The soccer World Cup fills me with dread. I want to look, but also to look away. Not because I don’t like football. I do. Not because I’m fussed about the St George flag. I’m all for it. Nor am I in any liberal confusion about wanting England to win. I want that too. Not even because I can’t stand the hysteria: Why can’t we have a commentary-free channel that just shows the games?
No. For me the problem about this World Cup is that it is taking place in Germany. As a consequence, in spite of the noble efforts to prevent it, we face a month of waiting for the inevitable moment when the terraces or the press proudly vomit a surfeit of war-obsessed, Nazi-fixated anti-German excess on to the United Kingdom’s living-room carpet.
The campaign to pre-empt this humiliation has its naive side — a nationthat has all but abandoned the teaching of German is unlikely to be able to sing England football anthems, as suggested, auf Deutsch — but in otherrespects it has been admirable. The Football Association has spearheaded a Don’t Mention The War effort among England supporters. The German embassy has done its bit. John Cleese has recorded a song to try to counter BasilFawlty’s contribution to the mess. Britain’s man in Berlin, Sir Peter Torry, even thinks the next month can be the watershed moment when the old obsessions can at last be laid to rest.
Dream on, ambassador. No one who has ever been to an England v Germanygame — with its incessant singing of the Dambusters march and its What’s It Like to Lose a War? chants — is likely to share that optimism. It is a fortnight since the Beckhams, no less, were compelled to cancel an RAFSpitfire and Hurricane flypast at their pre-tournament party. The other day the London Daily Mail dubbed the England team’s Baden-Baden headquarters”Stalag Sven”.
A new era in Anglo-German sensitivities? I don’t think so.
In his terrific recent book about the British and the Germans — inevitably also titled Don’t Mention the War — the historian John Ramsden traces the national neuralgia in virtuoso detail. His most important — and disturbing — observation is that today’s Nazi obsession has not flowed uninterrupted ever since 1945. On the contrary, it has grown over time, reaching a climax in the 1980s and 1990s.
The famous 1966 World Cup final certainly had a World War II subtext, but it was not accompanied by renditions of Ten German Bombers or by Nazi salutes, as it would be today.
Reading Ramsden, one grasps that all this says far more about therealities of modern Britain than those of modern Germany. And it would be perverse not to see that the British preoccupation with Germany’s Nazi past has been driven more by the media than by the public.
Ramsden’s analysis of the role of sitcoms, thrillers, war movies and television adverts in sustaining these obsessions is as compelling as his chronicling of the role of the tabloids, especially on football — ”Achtung! Surrender. For you Fritz, Ze Euro 96 Championship is over,” as one of the London Daily Mirror headlines once had it.
But it is not good enough just to tut-tut about the tabloids. The quality press can be bad too. The war remains the reflexive point ofreference for far too much of what the upmarket press and the BBC believes will be of interest about Germany. Stories about Holocaust memorials,neo-Nazi groups and the German attitude to immigrants get more editorialattention than stories about German party politics, economics or welfarereform. The disproportionate attention to Wagner in the arts media surelyhas a Third Reich subtext too.
None of this is to imply that it is time to draw the curtain on the Naziperiod or World War II, still less on the Holocaust. But we reapwhat we sow. The fact that we have educated — and are bequeathing to themid-21st century — a generation that knows nothing about Germany exceptHitler is nobody’s responsibility but our own. We started it.
In a quiz on Germany in Guardian last week, few people had heard of Konrad Adenauer and most could not identify German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Britain revealed by a 2003 Goethe Institut poll, in which three out of five Britons could not name a single living German, would have been inconceivable in the post-war era.
We have become blinded by this focus. It affects the way we look at the pre-Nazi German past and its culture. But the present suffers worse than the past. Joschka Fischer was right when he said that ”people to people, there is a problem”. The problem, though, is mostly ours, not theirs. It is never more rawly expressed than over football. But its most important effect is to subvert British-German political relations. Of all our alliances, though, this is the one with the greatest progressive potential.
Does British Minister of Finance Gordon Brown’s recent visit to Merkel in Berlin at last mark a recognition of that fact? If so, it would be an extraordinaryturnabout. Brown has been the despair of the Germans for a decade, investing little or nothing in that, or any other European, relationship. Until now his standard approach to Germany, and Europe, has been patronising and isolationist. Gordon doesn’t do relationships, an ally once confessed. Now suddenly he has travelled to Berlin as Britain’s leader-in-waiting, acknowledging the German economic rebound and embracing Merkel as a reformer and a leader rather than an obstacle or an irrelevance.
Brown has important work to do on his German relationship. Yet for Britain, and for the English in particular, the need to move on is even greater.
Fingers crossed for the England team. And fingers crossed that Brown’s visit marks the long overdue moment when Britain at last discovers who its friends are and where its interests lie. — Â