One of the many curiosities of Greece’s recent bailout battle with the EU was the ease with which old Nazi caricatures were thrown at the Germans. Surely the three postwar generations knew all there was to know about democratic values and behavioural systems? Surely, unlike some Japanese and Austrians, seemingly, and notwithstanding the odd far-right group (an affliction that pertains to many countries), Germany had truly learned from its past?
That certainly was the impression of my father, who came to visit me when I was a correspondent in Bonn in the mid-to-late 1980s, half a century after he and his immediate family fled Bratislava but many of his relatives perished in the camps. I had a German girlfriend at the time; her father had been a young motorbike messenger on the eastern front who recalled delivering an important missive to the Führer himself. We all got on. We had all, it seemed, moved on.
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