Understanding Germany

Abstract

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.