Spear's Wealth Management Survey

The Huns They Are A-Changin'

Forget the silly hates, sausages and other old stereotypes - Germans are actually quite agreeable human beings, says Anthony Haden-Guest

When I got to Gordonstoun the head boy was an impossibly lofty figure called Prince Max von Baden. There were plenty of other Germans there too, mostly Prussians, and I was friendly with some of the ones of my generation.

They included a von Stauffenberg, as I remember, a nephew of Claus von Stauffenberg, whose life, and heroic, doomed attempt to take out the Fuhrer is currently the subject of a movie starring Tom Cruise .

The Germans at Gordonstoun were mostly children of the kind of parents who Josef Goebbels once described with loathing as ‘radical noblemen.’ Otherwise, why would they have sent their sons to a ‘progressive’ school, started in Scotland - after considering of a country house in Pembrokeshire, Wales - by the radical educationist, Kurt Hahn?

Fairly progressive anyway. When my otherwise splendidly free-thinking housemaster, Erich Meissner - yes, another German - asked me whether any boys in the house masturbated, I was savagely punished for saying that I imagined they all did.

So during the post-war years I did not share the prickliness and sensitivity that often characterized Anglo-German relations at the time, a fraughtness splendidly caught in ‘The Germans’, one of the episodes from Fawlty Towers.

Nonetheless during those years, doubtless just because the British and the Germans are in many ways so similar, I noticed that small differences could be intensely irritating.

This, after all, was that impossibly distant period when Brits were thought to be doomed to languish in a state of emotional permafreeze until exposed to warmer parts of Europe, preferably the Mediterranean. So Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, France were terrific places to visit.

Germany would not then, I think, have been widely considered a liberating destination. There was that grim entity the Berlin Wall and I well remember the spiritual shadow it cast. I was on both sides of it as a young reporter covering the making of the Michael Caine movie, Funeral In Berlin.

This, and Len Deighton’s entire cycle of novels, had a great deal to do with our imprinted notions of Germany. A decade later the Germans had the Baader-Meinhof Gang, while we had the Angry Brigade, none of whom, I think, became mysterious prison suicides.

Mores differed greatly, of course. In booming West Germany. men shook hands too vigorously and too often. Indeed, the late Jorg Immendorff, the terrific artist, actually shook hands, clicked his heels and said ‘Immendorff’ when we were introduced. Germans ate black meat, sauerkraut, monstrous sausages and mountains of potato.

The men wore jackets with too much sporty ribbing and hats made out of material that seemed to be cut from billiard tables, and which almost invariably had a shaving-brush thingy stuck in the brim.

The women’s hats were like shell-casings and the women themselves tended to resemble either bullet-proof Rhinemaidens or the ringer introduced into Michael Redgrave’s railway carriage in the great Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Lady Vanishes.

True, as with the Brits, as indeed with all tribes, there is often an element of willful self-parody to such social dealings. ‘Are you joking?’ I once asked Michael Werner, the art dealer, about what I no longer remember.

‘You know that I am German,’ Werner said. ‘I have no sense of humour.’ Actually, Werner is a drily witty fellow, and a Berliner, and Berliners are known in Germany for their street-smart sense of humour. But our comparative senses of humour can indeed be an issue.

Years ago, I wrote and narrated a documentary for public television in New York. It was called The Affluent Immigrants, which was a polite term denoting Eurotrash, and it included a number of interviews and set-ups with my fellow ‘Trashers’.

One of these set-ups was in Southampton, Long Island. It was on a street nicknamed ‘Hun Lane’ because it was thickly settled by just the kind of rather grand Germans I had known at Gordonstoun. One of these, a prince, introduced me to a friend, a gynecologist (not their real names, OK?).

‘This is Heini,’ he said. ‘He is very popular. All the women open their legs for him.’

‘Well, Thomas! That is not so funny,’ protested the gyno.

The prince laughed heartily. ‘You see?’ he said to me. ‘He is German. He has no sense of humour.’ This, sadly, was all off-camera.

What we are now observing is that national characters are not monolithic and unchangeable. The Brits are changing in both subtle ways and unsubtle ones. There was a time when the Anglo-Saxons maintained stiff upper lips (Hello, Dianamania!), shrank from sensuality (Yo, Page Three!) and were reserved (Hiya, Big Brother!).

Well, the Germans have been equally transformed. The only von Stauffenberg I now see anything of is Franz von Stauffenberg. He is a conceptual artist, he lives in Berlin, which is one of Europe’s most lively cities, and he is one of the more amusing people that I know.