Germany’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, on Wednesday launched a trenchant attack on attacked the British media, saying it too often portrayed Germany as the land of the ”Prussian goose-step”.
Hostile coverage of Germany by British newspapers had created an image in Britain that was more than three generations out of date and was harming relations between both countries, Fischer said.
”My children are 20 and 25. When they watch Germany in some of the British media, they think this is a picture they have never seen in their whole lifetimes,” Fischer said in a BBC interview.
”Germany has changed in a democratic, positive way. Today this is a democracy. Two or three generations have grown up as real democrats.”
He added caustically: ”If you want to learn how the traditional Prussian goose-step works, you have to watch British TV, because in Germany, in the younger generation — even in my generation — nobody knows how to perform it.”
His comments came ahead of a state visit to Germany by the Queen early next month; and amid growing concern by diplomats in Berlin and London that exchanges between British and German schools have recently fallen off and need to be reinvigorated.
On Wednesday, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, Sir Peter Torry, suggested that relations between the two had suffered because of the demise of the traditional pen-pal.
British and German teenagers no longer wrote to each other, he told The Guardian in Berlin.
”These days young people have mobile phones. It would be nice if they could now have mobile pals. At least then they would be able to talk to each other.”
During her three-day visit to Germany, the Queen will visit Berlin and Düsseldorf and is expected to raise the issue of how to boost youth exchanges. She will also open an environmental conference in Berlin, visit a war cemetery in the former east German state of Brandenburg, and attend a concert at the Berlin Philharmonie, the home of Britain’s most famous cultural export to Germany, Sir Simon Rattle.
In his interview, Fischer, head of the Green party and the country’s consistently most popular politician, said that cooperation on an official level between Britain and Germany was ”excellent”.
”We look forward to the visit of the Queen, which I think will be very successful and highly appreciated,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
”But, people to people, there is a problem and I think the media are playing a very important role.”
German officials have long expressed their exasperation with British stereotypes of Germans, and about the failure of British schools to teach anything about the country’s recent history. The number of British students learning German at A-level has also slumped to an all-time low.
On Wednesday, however, British officials said that some of Fischer’s criticism was unfair, and pointed out that British interest in Germany appeared to be growing.
The number of Britons visiting Berlin this year had risen 37%, they said, while the popularity of films such as Good Bye Lenin! and Michael Frayn’s play Democracy, about Germany’s former chancellor Willy Brandt, showed the cultural relationship was alive and well.
Germany was also partly to blame for its indifferent image abroad. It could try a bit harder to promote itself, they added.
”When did you last see an advert for Germany in a London tube station?” one official asked. – Guardian Unlimited Â