How quickly this summer’s events have moved on. I was in Greece earlier this week, on the non-migrant shore. It wasn’t so long ago that that country, when it was in conflict with Germany about austerity and bank loans, threatened to send all its refugees on to Berlin, no questions asked. At that time, Angela Merkel’s face was appearing on posters in Athens, daubed with a Hitler moustache.

None of the Greeks are saying bad words about the Germans now – at least they weren’t in my hearing. They don’t dare. Merkel’s humanity has been relieving the Balkan bottleneck, and the Greeks are doing just what they had threatened to do – pointing refugees towards Berlin, no questions asked.

The pressure that the refugee movement has placed on Greece, in times of economic strife, has been difficult, and unfairly onerous, but to give the Greeks credit I haven’t heard much in the way of official complaint. Tourism, however, has inevitably suffered, with Lesbos and Kos losing their traditional international visitor arrivals hand over fist.

So will the same happen in Germany, as it surpasses its stated total this year of 800,000 refugees? What impact will that migration have on tourism? Certainly, Munich station has become something of scrum these past few days. Who knows what will happen when Oktoberfest kicks off, bringing huge numbers of beer-drinkers to those same platforms. The odd heavy drinker may even find himself waking up in a camp!

Whether there will be any other conflict between tourism and refugees remains to be seen; there’s a lot of available space in former eastern Germany where many towns are half empty, but these are not places where tourists yet go. They also tend to be strongholds of the Far Right.

The official line from the embassy is very upbeat: “the refugee story has no impact whatsoever on Germany as a tourist destination. Germany is and remains an open and friendly country that receives all visitors with a smile and a big welcome.”

That ‘big welcome’ is good PR for brand Germany, of course. And it is also a connection with history. One of the stories that doesn’t get told in the English-language history books is the huge migration at the end of World War II, where between 12 and 14 million German-speaking refugees were transported across a much diminished Germany and deposited on regional towns and cities. In most cases local residents were forced to give up rooms in their houses to these unwelcome visitors, and many of the newcomers remained with their hosts, as deeply resented ‘guests’, for years, until Germany’s economic recovery was sufficient to breathe back new vigour into their lives.

The ex director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, described it as “the biggest forced migration in Europe’s history, possibly in all history.” It is still a strong memory in the minds of many Germans, and in the end, the country came out of it very well.

More recently, there was German re-unification, and the massive movement of people that that produced. From which Germany has also emerged very well.

But those were people of the same culture. Absorbing 800,000 plus non-German speakers from a very different culture will be a tough task.

No doubt there are some people, now that the British Museum’s Germany: Memories of a Nation exhibition is open, who will say that a tax-payer-funded institution should not be glorifying a nation which has caused so much grief. I have two basic answers to that: 1) go and have a look at what Germany has given the world and 2) grow up and move on.

The exhibition’s timing is in fact little to do with the various war anniversaries this year, but more to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, and the re-uniting of the two halves that now make up the latest manifestation of Germany.

This manifestation is, as the exhibition points out, just the latest of several. For most of its existence the nation’s borders have been fluid, and ‘Germany’ has been as much a state of mind, as a place. All sorts of cities and regions – Prague, Strasbourg, modern Kalinigrad – were Germanic in their time. It was a big region, and a lot of its present population was once-upon-a-time living somewhere else (as we have seen in a previous blog) before they were forcibly transplanted into a diminished state. Even today, it has more borders with neighbours than any other European country.

But back to the show. It is compact and thematically- rather than chronologically-organised, which can be fairly confusing, especially as the labelling of the themes is high up on the wall and not very visible. Above all it is a telling and eclectic selection of items, amongst which I particularly noticed:

• The VW Beetle outside (in fact German cars are all about high value, so the Beetle was an exception, created in an era of austerity)
• The extraordinarily detailed Strasbourg clock from 1589, with moving figures of Death and God playing out a mini drama every hour
• The equally detailed galleon clock, a metal sailing ship that would roll across the table top, music playing and cannons firing, to mark the hour
• The cut-out-and-keep sticker sheet of Hitler and German soldiers
• The refugee cart in which displaced Germans from the likes of Silesia and the Sudetenland had to pack all their worldly goods
• The replica Buchenwald gate, with the insignia Jedem das Seine, ‘to each his due’
• The Angel of Güstrow, a giant suspended bronze statue whose face expresses deeply felt grief; the original was designated as ‘degenerate’ by Hitler and melted down, but another cast survived
• Memorabilia from the recent World Cup victory

Overall, it is a collection of objects which is intended to encourage ‘a rethink about Germany’, says the curator Barrie Cook. He describes the show as another milestone in a softening of attitude towards a nation for which, before the horrors of the 20^th Century, was an object of admiration for British and Europeans.

