Letter of the week: Berlin, open city

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Like Rachel Cunliffe, I recently received German citizenship (Personal Story, 8 August). Unlike her, my first visit to Berlin was in 1966, to a newly divided city. I was nearly 12 and exactly the age my mother was when she departed from there as a refugee in 1939. It was my mother’s first visit back; we visited her mother – my grandmother – in the apartment she returned to, alone, after the war. All her family had fled or been deported.

Much later I visited the memorial to refugees by Daniel Libeskind, then slippery because it was newly constructed, rather than because of rain. And I, like Rachel, was overwhelmed and disorientated in a now-unified city. On my most recent visit I, like Rachel, went to the memorial at Grunewald Station, where I saw the plaque commemorating my own great-grandfather’s deportation to Auschwitz in 1942.

My German passport is “a passport to my lost past”, too, and looks very different from the very basic document my mother left with in 1939 as a stateless Jew. The path to becoming German is not simple, and every visit to Berlin is marked by increasing memorialisation.
Julia Edwards, Winchester

Highgrove and misdemeanours

I’ve been reading the New Statesman since migrating when the New Society merged with it. Sometimes I longed for the reportage Anne Corbett recalls (Correspondence, 8 August), but I rapidly became attached to the opinions, commentary and insights my subscription gave me access to. I got my laughs elsewhere – or I did until I read Will Lloyd’s account of the search for wellness at Highgrove (The Sketch, 8 August), which had me laughing out loud.
Les Bright, Exeter

Will Lloyd’s piece about Highgrove reminded me of my dear old mum’s visit to its gardens many years ago. Mum was a very keen gardener and allotment holder. She was also rather fond of the then Prince of Wales. However, her view changed of him over the course of her visit. Nowhere could she see any representation of Wales in his gardens: no flowers, no displays, no produce, no nothing. She questioned the prim guides and they could not answer why the Prince of Wales had failed to show off our nation. I only hope her complaints reached his ears and the gardens now have something of Wales in them.
Sarah Austin, Cardigan, Ceredigion, Wales

NS in the bath

Once again I find myself laughing out loud while reading the New Statesman in the bath. The Frank Skinner column about weight loss and Ozempic (Lines of Dissent, 8 August) had me chuckling so much I had to leap out, rapidly dry off and flip open my laptop to write. Not just content with culture and current affairs, your magazine is ahead of the game in returning to mirth and levity after a decade of earnest self-flagellation and sanctimonious preaching from other left-leaning publications. Keep this healthy diet of humour going.
Charles Lambert, London SW15

Pondering improvement

Helen Macdonald’s “The wisdom of pond life” (Summer Reflection, 8 August) was a lovely read. As a lockdown project I had my garden completely redesigned for wildlife, including a small pond. I gave away my lawnmower, allowed my old garden shed to decay into nature – brambles are taking over – and embraced the concept of chaos gardening, not worrying too much about what grows where. Now that my 20-mile tramps over the South Downs are long over, sitting near the pond, bird-watching and listening to bees and hoverflies feasting on the green alkanet is a delightful pleasure. All private gardens and green communal spaces should have a pond: it would do wonders for our well-being and allow us some brief respite from the political “pond life” that diminishes our lives.
Peter Boon, London E11

The unchanging situation

I commend Jonathan Dimbleby’s detailed exploration into the most complex of issues, Palestine (The NS Essay, 8 August). A state of famine has now been declared in Gaza City and associated areas. It is heinous that children are dying of starvation and their families suffering from wholesale destitution. I would recommend the legendary documentary-maker Norma Percy and her series Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, which gives historical context to this horrendous situation. It can be viewed on BBC iPlayer.
Judith A Daniels, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Whose party?

Oliver Eagleton’s column (Politics, 8 August) perfectly encapsulates the difficulties faced by the new political party in the process of being set up by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Even on the basic question of how such a party is organised, there is no consensus and every single one of its 800,000 signed-up supporters will have a different idea of what its priorities should be and how to achieve them.

It’s unpalatable to admit but successful parties are usually steered by firm leaders who exert strict discipline over their supporters. While it may be thought admirable to build a party from “the bottom up”, I suspect that way madness lies, and Corbyn’s latest attempt to reshape the left will crash-land shortly after take-off.
Jeff Howells, London SE25

Swan’s way

I can’t be the only subscriber in Maidstone, Kent, to have noticed Kyle MacNeill’s erroneous assertion that only three institutions other than the monarchy may own swans (Nature, 8 August). The mayor of Maidstone owns those tagged on the section of the River Medway that runs through the borough. The tradition of Swan Upping was revived in 1975 and remains a popular part of the role.
Rob Field, Maidstone

Struggles of history

As someone who bought (and read) David Cameron Watt’s translation of Mein Kampf 50 years ago, I agree with Richard J Evans that it made explicit Hitler’s vitriol towards Jews and socialists, and his contempt for Slavs (The New Society, 8 August). We can’t say we weren’t warned. But facts are slippery, and it is not entirely accurate to talk of Germany’s “defeat” in the First World War as creating the conditions for Hitler’s rise.

Formally, the end of the war in November 1918 was an armistice, not a capitulation. German armies were still in France, and had been close to the gates of Paris only a few months prior. True, the domestic economy was a shambles, as returning soldiers who could not find a job discovered. And there was near-starvation, but that was grossly exacerbated by the controversial British decision to maintain a naval blockade. Still, legally, it was a draw.

The defeat came the following year at Versailles, where the Allies used the political chaos in Germany (in part, caused by the near-starvation of the Germans) to extract their pound of flesh, thereby creating the perfect conditions for demagoguery. Fortunately, we learned from the past. There was something distasteful about the rise of Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor, after the Second World War, but it was vastly preferable to the rise of Hitler 30 years before.
Andrew Hilton, Hundon, Suffolk

I tried in much younger days to read Mein Kampf but could never finish it. The autobiographical section was, I surmise, like other autobiographies in that it told the reader what the author had wanted them to think happened, as distinct from what actually did happen. The philosophical section made me think of the pub bore who you just can’t shake off. Leaving politics aside, Hitler was not a great writer. However, there is one thing I’ve always been curious about – perhaps Richard J Evans could help in this respect. What kind of reviews, if any, did it get in the German press in 1925?
Mark Taha, London W13

Inside story

I always read Will Dunn, so started on “The Comeback” without noticing the bold red word “Fiction” (8 August). In my defence, the magazine was already folded back and I was in the bath with a beer. I was idly thinking that his Downing Street access was amazing until the second man from the Sun appeared. Wonderful. Started like The Thick of It and ended like Tom Sharpe. Maybe another for Christmas?
Chris Rose, Wells-next-the-Sea

Station waggin’

Finn McRedmond writes that in Charlbury, Oxfordshire, “there is not much need for public transit when everyone has their 4 × 4, newest model” (“The Cotswolds plot against JD Vance”, newstatesman.com). Tell me, when she arrived on the direct train from London Paddington, did she not notice the railway station?
Richard Fairhurst, Charlbury

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