The German Genius

number for France, and a seventh of those going to Spain. Over the previous four years the figure for travel to Germany was static and had fallen behind visits to the Netherlands, Italy, and Greece. 5
    Possibly, the situation was getting worse. In 1986, in opinion poll figures, 26 percent of people had seen Germany as Britain’s best friend in Europe, but by 1992 that had fallen to 12 percent. When Britons were asked, in 1977, if “Nazism or something like that” could again become powerful in Germany, 23 percent said yes, 61 percent said no. By 1992 the pattern had reversed, with 53 percent voting yes and 31 percent no. 6 A Daily Telegraph editorial in May 2005 concluded sixty years after VE Day, “[W]e are a nation fixated with the Second World War and are becoming more so…” 7
    In the short run, this is unlikely to change. Another survey, this time of 2,000 private and state schools in Britain and published in November 2005, showed that “thousands” of fourteen-year-olds had given up German in favor of “easier” subjects (such as media studies) since the British government made the study of foreign languages optional in the autumn of 2004. More than half the schools in the survey said they had dropped classes in German in the preceding year. Another survey, published in 2007, showed that the number of institutions in Britain providing courses in German had fallen by 25 percent since 1998 and the number of undergraduate degrees in German awarded in London had fallen by 58 percent. 8
    Ambassador Mattusek, not unnaturally, didn’t like these results, but he didn’t think that xenophobia accounted for the change—more likely it was ignorance. He did point out that, since Germany is Britain’s biggest trading partner, it was a potentially “dangerous” development. “It’s risky to ask fourteen-year-olds whether they want to drop out of languages,” he warned, adding that teenagers think of Spanish as being “easy” and German as “difficult.” “Most pupils think of the beaches of Spain rather than the museums and castles of Germany.”
    But the ambassador’s concerns about “imbalance” in British education were borne out at Christmastime 2005, when the annual report of Britain’s Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA) concluded that the teaching of history in secondary schools “continues to be dominated by Hitler…There has been a gradual narrowing and ‘Hitlerisation’ of post-14 history…post-14 history continues to be dominated by topics such as the Tudors and the twentieth-century dictatorships.” The QCA subsequently issued guidance on teaching postwar history to provide “a more balanced understanding of twentieth-century Germany.” 9
    So Ambassador Mattusek was right in saying that the teaching of history in British schools is “unbalanced.” Was he right to link that with a British “obsession” with Nazi Germany? Speaking of his own country, he said, “People don’t take holidays there. Youth exchange is a one-way street…Our younger generations are slowly drifting apart and are listening less to each other. I can only speculate as to why this is. But I talk to a lot of British people and one answer that comes up repeatedly is that every country needs to go through an identity-building process. In 1940, Britain was practically confronted with an overpowering enemy and through the sheer mustering of British virtues, Britain finally managed to turn it round. That is very important in the collective psyche: to look back and think you really can do it.
    “Like the conquering of the West is part of the American myth, so it is the same with Britain and the defeat of Nazism. That coincided with Britain losing her Empire, which certainly rankled with some people and led to this obsession with Germany and not always in a very funny way. We have to make a distinction between the clichéd stereotypes that are outright funny—like in Dad’s Army or Fawlty Towers [TV comedy shows]—and something that goes a little deeper. The humour stops when I hear that German children are regularly beaten up and abused by British youngsters who don’t know what Germany is about.”
    Here again the ambassador is supported by some independent research. A survey in Britain in 2004 found that when British ten- to sixteen-year-olds were asked what they associated with Germany, 78 percent said the Second World War and 50 percent mentioned Hitler. A study at Aberdeen University