The current love affair that the Germans seem to be having with all things British has deep roots. It was Schlegel who first claimed Shakespeare for the German-speaking world when he said that the bard was ‘ganz unser’ (entirely ours). Goethe was equally obsessed. There are now more productions of Shakespeare’s plays in Germany every year than in England, with the advantage that he not only translates unusually closely into German but also that the audiences are hearing him in contemporary language.
Then there is the instinctive German respect for the British sense of humour, which threatens anarchy, but, by some miracle they dare not trust, never quite delivers it. The story of the man who crashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party dressed as Osama bin Laden, who was not only not shot dead on the spot but was also never prosecuted, plays very well here, as did the atmosphere at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which was held to have just the right mix of grandeur and lightness of touch. Even in Dresden, where the scars of one of the most destructive bouts of humour failure ever visited by a nation on an enemy city are still evident, people find the peculiar British balance of discipline, punctiliousness and irreverence fascinating.
Some of this interest has transferred itself to the Dresden Music Festival, at three weeks in length one of the biggest in Europe. Each year its theme is based around the music of a single nation, and this time it has been the turn of the British. What with the innate sympathy just outlined, and the unstinting sponsorship of Volkswagen, here if anywhere was the opportunity to reflect the vibrancy of British musical life. From the outset I wondered if the organisers really intended to expose their public to the scene in all its raw foreignness: the icon on their material unpromisingly shows a red telephone box (of the kind that don’t work any more) on some stones floating in a wide seascape under the word ‘Empire’.
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