Germany's History Resonates for a Wider Europe

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/world/europe/germanys-history-resonates-for-a-wider-europe.html

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London — In his office on the second floor of the British Museum, Barrie Cook, the curator of an exhibition on Germany, cheerfully pointed out that this part of the building was entirely flattened by a German firebomb in 1941.

“I would have been under there,” Mr. Cook said, his index finger tapping a grainy photograph of the destruction swiftly produced from his overflowing bookshelf. “Right there, flat as a pancake.”

World War II still reliably creeps up in conversations about Germany in Britain, which is why the exhibition “Germany: Memories of a Nation” is remarkable: It covers 600 years of German history instead of 13 years of Nazi rule.

The show speaks to an evolving view about Germany, which has become in peace what it failed to become in war: Europe’s pre-eminent power. But it also offers a nuanced explanation about why Germans appear so much more at ease with their role in Europe than the British.

In a year when a general election will determine whether Britain will hold a referendum on its European membership, there are lessons for Britain, Germany and Europe among some 180 objects on display.

Many of them are worth seeing on their own merit: There is a 1541 Bible that once belonged to Martin Luther with a handwritten psalm signed by the father of the Reformation himself; the three-cornered hat worn by Napoleon during his 1815 defeat at Waterloo (the only non-German object in the exhibition); and a porcelain rhinoceros made in a Meissen factory in 1730.

Several cities singled out for their contributions to German heritage are no longer part of Germany. Among them: Strasbourg, in France, one of the great cities of the German Reformation; Kaliningrad, Russian since 1945 but before then called Königsberg and home to the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the artist Käthe Kollwitz; and Prague, now the Czech capital but in 1348 the site of the first German-speaking university. All were part of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, which loosely united Europe’s German-speaking lands.

That helps explain the deeply felt and recurring search for national identity, which found its most grotesque answer under Hitler. But it also underscores the fact that Germans have a long history of layered identity and governance, making them more comfortable with the idea of the European Union and shared sovereignty than Britons, whose borders have been more stable (a recent challenge by Scottish nationalists notwithstanding).

As Mr. Cook put it, “For a long time, Germany was more of an idea than a country, and a very European idea at that.”

The exhibition also offers an intriguing explanation for why Germans were at the origin of so much of Europe’s technological, intellectual and creative innovation, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the Reformation to classical music and, yes, porcelain production (previously a well-kept secret of the Chinese): The decentralized chaos of the Holy Roman Empire produced an environment of competition, diversity and freedom for artists, inventors and intellectuals, Mr. Cook said.

More than two centuries after Napoleon defeated that empire, the European Union is again trying to turn its diversity into an asset and become more competitive. Could it learn from its distant predecessor?

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who toured the exhibition with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain during a visit to London last week, appeared to think so: “This shows the very fruitful mutual exchanges also in past centuries between European nations.”

As Britain ponders constitutional changes at home, it might find that a more federal kingdom would be both more united and more at ease with Europe. And as the European Union tries to win back the trust of its citizens and give its businesses more freedom to innovate, Britain’s laissez-faire and democratic instincts might help.

As Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at the University of Oxford, put it, “Britain needs to become a little more German and Europe a little more British.” Otherwise, he said, Europeans might get stuck with a “European Germany at the helm of a German Europe.”