the roamer<p>Friends. A memory suddenly came back to me. A sign of the frightening normality of <a href="https://mastodonapp.uk/tags/fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>fascism</span></a>. </p><p>When I was a teenager, we lived in a small house in one of the posh parts of Berlin. (Sorry, chaps, that's just how it was.) Our neighbour was an emeritus professor in art history. We had good relations. When I took my annual Interrail trips to France, he advised me on what to look out for in the cathedrals that I planned to visit. A kind old man, talking to me on his veranda in his vest, drinking tea.</p><p>He had started his academic career in the 1920s, in prestigious roles in Rome. During the war, he was an officer in occupied Paris in the 1940s. He was a friend of Ernst Juenger, the ambiguous hard-right-but-not-Nazi novelist.</p><p>I later discovered that in 1933, this kind man had joined the <a href="https://mastodonapp.uk/tags/SA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SA</span></a>, the street fighters of the <a href="https://mastodonapp.uk/tags/Nazi" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Nazi</span></a> party. I imagine this was pure <a href="https://mastodonapp.uk/tags/opportunism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>opportunism</span></a>, not conviction. Which in many ways makes it worse.</p><p><a href="https://mastodonapp.uk/tags/Corruption" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Corruption</span></a> is all around us. Stay firm.</p><p><a href="https://mastodonapp.uk/tags/resistance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>resistance</span></a></p>