1999, The Guardian

Tommy and Jerry

Beach towel warfare, Herman the German and 'Allo 'Allo . . . Britain's

image of its European partners is stuck in the 1940s, according to Michael Naumann, Germany's minister of culture. Antony Beevor asks why we still can't get along with the old enemy; below, Know your enemy: a brief audit of German stereotypes, by Emma Brockes

Tuesday February 16, 1999

'I was sitting in a cinema watching Saving Private Ryan', said a 19-year-old from Berlin, 'and the people around me cheered or clapped whenever a German was shot. It made me feel so uncomfortable.' She went on to explain that most of the English she met were friendly, but the fact of telling a stranger here that you are German, instead of, say, Dutch or French, seems to provoke a very different reaction. A small minority are openly hostile. Many more say magnanimously: 'Oh, don't worry. I don't mind.' Some try to make a joke of it, with some war-movie cliche such as 'Achtung! Achtung!' 'I am 19,' she said. It's not my fault what happened, but I'm not allowed to forget anything.' Like other young Germans, she feels that this is a reaction that they never get in other countries, even in those which were occupied by the Wehrmacht (German army). So why should the British still be so obsessed with the second world war, and does this indicate, as many Germans suggest, that we must somehow be historically and emotionally retarded?

The more one asks other Germans in London about their experiences, the

more one realises that the basic argument of Germany's minister of culture, Michael Naumann, is fully justified. Even Bettina von Hase, the daughter of a former German ambassador to this country, faced a resurrection of every 'jackboot cliche' when Germany was reunited after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. She faced a stream of mirthless jokes about 'dusting off busts of Hitler for the Fourth Reich'. When studying the Nazi period at Oxford, she had found 'that the British approach to history is wonderfully objective', yet it proved very difficult to be a German living in Britain. People used to bring the subject round to the war almost immediately. 'You were made to feel guilty from the start, and because the Holocaust was so obviously indefensible, you hardly

dared open your mouth.'

Perhaps the most significant point made by Germans in London is that the

crashing remarks and ignorant jokes are not usually made by those who lived through the war, but by the middle-aged and, particularly, by the young. This in itself is disturbing. It strongly suggests that the British are not trying to keep a flame of memory alive, so much as fostering national stereotypes based on a lamentable ignorance.

This almost deliberate lack of understanding is not purely a British failing. A German general told me how he and Ewald von Kleist, who had

been a courageous member of the resistance against Hitler, had each been labelled 'Nazi officer' at the bottom of the screen when interviewed by an American television network. Naumann was particularly incensed by a British newspaper calling the socialist Oskar Lafontaine a Gauleiter, a Nazi party regional chief. His reaction is entirely understandable. The trouble is that the British knowledge of the German language is limited to the vocabulary of the war movie - all too often the 'Gott in Himmel' (mach schnell) and the 'Achtung! Achtung!' that German visitors to England are supposed to smile at.

So do the British suffer from a uniquely appalling sense of humour? Hard

to tell. French television bought the 'Allo 'Allo series, perhaps because they would never have dared to make it themselves. Many Britons, especially the young, are so immersed in war-movie cliches that their attitudes as well as their language - to say nothing of their jokes - are conditioned to the point of being knee-jerk reactions.

What the British tabloids rejoice in as humour, the Germans find trying, if not downright offensive. The advertising industry in this country was quick to pick up the towels-on-the-beach competition as a sort of ersatz Colditz game, outwitting the 'squarehead'. This lager advert might be attributed more to the football new-laddism, dreaming more of victory over Germany at Wembley in 1966 than surrender on the Luneburg Heath, yet the two were always inescapably linked. Football, certainly for the politically confused yob tendency, became an extension of the second world war by other means. But this theme has proved so popular with some tabloid sports writers that the German player Beckenbauer was described as a 'Panzer', another epithet that exasperated Naumann.

If anything it is car, rather than lager, advertising which tells u

more about the British problem, and here there is not a whiff of the second world war. An advertisement for Rover implied that the highest compliment to its engineering was that Germans might consider driving it. And of course Audi made considerable mileage out of its Vorsprung durch technik campaign, adding at last another German phrase to our vocabulary that had nothing to do with second world war Jerrybashing. In fact, the success of the campaign strongly suggests that the British problem has long been one of jealousy and resentment.

We considered that we had been bankrupted as a nation by the second world war, having saved Europe and lost an Empire in the process. And we expected Europe to go on being grateful to us, even though history teaches again and again that nobody thanks their liberators. We did not even recognise that although our sacrifice might have been considerable, it was still nothing in comparison to the suffering of others, above all that of Poland and the Soviet Union. Almost as many Russian soldiers died in the Battle for Stalingrad, (where Michael Naumann's father perished), as all the servicemen from all western nations throughout the second world war. Yet what Britain found hardest to accept was that Germany should have recovered from almost total ruin and created the strongest economy in Europe in such a short time.

