Britain’s German Offensive

“Don’t mention the war,” Basil Fawlty warns an assistant through clenched teeth when German tourists arrive at his hotel in the BBC sitcom “Fawlty Towers.” He then proceeds to mention the war whenever he opens his mouth, taking their restaurant order--”orders which must be obeyed at all times”--as “Eva Prawn” and “pickled Goering.”

John Cleese’s portrait of a Briton obsessed with the Germany of World War II has become a comedy classic since it first aired 25 years ago.

What is not so funny to Germans, however, is that Britain’s popular perception of their country has not changed significantly in the last quarter of a century and that, like Basil, some of the British media regularly “mention the war” in regard to modern-day Germany.

That, at least, is the view of outgoing German Ambassador Gebhardt von Moltke, who wrote before leaving London last month that Britain’s understanding of his country “stops at 1945.”

While political and business relations between the two countries are good, much of the public and media has failed to recognize that “today’s Germany is a modern, open and democratic society which differs fundamentally from the one of the 1930s and 1940s,” Von Moltke wrote in Initiative, the magazine of the German-British chamber of commerce. He added his concern that British youths, in particular, show a “lack of interest and curiosity” when it comes to learning German and traveling to Germany.

He apparently is not the first German ambassador to have finished a diplomatic tour in London frustrated by his inability to convince Britons that his country is a thoroughly modern democracy and a reliable partner in Europe. But he is among the most vocal.

“We don’t deny our history. It would be a mistake to forget,” Von Moltke said in a telephone interview from his new post in Brussels as Germany’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “But 50 years has elapsed, and Germany has undergone a tremendous change. I am saying they should take note of that.”

Von Moltke’s views echoed those expressed by German Culture Minister Michael Naumann earlier this year after the Sun tabloid branded Germany’s then-Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine “The Most Dangerous Man in Europe” for his strong support of the euro, and the Daily Mail called him a Gauleiter, or Nazi officer, over European tax issues.

“To call him a Gauleiter goes to the gut,” Naumann said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times and London’s Sunday Times in February. “People do not understand what a personal offense this is to people who have spent their lives rebuilding this nation and are truly anti-fascist.”

But the Sunday Times chose to highlight another comment that Naumann made in the two-hour interview at a Berlin cafe. Under the headline “British Obsessed by War, Scoffs German Minister,” the paper quoted Naumann as saying that Britain was the only country to have made World War II “a sort of spiritual core of its national self, understanding and pride.”

Naumann pointed out that ever since England defeated West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final, German soccer players have been portrayed in the British press in military terms, and that Nazi imagery is routinely used to criticize Germany.

The article, meanwhile, asserted that Naumann was “the first German minister to hold a national culture portfolio since Joseph Goebbels,” although Goebbels was minister of propaganda and public enlightenment, not culture.

A slew of tabloid attacks on the minister followed, including one on the front page of the Sun showing a picture of Nazi concentration camp victims under the headline “Yes, Mr. Naumann, We Are Obsessed.”

Certainly, it is nothing new for the British press to beat up on Germany for its past. Tabloids frequently run headlines such as “Let’s Blitz Fritz” and “Herr We Go, Bring on the Krauts,” as the Sun and Daily Star did when England played Germany in the Euro ’96 soccer match at London’s Wembley Stadium.

And only rarely has a British newspaper felt compelled to apologize for its German-bashing, as the Mirror did that year for a front-page photograph of England stars Paul Gascoigne and Stuart Pearce in superimposed World War II helmets and the headline “ACHTUNG! SURRENDER! For You Fritz, Ze Euro 96 Championship Is Over.”

‘We’re All Agreed, We Hate Them’

This year, the Sunday Times magazine “apologized” on its July 11 cover for a xenophobic rant against Germany by the professionally offensive columnist A.A. Gill that nonetheless ran in the issue under the headline “Hunforgiven.”

“For we all hate the Germans--come on, it’s all right, admit it, we’re all agreed, we hate them,” Gill wrote. “ . . . Hating the Hun is perhaps the only thing that truly emulsifies the rest of us.

