The Barriers of Prejudice
The Germans and the British seem to find it difficult to understand each other. I have often thought about he reasons for this. In the fifties there was still considerable German prejudice towards the British and this sometimes went back even to pre-1914 times. It had to do with the "balance of power" which caused Britain always to oppose the strongest Continental power, a concept that certainly ruled England's foreign policy in the 18th and 19th century. On the other side German propaganda had held the British to be responsible for the 1914-1918 War because of commercial envy: the British were "a nation of shopkeepers", looking askance at Germany's rise in the world. It was the German poet Ernst Lissauer, a Jew, who had written the poem "Gott strafe England" (May God punish England) that then expressed the nation's mind. A whole generation grew up learning in school that Great Britain was waging war against women and children and blockading Germany in order to starve it into submission. Those sorts of prejudices were not easily exchanged for a different perspective of history.
The British, too, had their preconceived ideas of Germans both false and true. The terrible twelve years from 1933 to 1945 had inflicted major damage on Anglo-German relations that has not been wholly overcome. No other country has followed so intensely what happened in Germany in those darkest years of our history. It was perhaps because the British felt linked and related to us in so many ways and for that reason alone they failed to understand how our nation could be capable of such monstrous deeds. Moreover, in 1933, the British themselves were not at all decisively opposed to National Socialism as later on. They sometimes saw Hitler in the same light as Mussolini who, since coming to power, had brought order and prosperity to Italy and "made the trains run on time". That was the widespread foreign view and many British thought that Hitler would follow on those lines. They seriously underestimated him and could not believe that he and his system would embark on diabolical crimes.
This explains also why, in 1960, during my time in London when there were some anti-semitic outrages in Germany, the British reacted quickly, indeed violently, so that in the Embassy we had the impression that the pendulum was swinging too far the other way. Subconsciously people may have thought that having been proved wrong before in judging events in Germany and not having recognised the terrible excesses for what they were, they did not want to be caught out again. This also accounts for the widespread questioning, especially in the fifties and sixties, whether the Federal Republic was genuine in its democratic development. Again and again I was asked: "What are you doing to face up to your past?" "Are you telling your children the truth about Hitler?" "Do you not seem to want to forget too easily?" Were not, people wanted to know, the very forces which led Germany into disaster back in power again and preventing the growth of a new generation with healthier attitudes?
Another question put to me concerned our foreign policy. Were we about to repeat our mistake, turning to the East out of dissatisfaction with the West? Was there not Rapallo, and earlier still the Russo-Prussian Convention of Tauroggen in 1812? Whether the comparisons applied or not, anxieties remained that one day Germany might sever its Western links and try to achieve unification in alliance with the Soviet Union. Incomprehensible as these Western fears might be to most of us, I felt that we had to deal with them patiently and keep on explaining how things were really developing in Germany.
Of course, it could never be only a matter of our two Governments deciding that we must form closer links. The peoples themselves in both countries must understand each other better and create the basis for genuine friendship. Signing treaties for cooperation in economic, cultural and foreign policy and resolving that they would work would be like putting a roof on top of the foundations and hoisting on it the flag of Anglo-German friendship. First the house must be built on solid foundations and furnished well and that is something only individuals can do. This is particularly important in regard to Great Britain, a country in which people's individual credit matters more than material credit. These were my thoughts when, in May 1955, I embarked on my mission at the Court of St. James's.
