Hände hoch! and Achtung: Spitfire! These were the first words of German I ever read, in war comics and W. E. Johns’s “Biggles” books in the mid-1960s, when I was about ten years old. I also remember borrowing books from the library in my home town in Britain that described the real-life derring-do of British soldiers escaping from “dastardly” Germans.
Such stories helped to shape a view — fortunately, not mine — of Germany and the Germans held by a generation that hadn’t even been born by the time the Second World War ended. They were reminders of former glories and unconscious attempts to perpetuate the belief in British “exceptionalism” — the belief that Britain was in some way extraordinary and, indeed, superior to other countries.
At the time, this belief was being seriously questioned by the feeling, not only in the UK, that Britain had won the war but lost the peace, both economically and politically. There was no Wirtschaftswunder in Britain; on the contrary, food rationing continued until 1954. Britain, according to former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1962, had lost an empire but not yet found a role.
Troubled and difficult
Fast-forward to the turn of the century, and negotiations were taking place connected with the takeover by a German company of a British counterpart. I was told by someone involved that the negotiations took place — at the arrangement of the British side — in an airport’s conference room named after Royal Air Force war heroes. The British participants entered the room before dawn and placed towels over the chairs they wished to occupy.
A few years later, in 2003, the cross-cultural psychologists Stefan Schmid and Alexander Thomas published their long-seller book Beruflich in Großbritannien. They found that one of the central Kulturstandards guiding the behaviour of the British was still a negative, war-motivated Deutschlandstereotyp. This stereotype saw Germans as being untrustworthy, humourless and arrogant.
Does this explain the typically troubled and difficult — at least from the British point of view — Anglo-German relationship still evident in work settings today? What has remained of this sorry British process of attempting to mend its damaged self-esteem by a collective revelling in past successes?
Doing it better
Not much — or, at least, the process has changed only in nature — if the enormous success of British author and journalist John Kampfner’s award-winning book on Britain and Germany is anything to go by.
Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-up Country is a finely told history of Germany from the post-war years to the corona crisis of 2020. The account is made all the more convincing by the author’s obvious first-hand familiarity with the country and his affection for it. And the book is an only slightly rose-tinted panegyric to the achievements of Germany since the end of the war.
My judgement is that, for the majority of Brits, the after-effects of the lost peace no longer result in discriminatory remarks and behaviour towards Germany and the Germans. They are not the “dastardly” Germans of my war comics. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, responding to criticism in 2019 of Brexit by Tom Enders, then Airbus boss, Conservative MP Mark Francois, told the BBC: “If he thinks because he runs a big company, he can bully British MPs on how to vote, he’s going to be sorely mistaken. … My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German and neither will his son.”
Admiration and envy
Such attitudes, I think, mainly belong to the past. Rather, the title of Kampfner’s book describes one of the two factors contributing to the continuing difficulties in Anglo-German interactions: the Germans really do “do it better”. The British recognize this ability to produce better high-tech products, better motor cars and better politicians, who the world takes seriously. And, of course, Germany has handled corona better, with a death rate per 100,000 around half that of Britain.
The British admire this German ability to do it better, sometimes secretly — there are plenty of clandestine Germany-lovers in Britain — occasionally openly. But the drawback is that this admiration is tinged, sometimes saturated, with envy. Modern Germany, if not the Germans themselves, is everything the Brits would like to be. It is the evidence that they won the peace, and confirmation, if not of their exceptionalism, at least of their ability to play in the political and economic premier league.
Very direct
And so we come to the second factor that dogs Anglo-German interaction: the clash in Kulturstandards. Thanks to the indirectness of the British and their emotional reserve in communicating with strangers, this admiration and this envy may not be obvious to Germans in particular. They may not take in the signs that could prompt them to adapt their behaviour and make their communication style more appropriate.
The German no-nonsense, “task-oriented” approach to cooperation and getting things done, and the accompanying directness of communication — “Very direct, even for a German” was a comment I heard recently from a Brit — can appear to the British as self-enhancement, even arrogance.
“Not only do they do it better,” think the Brits, “they have the brass nerve to let people know that they believe they do it better.” Not a recipe for successful Anglo-German communication.