In Europe

never be another war is etched in our souls.’ His father froze to death on the Eastern Front.
    A weekend in Nuremberg, city of cuckoo clocks, toys, racial laws, the NSDAP's national rallies, the war crimes tribunal and the world's biggest bratwurst hall. The city has its
Altstadt
, and fake trams for the tourists everywhere. In reality, there is almost not a single piece of cement here older than fifty-five years. The entire old city centre of Nuremburg was bombed off the face of the earth, yet most local history books grant no more than a page or two to the war. The tribunal building is now used to try everyday criminals. The Nazis’ huge parade grounds have been preserved in part as a living memorial. The rest has been filled with inexpensive public housing.
    That evening I sit in the grandstand at those parade grounds, one of the few elements left of the Nazi complex. It is one of those quiet, mild spring evenings full of promise. The author Gitta Sereny, who would one day write a biography of Albert Speer, ended up here by mistake in 1934, in the midst of a Nazi rally. She was ten at the time, a prim schoolgirl on her way to visit her mother in Vienna. Later she would write down her impressions; she did not understand then what it was about, but she was overwhelmed by the drama, the theatrics, ‘the symmetry of the marchers, the joyful faces all around, the rhythm of the sounds, thesolemnity of the silences, the colours of the flags, the magic of the lights.’
    Those parts of the immense meeting hall still standing are now lifeless stone and peeling concrete. Hitler and Speer planned to make it a stadium for 400,000 spectators, twice the size of the Circus Maximus in Rome, half a kilometre long, more than 400 metres wide, the highest tier almost 100 metres from the ground. This would be the future site of all Olympic Games. In imitation of Kaiser Wilhelm, Speer said, they would ‘reignite the sense of national grandeur’, of which ‘the monuments of the forefathers’ were to be the ‘most persistent tokens’. It was up to Hitler and Speer themselves, in this case, to create that ‘bridge of tradition’: they wanted to construct their monuments in such a way that, hundreds of years later, after the buildings had collapsed and were covered in ivy, they would still have their own unique merit as ruins. Fantasy drawings were even made of the Nuremberg grandstands after centuries of neglect.
    That phantom merit is already becoming highly visible. Before me lies the unfinished ‘Great Way’. The six-lane road, built for the great
Wehrmacht
victory parades that were sure to come, runs on for kilometres. Today it serves as a kind of car park. This week, all the way at the back, a fair is being held; a huge fair, in fact, complete with a six-loop roller coaster, a skyscraping light-blue Ferris wheel, two haunted houses, a dining hall for at least 300 sausage-lovers, and countless stands, gambling halls and candy kitchens.
    The great tribune too, once the focal point of Leni Riefenstahl's spectacular Nazi film
Triumph of the Will
is steadily decaying. The pseudo-classical walls are covered in black and green mould, there is grass growing everywhere, some of the steps are coming loose. Up at the top a group of young people with shaved heads are drinking beer in the twilight. Blackbirds are singing. People are jogging around the old parade grounds. Beside me, four boys are practising with a skateboard, baggy pants, baseball caps turned back to front, tearing across the tribune's weathered benches, jumping from one tier to the next, dancing on this deeply charged concrete.
    Stretching diagonally across Europe, from Holland through Friesland and Denmark and reaching all the way south to Austria, lies a gigantic triangleof order and cleanliness. I am driving now along its southern flank, from one Bavarian village to the other, through a landscape of green pastures and rolling hills, here and there a church with an onion-shaped steeple. The God who rules this almost heavenly piece of Europe is fond of discipline: no path is left unraked, every patch of grass is neatly mown and manicured, every house stands sprightly and foursquare. I go by way of Eichstätt and Markt Indersdorf, and then suddenly I find myself at an exit for Dachau, and there is Dachau itself: another neat little town tucked up against the sprawl of Munich.
    The concentration camp, as it turns out, is just a part of the local industrial estate, no