The best of enemies: three centuries of Anglo-German relations
When I moved from Germany to Britain more than 15 years ago, I soon realised how large the two world wars still loomed in the public imagination. My new friends, neighbours and colleagues quipped ‘Don’t mention the war’ and gave me boxes of tissues on VE Day. It was all done in good spirit, but sprang from a cultural backdrop I struggled to understand – until I’d caught up with enough episodes of Fawlty Towers, Blackadder and Dad’s Army to get a sense of what the British-German journalist Matt Frei once called ‘the British obsession with the Krauts’. While often concerned with the second world war, that preoccupation is actually much older; and it is mutual.
