Being beastly, by God, to the Germans

My current research on British Christian newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s turns up quite a bit of interesting material that is not quite directly project-related.

For example: there was relatively little turning of the cheek in a commentary by the Dean of Wells (Richard Malden) in the Guardian (the Anglican Church paper and not to be confused with the Manchester Guardian) in May 1945 on what should be done with Germany in the post-war world.

The dean, in fact, took rather a hard line.

Direct retaliation – that is to say, massacre or mutilation of the German race – is out of the question.

You can almost hear the Dean's sigh of disappointment.

Such violation of the Moral Law is not for us. But within the inviolable limits prescribed by the Christian conscience it is not easy to see how any punishment which can be meted out to the German people can be counted too severe. I have said ‘to the German people’, because there is no real distinction to be drawn between them and the Nazi party.

After the First World War, the dean recalled,

…we were urged to discriminate between the Germans and their rulers. We were assured that the German race is at bottom simple, honest and kindly, content to live within a horizon bounded by music, philosophy and beer. Its admirable moral qualities had made it an easy prey for the wicked Hohenzollerns, who had exploited it to serve their dynastic ambitions.

However: 

The truth was, and is, that the Germans are not at bottom simple, honest and kindly, though it has often been to their interest to try to persuade foreigners that they are. (A sound axiom for dealing with them is: Any German will say whatever he thinks convenient, and do whatever he thinks he can.) They have consistently, for two hundred years at least, if not for longer, shown themselves to be as arrogant, greedy and brutal as any nation which walks the earth, with the possible exception of the Japanese.

Among the dean's more concrete suggestions was evacuating the German industrial city of Essen and laying it, as he put it, 

utterly waste, and to remain so for ever. Any attempt to re-occupy or rebuild it to be an immediate casus belli without parley.

The destroyed city would serve as a reminder and warning for future generations. (The seventh son of the seventh son is not mentioned, but you get the picture.)

Also:

The first step towards their regeneration must be for us to make them understand that they are almost universally detested, as few people have ever been; and despised for their sheeplike docility. They must be shown that detestation and contempt will be their portion until they begin to show themselves worthy of something else. If they are to be allowed to set foot in British territory in any part of the world (and for my own part I believe it would be wise to exclude them absolutely for a term of years and to make plain that trespassers will be executed), it must only be in rigidly restricted numbers…

…and subject to strict regulations. For example, Germans were to be treated as “ticket of leave men” (e.g., they would be required to check in at police stations at regular intervals), would be forbidden to acquire property, their correspondence to be strictly censored and they would be required to pay a special “poll-tax" that would defray the costs of all the surveillance that the dean thought necessary to keep them under control.

Unsurprisingly, the subsequent weeks' correspondence columns in the Guardian were pretty lively.

(Source: The Dean of Wells, “Treatment of Germany. The Way of Regeneration”, (Anglican) Guardian, 25 May 1945, 203-204.)  

(Part of the 'historical bycatch' series; explanation.) 

"Like a chain of grotesque paradoxes": Adolf Löwe on England

Something I ran across in my research just now:

“Thus the England and the Germany of the liberal age represent two extremes of social formation. On the one side a society which has grown up and is daily maintained by the spontaneous conformity of its members—on the other side a social chaos which from time to time produces wonderful flowers of individual development and then relapses into the dullness of the herd, held together by the mechanical forces of the state.”*

This was a comment by Adolf Löwe (later Adolph Lowe), who came to Britain -- or as he consistently refers to it in his book, "England" -- in the mid-1930s from Germany for reasons that I probably don't have to explain.  

In case there should be any misunderstanding, he's praising Britain (sorry, England) in the passage I quoted, which appears in his 1937 book The Price of Liberty. (He became a naturalised British subject in 1939.)

To Löwe, the English capacity for "spontaneous conformity" was a model for facing the need to balance freedom and order in the world of the new mass society.

From a little earlier in his book.  

“When I landed in England three years ago, with my German background everything which happens naturally here at first seemed to me like a chain of grotesque paradoxes. … It was only gradually that I succeeded in finding the common denominator which gives these paradoxes coherence. This forced me to cast about for some of the historical factors which have moulded this peculiar social form. From here a road suddenly opened up to a certain insight into the significance of the English social order for the future. This must even be understood in a double sense: not only of England’s own further development, but especially of her value as an example for a new Western civilisation.”**

---
* Adolf Löwe, The Price of Liberty: An Essay on Contemporary Britain (3rd edn., London, 1948 [1937]), 26.
**Ibid., 10.

