Remembrance Sunday and Germans

I'm just back from our little Suffolk town's Remembrance Sunday service.  The war memorial is brilliantly looked after, with family names of people from the town I recognise, who still live here, on it.  I remember people in the 1980s saying that the whole culture of remembrance would die out.  I'm personally very glad to see that seems to be far from the case.

Our family was/is completely non-religious and we never went to church except today - it wasn't about the religious act, it was about having a forum and an event to remember.  It was particularly important to us as my father was in the British Army and served in three armed conflicts (not including Northern Ireland).  My mother was very nearly a 23 year old widow a year into her marriage because of a mortar attack on my father in Aden in 1964.

Beautiful, well attended Remembrance Sunday in my town

Remembrance Sunday was also very poignant for us precisely because Mutti is German.  My grandparents literally fought on opposite sides in WW2.  My English grandfather had also served in the horrendous conditions of the trenches of WW1, one of the millions injured by German fire and invalided home.  This is quite an odd thing to grow up getting your head round.  It's something I share with plenty of other Anglo-Germans of course.

My German great uncle Walter was in the Afrikakorps and a British prisoner of war (he always spoke highly of the "Tommies" btw).  Another German Great Uncle, Heini, thought the War was a struggle for right and wrong between Germany and the Soviet Union.  He was sure Germany would win and did not want people afterwards to ask what he'd done, and to say "nothing".  He was 18, literally a kid, when he died outside Kiev in 1943.  His last letter home, just before Christmas, told how terrified he was to go out on patrol into the dark winter.

Amongst the first words of Father Andrew at our town ceremony was a call to remember the fallen, to call for peace and to celebrate the "reconciliation amongst peoples" - the former foes.  This has always seemed to me the complete nub of the matter.

The British Press

It's precisely for all of the above I am so sickened and fed up of recent items that have appeared in the British Press.  First we had the Daily Mail talking about the "Rise of the Fourth Reich" and Germany conquering Europe in the context of the financial crisis.  This has been going on for several months now.  They don't even have the historic knowledge to realise that a Gauleiter was a regional, not national, leader when they call Angela Merkel it.

Then came the Daily Express with its "Germany warns of War of Europe" headline, which was the most perverse distortion of Dr Merkel's speech to the Bundestag imaginable.  I don't want to send any traffic to either newspaper to boost their advertising stats: you'll have believe me.  I wrote in passing about the Express two thirds of the way down this blog.  This is a small but typical selection of the reader comments:

We also had the Church of England News publishing that absurd article about the "Gaystapo" and the "Gay Wehrmacht" - utterly devoid of any intellectual value, but so telling that the silly homophobic author chose to frame it in such language.  In passing I'd like to think that gay people will not fall for the same bigotry and prejudice in tarring all Christians with the same brush as the individual who wrote it.

Here we are 70 years on and some British appear still to be fighting a war that ended in 1945.  At school I regularly had kids who would give Hitler salutes.  I had swastikas drawn on my desk in the 1980s in Hampshire.  The fact I was born here, am a British citizen and my dad had actually risked his life serving 23 years in the British Army? Never mind.  When I was 19 at work on a gap year in Schleswig-Holstein the managing director of the company stopped me in the corridor.  Could I explain why the Sun had a headline "We beat them in 1945 and 1966, we'll beat them again" about the 1990 World Cup semi-finals?  I couldn't really and it was actually quite mortifying for me.  A few months later a letter arrived from one of the company's British dealers - it had the words "Did some old Nazi do this on purpose?" in it with reference to a faulty product that had been exported to the UK. Again all I could do was be desperately embarrassed on behalf of my father's country.

As someone who is half English and half German, and who has lived in both countries for many years (the first 12 were almost exclusively in Germany), I have -never- experienced overt prejudice or taunts for being half English in Germany.  All of the prejudice I've had directed towards me has been related to my being half-German and it is British people who do it. 

What is Actually Going On?

What seems to be going on for some/many* British people I think (*delete according to how generous you're feeling) is something like this:

• We're jealous of Germany.  How comes they still have a manufacturing industry, make excellent cars, washing machines, have a huge trade surplus, have superb high speed affordable trains that work, and are so wealthy compared to us? Also, why DO they always beat us at soccer?
• The reason we're jealous is actually when it comes down to it, we are well aware of how pants we are.  In essence we feel quite inferior.  Germany is perhaps the only European country we don't actually look DOWN on, if we're honest.  It's not like the rest of the "continentals" whom we can dismiss with some amount of mirth.
• At the same time, however, we also think/know we're superior.  This is utterly contradictory, of course, but an inferiority complex can quite often be bundled up with a superiority one.  It also doesn't matter, because at the end of the day WE WON THE WAR.
• Because WE WON THE WAR (but still feel jealous/inferior) we must bring this up at every opportunity to put the Germans in their place. (Never mind that almost 90% of German military casualties were on the Eastern Front and even with our terrible losses Britain suffered 2% the deaths the Soviet Union did - that's not how we teach history and it's definitely not what our movies will show, ever.)

