In The Europe of Yesterday, Theodore Dalrymple explains how Europe’s history continues to haunt it:
There’s no doubt that, more that half a century on, we haven’t overcome the legacy of the Second World War, at least where our feelings are concerned. Not long ago in Germany, I went to dinner with a man in his thirties who ran a forestry company. In order to explain how difficult it was even now to be a German, he described how a meeting in his company to decide on a company slogan dragged on for hours because someone suggested as a possibility Holz mit Stolz — Wood with Pride. Was it, everyone wondered, the beginning of the slippery slope to Auschwitz? This week planks, next week planes, the week after that world conquest. After long debate, they decided that no pride was permissible for Germans in any form.