The German Genius

words, difficult to translate, are used throughout the book. They are shown in italics at their first occurrence in each chapter, in roman thereafter.

Blinded by the Light: Hitler, the Holocaust, and “the Past That Will Not Pass Away”
     
    B y one of those profitable accidents of history, in 2004 two German brothers were living in London, each in a high-profile position of influence that enabled them, together, to make some very pointed observations about their temporary home. Being brothers but in very different occupations more than doubled their impact.
    Thomas Mattusek was the German ambassador in London. In that year he complained publicly that, almost sixty years after the end of World War II, English history teaching focused excessively on the Nazi period. He said he had found many British people who had an “obsession” with the Third Reich, “but there are very few people who actually know Germany.” He said Britain’s history curriculum was “unbalanced”—it had nothing to say about the successes of postwar Germany, ignored reunification, and glossed over other aspects of German history. He told the Guardian newspaper that he was “very much surprised when I learned that at A-level one of the three most chosen subjects was the Nazis.” 1 His brother, Matthias Mattusek, was at the time the London correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel , and he went further. He said it was “ridiculous” to reduce Germany—the country of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Ludwig van Beethoven—to the twelve years of Nazi rule, and he joked sarcastically that one of the defining characteristics of Britishness was now “resistance to Nazi Germany.” His undiplomatic wording occasioned a “frost” between the brothers, but at much the same time even Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer accused British teachers of perpetuating a “goose stepping” image of Germany that was “three generations out of date.”
    Mattusek was not the first. In an interview in 1999 before his departure as Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Gebhardt von Moltke, Mattusek’s predecessor, said “one has the impression that the teaching of history in this country stops in 1945,” and he too regretted the reluctance of young Britons to learn German or visit Germany. 2
    The German government does seem concerned about the country’s image, at least in Britain. In July 2003 a conference was held at the Goethe (cultural and language) Institute in London to explore how Germany might be “branded” better—i.e., sold as an attractive place to travel to, study in, do business in, learn the language of—much as Quebec and Australia have been successfully branded in recent years. A survey of the Radio Times , a television listings magazine, carried out in the week preceding the conference, showed that no fewer than thirteen programs had been broadcast over a period of six days, “all dealing with topics related to the Second World War.” A poll carried out ahead of the conference showed that while 81 percent of young Germans could name a living British celebrity, fully 60 percent of Britons could not name a living German. 3 In October 2004 the German government paid for twenty British history teachers to visit Germany—putting them up at top hotels—to discuss the issues. One of the teachers on the visit said, “Kids find the Nazi period interesting. A lot of things happen. There is plenty of violence.” He thought that postwar German history was, by comparison, “a bit dry.” A colleague from Newcastle thought his pupils “bigoted and uninterested. The general impression is that Germans are all Nazis who steal sun loungers. This is all a cartoon-style view. The problem is that if you ask them seriously they have no view of Germany at all.” 4
    There is some evidence that the German government is right to be concerned. A survey in July 2004 found that whereas 97 percent of Germans have a basic knowledge of the English language, and 25 percent are fluent, only 22 percent of British students have any knowledge of the German language and just 1 percent are fluent. Whereas 52 percent of young Germans had been to Britain, only 37 percent of young Britons had been to Germany. A 2003 Travel Trends survey showed that U.K. residents made 60 million foreign visits a year but only 3 percent were to Germany, the same figure as to Belgium and half the figure for the United States, one sixth the