The Memory of the Vanquished

There are questions we cannot answer with certainty, yet they continue to follow us. We can try to explain them through psychology, history, the workings of memory, or what Jung called the collective unconscious. We can choose to dismiss them as coincidences. And then there is another possibility—harder to prove and therefore more unsettling: that certain memories may somehow cross the boundaries of time and reappear in someone who has no idea where they came from.

I do not claim to know which explanation is correct. I can only tell the story of certain things that have happened in my life and leave readers free to decide what they mean.

The Germany I Saw as a Child

When I was a child, I had a geographical atlas, and even today I remember how often my eyes would settle on Germany. Not simply Germany as a country, but especially its eastern territories—the lands that had once been East Prussia, stretching toward Königsberg on the Baltic Sea. 

I was drawn in much the same way to another part of Europe: the old Austrian Littoral of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Trieste and Istria.

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the history of those places. I could not have known that Königsberg would become Kaliningrad, that East Prussia would disappear from the political map of Europe, or that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would vanish in the aftermath of World War I. To me, they were simply territories that seemed to hold my attention more than others.

What is strange is that this curiosity did not remain confined to childhood. It staye

d somewhere inside me, only to reappear many years later in forms I could never have anticipated.

When German Soldiers Died

There is another memory that has stayed with me. When I was a child and watched war movies in which German soldiers were killed, I felt an inexplicable discomfort, almost a sense of grief. I did not yet have the intellectual tools to form a historical judgment about Nazism, war, or Germany's responsibility for what had happened. I simply saw a human being dying, and instinctively I did not want him to die.

At the same time, I felt a spontaneous dislike toward the French, British, Russians, and Americans portrayed in those films. It was an instinctive feeling I could not explain. And precisely because it was so irrational and selective, I have often wondered about it as an adult.

There was also Yugoslavia, toward which I felt an even harder-to-explain hostility. Looking back now, with everything I have learned since childhood, I cannot help wondering whether those feelings were simply shaped by my surroundings, by the images I saw, by the books I later read—or whether they had deeper roots.

Albert von Berrer and Ernst Kölle

Many years later, two men appeared in my writing who belonged precisely to the world toward which I had felt that mysterious childhood attraction: Albert von Berrer and Ernst Kölle.

Albert von Berrer was a German general who fought on the Italian Front during World War I. He died in 1917, only a year before the Central Powers collapsed. He died before witnessing the defeat of the world to which he had devoted his life—and perhaps that is precisely why his story still seems unfinished.

Albert Von Berrer

 Kölle was much younger. He was a German soldier who died in 1945, at just twenty-three years old, as Germany was descending into the final catastrophe of World War II.

Ernst Kölle 

They belonged to different generations, but they shared something fundamental: both died on the side that history would ultimately regard as defeated.

What still strikes me is that I did not simply want to tell their stories. I wanted to make them speak. I imagined their thoughts, their fears, their relationship with death, and their awareness of a world that was disappearing around them.

At that point, a question became impossible to ignore: Why them?

The Reincarnation of a Memory

I cannot say that I was Albert von Berrer or Ernst Kölle in a previous life. I have no evidence that could prove such a thing. And I do not want to turn a personal intuition into a certainty that I impose on anyone else.

But there is another question I can ask.

Why would someone who, as a child, was inexplicably drawn to eastern Germany, Prussia, and the old Austro-Hungarian world, who felt an unusual distress when German soldiers died in war movies, and who would later develop such a strong fascination with the history of the defeated, eventually find himself writing about two men from precisely that world?

Perhaps it is the collective unconscious Jung described. Perhaps certain images of human history remain embedded in the psyche and, under the right circumstances, find someone through whom they can re-emerge.

Or perhaps the explanation is much simpler. Perhaps I was fascinated by German history from childhood, and as an adult I unconsciously sought out stories that reinforced that fascination.

And then there remains the most difficult possibility of all: that what we call memory may somehow survive individual death in a form we do not yet understand.

I do not claim that this is what happened.

I simply leave the question open.

The Memory of the Vanquished and the World of 1945

This personal story, however, leads me to a much larger question.

The world we live in is still, to a significant degree, organized around the international order that emerged from World War II. More than eighty years have passed, yet a substantial part of the global system we know was born from the ruins of 1945.

