A Pfennig Dropping Moment

 

As I left the Marktkirche in Clausthal I had not expected to see the royal arms and cipher of George III. How daft is that?! George was Elector of Hanover and here we were in the what had been part of George's realm! So you'd expect to see it , surely?

No! One war had drawn a veil over the Anglo-German past. The House of Windsor was not longer of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Moutbatten was not longer Battenberg and my own family name changed from Bergman to Woodham. The next war  completed the job and drew a blackout curtain over it!

Time had come to own my Anglo-German origins. So next day,  when I stood before the war memorial in Altenau and thought about it all, I found that for the first time I really was honouring our dead (unserer toten)! 
  No only our dead,  but our saints and heroes as well!  I'm thinking about those who saw what the Nazi world view was doing to the country and acted.

Deitrich Bonhoffer understood that the tragedy that had overtaken Germany and its neighbours had come about because Germany had forgotten its Christian faith.  

And now the whole of our western (so-called) civilisation seems to have forgotten its faith!

There are lessons to be learned from history, not just for the German nation, but for all of us!


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