Whatever the true economic situation now, Britain still seems to be

living with the psychological consequences of our industrial stagnation in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It is the lingering inferiority complex from when we were seen as the 'sick man of Europe' which remains our principal problem. Our security blanket was not the reality of the second world war so much as later, manufactured images. First came the 'Donner und Blitzen!' stereotypes from War Picture Library and other comic strips. Then came the film and television portrayals, with black and white simplicities in full colour. Once again, it is not just the British, but also the Americans who are at fault.

Naumann is not going to convince us to forego our obsession with the second world war, certainly not for the moment. Even though the new wave

of fascination about the subject represents a major shift of attitude, with the young less fixated by collective notions of loyalty and more interested in the fate of the individual within the maelstrom, there is still a strongly atavistic element. They, who know nothing of war, need to imagine how they would have measured up. For all their bravado, they secretly fear being swallowed up in a different way by a threatening, fragmented world. Hollywood has recognised this, and it is very adept at passing off a clever reworking of old favourites as originality. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Steven Spielberg's film, Saving Private Ryan.

The quite shameless climax combines just about every war-movie cliche in

the book, with a mixed handful of professionals improvising weapons to defend a vital bridge against an SS Panzer counter-attack. The redeemed coward and the cynic reduced to tears are straight out of central screen-writing. The US Air Force arrives in the nick of time just like the US Cavalry, (a dangerous delusion in the geo-strategic thinking of the US today). And to cap it all, the final frames are of Private Ryan, standing in old age amid the rows of white crosses in a military cemetery, saluting his fallen comrades as tears run down his cheeks.

It is, of course, easy to mock the Americans, but we, the British, taking pride in our self-deprecating humour, feel we are safe. Part of our smugness naturally comes from having had 'a good war'. We were so fortunate not to have been put to the tests of occupation and collaboration. But our greatest stroke of misfortune, for which we still find it so hard to forgive Germany and Japan, is to have won the war and lost the economic peace. We seem to be incapable of accepting the connection, but it is above all pathetic that we should have to make a 19-year-old German feel so uncomfortable sitting in a cinema here 55

years after the events depicted on the screen.

Antony Beevor is the author of Stalingrad, published by Viking.

Know your enemy: a brief audit of German stereotypes

1. They are firmly convinced of their own superiority False. German

politicians are to receive a daily reminder to be humble when their new

parliament building opens. Sir Norman Foster's renovation includes a

centrepiece of preserved Cyrillic graffiti, left by the Russians on the

Reichstag building in 1945. It praises Stalin and glories in Germany's

defeat. Furthermore, in one 1998 study, only 34 per cent of Germans

registered pride in their country's history, compared to 89 per cent of

Brits.

2. They are still prone to rightwing extremism False. While Germany's

extremist rightwing party, Deutsche Volksunion ('German People's

Party'), threatened to capture 17 per cent of the eastern vote in last

September's general elections, it ultimately failed even to make the 5

per cent threshold necessary for a place in the Bundestag. Its 192,000

votes make it a far less successful party than France's Front National,

which bagged 15 per cent of the vote in French elections. What's more, a

recent study published in the trade magazine British Social Attitudes

showed Germans to be more tolerant than Britons. Two thirds of Germans

welcomed the influence of foreign immigrants on their culture, compared

to just over half of Brits.

3. They are supremely efficient. False. A McKinsey 1998 report estimated

that capital productivity in Britain was 'substantially higher' than in

western Germany.

4. They are better than us at football Debatable. Despite England's

record of serial humiliation at the hands of German footballers, their

national side was beaten 3-0 by America at a friendly match in

Jacksonville on Saturday.

5. They are wealthier than us. Debatable. According to a recent survey by

Eurostat, the statistical arm of the EU, central London is the

wealthiest place in Europe. London ousted Hamburg from the top spot by

becoming twice as rich as the EU average. Germany ranked only fifth in

the national wealth league, behind Luxemburg, Denmark, Belgium and

Austria.

6. They have no sense of humour True. A man called Michael Berger has

founded a German Laughter Club in response to a survey conducted by a

research unit in Berkeley, California. The study found that, while

Germans laugh for an average of six minutes a day, Britons laugh for 15

minutes, the French for 18 and the Italians for 19. According to Berger,

Germans find puns, lavatorial humour and political jokes funny.

7. They have poor taste in music True. This year's German entry for the

Eurovision Song Contest was by a man called Guildo Horn with the German

hit, 'Piep, piep, piep, Guildo Loves You.' The elevation of former

Baywatch star David Hasselhoff to the status of pop icon in Germany has

always been taken by the rest of the world as evidence of the nation's

sense of humour. None the less, the world has Germany to thank for the

more illustrious efforts of Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, an endless Liszt of

classical titans.

8. They always get to the beach first. True.