That order had victors and vanquished. The United States emerged as the leading Western power, the Soviet Union became the other great superpower, Europe was devastated by war, and Germany was divided and radically transformed.

But no historical order lasts forever.

Today we are witnessing a transformation that cannot be explained simply by the rise of the BRICS. The war in Ukraine, the conflicts and crises in the Middle East, the strategic competition between the United States and China, and the growing autonomy of other major actors are gradually reshaping the international balance of power.

I do not necessarily believe that the victors of 1945 will become the defeated of tomorrow. The transformation may be much slower and much more subtle than that. We may simply witness a gradual decline in their relative weight, until countries we now regard as superpowers or great powers find themselves operating in a system where several different centers of power exist.

In other words, not necessarily defeat, but the end of a dominant position.

Rome Shows Us That Empires Change Before They End

It has happened before.

When we think about the Roman Empire, we tend to look for a precise date: 476, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus. But that date marks only the end of the Western Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire continued to exist in the East for almost another thousand years. The people we now call Byzantines considered themselves Romans and called themselves Rhomaioi. The term "Byzantine Empire" belongs to later historiography and, if used without qualification, can make us forget the continuity that the empire's own inhabitants recognized.

From this perspective, the final end of the Roman Empire came in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople.

But even then, history was not simply a succession of victories and defeats. Rome did not disappear overnight. First it stopped expanding. Then it had to defend its frontiers. It began losing territory, transforming itself, shifting its political center, and surviving in forms that its inhabitants still recognized as Roman.

This is something we often forget when we look at today's great powers: an order may already have entered the stage of relative decline long before historians are willing to declare it finished.

The World That Is Coming

Something similar may be happening today.

We do not know what the next international order will look like, and it would be naïve to pretend that we already know who its winners will be. But we can see that the world created after 1945 no longer appears as immutable as it once did.

The United States will probably remain an extraordinarily important power. But being a great power does not necessarily mean being the sole center of the system. China, India, Russia, regional powers, and other economic and strategic actors are contributing to the emergence of a more complex world—one that is increasingly difficult for any single country to control.

Perhaps the coming transformation will not consist of one empire simply replacing another.

Perhaps it will be the end of an age in which empires were capable of determining the fate of the world on their own.

And that possibility makes the history of those who lost even more interesting.

Perhaps the Dead Do Not Return. Perhaps the Questions Do.

When I think about Albert von Berrer, Ernst Kölle, and the child who, many years ago, stared at a map without knowing why his eyes kept returning to that particular part of Europe, I cannot determine whether there is truly a thread connecting them.

It could simply be a construction of my own mind.

It could be the collective unconscious.

It could be the result of a historical memory that slowly accumulated inside me.

Or, for those who believe in reincarnation, it could be something else entirely: a memory that does not belong exclusively to this lifetime.

I do not need to choose the answer for the reader.

I am more interested in leaving the question open.

Because perhaps reincarnation does not necessarily mean returning to Earth with a precise memory of who we once were. If it exists, perhaps it can manifest in far more elusive ways: through inexplicable attractions, places that seem strangely familiar, historical periods that seem to call to us for no apparent reason, or people who died decades ago yet suddenly compel us to tell their stories.

And perhaps history itself has a form of reincarnation.

Empires fall. Nations change. Borders are erased. Powers lose their relative weight. New actors take the place of old ones.

What once appeared to be permanently finished can return, even though it never returns in exactly the same form.

That is why I still wonder why, as a child, I kept looking at that particular part of Europe.

Perhaps it was nothing more than a map.

Or perhaps that map was showing me something I would not understand until many decades later.

I do not know which of the two is true.

But perhaps that uncertainty is precisely what makes the question worth asking.

Germany as an Archetype: Guido von List, the Runes, Reincarnation, and the Lost Search for the State

There are places that are more than places. They become symbols. They become inner landscapes that accompany a person throughout life, returning again and again without always revealing the reason why.

For some, that symbol is Rome. For others, Jerusalem, Athens, or another civilization that represents a deeper idea of humanity.

For me, the recurring symbol has always been Germany: not merely the modern nation, but the broader Germanic world in its historical, philosophical, and spiritual dimension.