There is quite a fundamental problem with the last proposition however - apart from the fact the Germans are well aware from their perspective where WW2 was lost/won.  It is essentially that the Germans tend to find the British obsession with "the War" actually genuinely puzzling: it certainly doesn't put them in their place to bring it up.  It just makes Britain (for whom most Germans have quite a lot of inherent respect) look faintly ridiculous.  Basil Fawlty needn't have said "Don't mention the War" to be polite: it's not polite to avoid it so much as to avoid a pretty sincere "huh?"

[My Twitter buddy @mynameisedd, who has a refreshingly younger person's take on all this (he's 17), has since put this to me as a young German person would probably react to a WW2 comment in much the same way we would if a French person came running up to us shouting "1066! 1066!" - I rather like this analogy.  Another might be an American expecting us to be offended or put down by mentioning 1776.  Would we care?]

Germans genuinely don't understand why anyone would bring up the War in the context of a sporting event, much less so in the context of their Chancellor making a historic speech in the very serious situation of impending economic meltdown.  Merkel's speech was about the need for Germans to assume their special responsibility, because of their history, and to reach into German tax-payers' pockets, to ensure that conflict doesn't arise again in Europe.  In case you're wondering, that is how many Germans see the overriding reason for the existence of the EU: something the Brits continually fail to see themselves.  For that to lead to the Express headline? Wow, just wow.

It's Not Just the Tabloids

This reaction is not because the Germans have no sense of humour.  The appearance of 'Allo 'Allo dubbed into German was I think a seminal moment for the country.  Similarly there have now been several home grown comedies about Hitler in recent years.  This is a very healthy development for a country that is acutely aware of its special responsibility to learn from the past, but which has moved on and is now in a very different place.

This isn't about humour at all - which of course the British can do brilliantly and which I personally greatly enjoy.  This is about deliberate, nasty, and apparently acceptable racism and prejudice.  And it also isn't limited to the Tabloid Press.  Their regular anti-German attacks are, incidentally, reported on in the German press and are generally met with a weary expression rather than any indignation.

Take a look at this.  It appeared two days ago in the Guardian.  The (slightly misquoted) German at the end is from 1861 (yep, 150 years ago) by the nationalist Emanuel Geibel.   It means the "May the world enjoy the German spirit".  This was a very particular phrase used by the Kaiser in the context of German Colonial Imperialism in Africa (he was of course busy trying to copy the British and French).  It was then employed of course by the Nazis in the context of their racial theories and policies.  The use of "Führung", in German, has only one interpretation in this context: it makes the reader think of Hitler and the Third Reich.  Angela Merkel's middle name is for the record, Dorothea.  "Hilda" means "Battle Maiden" from Old German.  This isn't casual racism - it is extremely deliberate and educated.

There are valid concerns, and there should be debate, about what is happening in the Euro Crisis regarding the interplay of democracy and economics.  Putting that aspect to one side, the Germans (and Merkel in particular) are damned on the one hand if they do not as Europe's economic powerhouse provide decisive leadership, as called for in particular by the Coalition.  On the other hand, when they do provide it, we do not have to wait long for calculated and spiteful racist commentary from not just the Tabloids, but also the so-called quality liberal press in this country.  Debate the issue, do not resort to frankly pathetic Third Reich jibes.

We Will Remember Them

Our War Memorial

And so we come back to this Day of Remembrance.  I think of the men who left our town in those dismal years of 1914-1918, and since then, who never returned.  I think of the service people who are serving and still suffering.  I think also of the millions of civilians who were injured, raped or died during conflicts: the emphasis is so much on military remembrance it seems, but many more civilians in particular during WW2, died.  I think of members of my own family, from both sides, who were pawns and victims in the divided politics of the 20th century.

And I really, really wish that people in this country could move on, keeping the personal remembrance, the dignity, and the gratitude; but without continually lowering themselves regarding the Germany of today: a country that in 2011 is our neighbour, our trading partner, our ally, and our friend.