If we are to avoid a repeat of the 1930s it is necessary to also avoid misremembering them (A warning from our darkest, bloodiest chapter, 11 March). The German hyperinflation took place not in the 1930s, but between June 1921 and January 1924, and was caused by the Weimar Republic’s attempts to comply with the reparations demanded by the western democracies (who simply seized German resources when the country proved unable to pay cash). The resulting evaporation of their savings no doubt did little to bolster the German middle-class’s faith in democracy, but the proximate cause of Hitler’s rise to power was the austerity policies adopted in response to the post-1929 depression. President Hindenburg imposed these policies by decree when the Reichstag refused to endorse them, but at least Hindenburg was himself an elected official. Today it is the wholly-unelected European Central Bank and similar bodies that impose austerity by decree.
Dr Julian Wells
Principal lecturer in economics, Kingston University
• You report that Ian McEwan likened the EU referendum to Hitler’s 1934 plebiscite and to Robespierre’s terror (Referendums such as Brexit vote remind me of Third Reich, 13 March). This is utterly ludicrous. Last time I looked, my local shopping centre was guillotine-free and there is no serious comparison to Germany in 1934. Hitler was in power by the time the 1934 plebiscite was called. Dachau was open by then. Hitler had been made dictator of Germany. Streicher had organised a boycott of Jewish businesses. Non-Aryans had been excluded from the professions. The Nazis had carried out book burnings and legalised eugenic sterilisation. Inappropriate historical analogies are at best unhelpful and at worst misleading.
Alan Gibbons
Liverpool
• It was suggested in a Guardian interview last year that Ian McEwan seemed to hold contempt for men less educated than himself. Did he actually know any, Decca Aitkenhead asked. His response: “Fewer and fewer … I knew so few people who wanted to leave the EU.” The inference is clear. On BBC Newsnight last Thursday, Richard Dawkins referred to British voters as “ill-informed”, “ignorant” and “misled”. If McEwan’s latest analogy with 1789 is apt, it is in part because of the disdain some in high circles continue to hold for ordinary people who exercised their democratic rights. Is it a surprise people vote differently from those who insult them?
Alan Carmichael
London
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