The founders of the European Community had one overwhelming objective – to bring an end to wars between the European nations which so disfigured the C20th.
Two programmes, back to back on Thursday morning (10 November) illustrated how, in small unofficial ways friendly reparations between countries are taking place at the level of individual citizens, as they always will even without political intervention.
The last item on From Our Own Correspondent looked at ‘British Germans’, soldiers who had stayed on after serving on British bases which are still not yet completely wound up nearly 70 years after the end of WWII and more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In many, maybe all of these cases, the decision followed marriage to a German woman.
Rather than ‘British German’, one man said, he considered that he had just reclaimed his identity as an Anglo-Saxon.
Then we went to Ors in northern France, to hear the story of how the mayor, who discovered that his godfather had translated Owen’s poems, set out to achieve the aim of turning the house from where Wilfred Owen wrote his last letter home before he was killed (just a week before the Armistice) into a fitting memorial, a project which involved the co-operation between an English artist, a French architect & a great deal of effort to raise the €800k from private donors, & some harrumphing from the English Wilfred Owen society who really would have preferred the house remain exactly what it had been, but are more than happy with the final result.
Links
From Our Own Corespondent
Bleached Bone & Living Wood
Jacky Duminy veut faire d'Ors un village des plus accueillants
War poet's last post of hope from a tiny cellar
Simon Patterson / La Maison Forestière
Related post
Historically English
