Leadership Quote by Douglas Hurd

Germany is being sentenced to a kind of historical afterlife: not just guilty, but perpetually legible as guilty. Hurd’s phrase "intensely dramatic" is doing more work than it seems. It’s not aestheticizing Nazi crimes so much as acknowledging their grim media logic: the Third Reich produced evil with symbols, rituals, uniforms, speeches, architecture, and a bureaucratic precision that reads like narrative. It photographs. It reenacts. It travels. That makes it harder to metabolize into the quieter, more ambiguous register where many nations prefer their atrocities to sit.

The intent is diplomatic but unsentimental. Hurd is signaling that Germany’s postwar rehabilitation will never be total, because memory is not a courtroom that closes its case. The subtext is also a warning about what "drama" does to public consciousness. Crimes that are vivid, ideologically explicit, and spectacularly documented become moral shorthand. They turn into the default reference point for political arguments, school curricula, museum economies, even the global vocabulary of evil. Germany “suffers” not because it has been unfairly singled out, but because the Third Reich made itself unforgettable.

Context matters: Hurd, a British Conservative foreign secretary in the late Cold War/post-Cold War era, is speaking from a country whose relationship to Germany is shaped by war memory and European integration. He’s also quietly contrasting Germany’s burden with the selective amnesia available to older empires. The line flatters no one; it admits that history punishes unevenly, and that spectacle is one of its most durable instruments.