Don’t mention the ... horizontal bricks?
Credit: RAF Valentines Day 1943 The plane home from Hamburg thrummed steadily through the night, down the western side of Germany to Amsterdam, then across the narrow sea to Essex. I think a returning WW2 bomber would have crossed higher, spent more time over the sea than the land. Thousands of ordinary people fly to and from Germany every day. Our countries are allied against larger aggressors to the east and west. It’s not necessary to wake these hurtful memories of things that happened before most of us were born. Except … when I had asked my brother earlier that day whether he’d like to live in Hamburg, he thought not. ‘Too many horizontal bricks,’ he said. We laughed at him of course. ‘That’s the way bricks are laid!’ but when he pointed across the street to one of so many postwar, Lego-like, redbrick rectangular blocks we understood what he meant. The pervasive evidence of rebuilding. My brother normally lives in former East Berlin, a city hung over by its own c20th history....