… [M]uch in the Finnish national character can be explained by the fact that they have been traditionally hunters in the forests, not agricultural people. In their wild corner of Europe they survived by lying low and keeping their heads down – while preparing beautifully designed traps for the unwary. (For a time in 1939–40 the technique worked particularly well with the Russians.) … [T]he habits and interests acquired in the forests still mean much to many people. Any Finn, no matter how taciturn, will thaw a little if he gets a chance to talk of saunas or fishing or hunting game or collecting berries or even mushrooms. And any Finn, no matter how industrious, will pounce on the first excuse for a holiday and make his way to his country cottage where, as far away from anyone else as possible and as untroubled as
possible by any modern convenience, he will restore his energies by living a forest life as his ancestors did.
Germany
‘They almost appear to be blaming us for their losses’
SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, AUGUST 1975
For a British diplomat chasing the top jobs, the embassy at Berlin (or Bonn, before reunification) came second only to Washington and Paris. But despite decades of profitable peace, Anglo-German relations toil today, as they toiled when this despatch was written, under the weight of memory of two episodes of total war. Diplomats posted to Bonn or Berlin were never short of a theme for their valedictory.
Sir Nicholos Henderson’s 1979 valedictory from Paris (p. 200) is justly famous as a courageous alarm call that Britain was falling behind her competitors in Europe and had only herself to blame. Henderson’s other valedictories from his previous European posts are less well known, but pack a similar punch – although with retirement still some way off, the ambassador picks his targets more carefully.
(CONFIDENTIAL)
Bonn,
13 August, 1975
Sir,
THE BURDEN OF THE PAST
Thirty years after the end of World War Two the British still have doubts and preoccupations about the Germans, more so than about any other people, more so than do many other nations in the West.
There is, of course, a difference between generations. I am struck by how slowly the ‘black record’ dies, by how often I am asked by visitors from the UK of a certain age, whose business does not bring them into frequent contact with the Germans, whether there is not some lack of balance, and some deep-seated undemocratic, not to say brutal, streak in the Germans that makes them unlike others and of which we should beware. But it is not only the older generation in Britain. Those who are too young to have experienced the Nazis are encouraged by television films and comics to see all Germans as ‘baddies’.
The Germans do not understand this. For a representative of Her Majesty’s Government in the Federal Republic today it requires great, not to say gymnastic, efforts to try to bridge the gulf between the British people’s lively remembrance of the past and the Germans’ oblivion about it.
There is no European country that is so governed by its past as Germany, and none that seeks so strenuously to avoid it. To the modern German there are no national heroes, nobody to compare with Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln in the US; or Cromwell, Nelson or Churchill in the UK; or Joan of Arc, Napoleon or de Gaulle in France. Even Frederick the Great and Bismarck are seen mainly as Prussian figures, coming from a part of Germany that is not part of the Federal Republic. When you come to think about it, about the nature of Germany’s recent past, there is really no paradox in this. But there is a certain obtuseness in the German attitude, and although I quite understand why they do not think, particularly the younger ones, that they should continue to suffer from guilt about what was done in Germany’s name a generation ago, I think it insensitive of them not to realise the difficulties others have in forgetting it. One of my first experiences of this kind occurred soon after I had arrived here from Poland, when some German who, in other respects seemed understanding and aware, told me that he could not see why the Poles continued to bear a grudge against the Germans because the Germans felt no grievance towards the Poles. Likewise, I continue to be surprised by the number of Germans who criticise Herr Willy Brandt for having knelt at the ghetto in Warsaw, a gesture they regard as unnecessarily humiliating. Herr Brandt, perhaps because he has lived abroad more than most of his compatriots, does not appear to have the customary gap that separates the way the Germans see themselves from the way others see them, an airlock in their system that is largely responsible, I think, for our view about their humour.
Then I think it is difficult for the hackles of an Englishman to remain entirely horizontal when he hears, as he does quite often, a German spokesman exhorting others not to forget the lessons of the ’30s. I remember Herr Scheel1 when he was Foreign Minister criticising the idea of the French force de frappe as being a Maginot Line. More recently Herr Scheel, addressing the American Congress, said that ‘totalitarianism may use arbitrary means, yet in the end freedom will triumph’. For those for whom the Nazi torch-lights still flicker in the mind’s eye, it is a little difficult to take, from those who may have borne them in procession, warning about the dangers of the dark. It is a particular theme of Finance Minister Apel’s to say that he and his generation feel no responsibility for the war and are not prepared to fork out money now under pressure of guilt. That is all right, but Herr Apel himself does not seem to realise the effect it has when he starts to criticise something, as I have heard him doing, as being a ‘Munich’. Of course Herr Apel, aged 43, represents the new Germany whose attitude toward the past differs from that of their elders: the latter try to ignore it; the young dismiss it as none of their business.
