If Anglo-German relations were on an ever-upward trajectory at the political level, however, they lacked a key component. As Sir Frank observed bluntly: ‘Warmth was missing from the relationship.’ And there was only one person who could resolve that.
So why British nervousness about a state visit from the Queen? Within government, there were concerns about the response of the British public and press. Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, there were many – in working men’s clubs, in Parliament and in Fleet Street – who were in no hurry to forgive or forget the events of two world wars. There had already been a state visit to Britain by the first President of West Germany, Theodor Heuss, in 1958. It had not been deemed a great success, particularly after Heuss’s visit to Oxford University. The German press were full of reports that he had been snubbed by students, who pointedly kept their hands in their pockets. This was certainly mild stuff compared to subsequent forms of student protest in Britain, but it had rankled in Germany, where the public still regarded the UK as the world leader in good manners. ‘German Press treatment of the “undergraduates with hands in their pockets” story did more than anything else to mar the atmosphere,’ the British Ambassador noted.
The government could not delay a state visit indefinitely, however, particularly since the Queen had already made state visits to both France and Italy. It was beginning to look rude. Now, with France thwarting Britain’s European ambitions, the British government looked at Germany again and decided the time had come to play the royal trump card.
There was a marked lack of enthusiasm at the Palace, however. It was not because the Queen disliked the idea of visiting the land of some of her forefathers. Rather, the Royal Family were acutely conscious of their German roots and extremely sensitive to any charge of giving special treatment to the ex-enemy, as a result. Even after changing their family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha during the First World War and leading the Empire through the Second, the family had still not entirely shaken off saloon-bar gossip about the Windsors being a bunch of closet Germans. The fact that Prince Philip’s sisters had all been on the other side, having married Germans, did not help.†
Furthermore, the Queen was well aware of the increasingly hostile feeling across her old Commonwealth realms towards Britain’s quest for closer European integration. Britain’s ‘kith and kin’ in the old dominions of Australia and New Zealand had lost blood and loved ones helping Britain fend off German invasion. How could it be that Britain was now seeking closer dealings with the old enemy, at their expense?
So when the Foreign Secretary, Rab Butler, finally proposed a state visit in 1964, the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, was surprisingly cool in return. She would only go, he said, ‘on advice’ and ‘at the request of the British Government’. Otherwise she would be accused of pursuing ‘private ties and relationships’, a charge that was ‘all wrong and untrue’. Undeterred, the Conservative government formally issued that advice. It would be Harold Wilson’s new Labour administration that was in charge by the time the Queen and Prince Philip took off for Bonn on 18th May 1965.
As with all the Queen’s pioneering early tours, the level of interest was phenomenal from the outset. More than a thousand media from all over the world had travelled to Germany to chronicle this royal exercise in fence-mending. It was a bracing task for a young Australian civil servant who had recently arrived at the Palace. William Heseltine had just been appointed assistant to the press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, when the commander was laid low by ill health. Heseltine suddenly found himself dealing with one of the largest royal media operations ever seen. ‘I was thrown in at the last minute,’ he says. ‘I had enough German to stagger through a dinner sitting next to a non-speaking burgermeister’s wife but not to speak to 1,200 press.’ He can still remember the photo-opportunity arranged after the Queen’s lunch with Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. ‘The programme said that after the lunch they were meant to go outside to “view the Rhine”. All they could see was 1,200 press completely obliterating any view of the Rhine.’
