Hamburg’s election shows that most germans prefer reconciliation to resentment  | thearticle

Hamburg is one of Germany’s smallest _Länder_, or states, but it has a proud history as the Free and Hanseatic City. The message sent by its 1.8 million voters in Sunday’s election will

resonate far beyond the North Sea port. The Federal Republic’s second city will continue to be governed by a coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens. But the Christian Democratic

Union (CDU) had their worst ever result. Such a humiliation could just be the final straw for Angela Merkel. She has promised to stay on as Chancellor until the federal election next year,

but this result might persuade her to step down sooner. With a mere 11.2 per cent, the CDU was hammered by Hamburgers for flirting with the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the

eastern state of Thuringia. Last week a massacre of German Muslims by a neo-Nazi terrorist in Hanau, near Frankfurt, brought home to Germans in the more prosperous West that the rise of the

far-Right was a threat to them too.  While the ruling CDU was severely punished in Hamburg, the AfD itself still scraped over the 5 per cent threshold required to enter the state parliament.

Even in this city state, perhaps the most liberal region in Germany, there is an audience for the AfD’s message. It claims to be conservative and nationalist; however, not only the party’s

rank and file but the leadership too come across as increasingly xenophobic, anti-Islamic and racist.  How could this be happening in a city that was practically annihilated by a devastating

firestorm in 1943, created by the incendiary and high explosive bombs dropped by the RAF? Such a biblical catastrophe, which cost the lives of some 40,000 Hamburgers, caused panic at the

time and, later, revulsion against the Nazi regime that had brought this terrible fate upon the German people. Interestingly, Hamburgers have long since forgiven the British for destroying

their medieval churches and mercantile houses. Facing East Anglia across the North Sea, Hamburg is traditionally the most Anglophone part of Germany. Its greatest poet, Heinrich Heine, made

fun of the English, just as he mocked everyone else, but he found snow in April and his damp digs in The Strand too much to bear, declaring: “Whatever happens, never send a poet to London.”

But this lifelong Francophile (who had actually been named Harry by his Anglophile father) was quite untypical of his Hanseatic compatriots. Even today, pro-British sentiments persist in

Hamburg, Bremen and other port cities on the eastern seaboard of the North Sea, which until the First World War was often known as the “German Ocean” (_Oceanus Germanicus_). Forgiveness is a

complex phenomenon, of course, especially in relation to war. Nobody has a right to be forgiven. The Germans themselves had committed such unprecedented crimes against humanity that it took

many years for them to be fully trusted — or to trust themselves. Defeat had been so total, the suffering and displacement of tens of millions so awful, that there was no question of a

revival of Nazism. The bombing of German cities did not win the war; in that sense, though, it helped to preserve the peace. The division of Germany was seen by many as a necessary

precaution. Only with reunification, nearly  half a century later, did Germany regain full sovereignty from the four occupying powers. Earlier this month, the 75th anniversary of the bombing

of Dresden was the occasion for the local leadership of the AfD to revive claims that the British and Americans had, by destroying the “Florence on the Elbe”, committed a war crime. At the

time, Goebbels had claimed that 135,000 people had been killed by the “_Terrorflieger”_. The postwar Communists repeated the Nazi propaganda minister’s lies, which were given a scholarly

veneer by the British historian David Irving, later exposed as a Holocaust denier. In the early 2000s a wider discussion about the Allied bombing of Germany began, which included revisionist

ideas that equated the Holocaust with the suffering of German civilians. Now the AfD is trying to persuade voters that the political establishment of the Federal Republic, as lackeys of the

Allies, has foisted on them a “culture of remembrance” which is all about atonement for their genocidal past, while covering up the “war crimes” allegedly committed against Germany.   In

Hamburg this week, however, that mendacious message fell flat. Some 95 per cent of voters rejected the AfD; they prefer reconciliation to resentment. The weaponisation of history is always

dangerous and especially in this case. Yet in Hamburg, at least, ordinary Germans rejected the AfD’s attempt to rewrite their past, which is also a rejection of the core Judaeo-Christian

principle: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Mrs Merkel, as the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, knows this better than most. If she can no longer make

the case against the AfD convincingly, it is time for her to leave the stage in favour of someone who can.