In case you missed it, this was The Guardian's take on the 'Naumann
Affair' yesterday.
DL
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Tuesday February 16, 1999
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.
'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. 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' 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 us
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.
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