The former head of the British Museum, now helping to create a German equivalent in Berlin, talks about our two nations’ contrasting attitudes to culture and memory, and why the end of the second world war is finally in sight

If you were searching for Britain’s greatest living European, it would be hard to ignore the claims of Neil MacGregor. His life’s work – he was born in 1946 with the continent in rubble and ruin – has been devoted to the judicious excavation of history and memory; to the understanding of our post-colonial world through the drama of objects, from the priceless to the humble, that the past has bequeathed to us. Sharply erudite in his insights, in person MacGregor is never far from a boyish chuckle at what he likes to see as the enormous good fortune of finding himself in the roles he has filled – director of the National Gallery for 15 years, and then of the British Museum for a transformative tenure in which he made it arguably the most vivid museum in the world. There seems a certain fateful inevitability about where he has now ended up. For the past year MacGregor has been chairing the advisory board in Berlin that is creating a new German equivalent to the British Museum, the £600m Humboldt Forum that will house its collections from around the world. Ironies are not lost on him.

“I am about to be 70 and obviously the defining memory of my childhood was the second world war,” he says. “It was over, we were told. But you quickly realise that what we are still sorting out in Berlin is really the business of 1945 finally reaching closure. The whole of my lifetime the second world war has been being ended in Europe.”

In the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world

The new museum will be a defining symbol of that closure, he hopes. It will contain “what the new Germany can articulate physically of its relationship with the rest of the world”. The history of the site, in the centre of the German capital, is heavy with symbolism. The exterior of the new building will be a mostly faithful reconstruction of the palace of the Prussian monarchy that stood on this site for centuries. The original, in the old East Berlin, was deemed a symbol of imperialism and demolished by the occupying Soviets after the war. In the 70s the parliament building of the DDR was built on the site, with enormous distinctive bronze-tinted windows. After reunification, that building in turn was demolished, partly because it was full of asbestos, partly because of its uglier associations.

The new museum represents a curatorial challenge but also a political, cultural and psychological one, MacGregor suggests. “Germany always has to do things in light of its own history.”

We are talking about these issues on the occasion of the publication of the paperback of MacGregor’s book Germany: Memories of a Nation. The book originally accompanied the landmark British Museum show that marked MacGregor’s farewell to the institution, at the beginning of last year. Was his new appointment prompted by that exhibition?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 2 metre section of the Berlin Wall is installed in the British Museum ahead of the Germany: Memories of a Nation, exhibition, 13 October 2014. Photograph: Geoff Pugh/Rex/Shutterstock

He suggests the conversations had begun a long time before, when he was at the National Gallery and helped Berlin stage its first big exhibition after the Wall came down, devoted to Rembrandt. Then about 10 years ago he was invited to join conversations about what the new Humboldt might contain. He was excited in particular by the idea of “this emblem of European military power housing these objects from cultures that the Nazis despised. You were reversing the history in the place of the history.”

In reality, MacGregor had developed a curiosity about these questions from much further back. He is the son of two Glaswegian doctors. His parents’ lives had been so disrupted and diminished by the war that they were determined that the future in Europe should be different for their four children. MacGregor’s father had seen action in the Royal Navy and his mother was an emergency doctor in Plymouth during the air raids. They weren’t really politically engaged, he says, except to the extent that they chose to work in the very poorest area of Glasgow. Their defining quality was, however, “a very international, European view”.

To this end they sought to give their kids a proper grounding in the continent. Each summer from the age of 10 MacGregor was sent away alone to live with a friendly family in France, as part of an informal exchange – homesickness was never part of the bargain. “Of course you loved it!” he says, flushing at the memory. “The idea of being alone and not with your embarrassing brothers and sisters and more embarrassing parents is always pretty liberating! And then after that I had some months of school in Hamburg in 1962.”

Those months at a German high school were really MacGregor’s first experience of the act of forgetting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Warren Cup, AD 5-15, featured in Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. Photograph: Trustees of the British Museum

“I was astonished to find that adults in Germany didn’t talk about what had happened in the war at all. It was only Germans of my generation that made those demands. And it was only really after the Eichmann trial and then, later, with films like Shoah, where the mechanics of it began to be thought about. The idea of discovering exactly what your parents and grandparents had done was a very disturbing experience. The idea that you can go on doing it, now also with the post-Stasi world is, I think, unprecedented.”

He sees these acts of memory as a defining difference within Europe. In Germany, he says, “the thing I continue to find striking is that in the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world.”

Did they really have an option but to confront what had happened though?

“Well,” he says. “Austria hasn’t done it. Post-Soviet Russia hasn’t done it. Japan hasn’t done it.”

And, he would suggest, Britain and France have never really done it. “If you compare the way we remember, the perfect example was the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that selective national memory: all true but not looking at any of the difficult bits.”

