Britain Has Lost Itself [View all]

[Zorro]

My grandparents, who fled Nazi Germany for Britain, would be heartbroken to see the country today.

By Peter Gumbel

At long last, it happened.

Shortly before midnight on Thursday, Britain completed its exit from the European Union, replacing a close 47-year long relationship with the continent with something far more distant. Now it will have to live through difficult years of separation that will sap its political vibrancy and diminish its role on the world stage. Though a trade deal was belatedly agreed, the economic fallout may be dire, too.

Yet for many, it’s also a deeply personal moment. My grandparents, who escaped Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II, found a home in Britain — to them, it was a beacon of light and hope. But they would be heartbroken to see it today. Inward, polarized and absurdly self-aggrandizing, Britain has lost itself. In sorrow, I mourn the passing of the country that was my family’s salvation.

My grandparents arrived in England in 1939 as stateless refugees. They felt not just gratitude for their immediate safety but also a deep attachment to the values of openness, decency and tolerance they found in their adopted homeland. Once the war ended, they became naturalized British citizens as soon as they could. In a letter to a friend, my grandfather praised the “generous hospitality and nearly unrestricted freedom” they enjoyed as migrants. They never shed their German accents but switched to speaking only in English.

My parents’ generation, in turn, gave their all for the country that took them in. They inevitably faced some anti-German sentiment in the early postwar years, but simply ignored it. My uncle, who arrived in Britain on a Kindertransport train when he was 15 years old, joined a commando unit of the British Army composed of German refugees and was killed on a Normandy beach on D-Day, aged 21. In the 1980s, my father, a businessman, and my aunt, a radiographer, were both decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for their contributions to the country. “After all the trauma of leaving Germany I had struck fresh roots in England,” my father wrote in a private memoir. “We had found a new home in every sense of the word.”

But the openness and tolerance that made the country a safe haven for them are in retreat. The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the surge of national exceptionalism that accompanied it revealed deeply held prejudices about migrants. Xenophobia and racism, presumed to be banished to the margins of public life, made an ugly return to the mainstream. And anyone with an international mind-set was suddenly at risk of being tarred, in the words of the former prime minister, Theresa May, as a “citizen of nowhere” — an ominous phrase not just for a family like mine that was once stateless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/opinion/britain-brexit-europe-germany.html