Full English Brexit

...comes, perhaps, one step closer.

Indeed, as Britain's conservative government is rapidly approaching a red line, it looks from Berlin as though Cameron is neither willing nor able to apply the brakes. Should Cameron move to establish numerical limits on immigration from EU member states, "there will be no going back," say sources in Berlin. First, they say, Cameron's proposal would be torpedoed in Brussels by Germany and several other EU countries and then he would return home and lose the referendum on Britain's exit from the EU.

Fog in Channel, Continent cut off

There are some interesting figures from a new poll on attitudes to the European Union in four different countries (Germany, France, Poland and UK).

The survey of more than 2,000 people in the UK and over 1,000 in each of Germany, France and Poland, shows a clear parting of the ways. Just 26% of Britons think the EU is, overall, a "good thing" compared with 62% of Poles, 55% of Germans and 36% of French.

Accompanying this anti-EU feeling is an ingrained cultural resistance to the European ideal and the very idea of being European. Just 14% of UK people polled say they regard themselves as European, compared with 48% of Poles, 39% of Germans and 34% of French. Whereas most people in Germany, France and Poland name a fellow European country as their closest ally, the British name fellow English-speaking nations: 33% named the US, 31% Australia and 23% Canada.

Equally striking, in the context of Cameron's attempts to negotiate a new deal for the UK, attitudes to British membership are pretty negative among our partners, who will have to sign off on any future special terms of membership we may want to agree. When asked whether the UK is a positive force in the EU, just 9% of Germans, 15% of French and 33% of Poles say it is. Opposition to giving the UK special membership terms is strongest in Germany, where 44% are against and 16% in favour, with 26% of the French in favour and 36% against. In Poland there is more support, with 38% in favour and 23% against.

While the article in which these number are offered emphasises the apparently growing 'gulf' between the attitudes of Britons and those of their continental neighbours, arguably the most surprising result is the low level of French support for the EU and self-identification as 'European'.

The French also seem more positively disposed toward the British (at least with regard to questions related to the EU) than the Germans are. 

I wouldn't have expected that.

The view from afar

From today's Guardian: Germany, land of armed road rage and annoying pseudo-English.

Rest assured, it's only partly accurate.

From "a dash of the Rhine and the Oder" to the "age of passports"

I have, on and off over recent months, been reading J. B. Priestley's 1934 travelogue English Journey.

It's the kind of episodic book that lends itself to returning to bit by bit. Priestley was a somewhat prickly character (I rather doubt that I'd have liked to join him on his travels) and a few of his opinions are pretty offensive (especially with regard to the Irish; I might get round to discussing that at some point).

However, the book is worth reading if only for the glimpses it gives of a 1930s England in the process of transformation; or, to put it more precisely (since all modern societies are always changing to one extent or another) in a particularly interesting historical moment of transformation.

In Priestley's personal perspective, one finds a mixture of ambiguity about the emergent, 'modern', 'Americanised' England (a combination of curiosity, wonder and fear) and a somewhat nostalgic look backward at an England in the process of disappearing.

There's an interesting passage that combines these perspectives, starting with a reflection on Priestley's own youth in Bradford and then using changes in that city to comment on the wider world situation in the 1930s. (I noted a citation of a sentence or two from this passage a few years ago, but it's more interesting in its complete form.)

It's rather long, but I think worth reading.

Bradford was, as Priestley puts it, 'always a city of travellers' affiliated with the worsted industries:

Some of its citizens went regularly to the other side of the globe to buy wool. Others went abroad, from Belgium to China, selling yarn and pieces. They returned to Market Street, the same sturdy Bradfordians, from the ends of the earth. You used to meet men who did not look as if they had ever been further than York or Morecambe, but who actually knew every continental express. They would go away from months, keeping to the most complicated time-tables. When they returned they did not give themselves cosmopolitan airs; it was very dangerous in Bradford to give yourself any airs, except those by tradition associated with solid wool men.

And then there was this curious leaven of intelligent aliens, chiefly German-Jews and mostly affluent. They were so much a part of the place when I was a boy that it never occurred to me to ask why they were there. I saw their outlandish names on office doors, knew that they lived in certain pleasant suburbs, and obscurely felt that they had always been with us and would always remain. That small colony of foreign or mixed Bradfordians produced some men of great distinction, including a famous composer, two renowned painters and a well-known poet. [...]