This attraction is not simply political. It is connected to deeper questions: the meaning of identity, the relationship between the individual and the State, the nature of community, and the eternal search for order in a world that often appears fragmented.

Guido von List and the Hidden Memory of Origins

Any reflection on Germany and esoteric thought inevitably leads to the figure of Guido von List (1848–1919), one of the most influential representatives of Ariosophy.

His best-known work, The Secret of the Runes, presented runes not merely as an ancient writing system, but as symbols containing a hidden spiritual wisdom.

For List, runes represented cosmic forces, inner principles, and stages of human transformation. He believed they preserved fragments of an ancient knowledge that had been transmitted through generations.

His ideas combined elements of Norse mythology, nineteenth-century occultism, and Theosophy.

From a historical and academic perspective, many of List’s interpretations are not accepted by modern archaeology or linguistics. Yet his importance lies not only in historical accuracy, but in the symbolic power of his vision.

List was searching for origins. He was searching for a lost continuity between the present and an imagined ancient world.

And perhaps it is precisely this search for continuity that continues to fascinate many people today.

Reincarnation and the Attraction Toward Distant Worlds

One of the deepest questions of human experience concerns why certain individuals feel an almost inexplicable connection to a particular culture, historical period, or civilization.

Traditions that believe in reincarnation have often interpreted these attractions as traces of previous experiences: fragments of a memory that does not belong to the rational mind alone.

Psychologically, Carl Gustav Jung offered another interpretation through the concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Certain symbols may emerge because they represent profound structures of human experience.

In this sense, Germany can become an archetype: the image of order against chaos, discipline against fragmentation, community against isolation.

Perhaps the attraction is not truly toward a nation itself, but toward what that nation represents in the inner world of the individual.

The City and the Birth of Politics

The word “politics” comes from the ancient Greek polis.

The polis was not simply a city. It was a community of citizens who participated in the creation of a common order.

For Aristotle, human beings were political animals because they could only fully realize themselves within a community.

Modern society faces a profound challenge precisely because it often separates individuals from genuine belonging.

The city becomes only a physical space rather than a living civic reality.

The German concept of Gemeinschaft, later analyzed by Ferdinand Tönnies, expresses this distinction: a community based on deep bonds and shared identity, as opposed to a society dominated by impersonal relationships.

Perhaps part of the fascination with the German cultural world comes from this idea of an organized community, one connected to historical memory and a sense of collective responsibility.

The Holy Roman Empire and the Forgotten Europe

For centuries, the Germanic territories and parts of Italy existed within the same political framework: the Holy Roman Empire.

It was not a modern nation-state, but a complex imperial structure where different peoples and territories coexisted under the symbolic authority of the emperor.

The figure of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen represents one of the most remarkable examples of this connection. Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Sicily, he created in Palermo one of the most extraordinary cultural environments of medieval Europe.

His life reminds us that medieval Europe cannot be understood through modern national categories.

The identities that today seem natural are the result of centuries of historical transformation.

Italy and the Challenge of Political Community

Italian history is a story of extraordinary creativity, but also of fragmentation.

The medieval city-states produced art, philosophy, trade, and innovation. Florence, Venice, Genoa, and many others contributed enormously to Western civilization.

Yet this political fragmentation also created difficulties in building a continuous centralized state comparable to other European monarchies.

The medieval conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the relationship between the Papacy and the Empire, and the presence of the Papal States at the heart of the peninsula all shaped Italy’s unique political development.

Southern Italy, meanwhile, experienced long periods of political unity, from the Norman Kingdom to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, following a different historical path from Central and Northern Europe.

The Search for Order and the Danger of Absolutes

History, however, teaches a fundamental lesson.

The search for order is a genuine human need. Societies require law, institutions, responsibility, and shared values.

But when the desire for order becomes absolute and attempts to eliminate human complexity, it can become destructive.

Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated this tragic contradiction.

The need for identity, belonging, and community is real. Yet history also shows that no nation, culture, or ideology possesses inherent superiority over others.

The real challenge is to create a strong community without transforming it into domination.

Conclusion: The Search for a Spiritual Homeland

Perhaps the attraction toward Germany is not merely historical or political.

Perhaps it represents the search for a lost form: an ideal city where law, culture, responsibility, and identity can exist together.

Maybe what we seek in the civilizations of the past is not the past itself, but an answer to the anxieties of the present.

