England fans booing the German national anthem shows there’s still much work to do

It’s been quite a week for relations between the UK and Germany. On Tuesday there was a certain football match at Wembley, where – in case you missed it – England prevailed by two goals to nil to advance to the quarter-finals of the Euros.

The next evening, BBC One delayed the News at Ten so the nation could see its tennis hero, Andy Murray, beating his second-round Wimbledon opponent, a German, in the fifth set. And Friday sees Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany for the past 16 years and the doyenne of European politics, visiting Boris Johnson at Chequers, where one topic of discussion is expected to be Merkel’s plan for the EU to quarantine anyone travelling to the Continent from these isles.

It has to be said that it is not that often that Germany – as Germany, rather than as a leading light of the EU – features in the UK news; and, when it does, the pretext is as likely to be football as anything else. This scarcity value may be one reason why such occasions bring forth a crop of agonising on the state of bilateral relations from a rather small coterie of Britons – of whom I am one – with first-hand experience of, and affection, for that country.

In the past, the tone of such commentary has tended to the doleful: when will we Brits finally abandon our unhealthy preoccupation with the Third Reich and the war and accept that Germany has changed? Why do so few know about the bright, modern, efficient and eco-aware country with friendly natives and glorious landscapes that is, or used to be, just a half a day’s train journey or an hour’s flight away? Why do so many lack the curiosity even to go and have a look?

Paradoxically, Germany seemed to be starting to edge up the league of tourist destinations for Britons, just as Covid conspired to shut everything down. This time round, though, the tone has been a bit more optimistic. It was forecast that the popular press would not greet the arrival of the German football team with headlines such as the Daily Mirror’s notorious 1996 “Achtung! Surrender”.

The generation brought up on war films, mock Hitler salutes and the television comedy Fawlty Towers was leaving the scene. Sport, argued some of my fellow Germanophiles, especially football, had ceased being a proxy for the war and had been bringing our two nations together. Well, maybe, and let’s hope so. But I am less optimistic.

While home and away supporters both cheered the two teams “taking the knee” before the kick-off at Wembley, the German national anthem was loudly booed for its duration. Alright, so devotees of social media voiced their disapproval and writers to the broadsheet papers offered apologies. But it happened.

And there was, it seemed to me, a particular frisson between the two teams as they came out onto the pitch, perceptible even from television. Germany still represents more than just a football team when they play against England at Wembley.

Nor am I fully convinced that whatever led a 20-year-old Prince Harry to don a Nazi uniform for a friend’s fancy-dress party – a lapse of judgement for which he had to apologise – has been expunged from British attitudes, whether at the top, bottom or middle of the social spectrum.

True, at the official level, it is Russia and increasingly China that are demonised, never Germany. At the popular level, though, Germany remains the national enemy.

Now you may well say, “we” fought two major wars against Germany that are both just within living memory, with all the suffering and losses they entailed. The costs of the Second World War included not just two decades of deprivation, but the loss of international power and indeed of empire – whatever your view of empire might be.

It is also true that in the aftermath of the war, there was resentment in Britain at the speed and success of the German recovery. Having visited Germany several times in the 1960s, I remember my father’s surprise at the housing and the transport and the supermarkets, perhaps especially the supermarkets, in what was then West Germany. As a country and a nation, however, we could surely have got over that.

For the truth is, those who had actually lived and fought in the war rarely talked about their experiences, and for the most part, or so it seemed, harboured no lasting anger. Germany had been forced into total surrender. Nazism had been discredited as an ideology and defeated on the battlefield. The surviving leaders and facilitators had been prosecuted at Nuremberg.

It was a new Germany that rose from the ashes to produce its “economic miracle”. In those years, Britain made efforts not only to distinguish between Germany’s past leaders and its people, but to forge links at citizen level, through civic and school exchanges, and learning the language.

As a family, we sat through a BBC television series called Komm’ Mit! before our first trip to Germany – for visits to my penfriend and the surviving members of the family my father had stayed with as an exchangee just weeks before the outbreak of war. Where are such efforts now? Plenty of Germans come to study and work here, or did before Brexit. But the number going the other way has dwindled. And the fault is entirely ours.

At an official level, the British not only failed to keep up the momentum of civic bridge-building, but actually helped to recast Germany again as the national enemy. Where young Germans were taught, and are still taught, at length, about the iniquities of Nazism and the need to show tolerance of differences of all kinds, most British schools continued to teach history in the same way as it had always been taught.

The war was too recent to figure in most curriculums at all, until perhaps the late 1960s, when that changed. Where I had repeated doses of the Tudors and Stewarts and school history ended in 1870, by the time my brothers were in their teens, the curriculum had been “updated” to bring them the Second World War on almost constant repeat – and the theme was not tolerance, but victory and defeat, good and evil, and Britain’s “finest hour”.

This national myth-building was accompanied by a steady stream of war films glorifying the Allies and the cartoonish nostalgia of TV comedies. Is it any wonder that, for so many Britons even now, Germany remains the textbook national villain – to the distress of several German ambassadors posted to London, who made representations to the government about the hostile depiction of their country in the state education system.

Now, Germany isn’t perfect: there is xenophobia against the Turkish community – many of whom arrived as guest-workers after the war – and against more recent newcomers, including some of those admitted by Merkel during the 2015 refugee crisis. Nor should the UK’s success in promoting tolerance and equal opportunity be belittled.

But the extent to which the UK still sees the Germany of today through the prism of the war reflects poorly on politicians and educators down the years. And our failure to understand Germany better may well have contributed to Brexit. David Cameron, for instance, grievously overestimated his ability to gain concessions from Germany and divide the EU.

To strike a slightly more optimistic note, there are now, finally, some hints of change. Two recent books have trodden fresh ground: Peter Hitchens’s The Phoney Victory, published in 2018, questions the British myth-making of the Second World War; and John Kampfner’s recent book, Why the Germans do it Better, considers the many ways in which this country could learn from Germany.

There was also an interesting little rapprochement, when the Duke of Edinburgh’s German relatives were among the very few guests invited to Windsor for his funeral. But these are just tiny, fragile straws in the wind. That it has taken more than seven decades to reach this point, however, and a new generation of Britons has no inhibitions about booing the German national anthem at a football match, shows how much there is still to do.