I can remember when one of the best-known clubs in Bradford was the Schillerverein. And in those days a Londoner was a stranger sight than a German. There was, then, this odd mixture in pre-war Bradford. A dash of the Rhine and the Oder found its way into our grim runnel—"t'mucky beck." Bradford was determinedly Yorkshire and provincial, yet some of its suburbs reached as far as Frankfort and Leipzig. It was odd enough. But it worked.

But the war changed all that. There is hardly a trace now in the city of that German-Jewish invasion. Some of the merchanting houses changed their names and personnel; others went out of business. I liked the city better as it was before, and most of my fellow Bradfordians agree with me. It seems smaller and duller now. I am not suggesting that these German-Jews were better men than we are. The point is that they were different, and brought more to the city than bank drafts and lists of customers. They acted as a leaven, just as a colony of typical West Riding folk would act as a leaven in Munich or Moscow.

These exchanges are good for everybody. Just lately, when we offered hospitality to some distinguished German-Jews who had been exiled by the Nazis, the leader-writers in the cheap Press began yelping again about Keeping the Foreigner Out. Apart from the miserable meanness of the attitude itself—for the great England, the England admired throughout the world, is the England that keeps open house, the refuge of Mazzini, Marx, Lenin—history shows us that the countries that have opened their doors have gained, just as the countries that have driven out large numbers of its citizens, for racial, religious or political reasons, have always paid dearly for their [in]tolerance.

It is one of the innumerable disadvantages of this present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic, this age of passports and visas and quotas, when every country is as difficult to enter or leave as were the Czar's Russia or the Sultan's Turkey before the war, that it is no longer possible for this admirable leavening process to continue.

Bradford is really more provincial now than it was twenty years ago. But so, I suspect, is the whole world. It must be when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all the new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Heinemann in association with Victor Gollancz, 1937 [1934]), pp. 160-61.

You find a few nice turns of phrase in this passage that suggest why, apart from the social observations, Priestley is still worth reading.

Fighting them on the (cultural) beachheads

This is a very nice article about how cool German culture has become (even being 'embraced' in the UK...who'd have guessed?); however, did they really need to use the word 'invasion'?

And, to me, the combination of text and image suggests that Germany's 'big shift' has involved making half-naked people stand in very, very uncomfortable positions.

I'm struggling to find this complimentary.

"A sort of wryness mixed with tentative enthusiasm"

Simon Winder's review of Philip Olterman's new book Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters is worth reading for at least two reasons.

First, it neatly encapsulates something about Germanness:

Everything that makes modern Germany so appealing – a sort of wryness mixed with tentative enthusiasm, a wish to be liked tempered by a genuine concern to engage with a terrible past – are all in this book.

Second, it notes Anglo-German connections that are somehow simultaneously unexpected and inevitable:

A long, excellent analysis of the Baader-Meinhof Gang is almost over before the reader realises that the only real Anglo-German element in the chapter is that Astrid Proll, hiding in London, once went to a concert by the Clash where the band were wearing Baader-Meinhof T-shirts. 

I have something new on my reading list.

What do they know of England...

Hard to believe, but apparently true: a British army veteran has been thrown out of a pub for the unspeakable crime of...wait for it...speaking German.

Tom Sharp, 71, said he was talking to his half-German daughter in the Packhorse pub in the Peterborough village of Northborough when their conversation slipped into German. Mr Sharp, who also served with the Royal Signals for 26 years during which he met his wife Anni in Germany, said the pub's landlady flew into a rage when she heard the language being used on Wednesday evening. He claims she told him: "We are white, you are English so you speak English in my pub otherwise get out." Other drinkers who witnessed the row and spoke up for Mr Sharp and his 49-year-old daughter Nichole Falconer were also ejected, he said.

Appalling.

All our best wishes go out to Mr. Sharp, his daughter and those fellow drinkers who showed enough Zivilcourage (and what I would hope to be genuine British cosmopolitanism) to stand up for him.

I imagine there are other, more hospitable places in Northborough to quench one's thirst (though I've not been there).

(I am reminded of Rick Blaine's comment when asked his nationality: 'I am a drunkard.') 

Tory MP 'regrets' Nazi stag party...

...because, let's face it, it became public.

