Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not as odd as it seems now, after the passage of a decade and a half. Few of those present would have predicted that German unification would mark the beginning of a long period of relative economic decline, in which sclerotic institutions devised to achieve social cohesion and labour security after the second world war would undermine German competitiveness and push up its unemployment to levels not seen for half a century. Today, the feature of contemporary Germany which seems most striking from a distance is its political insularity and its stifling and oppressive social conformity.

Yet it is probable that most Englishmen, even of a younger generation than Mrs Thatcher’s, still instinctively share her view. This is due partly to the formative impact on modern Britain of the second world war, as immense in its very different way as the war’s impact on Germany. But it is also due in large measure to gross historical ignorance. In most British secondary schools, the period from 1914 to 1945 is taught to the exclusion of virtually all other European history. The pursuit of relevance has banished the study of anything earlier. Yet the danger of studying such a minuscule period of history is that it encourages people to extrapolate from a recent past that may in fact be quite untypical.

In the middle of the 19th century, the received image of Germany was of a nation of engagingly old-fashioned and hopelessly impractical romantics in picturesque costumes, with whom one could spend hours quaffing beer and talking philosophy.