So the Germans want to tear down a Nazi bunker, and British heritage experts are swooping in to save it. How wonderfully perverse. One can almost hear the ghost of Lord Byron muttering about the sublime horror of it all. The bunker in question is a massive concrete relic from the Third Reich, a hulking grey scar on the Berlin landscape. Local developers have plans for a shiny new apartment block, but a coterie of British conservationists, armed with blue plaques and a sense of moral superiority, have declared the thing a site of “international historical importance”.
Let us pause to admire the irony. For decades, the British have been happy to let Germans wrestle with their own history. We exported our guilt to them, in fact, via the Nuremberg trials and endless BBC documentaries. Now we want to wrap their shabbiest architecture in a protective embrace. Why? Because we are addicted to history. We preserve everything: old mills, Victorian pissoirs, even the foundations of Roman latrines. It is a national hobby, a form of intellectual taxidermy. But this is German history, not ours. And it is ugly history, the sort that does not look good on a postcard.
I suspect the real issue is not the bunker itself but the creeping realisation that we have entered a new Dark Age. Everything seems fragile now, the liberal order, the nation state, the very idea of progress. So we cling to concrete blocks as talismans, hoping they can anchor us to something solid. But this is folly. You cannot teach lessons with bricks. The Nazis taught plenty with bricks, in fact, and we know how that ended.
The bunker should go. Let Berlin build its flats, its glass-and-steel carbuncles. Let the past be buried, literally. The strongest statement a nation can make about its history is to move on. Not to forget, but to stop fetishising. The Victorians understood this. They bulldozed slums, built railways over graveyards, and generally treated the past as a resource to be plundered, not a museum to be curated. They were right. History is a tool, not a shrine.
But of course, we are not Victorians. We are decadents, wallowing in our own decay. The bunker row is a symptom of a deeper malaise: a culture that no longer believes in the future. So we preserve every scar, every wound, and call it “heritage”. It is the intellectual equivalent of a hoarder’s flat. And the British experts, with their pious interventions, are the worst offenders.
Let the Germans decide. If they want to erase that horrid lump of concrete, good for them. They have earned the right. And if we want to preserve something, let it be a spirit of enterprise, not a burial chamber for dead ideologies.
