Invasion

The Germans have invaded Birmingham, England’s second largest city.

Don’t panic! They were invited, as they have been every year since 1966, with Birmingham pairing with the German city of Frankfurt to launch this annual Christmas Market in Birmingham’s downtown.

Under a full English moon, I watch a portly Santa, standing at a microphone on the second floor of a newly erected ersatz Hoffbrauhaus, in front of Birmingham’s City Hall, belt out “Hey Jude” with the slightest hint of a Bavarian accent, while 3,000 English men and women in the square below swing their beer steins as merrily as any Oktoberfest crowd and sing along.

The Luftwaffe bombed Birmingham 77 times between 1940 and 1943, dropping 1,850 tons of bombs on it, destroying nearly 13,000 homes, factories and other buildings.

Now, the Christmas Market Gemutlichkeit overwhelms the city centre, with German wooden log chalets running from Victoria Square the full length of the pedestrianized Victorian New Street: Um Pah Pah meets Dickens.

The sun sets very early here in December, so neon multi-coloured carousels and pavilions light up the boulevards while New Street’s windowed shop fronts spill their illuminating warmth onto the cobblestones of the street.

The grandchildren of the survivors of that not-that-long-ago conflict can’t get enough spicy warm Gluhwein, Kartofeln mit Sauerkraut, frosty Bier und Wurst, and fragrant Schinken, 12 whole hams at one stand roasting on 12 slowly turning spits over an open hardwood fire, just waiting to be carved off in thick, rich slices and piled high onto crusty slices of fresh Weisbrodt.

Food and beer apparently heal all wounds, including Frankfurt’s, which itself had nearly 28,000 tons of explosives dropped on it by English and American bombers, fifteen times as much as Birmingham, reducing Frankfurt’s entire historic medieval centre to rubble.

You would think the two cities would be implacable enemies.

Yet this is what the British and the Germans and the French and the Italians have been at for the past 70 years: bridging the differences, crafting trust, creating businesses, fabricating a new idea of Europe, a new reality erected on the ruins of what was left standing in 1945.

It wasn’t going to be easy and it wasn’t a project that was ever going to have a completion date.

Now it seems to be ending.

There’s nothing deeply profound here in this one annual event. The Birmingham Frankfurt Christmas Market is a commercial enterprise.

Everybody makes money.

Everybody’s happy.

But it’s also symbolic.

Will there still be a Birmingham Frankfurt Christmas Market in 5 years, after the terms of Brexit have been finalized?

Will the long association with Frankfurt continue?

Does it matter?

Birmingham will find plenty of ways to replace it if it disappears.

It’ll be one small loss.

But small sequential gains result in dramatic improvements in people’s lives.

And small losses accumulate to the opposite effect.