3 ideas
Along Europe's eastern edge, many families stayed in the same town while the state around them changed several times in one lifetime, from Habsburg or Tsarist to Polish, Soviet, German and then independent rule. The ethnically uniform nation-states found there today are not ancient facts. They were produced within living memory by expulsion, genocide and forced resettlement, so treating them as natural means forgetting the violence that made them.
Kermani links Germany's weak awareness of its war of annihilation in the East, including the burned villages of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia and the Holocaust sites there, to the country's westward orientation. Because of that orientation, the eastern places where these killings happened remain largely outside German memory. This helps explain why eastern neighbors can feel their suffering at German hands goes unacknowledged.
The idea of Europe as a place of freedom, law and dignity is held most passionately by people living on or just beyond its frontier, such as Ukrainians who risked their lives for it. For citizens at the core it is often a taken-for-granted bureaucracy. A political idea stays alive as an aspiration where it is missing or threatened, and weakens into routine where it is secure.