Oliver Haas wrote:
> Very interesting are also advertising sources such as British campaigns for
> German products making a link between lack of humour and efficiency.
>
> This rhetoric approach has been used for Lowenbrau, Becks, Gardena, Audi,
> and Continental Tyres in recent years.
Yes, well, I don't think it could reasonably be argued that the Germans are
above using racial stereotypes themselves for advertising purposes. We've all
heard of "Schottentarife", and my mother-in-law's local supermarket in
Karlsruhe used to feature the prominent logo of a kilted Scotsman pointing
ecstatically at his sporran: his name was McHappy. My late colleague Kaete
Silber, who collected for starving and impoverished Germans after the war, used
to say that the response of the Scots was astonishingly generous, particularly
given that they themselves often had barely enough to eat at the time. She
felt, with good reason, that this was never really appreciated by the
recipients.
Anyone who has been in Germany when another stupid anti-German rant appears in
the London papers will know the experience of having to try to explain that it
is not just Germans who are regarded as fair game for this kind of exercise.
But when A A Gill's particularly crass piece was prominently excerpted in the
Berliner Morgenpost a few years ago, I was given a really hard time by irate
Berliners of my acquaintaince. Besides making the obvious point about not
getting agitated about such manifestly silly stuff, I also questioned the
motivation of the paper in reproducing it in the first place. Gill becomes was
elevated into a "renommierter Publizist" whose opinions really counted. Why
make headlines out of this kind of thing? It is not difficult to get the
impression that the popular press in Germany combs the papers of the world
looking for this kind of thing precisely in order to raise the hackles of its
readership. Why?
In the aftermath of *that* football match of 3 September, a ZDF news bulletin
made reference to "haemische Bemerkungen in der englischen Presse".
Interestingly enough an article appeared in Bild on the morning of the match,
entitled "Bye bye England!". Even by the standards of that organ it was a
particularly nasty piece, salivating with Schadenfreude.
Howard Gaskill
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