Dark Memories

Tomorrow marks the end of Germany: Memories of a Nation at the British Museum, an exhibition so good it has proved in my mind that a well-curated museum can do more for your understanding than reading three history books on the same subject. I say "well curated" because the exhibition was also the first in which I can remember noticing the skill of the curator in the same way you would note the skill of a playwright or painter; truly Neil MacGregor is a master of his craft and deserves every honour and book sale bestowed on him. Much as with his Radio 4 series to go with it, his ability to draw entire stories from objects is the work of a supreme raconteur: the implications behind the Jewish prayer bag emblazoned with the imperial eagle of the Hapsburgs or the threatening, bizarre figure of Bismarck as a blacksmith at the forge.

I wanted to write something about the series and the exhibition, but there's not a lot for me to add, other than my newfound conviction that Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach may be the artistic pairing best placed to sum up the 20th century for future generations. I was interested, however, to note that there was a gap in the exhibition possibly there deliberately, possibly because it is impossible to fill. It is the gap between the dark and light sides of German history, and it occurs about two thirds of the way through the exhibition. From the sunny all-encompassing optimism of Goethe's world to the technical achievements of golden mechanical galleons and chronometers, Germany for much of this story has a forward thinking energy and verve quite intoxicating to behold. It's there in that prayer bag and in the Hebrew on coins and decorations - a reminder that many Jews felt safer in Germany than anywhere else in Europe.

The turn towards darkness is of course dominated by the Nazis, but intelligently MacGregor ensures it isn't a purely chronological shift - the pain of the First World War's famine is mixed in with it, and almost small enough to miss alongside that a print from the Thirty Years' War of a mass lynching, a cold reminder that the horrors of 20th Century Germany were history rhyming. Yet the Thirty Years' War is something quite unusual in the history of an Empire that for all its absurdities often proved a more peaceful and stable arrangement than its European contemporaries. I took to wonder whether German history was brighter than I often imagine it. Long periods of urban civic life whether in the Hanseatic league or the university towns along the rivers, unencumbered by imperial intervention, come across as pretty nice places to live if your alternative is, say, Hundred Years War France or Hungary under the Ottomans.

And yet, and yet, the gates of Buchenwald loom heavy over the whole thing. Are there hints of what will come in the insecurity and identity crises of the 18th and 19th centuries, the attempt to find a true "German"ness? Historians have been attempting to explain the Holocaust almost since the last oven went cold, and I don't claim that thee exhibition gives a new insight into it. But going by MacGregor's telling of the country's history, there is no slow slide into darkness and barbarism, no slowly building catastrophe, no attempt to use the power of hindsight to pick out the seeds of the slaughter in medieval or Enlightenment or Romantic thought. There is just that implicit warning that barbarism can come out of nowhere, at any time, to a free people who can write the St Matthew Passion with their heads and build moving golden galleons with their hands.