A hundred years on from the Great War, the Hun has turned into Mother Hen under Angela Merkel - but it needs to confront Russia over the Ukraine
In Britain, it is commonplace to celebrate our servicemen from both world wars. In Germany, it remains a controversial political statement to praise its own Photo: ALAMY
On Sunday, in the church of the village in which I was brought up, a talk will be given (by my sister, as it happens) about the six men from the parish who died in the First World War. Then there will be a service, and afterwards, tea. No doubt thousands of similar events will take place across the country. There will also be national commemorations. On Monday night, there will be a vigil at Westminster Abbey, ending at the moment when war with Germany officially began precisely a century ago.
We can feel justifiably proud of the way we do these things, and even of the fact that we do them at all. There is no other major European country which was on the right side in both world wars, which survived them unconquered, and which retains, unbroken, the constitutional system which existed before them.
The Queen’s grandfather, George V, was King of the United Kingdom in 1914. She is Queen – minus southern Ireland – of the same kingdom. The soldiers, sailors and airmen whom we commemorate owed their allegiance to him. Their successors today owe their allegiance to her. Never, in all that time, have our Armed Forces been corrupted by politics or forced to buttress dictatorship. Although the world has twice been torn apart and remade – three times, if you include the end of the Cold War – there has been no fundamental doubt about the legitimacy of the British state (again excepting Ireland) and parliamentary government.
The Queen also remains monarch of several countries – notably Canada, Australia and New Zealand – which fought as our allies in both wars, and retain legitimacy. These combine with Britain to be the greatest source of world stability outside the United States. You must not use the word “empire”, of course, but this is an imperial legacy of unique value. The other empires of 1914 are “one with Nineveh and Tyre”.
All this is a semi-miraculous achievement, and we should be more grateful than we are. Not France, not Italy, not Russia, not Austria-Hungary (which does not even exist) can commemorate with similar confidence and amity. Above all, of course, nor can Germany. A century on, public Germany cannot be quite sure what it should or should not say, what it can be seen to remember.
In Britain, it is commonplace to celebrate our servicemen from both world wars. In Germany, it remains a controversial political statement to praise its own. A war-generation German of moderate political opinions once told me how much he liked The Telegraph because it was only there that he could read military obituaries of Germans. In both world wars, German losses were far, far worse than our own, catastrophic numbers. How bitter it must be, even now, for families not to have public monuments and shared annual ceremonies where tribute can be paid to courage, suffering and bereavement.
So, is it better being British? I am not proposing to devote this article to the fierce historical debate about who did what wrong in the First World War. Without being any sort of expert, I am suspicious of the efforts to put all the great powers of 1914 on an equal moral footing. We often criticise ourselves for our Great War propaganda against the “Hun” – and much of it was certainly unpleasant – but we tend to forget that it was Kaiser Wilhelm who first used the term, as a boast. In 1900, sending off his men to help put down the Boxer rebellion in China, he exhorted them to take no prisoners: “Just as… the Huns under their king Attila made a name for themselves, one that can seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way.” German writers characterised the contest in 1914-18 as one between the “tradesmen” British and the German “heroes”. The 20th century has surely conclusively proved that tradesmen do less harm to the world than any warrior race.
My point is not to question whether we were, broadly speaking, in the right in 1914 or 1939. It is to ask how much good this heritage does us today. And it is to point out that Germany – because it has for so long, so consistently, admitted that it was in the wrong – has finally gained the ascendancy.
On Thursday, I rang up Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, to get his views. More than any other country, after all, Poland has cause to hate and fear Germany, which once subsumed two thirds of its current territory. “I remember exactly my feelings,” he told me. “Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting on the Berlin Wall the night after it was breached. My joy was tinged with fear: now they can unite, I wondered, will they try to have a go at us once again?”
Now, he feels, the Germans have proved their good intent. De-Nazification has been absolutely genuine, whereas the equivalent process with Communists in Russia has never happened. In football matches, “when Poles can’t cheer for Poland, they cheer for Germany”. The European Union, he believes, genuinely restrains German power while legitimising it.
This year, the British Museum is running three German-related exhibitions. Its director, Neil MacGregor, is keen to show how Germany has “wrestled” with its history. When Britain marks the First World War, he says, it can uncontroversially – sometimes unthinkingly – remember simply those who died. When Germany remembers, it is compelled to think about what happened afterwards: it tries to make its past “something that can borne and something that can be used”. He contrasts our cenotaph by Lutyens with the extraordinary hovering angel by the expressionist artist Barlach in Güstrow cathedral. The first is for the fallen; the second is for what the experience of the Great War meant for everyone – what he calls the “floating” Germany which has now, united, come to rest.
It has long been impossible to claim that Germany is lying when it says it wants peace, human rights, democracy and a “European” destiny. At a time when almost all leaders lack trust, you have only to look at Angela Merkel to see how she embodies those qualities which modern Germans have sought to achieve – hard work, decency, competence, coalition-mindedness, modesty, bourgeois moderation in everything. No Hun, more mother hen.
What other country could win the World Cup with so little fuss? What other EU state could stand behind a single European currency and the appalling strains it brings? What other European manufacturing nation has adapted itself so successfully to globalisation? What other truly rich power in the world so resolutely avoids ostentation and is content with delayed gratification?
What other country, in short, has attained its modern power precisely by not being power-hungry? If you tell a British official that his country is pulling way ahead of France, he is delighted. If you say the same thing to a German official – as I recently did – he gets angry. He does not want Germany to be “uber alles”. Or if he does, he would rather die than say so.
A hundred years on, then, Britain can feel proud, but purposeless. Germany can feel richer, more united, more secure and more accepted than at any time in its history. It had to change much more than we did, so it did it better. By losing so comprehensively, it has ended up winning.
Should we be frightened? Despite being a Eurosceptic, I cannot honestly say that I am. So long as we do not have adopt the euro and pursue ever closer union, we need not be alarmed that Germany is the great power in continental Europe. And I assume we are not alarmed, since we and the Americans are finally leaving the place, 70 years after we arrived.
But the final point is, as Radek Sikorski puts it, that “the real time is now”. Now Germany is truly not under US tutelage. Now that it dominates the EU and controls Europe’s currency, now that Russia threatens Ukraine, how will it behave? Dare it lead and, if so, how? The time may not be far off when it will long for the protection it was given by two generations of moral quarantine.
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