“By any measure you care to choose, the creation of a greater Germany has been the greatest disaster, the cause of more misery than any other political act in our continent’s history,” he wrote.

The three-page article goes on to savage German architecture, language and culture-”absent history,” concluding that a sign should be hung over the Brandenburg Gate reading Amnesie macht frei--”Amnesia will make you free”--a takeoff on a concentration camp sign.

Many Germans and Britons were outraged by the Gill piece, which they said went beyond the limits of decency. Lord George Weidenfeld, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote that Gill’s “crude and sometimes obscene insults” were a fiction.

But historian Niall Ferguson wrote in the Daily Mail tabloid that Gill’s article was “a tirade of anti-German vituperation, so over the top that it could really be taken seriously only by--you’ve guessed it--the Germans.”

Daily Mail Editor Paul Dacre, Mirror Editor Piers Morgan and Sun Editor David Yelland declined requests for interviews.

A Stereotype Fed on Pride and Jealousy

Alexander Chancellor, media critic for the Daily Telegraph, says that British tabloids “go in for a bit of German-bashing when they can’t think of anything better to do” and that stereotypes appeal to a public that does not know modern Germany.

“We have no sense of Germany, no reality. One doesn’t go there for holidays. We don’t buy German cookbooks. It is a strangely unreal place that sounds dull--a bit like us,” Chancellor said.

The tabloids play on this ignorance, Chancellor said, but, “I’m not sure how deeply felt this all is. . . . I’m not sure how many people are actually seized with Germanophobia.”

Historian Antony Beevor warns that a stereotype often repeated, even as a joke, becomes even more pervasive. The tabloids’ caricature of Germans as Nazis is reinforced by a plethora of good and bad World War II books, television programs and films.

“Obviously, there is a market for this knee-jerk xenophobia because it sells newspapers,” Beevor said.

The stereotype, he said, feeds on British pride and jealousies. The Allies’ victory in World War II was a great moment in British history. Britain was on the right side in a war against evil, held out against the enemy while its European neighbors fell to occupation, and won.

But saving Europe bankrupted the nation and cost Britain an empire. Then, as Germany rebuilt after the war and created one of the strongest economies in Europe, Britain’s economy stagnated throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Even though Britain has recovered and, in many ways, surpassed Germany in modernizing its economy, “many Britons still have a chip on their shoulder,” Beevor said.

Willful ignorance is not a uniquely British failing, Beevor added, and many, if not most, Britons are not anti-German.

Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, a Hamburg-born sociologist, British baron and a director of the Bankgesellschaft Berlin in London, concurs, although he often jokes that “Britain is 49% anti-German, 49% anti-French and 2% anti-both, and that includes Mrs. Thatcher [Margaret Thatcher, a former prime minister].”

Dahrendorf, a Liberal Democrat, said the tabloid bias does not hamper business or political ties between Germany and Britain.

But it does figure into the debate over whether Britain should join the common European currency, which many Euroskeptics see as a way for the powerful German Bundesbank to exercise control over the British economy.

“Most anti-German sentiment has to do with Euroskepticism,” said Die Welt correspondent Thomas Kielinger, adding that British broad sheets such as the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times, and many of their columnists, are strong defenders of Germany. “This [xenophobia] comes from people who just can’t abide by Germany as a leading country advocating integrationist policies.”

Thatcher, one of the staunchest opponents of a united Europe and of the euro, launched a thinly veiled attack on Germany last month in a speech to the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool.

“In my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe. All the solutions have come from English-speaking nations across the world which fought to keep liberty alive,” Thatcher said.

Asked afterward exactly what she had meant, Thatcher said she reckoned “some of you might have heard of World War I and World War II.”

As Thatcher continued to look back, so did the British tabloids. Also last month, British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson handed over command of 50,000 peacekeeping troops in Kosovo to German Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, putting British troops under German command.

The Daily Mail’s response: an article on the Nazi past of Reinhardt’s father, Fritz, who died 30 years ago and whom the general had not seen since he was a small boy.

Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Berlin contributed to this report.