Wir fahren nach Deutschland (We’re off to Germany)

[anglomedved]

Tomorrow we head eastward to Germany to visit my brother for 10 days near Würzburg. High on my list of places to go are Erfurt and Dresdner, both on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain when I lived in Germany from 1974 to 1982.

It's strange, I have a degree in the language, I was the de facto adopted son of a German family which fled to the west, and have travelled the length and breadth of the country (at least what used to be West Germany). Yet I realize just how little grasp I have of the 'true' German identity. 

I am beginning to suspect that the last person who got the German identity right was Dr Goebbels (Hitler’s propaganda minister), so right indeed that the Germans have been running away from it ever since. Certainly they were running away very fast in the 1960s, when I travelled Germany as an English teenager with near-fluent German (a rarity in those days). 

I’ll see if I can understand the country any better forty years on.

Posts may be a bit irregular for the next 10 days……