The German Genius

showed how, especially above the age of twelve, a sample of children would react much more negatively to a photograph of a person when told it was of a German than when shown the same photograph two weeks earlier without any mention of nationality.
    These reactions, says Mattusek, are a particularly British problem. “This attitude isn’t prevalent in other countries. A lot of our neighbours suffered much, much more than the British. But among young Russians, young Poles or young Czechs, you don’t get this. Perhaps a country with nine neighbours is constantly forced to make compromises and is much more in contact than a country that lives as an island.” 10
    His brother, Matthias—again—put it more strongly. “The British behave as if they had conquered Hitler’s hordes single-handedly. And they continue to see us as Nazis, as if they have to refight the battles every evening [i.e., on TV]. They are enchanted by this Nazi dimension.” Gisela Stuart, a German-born British Member of Parliament for the Birmingham Edgbaston constituency, said that the Mattuseks were “quite right to say the British are still obsessed with the Nazi period.” 11
    In 2006 John Ramsden, professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London, published an entire book, Don’t Mention the War , a study of the relationship between Germans and the British since 1890. He concluded that there had been several periods of friction during that time—around the turn of the twentieth century, in the run up to World War I, in the midst of that war—but that the British had thought highly of Weimar Germany and had not shown the same level of hate during World War II that they had in the earlier conflict (it was a clash more of ideologies than of peoples). Since 1945, war films and novels had kept the friction warm, however, aided by the Thatcher government when “Britain experienced…more open anti-German prejudice among her rulers than at any time since 1945.” 12 He concluded that the defeat of Germany “seemed still to be essential to the English sense of who they are, and how they got here.” 13
    That obsession shows no sign of diminishing. In July 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Bavaria became pope. The following day the London Sun , a tabloid newspaper, splashed its front page with the headline “From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi.” Several other tabloids had a similar reaction and the Daily Mirror , in an article exploring the new pope’s conduct in wartime, quoted an eighty-four-year-old woman from his hometown, Marktl am Inn, who said that, contrary to His Holiness’s claims that he had no choice but to enroll in the Hitler Youth, “it was possible to resist.” She said her own brother, a conscientious objector, had been sent to Dachau for his beliefs. 14
    In Berlin, Franz Josef Wagner, a columnist on the popular newspaper, Bild , was beside himself with anger. In an open letter to the British tabloids he warned them that “the devil seems to have slipped into your newsrooms…Anyone reading your British popular newspapers must have thought Hitler had been made pope.”
    All this seems to make Ambassador Mattusek right on both counts—Britain is obsessed by the Nazis and history teaching in British schools is unbalanced, concentrating too much on the years 1933–45.
    But this fascination with the Third Reich has done more than unbalance British education and foster an obsession with twelve years of dictatorship, helping to create an ignorance of the reality of modern Germany. It may well be the case that, as the Mattuseks say, defeating Nazism is now part of Britain’s self-identity. More than that, there is now a much wider sense that the Nazi period operates as an obstacle, a stumbling block, a reflecting mirror, that hinders us from looking back beyond that time, which has closed British minds to the Germany that preceded Hitler, an extraordinary country that he—a product of the Vienna gutter—on assuming office set about dismantling in a shocking and unprecedented way. Though the Russians and Poles and Czechs may not be as obsessed as the British, this blindness does apply in certain other countries as well. Wherever you look, Hitler still makes history but he also distorts it.
    On February 20, 2006, in Vienna, Austria, David Irving, a British historian who has specialized in writing books about the Second World War, was sent to prison for three years, found guilty of denying the Holocaust. * Irving