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.