Koleje Europy

When you feel such a deep inner need—on 9 May, for example—there is no escaping it.

On 22 June 1940 in Compiègne, Hitler speaks with Keitel, Göring and Hess. In the background stands Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s private railway carriage, transported there for the occasion: in that same place, on 11 November 1918, the German delegation signed the surrender that ended its lost First World War. 

After the French signed the terms of the 1940 armistice, the carriage was taken to Berlin. The Germans burned and destroyed the site—but not the private carriage.

On 10 November 2018, Chancellor Merkel and President Macron met in the same carriage. They had evidently felt such a deep inner need. 

Symbolic thinking is not an irrational affliction confined to dictators in the East. It is a chronological framework that orders and constrains political rationality. 

The date of 9 May may restrict Russia’s freedom of action, just as Kharkiv may be accepted—for a time—as the site of a wartime ‘decisive triumph’.