In Europe

to Professor-Huber-Platz, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz and the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität. The names speak for themselves. Here at the university is where it all converges: the pompous stairways, the pseudo-Roman statues beside them (in reality, two Bavarian kings in costume), the stupendous dome covering the hall, but also the wispy, innocent, desperate little pamphlets that the students Hans and Sophie Scholl let flutter down from the galleries here on 18 February, 1943.‘In the name of Germany's young people we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler's state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure that we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.’
    They had spread tracts and left behind graffiti on earlier occasions as well: ‘Freedom’, ‘Down with Hitler’. That was all the White Rose did. This time, though, they were caught by the caretaker and turned over tothe Gestapo. Four days later they were beheaded, along with their comrade Christoph Probst. The remaining activists – the students Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and their professor Kurt Huber – were arrested within the year and executed. A few Munich chemistry students tried to continue the pamphleteering. They, too, were executed. After that no one dared to carry the torch.
    The big university amphitheatre is further down the corridor. On this April morning, huge beams of sunlight come pouring into the building. I open a door cautiously. There is no one in sight. On the podium, a boy is playing the piano alone. Bach. He is oblivious to everything around him. His friends slip into the auditorium, remain listening breathlessly, they are young, their vision is clear. The room is full of light and sounds, images that come back, no one can escape them.
    In Munich you would think that Italy was just around the corner. Here the living is easy, even a bit lazy. The city already has something un-German to it, more like Bologna than Berlin. But if you head southwards, they are suddenly there in the distance, the Alps, the guardians, the massive grey-white wall that closes this flat country off from the warm sunlight. It has been spring for some time already, but here it has started snowing again. The sky is almost black. The trees grow thicker as time ticks away, my little van groans up the slippery inclines, the roads become white and empty.
    I take a room at Hotel Lederer am See, overlooking the dark Lake Tegernsee in the village of Bad Wiessee. Every now and then an avalanche puffs up on a distant mountain. The other guests are all retired couples, and the background music is perfectly attuned to their happiest years: Glenn Miller, party songs from the 1930s. I see in a commemorative book that, back then, the hotel was called Pension-Kurheim Hanselbauer. The book tells of the founders, of parties and celebrations, of the staff's hobbies; they tell of everything, in other words, that has to do with this ‘wonderful world on the Tegernsee’. Interestingly enough, however, one event is left unmentioned, and it is precisely the one which gave this hotel an immortal place in European history: the Röhm Putsch.
    It was from Hotel Lederer am See that Hitler, in the early hours of 30 June, 1934, had Ernst Röhm and other members of the SA elite pulledfrom their beds (which a few of them happened to be sharing with handsome SA youths). They were arrested and, in the days that followed, executed one by one. Hitler also seized the opportunity to settle accounts with a whole series of other old enemies, particularly those from national conservative circles. It has been estimated that during this ‘Night of the Long Knives’ – which in reality lasted a weekend – some 150–200 of Hitler's political opponents were murdered. Röhm was the last. Hitler hesitated at first; Röhm was, after all, his old companion in arms. Finally, in his cell, Röhm was given a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
containing an account of his ‘treachery’, and a pistol. Not getting the hint, he sat down and started reading the paper. In the end, two SS officers had to shoot him anyway.
    30 June, 1934 was almost as much a key moment in Hitler's career as 30 January, 1933 had been. It was in 1933 that he seized power, but only in 1934 did he succeed in consolidating it. That is the deeper meaning of the events at Pension Hanselbauer.
    The Nazis justified the Night of the Long Knives as an act of political and moral purification. Yet the homosexual