I also have been surprised in talking to Germans from different walks of life and of varying ages, how relatively little admiration there is for Stauffenberg2 and others who resisted the Nazis. When I said to the wife of a very senior German official who had mentioned the horrors of the Nazi time that I assumed that for her and other like-minded Germans, Stauffenberg must be a heroic figure the answer I got was ‘No, he tried to undermine his country in a moment of dire need.’ Of course, this is not a universal attitude, and certainly among the young there would be admiration for those who had sacrificed their lives in trying to overthrow Hitler, but they are not national heroes by any means. In this same vein, I should also mention how often Germans refer to the sacrifices they have had to make since 1945, i.e. in particular, the loss of territory in the East, as being due to the fact that they lost the war, rather than to the fact that they caused it. They almost appear to be blaming us for their losses.
1. Herr Scheel: Walter Scheel, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1974–9. Like a sizeable minority of Germans of his generation, Scheel was once a member of the Nazi Party. So was his successor as President, Karl Carstens.
2. Stauffenberg: Claus Von Stauffenberg, leader of the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler with a briefcase bomb.
‘Seriousness, thoroughness, humourlessness, perfectionism and pedantry’
SIR JULIAN BULLARD, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, MARCH 1988
Julian Bullard was the last British Ambassador to divided Germany; the Berlin Wall fell the year after he retired. It was not the first time in his career that his lot had been to face down a Communist regime. As head of the East European and Soviet Department, Bullard had overseen the very public expulsion of 105 Soviet KGB agents from London. A further extract from this despatch is on p. 123.
BRITISH EMBASSY BONN
7 March 1988
The Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Howe QC MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
Sir,
TAKE TROUBLE WITH GERMANY
I have the honour to send you my thoughts on leaving the Federal Republic of Germany after 3 periods of service at Bonn spread over 25 years.
Introducti
on
It used to be said that the Federal Republic was a country where the Government worked badly and the economy well, and where the first knew better than to interfere with the second. In the last year or two the Government in Bonn has at times worked so badly as to cause serious qualms at home and abroad, while many doubt whether the economy is as well equipped for the 1990s as it showed itself to be in the 1960s and 70s. Does this matter? I think it does, because the health of Germany matters to Britain, and because I believe the Federal Republic to be a less stable and less ‘normal’ country than may appear at first sight.
Constants
Certain constants have operated here throughout my time. There are the regional differences, which become more evident as one learns to recognise the surnames, accents and facial characteristics which go with certain attitudes of mind. But I think it is still possible to talk of German national characteristics, and one of these is the seriousness, thoroughness, humourlessness, perfectionism and pedantry which have made the German the butt of so many anecdotes. (To quote a true one, the artist Philip Ernst painted the view from his window, leaving out a tree which spoiled the design: that night he was attacked by remorse, got up from bed – and cut down the tree.) ‘Ordnung’ has a high status here, and to some Germans the rule of law seems to mean more than the rule of conscience.
On top of this comes patriotism, but of a peculiar kind. It attaches itself unhesitatingly to German sporting champions, but begins to have misgivings at the sight or sound of anything that echoes the Third Reich. An influential book of 1987 called Die verletzte Nation (‘The wounded Nation’) showed how especially younger Germans recoil from what in other countries are self-evident propositions about loyalty to the State. This is one of the reasons why even some of our best friends in Bonn found it hard to understand the Falklands episode.
The other main constant is the structure of the Federal Republic, in the form given it by the victorious allies and German constitutional lawyers. ‘Designed to be inefficient’, this system has been called, and the brakes built into it are indeed powerful. In a federation, and with proportional representation, elections come round at an average rate of 3 a year, and more often than not they produce coalitions. Another check on policy is the apparatus of administrative and constitutional courts which can block, perhaps for months on end, anything from American chemical weapons to a plan to build a test-track for Mercedes cars. These checks and balances seemed to do Germany no harm during the years of the economic miracle: indeed they were thought to promote the consensus on which that was based. But in recent years it has been clear that difficult decisions would be taken and put into effect more quickly if there were not so many in-built ways of holding them up.