And while we're at it, can we please make it verboten to apologise -- as was done in this case -- 'for the offence caused': this is a particularly annoying weasely apology in which one implies that those who took offence share at least a significant amount of joint responsibility with those who caused the offence.

I mean: Conservatives in particular love to go on about personal responsibility, something that Mr. Burley (who, while enjoying a good old Nazi dress-up party, no doubt finds himself amongst those Tory backbenchers who bray on and on about the dangers of German 'dominance' in the Europe that they are so ardently pushing Britain to leave) seems to not be able even to identify, let alone accept.

German Atlanticism of times past: No snakes in this here Garden of Eden

Something I ran across while looking up British press responses to the work of Oswald Spengler: a review of Ohne Amerika Geht Es Nicht (roughly: 'It won't work without America') by Emil Müller-Sternheim.

OHNE AMERIKA GEHT ES NICHT. Von E. Muller-Sternheim. (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag.)—This is a curious book. Imagine all the criticisms of the United States which have recently been put forward by various writers, and then imagine a decided, even enthusiastic refutation of all of them, and one would have some idea of this volume, which is dedicated to President Hoover.

As the title implies, the writer holds that without the active assistance of America Europe is doomed, not only in the economic sphere but in culture, art, morals—almost in every respect. The thesis is developed in a very lively fashion and, incidentally, contains criticisms of Malthus, Karl Marx, Ricardo and Oswald Spengler, who is treated as a representative of European snobbery. All the less favourable aspects of American civilization are passed over, and at the end one wonders whether there can be any snake at all in this Garden of Eden.

The American woman has a laudatory chapter to herself; American State-education is analysed, entirely to its advantage as compared with German. The Kellogg Pact and the League of Nations are described as supreme achievements of American statesmanship, and America is strongly defended against charges of “denationalization” of its immigrants, which had been brought against her by German critics.

As a reaction against superficial condemnation the book certainly is of interest, but one doubts whether even the most patriotic American would care to accept all Herr Muller-Sternheim’s assertion [sic] without qualification.

The Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 1930, 918. (Paragraph breaks added)  

The book certainly sounds interesting (not least for the dedication to President Hoover); however, ...minor quibble: I happen to know some rather patriotic Americans, and, pace the (unnamed) reviewer, I think they'd eat this sort of thing up 'without qualification'.

[UPDATE]

While we're dealing with the topic of American-style German love:


Olli Schulz und der Hund Marie, 'America-Ibiza Connection'

Music to watch the girls* ... go up the wooden stairs

Little would I have expected to hear to hear the following in Muji's on Tottenham Court Road:



Claus Doldinger, Tatort-theme

But hear it I did. You can imagine that this did stop me in my tracks for a moment (more concretely: on the staircase that leads up to the upper floor of the shop).

To watch the crime show that goes with the tune, go here.

* refers to this.

Good morning Britain

Quite good stuff, as is to be expected, from Charlie Brooker today:

"There are millions of people in Alarm Clock Britain," Clegg writes. "People, like Sun readers, who have to get up every morning and work hard to get on in life."

Basically, Alarm Clock Britain consists of people who use alarm clocks. That counts me out, because I wake each morning to the sound of my own despairing screams. Which I guess makes me part of Scream Wake Britain – a demographic Clegg has chosen to ignore.

I find that the point at which politicians start droning on about about the sacrifices of ordinary people who...uh...get up and go to work is essentially the point at which they might as well admit that they really don't have anything useful to contribute to the debate.

To any debate.

It's rather equivalent to defending your policy by saying 'think of the children', i.e., an admission of intellectual bankruptcy.

Although I have to say Nick Clegg has suprised me in at least one way: I never thought I'd find him more embarrassing than David Cameron.

Other than being positively disposed towards Germany, I can't say that Nick has much going for him these days.

And, given that he's in some way tarnishing us Germans by association with his silly pandering to Sun readers, I think he's best start Mentioning the War pretty soon, so as to save us some embarrassment.

Loving ze Germans

Quite a week. Not only is the BBC showing a documentary on the 'Real Germany' (in which the war is not mentioned, though, of course, only after the ritual show of pointing out that it's not being mentioned) and now someone at the Guardian goes and declares Germany the 'greatest European art nation of the 20th century'.

Gott im Himmel!, as they used to say in my old black and white comics....

Vaz it zomezing vee zaid?

We will fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds....

