I am breaking my silence here, but I just wanted to ask Osman something. I
presume when you write that Burchill is not saying she dislikes the Germans,
you are merely reflecting her use of irony (i.e. she really does dislike
them, but for that she likes them) and commenting critically upon it. I
presume when you say some of her comments are not so bad, e.g. children are
well-behaved, this is a sarcastic dig at her suggestion that German children
are brought up in an authoritarian fashion? I think you must mean this.
Bill
> ----------
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Reply To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 11:31 am
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Back 2 Julie (or: Um welche Wurst geht es hier eigentlich?)
>
> Apologies for posting this long after the debate has gone cold - but I had
> a
> heavy teaching/interviewing load on Monday and Tuesday of this week and
> just
> wasn't able to put finger to keyboard.
>
> Having read it through to the end, and others by the same author, I feel
> strongly that 'that' piece about the Germans wasn't actually about the
> Germans;
> like most things Julie writes, it was about herself in the first instance
> and
> about Britain in the second.
>
> That a defining moment in her childhood was when she saw a picture of a
> concentration camp is not so much an attack on the nation as a formative
> experience widely shared by Germans and non-Germans alike. The desire to
> give
> up learning German as a child was British commonplace from the 1930s
> onwards;
> we recall that Princess Margaret burned her German books in 1938 when she
> realised that a continental dictatorship could save her from tedious
> classroom
> drills. As for the ugliness of the language, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde
> made
> similar points and are viewed as classics rather than as racists. That the
> young Julie should have jumped a train in Northamptonshire when 'harmless-
> looking' hippies entered the carriage is laboriously deconstructed by the
> older
> Julie as resulting from the 'self-dramatising' antics of an 'angst-ridden
> teenager'.
>
> She then turns to her holiday in the Canaries. Many companies advertise
> holidays there without bothering to inform their Anglophone clients that
> the
> hotel they have chosen is German-owned and most activities and
> announcements
> will assume familiarity with that language. This can be frustrating and
> yes,
> German does not sound particularly mellifluous to the untrained English
> ear
> (see above). But Julie herself has a reasonable command of it (and has
> quite a
> following in certain German circles, see Rainald Goetz et al.).
>
> She then gives eight reasons why she likes the Germans. These, she admits,
> are 'boringly predictable'. They have been discussed in this forum and
> range in
> my view from the inoffensive and even positive (well-behaved children;
> German
> practices when tipping or swimming) to the interestingly debatable (not
> being
> German makes you suddenly very popular with the locals), the clichéd
> (food,
> manners) and the offensive (Germans as fat and impolite). However, it is
> the
> last paragraph that reveals Julie's real intentions in this piece: that
> she is
> NOT saying she doesn't like the Germans. She praises them for having
> remained
> consistent, while in Britain, the party of Hardie and Bevan has turned to
> 'the
> looting of the country by big business'. This is the not so cryptic
> message
> which she has cunningly concealed in what looks at first glance like a
> 'Hun
> meets the Sun' type diatribe. Her parting shot is that the Germans ('bless
> them') HAVE changed just a little but not too much, and for this they have
> her 'affection and respect'; the implication is clearly that New Labour
> has
> changed far far too much, and has thus forfeited affection and respect.
> Watching the news last night made me think: how prophetic.
>
> od/ukc
>
|