet, and the munching and chattering are silenced. The Führer may still be far away, but every nerve is paralysed by the approach. The eyes of twenty-five thousand people gaze, as if hypnotised, towards the door through which the worshipped figure will soon appear. Then short, sharp, brutal words of command are barked out from every side — a barracks sound, which all ears drink in with deep pleasure. Enter the standard bearers, precisely 226 of them, with huge red, white and black flags emblazoned with swastikas, to stand in a semi-circle behind the podium. A section of the party leadership, almost eighty representatives of the Reichstag, among them Prince August Wilhelm (also in Nazi uniform), take their places beside the white table. Spotlights now pick out the entrance. And thus we wait, for half an hour. The tension is almost unbearable. Twenty-five thousand people, audience and SA troopers alike, stand stiffly to attention, faces turned to the entrance, while Nazis with red-cross armbands work non-stop, ferrying those who have fainted out on stretchers. The crowd appears not to notice; it seems this is a perfectly regular occurrence.

At half past nine the loudspeaker bawls out, “Der Führer kommt.” Twenty-five thousand people raise their arms and roar back: “Heil”. When I hear this roar, I instantly understand the Nazis’ success. Only dervishes howl in this way, and those in mortal despair.

The howling has no end. It goes on and on, an inarticulate roar. Then, ahead of the Leader himself, his personal bodyguard, the SS, bare-headed in dark-blue uniform, make their way between the lines of troopers, followed by the most illustrious members of the party, among them Goebbels in mufti, and finally Hitler himself, in uniform, bare-headed, followed by more of his guard. Up on the podium, the inner circle. Flashes of magnesium light, photographers leaping up and down, and little girls in white presenting bunches of roses to the Messiah, who strokes their cheeks and, in almost the same motion, directs the flowers on to one or another of his aides. It is a vision, a faded reproduction from 1914. For the most trusted disciples, the reward of a few, perhaps three or four, shakes of the hand. Prince August Wilhelm, for example, is merely third in line. Imagine the effect on the supposed ‘mind’ of this mass audience as, with its own eyes, it sees the Leader favouring a royal prince, third in line, with the briefest of handshakes, then almost pointedly ignoring him.

Hitler is forty-six. [Ed.: Márai is mistaken. Hitler was then 43.] A vegetarian, slim, abstemious. Everything about him, the shape of his head, the mouth, the forehead half-covered with a fetching lock of brown hair, the way he moves his hands, is strikingly effeminate (supposedly ascetic). He takes his seat at the centre of the podium, rests his head in his palm, takes no notice of the rabble or the military parade, stares stiffly ahead. He sits likes this for ages, a full quarter of an hour, while the music plays: first the National Socialist march, then — in memory of Horst Wessel — “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden”, with twenty-five thousand people bellowing out the words. He glances at no one. He just sits there, deadly serious, “lost in reverie”. Perhaps he is thinking of his country’s fate, perhaps grieving for the memory of the young man who died. When the music falls silent, he shades his eyes with his hand, bows his head, and remains in this posture for several minutes, motionless.

“He is deep in thought,” my Nazi minder whispers to me. His face is twisted with excitement.

In the hall there is a deathly silence. The silence of twenty-five thousand people. You cannot hear a single cough. This is not politics, not a party meeting. This is religion, worship. Then, from all around the hall, the loudspeaker roars, a steady crackle like canon fire: “Der Führer spricht!” Hitler rises slowly to his feet, brushes the brown lock from his forehead, and steps up to the microphone.

