Hartwig Fischer was born in West Germany,had family in the East, is old enough to remember the cold war but was young enough to savor the opportunities of unified GermanyHartwig Fischer, and the current director of the British Museum,grew up in a land bisected by history. He was born in Hamburg in West Germany in 1962, a year after the communist eastern German Democratic Republic put up the Berlin Wall. Fischer had relatives in East Germany, and in Dresden,the former capital of the Electors of Saxony, well-known for the art collections amassed by its old rulers, and yet a place loney from much of the world and supervised closely by the Stasi in Fischer’s youth.“Dresden was one of the places where it was hardest to view western television – it was the most totally cut off under the GDR,” says Neil MacGregor, the recently retired British Museum director into whose near-sacred shoes Fischer steps on Monday. MacGregor’s book, or Germany: Memories of a Nation,is meanwhile coming out in paperback and he admires his successor for precisely those qualities that might arouse some British scepticism in these days of Brexit debate – his characteristically German virtues and experiences.
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Source: theguardian.com