Berlin is at it again, proving that the German capital has no greater enemy than its own history. The latest scandal: a proposed demolition of a Nazi-era bunker, a colossal concrete relic of the Third Reich that has somehow survived the postwar purges. The plan has been met with a chorus of outrage, with critics labelling the move ‘absolute madness’. And for once, the hyperbole is justified.
Let us consider the bunker in question: a hulking, windowless behemoth, a structure that embodies the worst of the Twentieth Century. It is not a pretty thing. It is not a monument to anything noble. It is a scar, a physical manifestation of a regime that plunged Europe into darkness. Yet destroying it is not an act of purification; it is an act of cowardice.
The Germans have a complicated relationship with their Nazi past. On one hand, they have done more than any other nation to confront and atone for their history. On the other, there is a persistent urge to sweep the concrete evidence under the carpet. This bunker is not a trophy for neo-Nazis; it is a lesson for the living. To demolish it is to deprive future generations of the chance to stand before it and feel the weight of what happened. It is to sanitise the landscape, to make the horror abstract.
Enter Britain, the unlikely paragon of heritage stewardship. Yes, the same Britain that has its own colonial skeletons rattling in the cupboard. But here, in the management of awkward history, the British have a certain genius. We do not blow up our uncomfortable past; we fence it off, put up a plaque, and charge admission. The Tower of London, a site of executions and torture, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We do not tear it down. We let it speak.
This is not about moral equivalence. It is about the necessity of tangible memory. The Berlin bunker, like the remains of the Berlin Wall, should remain as a testament to what happens when ideology runs amok. The Germans would do well to look across the Channel and learn from our approach. We preserve the ruins of the Blitz, not to glorify the bombing, but to remind ourselves of the cost of war.
Of course, the usual suspects will cry ‘historicising Nazism’ or ‘giving comfort to the far right’. Nonsense. The far right feeds on grievance, not on concrete. If anything, removing the bunker plays into their narrative of victimhood: ‘See, they are erasing our history!’ No, let the thing stand, ugly and undeniable, a monument to failure.
But there is a deeper issue here, a symptom of the intellectual decadence that has infected modern Europe. We have become so afraid of offending that we would rather destroy than contextualise. We suffer from what the historian David Lowenthal called ‘the heritage crusade’: a selective memory that prunes the past to fit present sensibilities. This is a fool’s errand. You cannot build a stable identity on a foundation of deletions.
Britain, for all its faults, understands this. Our heritage is a messy, glorious, often shameful tapestry. We do not airbrush it; we argue about it. We have statues that provoke controversy, and we argue about them too. But we do not tear them down in a fit of pique. We let them stand and let the arguments rage. That is how a mature society handles its history: with debate, not dynamite.
So let Berlin keep its bunker. Let it be a museum, a memorial, a reminder. Let schoolchildren walk its dim corridors and feel the chill. Let tourists snap their photos and shake their heads. And let us, the guardians of awkward history, look on with a mixture of pity and pride. We may be the world’s foremost exporters of historical embarrassment, but at least we know how to keep our ghosts in their place.
The ‘absolute madness’ is not in preserving the past; it is in pretending we can escape it.