The final question is not only:

“Where do we come from?”

The deeper question is:

“What kind of community do we want to build in the future?”

Because every human being, in the end, searches for a city.

Not only a city made of stones, but an inner city — a place where one can recognize oneself.

The Brandenburg Gate and the Memory of Germany | Das Brandenburger Tor und die Erinnerung an Deutschland

The day after October 7, when I saw the Brandenburg Gate illuminated with the colors of the Israeli flag, I experienced a feeling that is difficult to explain rationally. It was as if that image had awakened another image, one that belonged to a Germany of more than eighty years ago, when the same monument stood beneath banners bearing the swastika.

I do not ask anyone to believe in reincarnation, metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. These belong to the realm of philosophy, religion, and personal experience, not historical proof. Yet I cannot deny that, whenever I write in German for a German-speaking audience, I often feel an inexplicable familiarity with that country and with that period of its history. It is as though fragments of a memory surfaced from somewhere beyond my own biography.

Perhaps they are nothing more than the product of imagination. Perhaps they are symbols created by the unconscious. Or perhaps they belong to what many Eastern traditions call the continuity of the soul through successive lives.

This idea is not foreign to German intellectual history. Hermann Hesse devoted much of his work to Indian philosophy, Buddhism, and the spiritual search that transcends a single earthly existence. The fascination with the East, with ancient traditions, and with questions about the destiny of the soul has always had a presence in European culture.

Even within National Socialist Germany there were figures, such as Heinrich Himmler, who cultivated highly unorthodox beliefs and developed ideas connected to ancient symbols and historical figures. These beliefs, which were often distorted and placed at the service of a destructive ideology, nevertheless demonstrate how powerful the human search for origins, identity, and transcendence can be.

Within my own reflections, two names often emerge: Ernst Kölle and Albert von Berrer. I cannot demonstrate that they have anything to do with me. They may simply represent symbols through which my mind tries to understand history. But if they continue to "speak" to me, their message is not about war, revenge, or nostalgia for the Third Reich.

Their message concerns Germany itself.

For decades, Germany has carried the enormous moral burden of the crimes committed under National Socialism. That responsibility cannot and should not be forgotten. Historical memory is an essential safeguard against repeating the darkest chapters of the past. Yet memory should not become a permanent sentence imposed on an entire nation, preventing it from moving forward.

Since 1945, humanity has witnessed many other wars, genocides, persecutions, and humanitarian tragedies. History did not end with the fall of Berlin. The challenge of our time is to preserve historical responsibility without reducing the identity of a people to the crimes of a single regime.

Sometimes contemporary Germany appears to search for its moral and political identity through very strong symbolic gestures. These gestures may be interpreted in different ways, but they reveal a country still seeking the right balance between remembrance, responsibility, and the confidence to look toward the future.

Aristotle taught that virtue lies in the mean, avoiding excess in either direction. This ancient lesson remains surprisingly relevant today.

If those impressions are more than imagination—if they truly represent echoes of lives lived before—then they cannot exist merely to awaken memories. Memory, by itself, serves no purpose unless it becomes wisdom.

Their meaning, as I understand it, is not to reopen the wounds of history or to seek revenge for the past, but to encourage Germany to rediscover the best of its own tradition: its culture, its philosophy, its scientific spirit, its sense of discipline and responsibility, and its capacity to contribute to European civilization.

A Germany that is strong without being aggressive, conscious of its history without being imprisoned by it, and capable of inspiring Europe not through domination but through example.

Europe does not need a Germany trapped by its past, nor a Germany that forgets it. It needs a Germany capable of leading with confidence, responsibility, and moderation together with the other European nations.

The European Union remains one of the greatest political experiments in history. It can become a true reality only if it becomes not merely a union of institutions and financial interests, but a genuine community of peoples.

An Europe capable of cooperating with all its allies while preserving its own political, cultural, and strategic autonomy. An Europe that is not built only by elites and economic mechanisms, but by citizens who recognize themselves in a common destiny.

If there is indeed a mission entrusted to each generation—or, for those who believe in reincarnation, to each soul returning to the world—it is not to revive the conflicts of the past, but to transform memory into wisdom and history into a foundation for a more balanced, peaceful, and human future.