Hamburg after Bologna, or glimmers of hope when prospects are dire

With the far right dominant in so many countries, we need to take what pleasure we can from the glimmers of hope that show up every now and again in certain places.

I wrote recently about the surprising but heartwarming achievement of a popular movement called the ‘Sardines’ in keeping the hard populist right out of power in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. That’s the area that includes Bologna and Parma, and I’d learned to respect it already as the home of Bolognese sauce, Parmesan cheese and Parma ham.

“Also the best mortadella,” my wife Danielle admonished me, when I made the mistake of buying some of the Spanish variety in our local supermarket.

Emilia-Romagna doesn’t have a coastline, so I wouldn’t have expected sardines from there. The human variety, however, so-called because their rallies are so well attended they have to squeeze into public squares, have proved even more appealing than the mortadella.

Their impact? Matteo Salvini, homophobic and xenophobic leader of the far right League movement, was denied a much anticipated victory in the region despite having personally devoted significant time and prestige to the campaign. A rare upset to a rampant right, still in the ascendancy across a world where even someone who has done as much as Donald Trump to torpedo his own prospects, nonetheless stands a good chance of re-election.

This week produced another glimmer of hope to set alongside Reggio Emilia. Another regional election, this time in the great German city and federal state of Hamburg, on 23 February.

SPD members celebrating the Hamburg results

Curiously, the standard party of the centre left, the Social Democrats or SPD, lost four seats. They were left with 54 out of 123 seats in the state chamber, eight short of a majority.

That, however, was more than made up for by the Greens gaining an extraordinary 18 seats, more than doubling their representation to 33.

The party of the far left, simply called ‘The Left’ (Die Linke) also increased its presence by two seats to 13.

If you’ve been adding up these numbers as we go, you’ll have seen that the three parties of the Left between them accumulated 100 seats, a huge majority of the Chamber. So what happened to the Right?

The traditional conservative party, the Christian Democrats or CDU, lost five seats to emerge with just 15. That was the CDU’s worst-ever result in the city. It was probably being punished for having flirted with the far-right Alternative for Germany party or AfD in another State recently. 

The party that likes to present itself as liberal, the Free Democrats or FDP, was reduced to a single seat. 

But the best result of all was what happened to the hard-right AfD itself.

Far from making any advance, it lost a seat to just seven and its vote share fell to 5.3%. The threshold for a party list to win any representation is 5%, so it is teetering on the brink of exclusion from the State Parliament. That was the price of having maintained unremitting anti-immigrant rhetoric which was rightly seen to having contributed to a right-wing terrorist attack in Hanau a few days earlier. 

Mourning the ten victims of right-wing terrorism in Hanau

That made the slap in the AfD’s face all the more deserved. And all the more welcome. Couldn’t have happened to a better bunch.

Two such results so far this year. It’s not much. Straws in the wind and no more. But they’re encouraging straws in a wind blowing in the right direction.

They show it can be done. Which means we can do it again.

Pleasure, and a timely lesson, from the Hamburgers

There are more bridges in Hamburg than there are in the whole of Venice and Amsterdam. Taken together.

How do I know that? I was told by a taxi driver. And the word of a taxi driver is not to be doubted, is it? Like the word of a US President. So I haven’t checked. I have to admit, though, that if I haven’t looked, it’s partly just because I wouldn’t want to find out that it wasn’t true.

The Elbe in Hamburg

In any case, it’s highly plausible. The city has water everywhere. It’s a great port, after all, at the mouth of the river Elbe, and with many channels of its tributary, the Alster, flowing through parts of the city centre. Water, hills and parks make a city, in my view, and Hamburg has the first and last of these.

Water, water, everywhere

Many of the waterways are lined with old warehouses, a reminder that the city was once one of the chief centres of a great trading association of northern Europe, the Hanseatic League. Most German cities like to have their car number plates identified by a single letter – B for Berlin or F for Frankfurt, for instance – because a short abbreviation indicates a great city. Hamburg insists on two – HH for Hansestadt Hamburg, recalling its long commercial traditions.

Hamburg warehouses. And more water, of course.

‘England is a nation of shopkeepers,’ Napoleon once said. I realised just what he meant, and just why he said it, when I was recently reading some material on Britain in the eighteenth-century. In the Napoleonic wars, Britain tried for as long as possible to avoid getting involved in fighting on land in Europe, preferring to limit its military commitments to the sea (trade needed the sealanes kept open, after all). Instead, it offered subsidies to its allies to do the actual fighting. It could offer those subsidies because it was a powerful trading nation, though as I argued here recently, even Britain suffered as embargoes and counter-embargoes were imposed.

Hamburg, like Britain, prospered by trade. A message Brexiters and Trumpistas would do well to remember. Erecting barriers makes nations poorer. Knocking them down makes them richer – all of them: this isn’t a zero-sum game, both sides gain from trade. And war damages them.

Alongside parks and waterways, spires help a city too. My eye was caught by a tall church tower as I was walking between meetings, but I couldn’t get to it just then – I was in the city for work, after all. However, later, having seen a colleague off at the station, I found that my route back to the hotel took me close to it. “I could take a look,” I thought.

The ruined church of St Nikolai in Hamburg

It turned out to be the tower of the St Nikolai church. Only the tower and the chancel survive. The main part of the nave was destroyed in 1943 when the Allies bombed the city, in the aptly – and vengefully – named ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The Royal Air Force bombed at night, the US Air Force by day; the RAF carpeted the city indiscriminately, the USAF targeted military works (such as a submarine factory); a fire storm engulfed the city, leaving a number of dead that has never been precisely determined, some of the corpses having been completely incinerated in the flames.

