For one nation, it was silence and poppies of deepest red. For the other, raucous music, roses and balloons of lightest white. On Sunday, by a quirk of the calendar, two peoples fated to clash in two catastrophic wars paused to remember the two events, which, between them, marked the beginning and the end of the short, bloody 20th century.
In Britain, it was Remembrance Sunday, officially the commemoration of those who fell in all conflicts, but this year freighted with extra meaning — thanks to the centenary of the bloodbath named as the Great War. In Germany, November 9, 2014, served a different anniversary function: Twenty-five years to the day since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was only a whim of the diary that made these two dates converge, but the link was always there. It was the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm who spoke of the last century as “short”, bookending his account of the period from 1914 to 1991. The significance of the first date hardly needed debating. Hobsbawm settled on the latter, 1991, because of the formal dissolution that year of the Soviet Union. But the moment when that process was set in train, the moment the Cold War drew to a close and the division of Europe ended, was that November night in Berlin, when the wall held no more. It is 1989 that is seared into the global consciousness, like 1789 or 1945 or, indeed, 1914: Less a date than a universally understood marker, the boundary between one epoch and another. That gave a singular focus to the ceremonies in Berlin. In Britain, by contrast, Remembrance Sunday had more than one event on its mind. It was there for veterans of the Falklands and of subsequent wars in Iraq or Afghanistan — witness the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association, who paraded down Whitehall on polished mobility scooters — as well as to remember those who laid down their lives in Flanders Fields.
Nevertheless, the First World War was the unstated focus. Now that not a single combatant of that War lives on, now that it has crossed the border from memory into history, it is left to the heirs and descendants of those who served and those who fell to march in their name. One regimental association after another strode down Whitehall bearing a wreath, its contingent made up not of veterans, but the sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who signed up a century ago. At least one carried the medals of their forebear in a glass case.
And so, among the new associations allocated a place in the procession, were groups tracing their origins to the battles of 1914-1918: The Gallipoli and Dardenelles International, along with the London Scottish, the first Territorial Army infantry battalion to see action in that war and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, deployed to France and Flanders one century and a fortnight ago. Marching too, in the “civilian column”, was a group whose very name evokes one of the ancillary horrors of that terrible conflict: The Shot at Dawn Pardons Campaign.
The result was that the shadow of 1914 hovered over proceedings, even in the chilly November sunshine. It was one reason why Mark Blundell, 52 years old and with no personal or family connection to the armed forces, made sure to get himself a good position in the six-deep crowd close by the Cenotaph. He had never made the Remembrance Sunday trip before. “I think the hundredth anniversary makes it more poignant,” he said.
He had clocked the double anniversary of the day and was mindful of those who had lost their lives attempting to breach the concrete wall that used to divide Berlin. He had been “thinking about the sacrifice people made, so that we’ve got peace in Europe. It’s topical at the moment: What’s the future of Europe and how do we stick together?”
Just a few yards along, Erica Halliburton, 58, was there to watch her ex-Royal Air Force husband march past. She too had been thinking about 1989, remembering that her son Ryan was just two when she saw those stunning pictures of East Germans hammering their way into West Berlin. For her, the story of the last century was clear. “People are always going to fight for freedom. They will always want to be free.”
Once the two-minute silence was over, the bustle of one of the world’s busiest cities brought to stillness, and once the royals and the politicians had laid their wreaths, returning to the warmth of the indoors, it fell to the men of the Normandy Veterans Association to lead the marchers, bringing the first rain of applause that never stopped. Pride of place went to them because 2014 contained another charged anniversary: Seventy years since the D-day landings.
All of which made clearer the unseen thread that connected these events. For an inescapable part of the legacy of the First World War was that its aftermath incubated the origins of the second, the humiliation of Germany in 1919 fuelling the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. When that Second War was over, it seemed as if the only remedy to aggressive German nationalism was to divide the country in two — to tame the beast by splitting it — and so it remained until 1989.
It is this story whose end the German people marked with such celebration on Sunday, Chancellor Angela Merkel poking roses into what remains of the wall that shut her out of half her own country until she was 35 years old, ageing rockers singing David Bowie’s Heroes, fireworks lighting up the Brandenburg gate, those white balloons released into the air. They were marking the end of an era of violence that erupted in 1914, resumed again in 1939 and never fully closed until 1989. The party 25 years on was always going to be an occasion of untrammelled joy.
No wonder events in Britain were more bittersweet. Britons were celebrating those who had survived and those who delivered the victory that meant freedom from tyranny.
However, those in Britain also remembered the lethal cost, the millions of wasted lives. In Germany, the colour was white, in Britain blood red. Germany was remembering the end of that deadly short century. Britain was remembering its beginning.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
