Anglo-Saxon divide

Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of both England and Germany. In due course it occurred to him, as a man of wide cultural sympathies, that he ought to be in a position to write an interesting book about Anglo-German relations.

But how to structure such a work? Oltermann is too polite to say so, but a great part of the problem is that modern English readers are abysmally ignorant of Germany. This used not to be the case: before 1914, to be educated was to be able to read German. But today, with rare exceptions — Miriam Gross, Daniel Johnson, Timothy Garton Ash, Norman Stone — we know next to nothing about Germany, except for a detailed knowledge of the period 1933-45. We have no wider frame of reference; no perspective that is not distorted by the Nazis.

Oltermann decides, quite understandably, that he does not want to mention the war. He sees the Nazi era as ‘a historical black hole, sucking up everything interesting that happened before or after’. So he confines himself to a whimsical epilogue about Unity Mitford’s friendship with Hitler, which ends with Oltermann and his wife Joanna wandering round the Englischer Garten in Munich and wondering where Unity sunbathed naked in August 1937, and where she shot herself, without quite managing to kill herself, on 3 September 1939.

Instead, we get a lot of football: too much for those of us who are not greatly interested in the game. When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, it seemed to me that people talked about football in order to avoid controversy. The Germans tend to beat us at football, but there is not much insight to be gained from the tasteless anti-German headlines in the British tabloids at the time of the 1996 European Cup semi-final at Wembley.