...but, no longer, it seems, on the train platforms.

By the end of 2013, Germany's rail company Deutsche Bahn wants to include the Cologne-London route in its regular offerings. From that point onwards, high-speed ICE trains will rocket through the French countryside at 300 kilometers an hour before travelling -- slightly slower -- under the English Channel to London.

Preparations for that date, however, are well underway -- and on Tuesday, the first ICE pulled into St. Pancras Station in London following a test run. The train was received by the head of Deutsche Bahn Rüdiger Grube and German Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer.

Of course, Jerry has this time cleverly disguised himself with British markings.



We've seen this trick before...



(And, of course, here.)

For you, Tommy, ze journey is just beginning!


(Photo via)

'More heavy even than the Germans'

From a fascinating book on journals kept by Britons while travelling around the British Isles and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century (paragraph breaks have been added, and footnotes removed):

It is clear from discussions on the rowdiness and bad manners of the British populace that drinking to excess was indulged in often enough to be considered a national pastime. Drunkenness was so common in Britain as to be designated ‘the great sin of our great cities’ and ‘that great curse of our population’ by two travellers.

Journals suggest that [continental] Europeans consumed large quantities of drink, but did so quietly and without giving offence. Their civility sharpened travellers’ awareness of the vulgar British way of drinking as if the goal were to get loud and rowdy. On the streets and at fairs in Britain drunkenness and blackguardism were common and very visible. Public festivities in Italy were thus a surprise to George Gissing who declared, ‘Ever since I came to Italy I have not seen one drunken man, not one.’

Many travellers found it refreshing to see so many Europeans able to amuse themselves in public without getting tipsy. Perhaps the British drank to excess because they were not as adept at amusing themselves naturally while in a sober state. Travel journals certainly suggest a deficiency in this area, as if amusement and pleasure aroused twinges of guilt in the British.

After attending a carnival in Italy, J.R. Green commented on the joyousness characterizing the revellers. Their naturally fun-loving spirit contrasted markedly in his mind with the typical crowd at an English fair whose fun and amusement had to be artificially created, not only by alcohol, but also by such ‘complicated apparatus’ as clowns, moveable theatres, vans with fat women and two-headed calves. Summing up the difference between English and Italian festivals, Green [135] remarked, ‘An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse himself.... He is full of joyousness and fun...is himself the fun of the fair. His neighbour does the same.’

Travelling in Portugal, Margaret Law concluded that the rigorous work schedule in England accounted for people’s inability to amuse themselves. Unlike the Portuguese, the English worked too much, in her view, and were thus too weary to relax and enjoy their leisure time.

Admittedly, the southern Europeans were renowned for their pleasure loving cultures, but even the Germans seemed more amenable to relaxing and having fun that the English. Watching evening strolls in the gardens of Germany, Charles Wood thought them more lighthearted than any entertainments in England. People walked, sat on benches, talked and listened to music in such an easy, carefree manner, that Wood noted, ‘The English do not understand amusing themselves after this manner; they are more heavy even than the Germans, at any rate in their recreations.'

Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 134-35.

'Germany does not stand alone in organizing for good looks'

I'm not entirely sure exactly what sparked this item from the editorial page of The Times in 1929, but it seems likely to have been a move by Berlin doctors to offer cosmetic surgery to disfigured people; somehow (at least in the mind of The Times's editorial writer) this was generalised into an 'anti-ugliness league' and provided inspiration for the following (paragraph breaks have been added):

An Anti-Ugliness League

There is plenty to be said for the newest movement in Germany. To form a League to raise the standard of human looks is but to apply to a very important field that principle of cooperation which has worked so well elsewhere. Nothing will strike posterity as more absurd than the way movement after movement is started in England to preserve or beautify buildings or places that are only seen at rare intervals, while nothing whatever is done to improve the faces which everybody sits opposite in tramcars and omnibuses or passes in procession in the street.

For town dwellers the face of England is a human face endlessly repeated, and we shall do well to watch the new League in Germany and to regard with eager expectancy each slight improvement it brings about in the national face and figure over there. It is an old and deep-rooted belief that ugliness and sin go hand in hand, and that the beautiful face goes with the beautiful nature. Remembering this, we may find the motive power behind the new League in Germany in a recent announcement by the Berlin police of their next step in the war against crime.