Special Factors
Two things are special about the Federal Republic. The first and more obvious is that we have here a state not co-terminous with the nation which lives in it. In saying this I have in mind not only the 17 million Germans in the GDR, but also the German communities in the Soviet Union and in every East European country except Bulgaria, numbering perhaps another 4 million altogether …
The second and less obvious peculiarity of the Federal Republic is that it rests on a crust of history only 40 years thick, beneath which a hot fire can still burn. We saw this over President Reagan’s visit to Bitburg1 in 1985, and we are starting to see it now as journalists look for parallels between the cases of President Waldheim and von Weizsäcker.2 Herr Werner Höfer,3 a kind of German Sir Robin Day, lost his post in 1987 when a magazine reprinted something he had written in 1943. The Historians’ Debate of 1986/87, which was about the historical context in which Hitler’s crimes should be seen, has given way to a Philosophers’ Debate about how much of a Nazi Heidegger was. I have known Germans shy away from statistics on handicapped children, from boarding schools and even from an auditorium holding 2000 people, simply because of their historical echoes. Earlier and safer periods of German history are studied with interest, but not with anything like the emotional bond which unites so many people in Britain with the nation’s past.
A corrective is needed here. Outside the province of the state, Germany is rich in traditions which go back a long way and do not seem to be uneconomic. In large country houses meals are still served by what are obviously family retainers in uniform, and I know one Schloss near Coburg which still sends the best tablecloths to be washed at a place in Holland where the water is thought to be specially soft. At the other end of the social scale, the fruit and vegetable market still brings the grower into direct touch with the buyer in the town square, and there seems to be no shortage of skilled manual craftsmen, whether it is a question of laying cobblestones in elegant fan patterns or of reducing a tree trunk to a squared baulk of timber in about 10 minutes. There is continuity too in the barracks built by Hitler which now house (among other things) Ministries, Universities and an Agricultural Research Institute near Brunswick – where incidentally the starting point for today’s research into non-food crops was the work done by Hitler’s scientists on import substitutes in the 1930s, in preparation for the Second World War and the inevitable allied blockade. It is the Federal Republic itself, not life inside it, that lacks history.
1. Bitburg: President Reagan accepted a German invitation to visit the Bitburg military cemetery as part of the events to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of VE Day. Then the White House realized that Waffen SS were among the 2,000 Nazi soldiers buried there. Reagan went ahead with the visit despite the controversy.
2. von Weizsäcker: Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker worked on nuclear research for the Nazis under Werner Heisenberg in the 1940s. The Americans beat them to the secrets of chain reaction. After the war, the German physicists said this was a deliberate failure – they did not want the Nazis to be first to the atomic bomb.
3. Herr Werner Höfer: Höfer wrote an article in 1943 in support of the execution of the pianist Karlrobert Kreiten, who was hanged after a Gestapo informant overheard him criticizing Hitler. Höfer was forced to resign from Germany’s equivalent of Question Time after Der Spiegel published the story.
‘German television makes Des O’Connor look like alternative comedy’
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER, HM AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY, OCTOBER 1997
When New Labour stormed to power in 1997 some diplomats found themselves out of step with the times. High-ranking diplomats had served Tory ministers for more than a decade, and enough of them lived up to the Foreign Office stereotype as public-school Telegraph readers to kindle the suspicions of left-wing MPs on the back benches. The difference between the two sides was largely one of culture and outlook. In the lead-up to the election a group of nervous diplomats sought out Denis MacShane, who rose to become Minister for Europe under Tony Blair, to ask him what might be on the incoming Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s agenda. He told them to try reading the Guardian.
But there were also deep policy differences; Labour orthodoxy in opposition was that the Foreign Office was guilty of supporting apartheid South Africa and of appeasing Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslavia. And a few diplomats did get the chop when Labour came to power. But the best of them were able to adapt to the changing political weather. Sir Christopher Meyer, recently appointed ambassador in Bonn, was New Labour’s pick for Washington. In promoting Meyer to the most high-profile job in the service, Robin Cook was giving a huge vote of confidence in the Foreign Office’s political neutrality; Meyer had once been press secretary to John Major. The ambassador repays the compliment in this valedictory, with a glowing account of the impact in Germany of Tony Blair’s landslide election on 1 May 1997. The valedictory also makes reference to the victory in the French parliamentary elections a month later of another European Socialist, Lionel Jospin (Prime Minister of France, 1997–2002.)
RESTRICTED
BRITISH EMBASSY BONN
10 October 1997
The Rt Hon Robin Cook QC MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affai
rs
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
Sir,
GERMANY: HELLO AND GOODBYE
As the shortest serving British Ambassador to Germany since the War, and probably ever, first and last impressions become one. I offer the Chief Clerk a new concept in value for money: the combined first and farewell call.
My time falls into two distinct parts: before 1 May and after 1 May. Labour’s massive win has transformed Britain’s position in Germany for the better. The job is to turn this into a long-term increase in British influence.
Before 1 May Britain was in German eyes a tiresome irritant. Kohl felt personally offended by the last Government. In the EU we were a problem to be got round. Nobody was terribly interested in our views. Nobody wanted to admit that Britain knew something about restructuring and tackling unemployment that Germany did not.
Parting Shots Page 4