The German ambassador, Peter Ammon, leaves Britain this month and retires after a distinguished diplomatic career as Berlin’s man in Paris, Washington, and finally London. Before packing his koffer, Herr Ammon issued the traditional plangent lament that every single German envoy to our shores in my adult lifetime has voiced: Why, oh why, must Britain keep mentioning the war?
In a valedictory interview with the Guardian (where else?) Herr Ammon appealed to the UK to stop ‘fixating’ on World War Two, instancing the huge success of the films ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘Darkest Hour’ as examples of our deplorable tendency ‘to focus only on how Britain stood alone in the war, how it stood against dominating Germany. Well, it is a nice story, but does not solve any problem of today’.
Essentially, this complaint by the ambassador – and his predecessors who have said much the same – is that of the German guests at Fawlty Towers: why must you Brits wallow in your glorious past, and why can’t you accept the reality of a brave new Europe in which we are a band of brothers bound together in fraternal amity, forgetting the horrors of the past?
The difficulty with this line of argument is that modern Germany is just as obsessed with the Second World War as Britain – the difference being that the two nations approach the subject from completely different angles.
Every year, I lead a historical trip to Germany on the theme of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
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