This would be the first state visit to command live television coverage – and in exhaustive detail about every member of the entourage, too. Sir William still recalls a breathless commentator declaring: ‘Hier kommt Lord Plunket . . .’‡ To the delight of British diplomats, that coverage did not fade after the opening stages of the ten-day tour, but remained similarly breathless to the end. Knowing the importance of setting the pace and tone of a visit from the start, the Queen had made a particular effort ahead of the opening state banquet. It was to be held at the (then) presidential palace, the Augustusburg in Brühl, near Bonn. Given that the palace was celebrated for its swirling pale-blue rococo interiors, the Queen had already alerted her dress designer, Hardy Amies, who designed a sleeveless evening gown to match her surroundings. It was such a sensation that the photographer, Cecil Beaton, asked the Queen to wear it for a series of official portraits three years later. The sight of the Queen in her Brühl-inspired dress, her pearls shimmering inside the diamond-studded loops of the Vladimir Tiara, was precisely what the German public had been hoping for. Dreary egalitarianism might be what Germans sought and expected of their own leaders, but not of ‘die Queen’.
‘What the Germans loved in 1965 was that the Queen did not make any compromise. There was no populist accommodation for modern Britain. She was majestic,’ says Thomas Kielinger. ‘She waved from on high. There was still that deference in Germany, even if it was in decline in Britain. In Germany, we admire the stylistic expression of grandeur. This was a great theatrical event. And Britain is the great country of the stage.’
In his speech of welcome, President Heinrich Lübke saluted Britain as ‘the teacher of other nations’, a nation that had made ‘a decisive contribution to the spread of civilisation’ and world trade. Taking the long view, he remarked that ‘until the First World War, there was hardly any serious conflict of interest between our two countries’. He quoted Winston Churchill’s dream of a ‘United States of Europe’, adding Germany’s wish to see Britain ‘included in the future unification of Europe’. In the meantime, Lübke hoped the Queen enjoyed her visit as much as Queen Victoria had enjoyed her own homecoming down the Rhine with Prince Albert 120 years before. There would be no glossing over the family roots on this tour.
While her dress had wowed the public, it was the Queen’s words that would ensure glowing reviews from Germany’s political class and the media. One phrase, in particular, was much quoted the following day: ‘This tragic period in our relations is now happily over.’
Across Germany, six-figure crowds turned out in one region after another, as the Queen travelled in the royal train, which would be her home for eight of her ten nights on German soil. Sir Frank Roberts was informed by the German government that more television sets had been sold in the weeks immediately prior to the visit than in the whole of the previous year – happy echoes of Coronation Britain.
The Germans were thrilled when the Queen appeared in a foundry worker’s helmet at the Mannesmann steel mill at Duisburg, but only because she had looked suitably regal a few hours earlier at the state lunch at the Schloss Benrath. Children and horses were a prominent feature of the programme. The Queen’s soundbites might not match those of JFK but, in terms of public impact, post-war Germany had seen nothing quite like it.
On the British side, immense care had been taken to ensure that the Queen and the Duke were not filmed with any embarrassing German in-laws or cousins, despite the wishes of the German government to include them at major events. Ahead of the visit, the British Ambassador had written to the Queen’s deputy Private Secretary, Martin Charteris, warning that her hosts were very unhappy about royal attempts to freeze out the German relatives. Sir Frank Roberts relayed his discussion with the President, who had pointed out that it would be very bad manners. ‘The federal republic was basically a bourgeois country,’ the President had explained, ‘and public relations were bourgeois
. It was universal practice that when a visitor from overseas with relatives was being entertained, the close relatives would as a matter of course be invited to dinner.’ No matter that some of them had sported a swastika two decades earlier. If the Queen’s German relations were blackballed from the royal guest list, President Lübke would get ‘very severe criticism’.
In the end, little-known figures like the Duke of Brunswick and Prince Georg of Hanover were quietly slotted into dinners and receptions with a minimum of fuss. The Queen and Duke also spent the middle weekend in complete privacy with some of the Duke’s relatives, not least so that he could show the Queen some of the places he had known as a boy. These included Salem Castle, former seat of the Duke’s uncle, Prince Max of Baden, and a place where the young Prince Philip had spent part of his education. ‘It was a private weekend and the press didn’t bother them,’ recalls Sir William Heseltine. ‘I remember trying to get in past huge doors and guard dogs.’
