FRIDAY 13 DECEMBER 1991
I write out of exasperation, for it seems to me that no one I have spoken with since the so-called German reunification cares to take seriously the proposition I put to them, that we, the Germans, not just the few odd Skinheads bashing in the skulls of foreigners in the streets, are incapable of believing in anything, really, except our racial survival, from which we distil our same old sense of racial superiority. I say we, although I no longer in fact qualify as a German, having spent most of my life in America. But I grew up under Hitler and lived again recently as an ordinary German in West Berlin, before that very name became part of the rubble of history. I saw the last of the Wall come down in front of the Brandenburg Gate, stood by and watched the East German bulldozer scoop up heaps of the broken concrete and dump the debris thundering and sending up clouds of dust into the grey-green East German army trucks. It was night. Spotlights were on the soldiers dressed in fatigues, making rather a performance of their work, the young driver of the bulldozer in particular, showing off before the sparse crowd of onlookers gathered under the trees at the edge of the Tiergarten. Again and again a camera flashed.

There was a team of reporters with the usual equipment, as I recall. This was the final clean-up before a West German restoration firm ...