I started out as a Teutono-sceptic. How could it be otherwise? You grow up reading Commando comics, you watch Hogan’s Heroes — which makes a clunkingly unfunny distinction between Bad Germans and Stupid Germans — you snigger perhaps at ’Allo ’Allo. At school an eccentric German teacher tries to correct the balance with Beethoven and Willy Brandt, but in the end my generation is still held hostage by the inbuilt hostility of our fathers who last glimpsed Germany at 17,000ft through the bomb-sights of a Lancaster. One of my predecessors in the Times office in Germany was Frank Johnson (who died last week), who would think dark thoughts in pubs. “That man over there gnawing a sausage. You think he looks as if he was of military age? What did he get up to?” That was in 1985. We were not exactly in the Nazi-hunting business but, well as Frank would say, we kept our eyes open.
And now? I have made my separate peace. On behalf of all former Biggles readers I would like to say: it really is time to stop mentioning the war and shed half a century of heel-clicking clichés. To this end I have written what one British observer has described as a Truth and Reconciliation Book, a lightly fictionalised memoir of a correspondent’s clashes with his confusing host culture. It was written in English with the explicit aim of being translated into German, to explain to Germans how British stereotypes arise, how some of them are rooted in truth, and how they can be subtly undermined. That’s it really: for the past few months, writing the book has been a harmless hobby. Other people go sailing at the weekend or organise their beer mat collections; I have been stereotyping. But against all sensible odds, the book has become a bestseller in Germany. Three weeks after publication it is in its fourth print-run and I am being bombarded by the strangest of questions: why don’t the British love us? The rough translation of this is: why don’t we love ourselves more? They are buying my book — crassly titled My dear Krauts at the suggestion of the German publisher — as an act of self-flagellation. No other society so regularly seeks the views of foreigners. How are we doing, Dutch or Italian or indeed British correspondents are asked on television. Are we messing up again; are we failing Europe; are we incapable of change? It is difficult to imagine British television producers showing a similar interest in the opinions of the outside world.
This vulnerability makes Germany attractive. Interesting, even, for those of us who are paid to live here. You never know from one morning to the next whether politicians (or your doctor or your pub landlord) are going to be crippled with self-doubt or whether they will declare their undying pride in being German. It is like living in a youth hostel run by a paranoid schizophrenic, bound by rules randomly enforced. So you end up worrying about the Germans in a chicken-soup-and-barley kind of way, wanting them to take the right medication and get better soon. Correspondents thus have a therapeutic obligation to examine the old clichés, to hold them up to the sunlight and check the watermark.
German work ethic? Germans work significantly shorter weeks than we do, have more free time and longer holidays. They have time to develop friendships outside the office in a way that the British have long since forgotten. They take friendship seriously, thoroughly. The original catalogue of supposedly typical German character traits was drawn up at the Chequers meeting of British Germany experts to advise Margaret Thatcher on the eve of German unification. The list began with Angst and aggressiveness and rambled on a bit. One can mock Lady Thatcher for letting caricatures mould policy. Yet she was trying to think historically and was quite reasonably searching for ways to predict German behaviour. British clichés about Germany developed in the 1960s when it was clear to us that we had won a war but lost an empire. The Germans had lost the war but were enjoying an economic miracle. Since exploring the reasons for our decline would have involved un-British self-examination, we chose to blame the flawed German character (suspiciously well-organised and hard-working). When mass tourism began, we shared our Spanish hotels with Germans and saw that they were better off than us. At a moment, 20 years after a war, when reconciliation might have begun, a culture of envy set in, gnawing away at our relationship.
Jokes about Nazis took on a new edginess. Various German ambassadors to Britain were probably right to moan. We can be quite nasty, even racist, about the Germans, especially when we feel they are ahead. And after a while the British argument that Germans, by not laughing at our Hitler gags, demonstrate their own lack of humour no longer holds water. Even so, Germany’s supposed lack of humour is the most enduring negative stereotype and it demands some kind of sensible explanation.
Part of the German crisis of self-confidence is love of British humour. In German living rooms there is an encyclopaedic knowledge of Benny Hill, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Mr Bean, The Office — slavishly copied — and Borat, Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Now that we have handed the British car industry to the Germans, comedy has become one of our few visible export brands. The Germans really do laugh, loudly and with only a slight delay, at British humour. Admittedly there was an embarrassed, buttock-shifting moment in cinema showings of Borat when Sasha Baron Cohen staged a “running of the Jew” fiesta. On the whole though, we are on the same wavelength. A few years back the British Embassy in Berlin organised an Anglo-German Comedy Summit, bringing together scriptwriters to see if they could iron out some of the problems and come up with Euro-wit. Instead the two groups agreed that they could laugh most at Friends, the swiftly paced American sitcom.
But the translation of humour from one culture to another is not easy. One of the themes of My dear Krauts is the running battle between the correspondent-hero and the German tax authorities: he has been put into a higher bracket and saddled with huge back-payments. That requires a visit to an accountant who missed his vocation to be a vet. When our correspondent enters his office he has his hand up to the bottom of a labrador, checking its anal glands. Not exactly Dorothy Parker, but the scene really happened, and surely if anyone can laugh at a bit of slapstick it must be the Germans. The publisher, however, wanted it excised.
“Too Benny Hill,” said Daniel from Ullstein.
“I thought Germans liked physical humour.”
“I’ve tested it on my female colleagues,” he said. “They thought it was gross.”
“But that’s British humour too. We do gross, we do bad taste.”
Daniel thought for a while.
“Anal’s out,” he concluded. “The Germans don’t do anal any more.”
