I have just made the long journey by road from Cologne in Germany to Albi in the south of France and reflected, on the way, about the trauma that hit one generation and escaped the next. Looking out over Cologne I could see the two spires of the cathedral and the odd pre-war building. But much of this city was destroyed during WW2 and painstakingly rebuilt – not in the crass, ugly way that the British rebuilt cities such as Plymouth and Southampton – but as if the hatred that led others to destroy their city could be turned into a deeper lasting physical beauty.
Where I live in the south of France, of course, saw little of the war. It was Vichy France. The only memorial in the churchyard is not to fallen soldiers – but to members of the resistance. The reason this part of France is the most preserved of all European regions is because it has barely experienced war since Pope Innocent sent an army to destroy the Cathars (the so called good people) in the middle ages. So here were two extremes of beauty – one built from the ruins of American and British men who thought they were doing so much good as they obliterated all below them, and another people who owe their fairy tale landscape of ruined castles on rocky outcrops to papal brutality and and “unspoilt”villages to collaboration with a cruel dictator.
Such is Europe. Historical ironies abound. All those involved in the tragic farce of war 70 years ago believed they were acting in the name of something called “good”. But as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said “Men always love what is good, or what they find good; it is judging what is good where they go wrong”. Not so extreme or brutal now within the ethical confines of the European Union; but as we survey the scene across our corporate empires and look at the self-immolation that is Ukraine, Sudan and the perpetual acts of human despair everywhere do we ever really ask whether what we take as “good” may have within its heart an impersonal destruction or the betrayal of not standing up for what we really know is right? And what will others say of us for all we did or did not do – two generations hence?