The British press, for the most part, gave the visit very favourable coverage, although the royal photographer, Reginald Davis, remembers that this was out of deference to the Queen, not the hosts. He recalls that some of the British press party would always recoil at the sound of the German national anthem and conspicuously refused to stand to attention. ‘When they played their national anthem, we made a point of walking around,’ he says.
The only episode approaching a diplomatic incident, however, involved neither the British nor German media, but the French. They had taken magnificent Gallic umbrage at the Queen’s speech in Koblenz on 20th May, in which she had referred obliquely to the most famous Anglo-German victory in history. This state visit was taking place just days before the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and the Queen alluded to the Prussian Field Marshal, the Prince von Blücher, whose late arrival had helped the Duke of Wellington defeat Napoleon in 1815. The Queen did not actually talk about Waterloo. She was merely using it as a metaphor. ‘For fifty years, we heard too much about the things which have divided us,’ she said. ‘Let us now make a great effort to remember the things which unite us.’
The French, perhaps prodded by their President, made a terrible fuss. ‘The monstrous gaffe of Queen Elizabeth,’ declared the headline in Paris-Presse. Even the normally sober Le Figaro called for an end to the ‘celebration of victories’ (though it stopped short of demanding the renaming of the Arc de Triomphe, the Gare d’Austerlitz and all of France’s own victory-themed landmarks). The Foreign Office circulated an amused memo about French ‘tantrums’ and the German press poured scorn on their thin-skinned neighbours.
For many German commentators, the high point of the tour was the Queen’s visit to Berlin and its grimly spectacular barrier with the communist East. The decision to include Berlin had been a delicate one, since it was not technically part of West Germany but Allied territory administered by Britain, France, the USA and the Soviets. Both the British and German governments had been determined to give the USSR ‘no ground for claiming that the Allied status in Berlin had been tacitly undermined’. With that in mind, comic discussions took place between London and Bonn about how much of the wall the Queen might actually see without provoking a diplomatic incident with the Soviets. In the end, it was agreed that the Queen would look at the wall but not officially look over it. On the other hand, no one would mind very much if she had a quick peek across to the other side.
As far as the German media were concerned, she definitely had a very good gawp. The Frankfurt Abendpost reported the Queen’s ‘almost shocked expression’, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung spoke of her being ‘obviously moved’. There was no doubt that she got a good look, because she talked about it to the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, during ambassadorial presentations a few weeks later. He made a confidential note of the conversation, now lodged in the National Archives, noting that the Wall had made a ‘considerable impression’ on her. She admitted that she had previously doubted the need for quite so many troops on the border with Eastern Europe. ‘One look at and over the Berlin Wall’ had made her think again.
For the people of Berlin, still coming to terms with their isolation, it was a badly needed morale-booster. ‘My uncle was the first postwar attorney general of Berlin,’ says Thomas Kielinger. ‘Being a beleaguered city, the Berliners felt particularly happy at being singled out for this special treatment.’
As it turned out, the Russians had not been greatly troubled by the royal presence at all and let it pass. Foreign Office files show that the communist East German government, on the other hand, was duly outraged. It set to work churning out some vintage propaganda. The state-controlled Berliner Zeitung ran a lengthy report on the punitive cost of all the Queen’s castles, adding gravely: ‘The dresses of the Queen, which are burnt after being worn once, are paid for by British workers.’ Nonetheless, large numbers of East Germans had been seen straining for a look across no-man’s-land for a glimpse of the Queen. A British intelligence official, M. P. Buxton, reported that the Soviet officer in charge of the Marienborn border crossing had asked a British interpreter if he could procure any Western periodicals. The Russian was most disappointed not to be able to see a good picture of the Queen.
As Britannia set sail for home after the Queen’s farewell dinner in Hamburg, the West German press was heaping praise on what had been a landmark for both nations.§ Welt am Sonntag noted that Britain had seen a new side of Germany. It also thanked the Queen for coming to the Berlin Wall. The paper noted tersely that when General de Gaulle had visited Germany three years earlier, he had not even set foot in Berlin, for fear of upsetting the Russians. One former state secretary from Hanover had gone as far as describing the crowds filling trains and buses to see the Queen as a ‘Völkerwanderung’ – a phrase usually applied to the great European migrations that followed the decline of the Roman Empire.