Picasso evoked the terror of the Nazi bombing of Guernica

The museum in the crypt of the ruined church makes it clear that the chief blame for the horror belongs to Hitler and Nazism, that none of this would have happened had they not set Germany on a vain road to world power, and that the Nazis indeed had pioneered the use of mass bombing of civilians before the Allies did: the museum mentions Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Warsaw, Coventry and, indeed, London, all bombed long before 1943.

That’s generous of the German historians.

However, it hardly lessens the guilt of the Allied strategists. The exhibition quotes Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris saying ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried… and we shall see.’

Let’s be clear: the bombing of civilian targets has only one aim. In World War 2, the Allies called it ‘breaking the morale of the population’. Today we call such attempts by a single and simple word: terrorism. The destruction of Hamburg by fire was absolutely clearly an act of state terrorism, something we would do well to remember whenever we throw up our hands in horror at state terrorism practised by our enemies today.

Hamburg ablaze during Operation Gomorrah

St Nikolai has been left ruined, like the Memorial Church in Berlin or Coventry Cathedral in England. There is a quiet, stately mournfulness about these monuments to those moments when we get things wrong and build walls instead of bridges. 

Salutary in this city of so many bridges and which has suffered so much.

Are you listening, Trumpistas and Brexiters?

I suppose it would have been appropriate to have had a hamburger
among the Hamburgers. But I resisted the temptation

End of the line

The thing about King’s Lynn is that it’s pretty. And picturesque. And on the sea.

The sea in question is the Wash, a square-sided bay into which four rivers pour, open on the fourth side to the North Sea. There are plenty of fine views and great walks. But swimming? Well, the North Sea certainly isn’t the Med.

King’s Lynn is also historic. Why, it even has a fine Hanseatic warehouse. That’s a warehouse that back in the high Middle Ages was used by the Hanseatic League, that association of North German trading cities that handled huge volumes of commerce across the Baltic and North seas.

Hanseatic Warehouse

Which is something of a clue to the nature of King’s Lynn. It’s really not that far from Hamburg, the city whose number plates proudly display the letters ‘HH’: Hansestadt Hamburg, the free Hanseatic city. Which means that King’s Lynn, while certainly in England, sometimes feel terribly close to Germany.

To put it another way, if I were asked to sum up that fine city in just one word, it would have to be ‘remote’. There’s one train an hour from London, and woe betide you if you get in the wrong half: it gets uncoupled at Cambridge, because King’s Lynn is perceived as only being worth half a train.

What a boneshaker of a ride it is too! Try to head for the toilet and you run a serious risk of being thrown to the ground at least three times in the length of half a carriage. As for using the toilet itself, while I won’t describe the risks for a man, let me just say that they are severe indeed.

When I was invited there the person I was seeing told me that it meant travelling to the end of the line, and boy did it feel that way. You reach buffers at the station, with a distinct sense that this is as far as England goes. Even though the whole town spreads out behind the station, there’s a feeling that actually there’s nothing more, just the sea, and then Germany.

King's Lynn: end of the line

Getting there turned into a bit of an adventure too. I buy my train tickets through a fine internet service called ‘thetrainline.com’. It makes sure that you have enough time to get between stations when you have to change trains. In my case, that meant allowing me 45 minutes to get from St Pancras to King’s Cross, which are about 300 metres apart.

Unfortunately, I always forget how generous the trainline’s margins are, so I do what it tells me and catch the trains it peremptorily tells me I have to take. That meant I didn’t just arrive on time for the King’s Lynn train but with about 40 minutes to spare. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait for long before the train pulled in and we could climb aboard. I settled down and made myself comfortable.

That was fine until about five minutes before departure time. At which point a tinny voiced announced across the public address system that the fire alarm had failed its test, and therefore ‘this service is out of service’ – an interesting if paradoxical statement, since if it was out of service, it was surely no longer a service, making the announcement internally contradictory. But perhaps I was being too picky.

More to the point, I wanted to suggest that they put it back in service anyway, because I at least wasn’t planning on there being a fire between King’s Cross and King’s Lynn, so we could probably do without a fire alarm. I was also prepared to promise to leave the train if, against all probability, a fire did break out.

However, that didn’t work and the train was cancelled. That was a pain because with only one train an hour, that was likely to make me late. But a railway employee told me that we could catch the 10:14 instead of the 9:44, which slightly surprised me, since I didn’t think there was a 10:14. Call me a cynic, but I think railway staff sometimes just say these things to avoid a discussion.

But then, oh miracle, we heard another announcement, this time booming through the station. “The 9:44 to King’s Lynn will leave from platform 9 instead of platform 5”. Since it was 9:43 by then and platform 9 is three minutes’ walk from platform 5, the King’s Lynn passengers provided the station with a fine exhibition of firstly checking with each other that they’d heard correctly and then attempting to move to the new platform at high speed but without compromising their dignity.

All the way, assuring each other that the train wouldn’t leave without us, though we didn't entirely believe it.

Anyway, it did wait, and an hour and 37 minutes later, it reached the end of the line and King’s Lynn. Where it deposited me in time for a fine meeting with interesting people. So despite some stressful moments, in the end it was a successful trip.

Proving that King’s Lynn, as well as being remote, is pretty, picturesque and in addition, fun.