Greetings Readers,
“Allow me first to apologise for this interruption” seems like an apposite quote to start this post, as does the image of the eponymous ‘V’ from the film adaptation of Moore and Lloyd’s classic V for Vendetta. Why do you ask? Well, there has been a significant and very obvious interruption to my planned schedule of blog entries and, rather bizarrely, it’s not for want of things to talk about. In fact, quite the opposite. I have desperately wanted to “…[take] some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat” but how to properly broach the topic in question, and knowing that I need to get it out of the way before I can go back to inane posts about writing and wargaming, has led to some serious writers’ block over the course of the last four months.
So what’s the issue?
Well, to put a not too finer point on it, Great Britain is the issue.
Having moved to Germany in July of 2016, in April this year I finally made the return trip to England to visit friends and families. Naturally, this led to the obvious question, “What’s it like living in Germany?” complemented by a similar line of questioning upon my return to my new home, “What was it like going back to England?”. The fundamental problem is, that it was (and is) very difficult to answer either of these two questions positively. Nine months of forging a new life in another country can give you some real perspective when you return to your point of origin, and unfortunately, it’s not one that works in GB’s favour.
The simple fact of the matter is that life in Germany is just better. As those who know me will have heard me say before, it’s not that the Germans do any one thing better, it’s just that the quality of every conceivable facet of life in Germany is just a notch or two higher so that the cumulative effect is massive leg-up in societal standards and those of everyday life.
We might joke, but the trains run on time.
In point of fact, if your train is not going to arrive precisely when it should, a little message will scroll across the announcement board saying, “a few minutes delay”. In Germany, a few minutes late is late. That’s without mentioning the fact that the average age of rolling stock in Germany is around 10-15 years, compared with the 30+ average in Great Britain. It’s also clean, and it’s spacious (this coming from someone who’s 6’2″). The same goes for buses, the bane of British public transport. By comparison, German buses are almost always clean, modern and punctual. Did I also mention that German public transport is around a third of the cost of its British counterpart, tickets cover you for buses, trams, underground, and regional trains, and that you will never see a single ticket barrier?
I think you’re starting to see my point…
Whilst I loved seeing friends and family, being back in England was ultimately exhausting and disheartening. The country looks and feels run down. One of the highlights of the trip was attending Salute 2017 with my best friend and his wife, and although I had an absolutely amazing day out with two people who I love very dearly, it was a struggle to ignore the fact that travelling through three or four different counties, the roads were all filthy and strewn with litter, buildings are small and often in a parlous state of repair, and people look unhappy and unhealthy with a simmering undercurrent of discontent. Contrast with the clean, well-maintained roads in Germany, or the decent-sized housing and continual renewal and high-quality new build (and I don’t mean the frenzied, ‘shove as many as you can on a plot of land the size of a postage stamp’ style ethos endemic to the British housing market). In London in particular, there is a massive disparity between certain areas. The area around the ExCel centre is a case-in-point example: You can quite literally cross a road from some of the most deprived housing estates in London to the modern affluence of the ExCel centre, overlooked by the financial heartlands of the Isle of Dogs, and it’s like crossing the border between East and West Germany before the Soviet Union fell.
By contrast, there is an expectation of a minimum standard in all things in Germany and Germans simply won’t tolerate it when things fall below this threshold. Unfortunately, this shines an unfavourable light on one very British trait that we love to champion; what could perhaps be best described as ‘Blitz Spirit’. As one of the many hold-overs from victory in WWII, we Britains always aspire to ‘soldier on’ and ‘make the best of a bad situation’ as did Londoners during the Blitz, revelling in the demonstration of that stereotypical ‘stiff upper lip’ and stoicism for which we enjoy being renown. In times of hardship it is most certainly a noble aspiration, however, the problem is, that it is an inherently self-destructive habit when used as a baseline attitude for dealing with day-to-day societal standards. We happily accept lower standards and adversity in our society, infrastructure and daily lives, and do so in a manner which suggests this is something to be lauded rather than an issue to be addressed.
Oh sure, we complain and grumble with the best of them, but at the end of the day, we shrug our shoulders and ‘muddle through’ because that’s the British Way™.
And when you start examining the national character, especially through the lens of defining British attitudes, it becomes an all-too-quick, downward spiral. For instance, let’s do something inherently inappropriate, and mention the war (he said, with bitter irony). There’s a strong argument for suggesting that losing WWII is the best thing that ever happened to Germany. Now that sounds like a fairly inflammatory statement under the circumstances but bear with me here. Defeat at the end of the second world war, and the revelation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, forced the German people to take a long, hard look at themselves. Nothing quite brings you up short like being directly confronted with the fact that overbearing pride in your national identity directly led to the death of some 12 million human beings in the space of five-plus years (for the pedantic; an estimated 6 million Jews and an estimated 6 million victims from other ethnic groups, political dissidents, vulnerable and disabled, and other ‘undesirables’ or ‘inferior’ peoples). That kind of atrocity really forces you to examine your national character and make serious changes, and that’s before you even address all the added baggage of your country being in ruins and split right down the middle by the people that angrily attempted to bomb you back to the stone-age for your hubris.
The problem is, we British have never really benefited from the same forced, reflective process.
The uncomfortable truth is, the Nazis were simply trying to forge a German Empire in much the same manner as we had already done with the British Empire (albeit on an accelerated timetable, and utilising the benefits of industrialisation and mechanisation). When we talk about the invasion of sovereign nations, the massacre of indigenous populations, the persecution of ethnic groups (and so on) from atop our ivory tower of victory in WWII, we rather forget that Britain had already been there, done that, and forced some poor bastard in a foreign workhouse to make the T-Shirt for us.