In his despatch to London, the British Ambassador noted the way in which the German press had been studying the British coverage with a toothcomb – and had been pleasantly surprised by the results. ‘The British public has, for the first time since mass media of communication came into their own, been exposed to a concentrated diet of unprejudiced reporting on Germany and the Germans,’ said Sir Frank.
It had also been something of a novel experience for the Queen’s first Labour administration. The new Foreign Secretary, a few months into his job, had been bowled over. ‘I believe you had planned to be at Chequers for the weekend,’ Michael Stewart wrote to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, on 26th May. ‘If you could get back to greet Her Majesty, I think it would be well worth doing. The tour has been something of a personal triumph as well as a test of endurance.’ Wilson did not need to be asked twice.
Clearly the Queen enjoyed herself. There are few non-Commonwealth nations she has toured more, having made five state visits to Germany and several more official ones. The rest of the family are regulars. Here is a G7, European and NATO partner with which Britain has so much in common, so many historical (and royal) ties and yet so much baggage. Reconciliation would be a theme of all her subsequent tours. On her next state visit, in 1978, the Queen was back at the Berlin Wall and won tearful applause for her speech to Berliners in which she declared: ‘My people stand behind you.’ There was more grumbling from the communist side of the wall and more complaints from the French, too. This time, they were upset that the Queen had obliquely alluded to French persecution of the Huguenots in one of her speeches. This was a period of heightened terrorist activity in Europe. The German media were bowled over by the fact that whereas the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, had recently visited Germany with hundreds of security men, the royal visitors had not. ‘The Queen and Prince Consort brought with them one security officer each,’ noted Welt am Sonntag, ‘fewer than many a Bonn state secretary. Impressive indeed, this woman’. At a political level, the relationship was closer than ever (even if the Queen had not quite forgiven Chancellor Helmut Schmidt for stubbing out his cigarettes o
n the royal china the year before at a Palace dinner for the NATO summit in London). The chiefs of the German armed forces were thrilled to be invited to spend a day at sea in Britannia. ‘Our Queen For Five Days,’ the front page of Bild had declared. And so she was.
There would be more reconciling in 1992, as the Queen marked the reunification of Germany. She also honoured the civilian victims of the Allied bombing of Dresden at a service involving the choir of Coventry Cathedral and a lesson read (in German) by the Duke of Edinburgh. In 2015, she was still reconciling past and present as she visited a concentration camp for the first time, meeting survivors and liberators of Bergen-Belsen. ‘She is so loved in Germany,’ says former Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in Berlin for part of her 2015 visit. ‘The crowds were off the charts. I was really struck by how many times she had been and how hard she worked on this relationship.’
So much has changed over the years, not least Germany’s shape, size, borders and capital city. Yet this is a relationship that has fundamentally changed not one jot. Nor have the headlines. ‘Your Majesty, You were wonderful,’ declared the front page of Germany’s largest newspaper, Bild, at the end of her 1965 tour. Half a century later, on 25th June 2015, the Queen could have been forgiven a vague feeling of déjà vu as she picked up Bild once again to see the headline: ‘We Love You, Ma’am.’
CHINA, 1986
It is still remembered by the media for the single phrase: ‘slitty eyed’. No profile of the Duke of Edinburgh ever since has been complete without a mandatory reference to his alleged remark to a group of Edinburgh students during the 1986 state visit to China. The precise wording has never been exact, because no recording of the conversation exists. It was based on the account that a student, Simon Kirby, twenty-one, gave to a reporter at the time, detonating a media explosion. More than three decades later, it is still the first thing that many people recall about this game-changing royal mission – though not those who perhaps matter most: the Chinese themselves.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 54