I’m sure he’s right; the exhibition works well, but that’s not to say that there won’t be voices raised against it, from people who can’t forgive or forget.

Those memories relate to what the museum Director Neil MacGregor has called “the biggest forced migration in Europe’s history.” That migration, the ‘Vertreibung’ of 1945-47 saw millions of ethnic Germans from areas such as Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Sudetenland (seceded to neighbour countries at the end of the war) being uprooted from their homes, relocated, and made to live amongst the ruins of post-war Germany.

Whole trainloads of these refugees, between 12 and 14 million of them, were transported across a much diminished Germany and deposited on regional towns and cities. In most cases local residents were forced to give up rooms in their houses to these unwelcome visitors, and many of the newcomers remained with their hosts, as deeply resented ‘guests’, for years, until Germany’s economic recovery was sufficient to breathe back new vigour into their lives.

In many cases these populations never supported the German side in the war, and their only crime was in speaking the German language. Says MacGregor: “It’s as though in 1945 the entire population of Canada and Australia had been forcibly settled in Britain. It’s certainly the biggest forced migration in Europe’s history, possibly in all history.”

So deep was the trauma of this migration, so deep the resentment of the migrants, that numbers of residents of German towns and villages still feel unwanted today, and some original residents still discriminate between true locals and war-time incomers.

So why bring all this out now? Well, only an outsider institution like the British Museum would be able to consider this as worthy subject matter to be included in a major exhibition. Frankly, most Germans don’t like to dwell on it, seeing the migration as part of the punishment for losing the war, and overwhelmed by the shame at behaving so badly towards the rest of Europe in general, and the Jews in particular, during the conflict.

But there is another factor at work in the timing: the generation that was translocated all those decades ago is disappearing fast, and those that remain have started to open up about their memories and experience of their war years. For many of their children and grandchildren it is virtually the first time they’ve heard their parents and grandparents speak about it, and of course they are sitting up and paying attention.

The British Museum’s Germany: Memories of a Nation opens 16^th October. BBC Radio Four is running a 30 part-series with the same title, and presented by Neil MacGregor, starting from September 30^th.

Head first for the charming town of Tübingen, south of Stuttgart, where from the hill-top castle you can enjoy wonderful views of the countryside that nurtured early modern people. The museum of the University of Tübingen, in the cobbled castle courtyard, has a collection of 35-40,000 year old sculptures made by those people, and it is still a research base for the archaeologists who discovered them.

Inside, in a darkened room of their own, are miniature mammoth ivory sculptures of lions, mammoths, a bison and the prancing horse from Vogelherd Cave, some of the first art ever found. In adjacent rooms and corridors you can see some other finds that reveal more detail about the lives of the hunter-gatherers who were their makers.

Oldest known expression of imagination

The attractive town of Ulm situated on the Danube, east of  Tübingen, should be next on the itinerary. Here you can see the 40,000 year old Lion Man in the excellent Ulmer Museum. This mammoth ivory statue of a male human figure with the head of a cave lion is the oldest known expression of imagination, because to create such a fictitious creature required a well-developed brain like our own. The Lion Man is one of the most important finds of the 20th century because it shows that ancient people known to be physically the same as us (from skeletal remains) also shared our mental capabilities.

Next, head to Blaubeuren nestling in the shelter of the southern edge of the Swabian Alps and famous for its abbey and remarkable turquoise lake. The ground floor of its Urgeschichtliches Museum welcomes you to the fireside of a hunter-gatherer camp and provides the background to the discoveries made in many of caves in the surrounding hills. Upstairs little rooms are dedicated to various aspects of Ice Age art and includes one where you can see the oldest known musical instruments: the flutes from Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels caves made from swan and vulture bones, as well as mammoth ivory. If you enjoy walking, Blaubeuren is also an excellent base from which to explore the hills and pass by the famous caves that were the cradles of artistic activity.

And finally, if you are returning via Stuttgart, stop off to see the 40,000 year old sculpture of a woman from Hohle Fels in the new displays at the city’s Landesmuseum Württemberg. Nicknamed Europe’s ‘Eve’, this remarkable sculpture is a must for any Ice Age itinerary.

Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind is on at the British Museum until 26 May 2013. Tickets cost £10.00 (Members free) and can be booked online. It is accompanied by a book by Jill Cook.