The faces! As he speaks I study the faces of the leaders on the podium, the faces of the eighty representatives of the Reichstag. And what faces they are! Only two show any spark of intelligence: Goebbels — small, dark, cunning, energetic, with alert, knowing eyes — and Goering, President of the Reichstag, one of the old breed of Prussian military types. And then, watery, soulless eyes; blood-red, beerbloated faces; close-shaven heads: third-class physical material. What can there possibly be in a head that gazes out at the world from eyes such as these? What confusion, what twisted obsessions? It’s all a sort of fake-militarism, a counterfeit; and not just the uniform. The bearing, the tone of voice, the whole gallumping flashy style, is just a sham. This is the gutter, militarised, stuffed into uniform. This is the mob, saluting to orders, playing at soldiers for a bowl of hot soup. This is the rabble, standardised: organised stupidity, the herd instinct mobilised, brutishness hired and feed, the boor trained to obedience and roused by the issuing of a rifle. This is the typical Nazi face, one which only a thoroughly sick society could have dreamed up for itself.

A significant part of the audience consists of the elderly; the rest are mostly very young. Middle-aged men are few and far between, and I haven’t seen a single attractive woman: such women clearly seek other kinds of amusement at this hour. However I have seen others of their sex, listening tearfully to Hitler in unspeakable excitement and dabbing their eyes with trembling hands. I am seized by the worrying sensation of having been locked in this hall with twenty-five thousand lunatics. It is not a pleasant feeling.

They already know the text. Tonight it’s exactly the same: “I started with three hundred; today twelve million stand behind me. I am the chosen leader of fifty per cent of the German electorate — (not true) — tomorrow sixty per cent, the day after that eighty per cent; and one day I shall have a hundred per cent. (All this for the thirteenth year running, monotonously, always the same.) “In the Third Reich I will mobilise capital, I will give everyone work, I will wipe out the ancient enemy — (the Jews and the French) — I will purify the race: I am the leader.” (verbatim). I cannot believe there are many sitting in the hall who would be surprised if he ended with, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Clearly this is no longer a political faith. It is simply a faith. The Messiah is under no obligation to account for himself, only to make revelations. He appears, walking on water, and speaks.

Goebbels listens, with head raised. His is perhaps the only face in the building that betrays any sign of actually thinking. If this man ever says anything serious, what emerges will prove very uncomfortable.

What the Leader declares is familiar, commonplace. As he proclaims it, in this hall, it is probably convincing. Faith is everything. And besides, loudspeakers are very persuasive, difficult to shout down. The speech is one that you drink like boiling water. It has no taste or smell, but it is boiling, and it scalds.

In the courtyard outside, a sombre double line stands guard over the car park reserved for the top brass and the Leader. I don’t wait for the meeting to end; I leave as soon as Hitler has finished speaking. The bodies of huge luxury limousines loom all around me. I’ve never seen so many mammoth cars. When it’s a matter of maintaining status and dignity, the money flows freely enough from the coffers — and there’s nothing left for actual running costs.

In the dead, frozen streets police order the rare passers-by to move on. A few steps further, and I am back on the familiar, lively night face of a Berlin thoroughfare.

The German population is large and of many different persuasions. Only one fifth listen — whether from conviction, calculation or in the throes of despair — to the Messiah who stands at this moment before his believers in the thick magnesium light blazing down on the Sportpalast podium.

This fifth will never reach sixty million, as the Messiah knows perfectly well by now. But this same fifth of the sixty million does immeasurable damage, creates real mischief, and is capable of causing unrest for many years to come: for Germany, for Europe, and for the world.

So long as this one fifth sticks together and holds fast, there can be no question of peace. I tell you, you should see those faces!

The day after this was printed, Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

When I was a youngin’, one of the joys of Sundays was the trip to the bakery and the newsagent after church. A vast array of newspapers was on hand for perusal while Pop nipped into Topps Bakery next door. We usually only bought The European, but I browsed everything on hand. One of the available titles was the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, founded in 1834, and the oldest German newspaper in the New World. The “Staats” was daily from 1854 until 1953, when it went weekly. In the late 1930s, the circulation was about 80,000, falling to 25,000 in the late 1990s, and stands around 10,000 today. It seems a pity that this “New York” newspaper is now edited from Sarasota, Florida instead of from Manhattan, but at least the Staats-Zeitung survives.