Hitherto they have broadcast finger prints, but that is boring work and the patterns on fingers rarely give much aesthetic satisfaction. They seldom suggest a new and successful wallpaper and the fun of tracing their unique differences soon palls. So the Berlin police are going to broadcast faces, and they have a double inducement to raise the standard of the German face. If a nation can be produced whose most hardened criminals are good to look at, the policeman who spends his days scrutinizing countenances, broadcasting them and measuring them, will live his life amid beautiful surroundings, which is well known to be worth a large salary in itself. A more beautiful nation will enjoy a cheaper police force.

What is more, it will need fewer policemen, for it is the teaching of psychology, which the Germans at any rate are not likely to disobey, that the way to gain a good character is to behave cold-bloodedly as if you had it. Men of noble mien, such as the League will aim at producing, will find their lower natures overcome by their fine faces and will cease first to do wrong and then to wish to do it.

Germany does not stand alone in organizing for good looks, for there has been talk in Italy of providing free plastic surgery at the state’s expense for those who think that alterations would improve their prospects in business or marriage. Nothing has yet been said about how many signature of neighbours, hotel proprietors and the like, will be needed to bring about compulsory alterations in the interests of the locality where an ugly person resides, but the highly controversial question will soon arise who is fix the norm of beauty and lay down the German, or Italian, or English face.

Aesthetics generally lead to blows from lack of fixed standards, and the best solution will probably be a strict adherence to the standards of antiquity. The arms of the Venus de Milo are still being fished for in the Aegean, and if they are found it will be a great help. The future in this, as in other matters, must be built upon the past, and it will only be by starting with the ship-launching features of Helen of Troy as the type that we shall learn to build the two-thousand-ship face of the future.

The Times, Saturday, 6 April 1929, p. 11

See you in the penalty area!

Having followed The Wife's link to a Daily Mail article on the impending Germany-England match, I was struck not only by the stirring words from Herr Battenberg Windsor, but also by the immediate reference to the war.

The Boer War.

Biggest invasion since Boer War: 20,000 England fans arrive in Bloemfontein

Sigh. [Dammit: they've changed it since I commented. I should always, always, always do screenshots on these things.]

It occurred to me among all this martial breast-beating that there is another association that comes to mind when adding the words Germany + England + Football + War: the 'Christmas Truce' from 1914, when, for a brief period soldiers on both sides of the lines put down their arms and shared some kind words, alcohol and, legend has it, an impromptu football match or two.

The football bit isn't in this excerpt from Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), but it's still wonderful.



I know it's too early for Christmas.

And certainly -- in football terms -- for a truce.

Schland!

(PS: I know that some of the soldiers in that excerpt are Scottish rather than English. But not all of them.)

Straight from the royal horse's mouth

My favourite shitty Britrag cites one Prince Harry doing his bit for an English victory in the historical football clash that will start at 1-6-0-0 today:

I just hope we beat Germany because there has been a bit of a past history between England and Germany, but you know as long as our guys do their best, the country will be hugely proud of them.

Which "bit of a past history" (whatever that may mean anyway) is he referring to, I wonder. The House of Hannover? The House of Coburg Saxe-Gotha? The royal House formerly known as The Battenbergs?

From a monarchist perspective, today's match is merely another family get-together, no matter how plebeian the English players might be.

44 years of hurt...and with any luck, four more

Quite apart from the sporting relevance of Sunday's England-Germany match, I'm really looking forward to the next few days of commentary from the English tabloid press and from English fans.

Matches involving ze Germans have always tended to bring out their best instincts.

If nothing else, it gives them an opportunity to try out the dimly remembered pidgin German they learned from endless reading and re-reading of black-and-white war comics.

Earlier this month, a Sun article (otherwise full of praise for the German team) responded to Franz Beckenbauer's criticism of England's performance hitherto in the World Cup by referring to him '[putting] the jackboot in'.

Class.

Not that one need be overly sensitive about this stuff, but still: how ridiculous does this verbal goosestepping become when most of those on the German side, with an average age of under 25, would struggle to remember the Cold War let alone the one with Britain's finest hour or two?

With that background in mind, I found this advert from South African telecommunications company MTN as good a comment as any:



As to what might happen a few days hence in Bloemfontein, I have no idea. But I'm cultivating a Teutonic Zweckpessimismus and expecting a Zitterpartie.

But I believe it was an Englander who said, 'Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.'

Schland!



[UPDATE]: An explanation of the above video for non-Germans.