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Thinking the wurst
Julie Burchill
Saturday September 22, 2001
The Guardian
Ever since I was a kiddy, I've had a bee in my bonnet about the Germans. I remember exactly what happened: I was about nine, and flicking through one of my dad's second world war part works, when out of the blue, bang, I came across a picture of people in a concentration camp staring through barbed wire at the camera. I seem to remember to this day that I literally felt the world shift on its axis as I stared into those hollow eyes, and frankly that was it for me and Fritz. No socioeconomic analysis, thanks - this was personal and almost entirely selfish, my cosy little world having been shattered on that day. Before that twisted epiphany, I honestly believed that cruelty was what was taking place when my mum wouldn't let me stay up late to see the dirty bits on Play For Today.
I nursed my loathing over the years, and it's fair to say that Not Being German - in fact, being The Opposite Of German - did in some way define my life. I initially started playing truant from school because I was given their pig of a language to learn, which led to all sorts of interesting insubordinations once I realised how easy it was. One memorable night in 1978, on my way up north on the train for a little amphetamine-fuelled R&R, I pulled the communication cord and leapt out in the middle of nowhere just because, prior to leaving London, a group of harmless-looking hippies got on and, as the train pulled away from the station, revealed themselves to be Germans. In a sumptuous, almost sensuous reverie of loathing, I listened to them chattering on until, just outside Kettering, I lost the plot and made my bid for freedom. Everyone asks me why I didn't just move carriages, which merely makes me smile knowingly at how quickly your average bear forgets what it's like to be a terminally self-dramatising, angst-drunk teenage girl. Wandering about for hours in the fields of Northamptonshire, muttering »Why? WHY?« and »We're all doomed!« was just about the most fun I'd had yet.
However, I recently spent a week in the Canary Islands in a hotel, which, it turned out, was part of a German chain. It was full of Germans! Not just half full of Germans, or three-quarters full, but 99% full of Germans. And you know what? I had a really good time.
At a time when the German character is raising European eyebrows once more - first, there was the case of Wall's scrapping the immortal gags on their lolly sticks (What do you call a man hiding in a pile of leaves? Russell!) because, ahem, they'd had complaints from German parents that their children didn't »understand« them, and now a large swathe of respectable German politicians have demanded a constitution that states boldly what it »means« to be a German (been here before, I think; soil and blood and all that, innit?) - I'm afraid I'm going to have to do the boringly predictable thing and go against the grain once more. Myself, I don't think the Germans are so bad at all, and here's why.
1. Germans make one feel thin - REALLY thin.
2. Germans make one seem polite - VERY polite.
3. When abroad, Germans make one popular with the indigenous people - EXTREMELY popular.
4. English food may have been a byword for junk and excess for decades, but seeing what Germans eat cannot help but make one feel like Elizabeth frigging David. All that meat for breakfast! And the way they put pig in everything! And then, to rub it in, the way they called meat »fleisch«.
5. Germans don't swim. They don't jump, splash, dive or duck. They stand by the side of the pool, staring at the clear blue water as though it's visibly throbbing with flesh-eating microbes, and then shake their heads slowly, sigh deeply and return to Helga or Herman on the sun lounger. That's the reason they're so obsessed with having the rotten loungers, obviously - because they don't want to get in the water. Which means that I get a whole, dirty double-Olympic-size swimming pool all to myself.
6. German children are trained from an early age to within an inch of their lives to keep quiet at all times. So what if they're like dead-eyed mini automatons who may one day unquestioningly carry out undreamt of atrocities? At least they don't splash water in your eyes and make your mascara run.
7. The Tipping Question. Even if you are the tightest of Tommy Long-Pockets back in Blighty, being around vacationing Germans will make you feel like a combination of Viv Nicholson, Diamond Jim Brady and a sailor with a six-hour shore leave pass. Guaranteed to do wonders for both the ego and the soul.
8. I've gotta go there just one more time - that language! Is it eating Spam for breakfast that makes them sound as though they're trying to clear a huge wad of phlegm from their throats, or is it the immortal tongue of Goethe and Nietzsche? Whatever - what a swine. Krankengymnastik - massage; scumsoapen - shaving foam; menstruationsschutz - work it out for yourselves! And, pardon my French, but is there any other language in which so many words sound like fart, sick and shit? No, I think we can safely say that, compared with the most educated and erudite of Germans speaking his own language, even a Brit as vocally challenged as myself or Tony Parsons comes across like Paul Scofield.
Reading this back, it sounds a bit mad - as though I don't actually like the Germans at all, and I'm still banging the same drum I was when I was a callow teen. But as the old certainties slip away from us, as the party of Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan leads the systematic looting of the country by big business, I find myself grateful to anything that stays the same. The Germans, bless them, have changed just enough and no more - and for this they have my affection and respect.
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