When Matthias Matussek of Der Spiegel interviewed the Booker prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan in London, it was meant to be a liberal exchange of ideas – a salon, if you will. “We had a lovely dinner, then bumped into a famous director on our way out. I won’t tell you his name but he was nominated for an Oscar. When Ian introduced my wife and me as ‘friends from Germany’, the director gave us a Nazi salute. Then laughed his arse off. I was in the West End of London in f***ing 2006. What the hell was that about?”
It was a joke, apparently. “And I laughed it away,” says Matussek. “What else can you do?” But when Matussek wrote about the episode, McEwan denied it. He said the truth was rather less interesting, and that Matussek should put his imagination to better use and become a novelist. “I didn’t make it up,” says Matussek. “Nor did my wife … [it] was very telling – McEwan would rather trust an Englishman he happened to bump into than a German he’d been with all evening. Is it any wonder my fellow countrymen think there’s a deep well of anti-German resentment in Britain?”
Matussek worked as Der Spiegel’s London correspondent for two years. He ranted about how the stoicism, education and humour of the British were being devalued by Big Brother, binge-drinking and happy-slapping. When he returned to Germany to become the paper’s culture editor, the diplomatic corps must have breathed a sigh of relief. But in pride of place on the wall of his Hamburg office is the goodbye column he wrote in the Evening Standard. It praises the British character after the London bombings of last summer. And it ends: “Great Britain, I will miss you.”
Matussek’s love for Britain isn’t shared by all his countrymen. In a recent survey to find Germany’s favourite European neighbours, the British didn’t do terribly well. “The French came top,” says Matussek. Well, they have lovely scenery, which is why the Germans are all buying second homes in the Alsace. “England was between the Serbians and the Croatians – No 29 or something.” And with 100,000 football fans in Germany for the World Cup, we’re unlikely to improve on that position any time soon.
Fans who travel to Germany this summer will be singing from the unreconstructed English hymnal. It contains anthemic standards such as Stand up If You Won the War, and Two World Wars and One World Cup. Meanwhile, readers of The Sun have been voting on a new song for the terraces. The winner, sung to the theme from Dad’s Army, is Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Jürgen Klinsmann? It comes complete with air-raid sirens. Sven-Göran Eriksson (who has been on the wrong end of a few football songs in his time) wants the World Cup – with its slogan “A Time to Make Friends” – to be a new beginning. In Free Lions, a guide for England fans, he asks supporters to avoid anti-German songs. Especially Ten German Bombers, which celebrates the RAF’s success against the Luftwaffe. And the lyrics to more appropriate songs, such as God Save the Queen and You’ll Never Walk Alone, have been added to the Foreign Office website. The only problem is, when they’re stuck for lyrical inspiration, England fans don’t tend to think of the Foreign Office.
But they should. The advice about what songs to sing is more than PR. The German police have already warned fans that the Nazi salute and the goose step will not be tolerated. “This simply is a criminal act in Germany,” says Walter Ernstberger, director of police in Nuremberg. And not, as is traditional in England, “a bloody good laugh”. And whistling The Great Escape – if it is done with malicious intent – could actually be enough to get arrested. The message from the German authorities is clear: don’t mention the war.
In a Harris poll last year, 62% of Germans said they never talk about the war anyway. Visitors to Germany won’t find Hitler’s bunker on tourist maps. Colditz Castle is stuck out in a village near Leipzig and requires two bus journeys to get to. And Nuremberg’s tourist office has no information on its Nazi history, except a tiny black-and-white booklet obliquely entitled Germany 1933-1945. It is more interested in pushing the Toy Museum and Business Tower than the Zeppelin Stadium and Courtroom 606.
That’s why, when there was a public vote for the greatest figure in German history, on the German public TV network, the organisers introduced a “no mass murderers” rule. Nobody was allowed to nominate Hitler or anyone associated with the Third Reich. When the votes were counted, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor during the post-war reconstruction of West Germany, was declared the winner. It showed the lengths Germany is prepared to go to sanitise its past.
“You Brits dwell on the war because it was your finest hour,” says Matussek. “The war defined modern Britain.” After the London bombings of 2005, a YouGov poll asked Britons to choose from a list of phrases that might be used to describe or define what it is to be British. In first place was “Our right to say what we think”. In second place was “Our defiance of Nazi Germany in 1940”. Matussek says, when England fans chant about the war, they are simply reliving their glorious past. “Which is a healthy thing to do,” he says. “But for us Germans, it’s sometimes tedious.” Don’t expect the German fans to sit in silence. Chanting, after all, still offers them another chance to practise their English. When Bayern Munich came to Manchester United, they ran through their entire repertoire – in English – including Zing Ven You’re Vinning and Stend Ap If You Heit Man U. And if Germany meet England, they will make sure to chant about BSE (with mooing noises) and “Inselaffen”. They should save their breath: England fans don’t understand insults in a foreign language. But do ordinary Germans really think of us as “island monkeys”? And do we really care?
The Inter City Express from Hamburg to Berlin has recycling bins, and Wi-Fi, and self-cleaning toilets. But it’s still a minute late leaving the Hauptbahnhof. Since trains and punctuality are so important in the German world, the Deutsche Bahn hands out official certificates of train tardiness (Bescheinigungen über Zugverspätung) if a train is late. A minute doesn’t count as Zugverspätung, not even in Germany, but you can use the certificates as an official explanation of why you’re late for work or school. Or keep them as a souvenir of living the German way.
My guidebook says, to greet strangers in Germany, simply knock twice on the table. It means: “Hello, everyone.” I try it, but everyone on the train turns round to find out what all the knocking is about. I figure my guidebook is out of date and try another approach. “Hallo, jeder,” I say. Everybody looks surprised at an Englishman speaking German. As one man says, “We have a joke in Germany:?if you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak one, you’re English.”
The conversation is hesitant at first – like my German. So we start to talk about Anglo-German relations in English. The Germans will speak English at any opportunity. There are about 450 English words in the German vocabulary. They use them as often as possible, mainly to prove how sophisticated and educated they are. Many English verbs are “Germanised” and absorbed into the language – for instance, “managen”, “involvieren”, “e-mailen” – and it doesn’t seem to create a scandal the way it does in France.
Talk on the train is in “Denglish” – that wonderful mix of Deutsch and English, such as: “Hello, Sir! How goes it you?”
