Has Germany finally shaken off its dark past?

In 1982, a board game appeared in West Germany. If you landed on square B9 you were sent to a refugee camp in Hesse where you became ill from loneliness, unfamiliar food and not being allowed to work. Worse still, you had to miss a go and spend the free time thinking about ‘how you would feel in such a situation’. Even if, like me, your childhood was spent crying over lost games of Monopoly, nothing could quite prepare you for the cheerless experience of playing ‘Flight and Expulsion Across the World’. It’s unlikely an updated version has been commissioned for our home secretary, with players assigned counters representing the Bibby Stockholm, inflatable life rafts and Rwanda-bound jets, but you never know.

A group called German Youth Europa launched the game in order to close Germany’s empathy gap. West Germany, critics claimed, was Ubergfremdung (swamped by foreigners). What nonsense, retorted German Youth Europa: Germans made up 93 per cent of the Bundesrepublik’s population, despite having absorbed 12 million expellees after the second world war.