Jeffrey Sachs is persuasive (Let Greece profit from German history, Opinion, 22 January): Greece should be granted substantial debt relief. As he points out, Germany rightly enjoyed debt relief under the 1953 London agreement and the Marshall plan, after everyone learned the lessons of the draconian Versailles Treaty. This is now somewhat ironic, especially since Angela Merkel announced in Davos that Greece should repay its debts in full, despite obviously being in no position to do so.
But perhaps the troika (EU, ECB, IMF) ought to go further and cancel the debts altogether. There is a precedent for this, to be found in Athens itself, some 2,500 years ago. The Greek sage Solon enacted the great “Shaking off of burdens”, cancelling the debts the poor owed to the rich. The wealthy landowners – the eupatridai or “well-born” – regularly enslaved peasant and tenant farmer alike if any failed to pay up a sizeable chunk of their annual earnings. This exacerbated an already appalling inequality, until Solon, to quell the rioting, intervened. Unfortunately, many of the eupatridai got early wind of his plan and, true to form, borrowed massive sums to buy up huge tracts of land with the sole purpose of seeing their own debts cancelled along with those of the poor. Solon is a great object lesson in political and economic forgiveness, even if, in the end, it didn’t all turn out as well as was expected.
In visiting Athens in 2013, I was deeply saddened by the sight each morning of dignified, elderly citizens, sitting on blankets spread on the pavements, quietly selling off their possessions, simply in order to buy food. These people, victims of a punitive system not of their own making, need a new Solon, not another Draco.
Dr Paul Grosch
Plymouth
• I am a Hungarian German. Under article 12 of the Potsdam agreement, ethnic Germans all over Europe were basically asset-stripped without any compensation. We are talking about approximately 10 million people of German ethnic origin. If we were legally allowed to claim compensation for all of our property, how much could we claim for? Also, how much compensation should we be able to claim for our forced labour in camps in the former Soviet Union? So much for Germans being generously treated after the second world war. The British, the Americans and the Russians have never accounted for their crimes against us, let alone offered us any compensation. Never mind compensation, even an apology would be nice.
Eva Kurcz
Raposka, Hungary