Two things, he says, in the past couple of months have highlighted that complacency. The Cecil Rhodes statue debate “shows that we still cannot look at the past dispassionately, even a hundred years on”. Likewise, the centenary of the Easter Rising. “There is still no appetite to look hard at British behaviour in Ireland. What I find so painfully admirable about the German experience is that they are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is. You can’t be an informed adult – or an artist – in Germany without doing that.”

The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes

That reflexive act of memory also colours the great political schisms of our times. Much has changed in Europe in the 18 months since the British Museum’s Germany show and the first publication of his book. It contains many chapters of forensic storytelling, but the one that stands out reading it now is MacGregor’s analysis of a simple refugee cart. That cart was representative of one of the most forgotten events of the last century: the forced “repatriation” of German speakers from eastern Europe after the war. About 30 million people were “ethnically cleansed” and 12-14 million returned to a devastated homeland they didn’t know, and became absorbed into a society that was rebuilt and reordered within a decade.

“If you try to explain why Germany has taken its unique stance on Syrian refugees in Europe you can’t ignore this,” MacGregor says. “Some argue the policy is another way of atoning for the Nazi era. But another absolutely central motivation, rarely mentioned, is that almost everybody now in Germany in their 20s or 30s has a grandparent or great-grandparent who has been a refugee. Pretty well every German has direct family experience of knowing what it means to be welcomed.”

The other debate that has become more charged since the book first appeared is the notion of sovereignty. MacGregor believes that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they use that word. Partly because of its own traumatic experience of nationalism and partly because of the history of shifting borders and alliances during the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, he says, sovereignty always means an appetite for coalition and compromise. “Any German knows that as well as the Bundestag there are 16 other parliaments making laws within its borders. In Britain we don’t have the language for that.”

The European debate in Britain looks so strange if you are a German for precisely this reason, he suggests. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neil MacGregor with Hartwig Fischer, director of the Dresden state art collections and Käthe Kollwitz’s Pieta at the Residenzschloss Dresden. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

MacGregor’s own benign reign at the British Museum was something of a microcosm for the possibilities of collaboration and partnership. He helped to transform the museum from a colonial relic into a sort of enlightened arm of the Foreign Office, keeping channels open with Iran, for example, and extending partnerships for cultural exchange across the world. That work is never a smooth progression. Having been instrumental in providing support and interventions to help preserve Iraqi architectural and cultural treasures after the 2003 invasion, he has viewed the latest desecration of memory in Palmyra, Syria, with despair.

“At one level the IS destruction has been about just shocking the world and terror. But part of it has been about the deliberate reordering of history that is common to all wars.”

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You could say MacGregor has placed himself consistently on the frontline of such brutal engagement with the past, trying to exhume traces of human cultural memory from the militarised march of history. A few years ago I watched him tiptoe through this no man’s land over the course of a week in Iran in which he irrepressibly cajoled and persuaded cultural representatives of the Ayatollah’s regime to collaborate in the great British Museum exhibition Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran in 2009. I was struck, in some of the more repressive corners of the Islamic republic, by his faith in the historical triumph of civilisation over barbarism. How does he maintain that faith?

“Well it’s more I think we have got to keep believing it,” he says, “what else is there? If you look at western European civilisation they are all societies where very high levels of culture have been accompanied by astounding levels of brutality. The French culture is unthinkable without the Terror; Britain: Shakespeare and the slave trade. All of our cultures had this absolutely murderous shadow side. And in Germany it became apparent to a degree that was perhaps unparalleled…”

I remember a few debates in Iran, I say, and his determination to always argue, in all cases, for empathy over judgment. Does that approach ever waver – shouldn’t we sometimes just condemn?

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“The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes,” he says. “What does the world look like if you have an Iranian memory? Well you know that your country was the great civilising force of the region for 4,000 years. And you also know that your country’s attempt to become a liberal democratic nation in 1900 and in the 1920s were twice destroyed by the British and then violently destroyed by the British and Americans in the 1950s. You know that Iran was occupied and partitioned by the British in the second world war; in Britain we have completely forgotten that fact, if we ever knew it. But they certainly haven’t forgotten it…”

This principle, quietly but stubbornly held, is the one that he lives by and seeks to extend into the world, a one-man empathy crusade.

“At one level,” he says, “it is that very simple idea: ‘you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free’. I do believe that the more truths you can glimpse and lay hold of, even if they are shifting and contradictory, the better chance of freedom you probably have.”

Though he is generally too modest to say it in such grand terms – and even now accompanies it with a giggle (“That sounds very deep…”) – there is no more symbolic place, he believes, to express that idea than in 21st-century Berlin.

Germany: Memories of a Nation is out in paperback now (Penguin £9.99). Click here to order a copy for £7.99