With gusto.
We also conveniently forget that many of the less-than-savoury feelings of racial superiority propounded by the Nazis were alive and well, and deeply embedded in British society in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and are still engrained in large swathes of the children of that era today (and continue to trickle down through many of their smaller-minded offspring). WWII was our ‘get out of jail free’ card, because it allowed the British to narrowly avoid coming face-to-face with their own iniquities and the secret, collective sigh of relief we breathed at the end of war, and the desire to lionise ourselves rather than look too closely at our own national character, has propelled us forward ever since.
And boy do we love to harp on about it…
It’s an odd dichotomy that we love to stereotype the Germans as being stuck in the 80’s, but in many ways, have ourselves failed to move on from the late 40’s. Whilst I am a great proponent of remembering the past to avoid the mistakes of the future, it is very definitely time we let go (it’s not respectful if you’re paying lip-service to remembrance born of droning regularity). We are talking about a conflict which was over 70 years ago now and actually, when it comes right down to it, bears very little relevance to current, day-to-day life (despite what certain elements of British society would like to believe), especially as, with the Brexit vote, we have made the ill-advised decision to turn our backs on the institutions we helped to create to safeguard against another, or those we created in its aftermath to better serve the people. Unfortunately, the fear of closer examination of our national character means we continue to trumpet the fact that ‘we prevailed’ in WWII, and the qualities we romanticise as being endemic to that victory, in the rather desperate hope that nobody looks too closely at the absolute mess we’ve made since. Unfortunately, this fear of discovery and self-lionisation is ruthlessly exploited by certain strata (pl) of society: Living outside of Great Britain for any length of time, makes you all too aware of the horrendous bias of large swathes of the British press. It’s almost bad comedy, seeing the degree to which we lampoon countries like Russia for the state control of media or America for its burgeoning cult of ignorance, but completely ignore the iniquities of our own media, which sees the majority of our major press outlets controlled by a concerted conglomerate of banking and big business, overtly in bed with a duplicitous career political class, all of them carefully stoking the worst excesses of our national identity and helping us to project our fears on external threats, so as to avoid greater scrutiny at home.
You only have to look at Brexit to see this in action.
Now, even if leaving the EU made financial and political sense (which it most assuredly doesn’t), it is going to be a disaster for our national identity. Isolation from the rest of Europe is going to serve to exacerbate the worst excesses of our national character: Being part of the European Union forces countries to put their national identity in check and consider themselves as part of a larger whole whether they like it or not. I often like to think of it as international peer review for national politics. The other side of it is, if you’re part of a group, you’re also forced to consider your responsibility for your actions within the group and how they directly affect your experience of it. In theory (at least) you learn to compromise and work collaboratively towards mutually beneficial goals. Unfortunately, being outside a group, it becomes all-too-easy to shift responsibility for any problems you encounter onto the actions of the group, even if they come as a direct result of your own mishandling. This is a narrative already starting to take shape in Great Britain and it poses a massive threat to the country, not just because of how it will colour our interactions with the world around us, but because it will also provide another excuse (in a long line of excuses) not to take that long, hard look at ourselves that we so desperately need…
Before closing this post, I just want to return to one earlier point which I would feel remiss if I didn’t address: The stereotype of the Germans being stuck in the 80’s.
Again, this really demonstrates our hubris as a nation.
Germany isn’t so much stuck in the 80’s, as it doesn’t tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater like we do. Whilst we’re always focused on the short-term, get-it-while-you-can, keep-up-man, current fashion, Germans still innovate, they explore the cutting edge, they keep their finger on the pulse, but they also preserve things that work and benefit them as a society. They’re a fantastic example of the age old axiom, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Although it is going to sound really flippant, the best example of this I can give you is to tug at your sense of nostalgia and mention butchers and bakers. In Great Britain, the exponential growth of the supermarket during the 80’s and 90’s was the death-knell of the local butcher and baker, so that today you’re usually hard-pressed to find a village or town with a butcher and a baker (let alone more than one), and those that remain, tend to really sell themselves on tradition or supposed superior quality of ‘locally sourced’ produce (with customarily inflated pricing). In Germany, pretty much every town (and village) supports at least one butcher and baker (often more), and whilst admittedly they’re usually franchises, they still manage to co-exist alongside supermarkets because people like having a local butcher and a local baker, and see the utility in continuing to do so. It’s the same reason that the shops are shut on Sunday and you usually go and see friends and family for coffee and cake at 3pm; cycle paths, branch lines and tram lines still exist, continue to be maintained and extended; there’s an ice-cream parlour in every town; families typically live two generations in one house, one on the first floor the other on the ground floor; bank branches are locally owned and you can see your account manager who lives in the same town as you; friends play board games when they socialise and that’s usually how you start a Friday night; people dress smartly whether they’re at work or not; workmen take pride in their work, no matter how mundane it is; and a myriad of other things that we think of as belonging to another decade, but in actual fact, just make sense to keep on doing because they work and they make life better.
Long story short: We really need to get our head out of our backside and instead of laughing along at the same, tired, worn-out jokes about ‘Zee Germans’ actually recognise that, if we swallowed our over-inflated sense of national pride, we might just learn something about how to be a well-rounded, functional, and democratic, 21st century society instead of just pretending very loudly, hoping nobody notices, and getting angry when people finally call us on our bullshit and point out the pretence…