The wine, the greatcoat and the rifle
Dear Reader,
This week, my newsletter for members took a look at Friedrich Merz’s blitzstart as chancellor. I argue that he has successfully changed the narrative around Germany on the world stage by replacing his predecessor's reputation for dithering with action and camaraderie. But, look a little deeper, and the differences to Olaf Scholz become less clear. Plus, I round up the important news of the week.
Now to today’s newsletter…
Back in 2016, I went on a road trip around the Czech Republic and Slovakia with a friend I’d met a few years earlier in the Middle East. He had moved to Central Europe to teach English, but his real purpose for being here was discovering the part of the world where his ancestors had lived for centuries before being driven out by the Nazis.
I took a week off work and we met up in Prague, where we hired a car and headed east. Knowing where we were going, our Airbnb host in the Czech capital put us in touch with a friend who had gone back to his home village in Moravia for the weekend to partake in the local wine festival. It was apparently legendary, and she said she had always wanted to go but had never made it.
Three hours’ drive later, we reached the village, just above the Austrian border, directly north of Vienna. By the time we arrived at the festival – essentially just a large cow shed filled with hundreds of bottles of booze – the locals had already become intimately acquainted with that year’s vintage. Lukáš, our contact, greeted us like old friends and gave us a tour through the region’s grapes.
Before long, the light was fading and we realised we’d forgotten to find a room for the night. Lukáš asked around and told us we could sleep at his cousin Hugo’s house. I could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t completely comfortable with the idea, but we were no longer in any position to drive, so we didn’t have much choice.
Once the festival finally wound down, Lukáš and his friends led us to Hugo’s house. Our host turned out to be a large, thick-set man with a chest as broad as the barrels he kept in his cellar. In the village, most families have their own small vineyards, harvesting and pressing the grapes themselves, and storing the wine in their cellars. Hugo was clearly determined to show us that the wine we’d sampled at the festival was nothing compared to the good stuff he had downstairs.
He took us barrel to barrel, siphoning off dark red liquid for us to sample. My companion didn’t hold back, taking ever larger swigs from the jug, which led to a rapid decline in his mental faculties.
Eventually, we found ourselves sitting around Hugo’s dining table devoting our attention to one particular vintage. By this stage, my friend was comically trying to chat up a young man next to him, repeatedly telling him how beautiful he was. Meanwhile, Hugo had stood up and launched into an impassioned finger-wagging speech in German.
When he sat back down, he told me, with a look of satisfaction, that the speech had been delivered by Hitler. Before I had time to digest the fact that he’d learned a Hitler speech word for word, he’d already moved on, talking animatedly about the bravery of Czech pilots during the Second World War, many of whom had been aces in the British air force. Then the conversation moved on, as tends to happen in states of intense inebriation.
By now, I was only vaguely aware of time and space. But, at some point, a clearly agitated Lukáš came over and said that Hugo and my friend had both disappeared. He’d looked in the house, but couldn’t find them.
“Your friend’s Jewish, isn’t he?” he asked. My companion had what an English children’s author recently got in trouble for calling “a beautiful Ashkenazi nose”, and apparently the locals had noticed.
Lukáš explained there was a reason Hugo could recite Hitler’s speeches – he was fascinated by the man. He said we should find the two of them, quickly.
We ran out into the night and started looking for them. Soon enough, the mystery was solved. Someone opened the garage door and there they were. My friend had a rifle in his hand… and a wide grin on his face. Hugo was showing him his collection of Cold War memorabilia. Sweetly, he had wrapped him up in a greatcoat to keep him warm. My friend, a history buff, was inspecting the gun with some satisfaction. He staggered over and said something about the coat being a genuine Soviet artefact.
Everyone else at the party seemed visibly relieved steered them back inside.
The night ended with Hugo discovering I was Scottish. He proudly showed me his prized possession – a set of bagpipes he’d bought on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. He said he had tried to learn, but had never managed to get any music out of them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d been sold a dud. But I managed to coax a tune out of them – to his obvious delight. He insisted that I come back to play at his wedding the following year.
For the next two days, we were treated like guests of honour. Hugo showed us the village and told us about its turbulent history.
Up until 1945, the entire area had been entirely German. But, after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 on the pretext of “protecting Sudeten Germans,” all trust between Germans and Czechs was destroyed. At the end of the war, Germans were given a few days to pack their bags and leave land they’d farmed for hundreds of years. In the middle of the village, the former inhabitants had erected a monument. On it were the words Wir werden wieder kommen – ‘we will come again.’
Hugo’s own house had been built by Germans. He told us that the descendants of the original owners occasionally came back to visit. At first, he was wary, thinking they wanted to reclaim it or were searching for hidden valuables. But in time he realised they just wanted to see the place. So he’d sit down with them and have a coffee and a chat.
One evening, he took us to a dance in the next village. The local men who came to talk to us either seemed to shrink in front of Hugo, or were clearly hostile. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he spoke to everyone in the same calm tone he spoke to us.
Outside the dance, while smoking a cigarette, I got chatting to a young man who told me that Hugo had once been “the village Nazi”. He had been feared by the younger men and was known for being violent. But he’d mellowed lately. The man put it down to the fact that he now had a fiancée.
The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache to find Hugo and my travelling companion drinking coffee together. Other than my friend’s basic Czech, they didn’t share a common language. But they looked quite content in one another’s company.
After breakfast we packed up and continued our trip, promising to come back someday.
In the car, my friend looked at me with a straight face and said: “That guy was the greatest Nazi I’ve ever met.” I didn’t have a better way of putting it. So I just laughed.