I was preparing to go on the radio on the morning of the D-day commemorations when I remembered I needed to talk to a neighbour of mine about something else entirely. I don’t know him well but he’s a nice man, a good bit younger than me, with a young family. He’s German. I’d been wondering how the D-day events were being covered in Germany, and nearly asked him about it, but then stopped myself, remembering that I’ve never been quite sure how – or if – to talk to Germans about the war.
In 1982, when I was 15 years old, I went on a school exchange to a town called Leonberg, near Stuttgart. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t looking left and right and over my shoulder for baddies there, not at all. The teenagers and their teachers and their families were just like us, which wasn’t surprising to me, but the war had been very prominent in the books and films of my cultural life, and I had questions about it. And they weren’t, to be clear, along the lines of: “Did your grandad bomb my nan?” Although, to be honest, I’m not quite sure what I wanted to ask, nor who to ask, or how to ask it. But I was doing a lot of wondering.
Then, one evening over dinner with my host family, somebody dropped the W-word. I think it was in the context of talking about a nearby town that had been heavily bombed in the war. I must have gone pale or looked astonished or made a noise or something, because the table fell quiet and they all looked at me. I can see my penfriend’s face now, confused, apparently thinking I might not have been aware of it. “You know about the war?” he asked. And followed this up with: “You have heard of Adolf Hitler?” Oof. This was heavy. I might have croaked out a yes, or a ja, and that was that. Questions remained unasked.
Ten years after that, in 1992, I cycled to Croatia, through a lot of Germany. By now I knew what I wanted to ask. It was stuff like: what are you taught in school about it? What did your parents and grandparents tell you? Are you all supposed to go around feeling guilty? Do you get fed up being asked about it, or perhaps not being asked about it? I had countless conversations with people in bars and cafes and whatnot, talking in some depth about modern politics, the wall coming down, football, Nena’s 99 Luftballons, the war then under way in the former Yugoslavia and so on. But I never found a way of mentioning The War.
And as time passes it gets harder, as it feels ever more unreasonable to raise something that was coming to an end 80 years ago. Why are you still asking about the war, some poor German might demand, not unreasonably. But I wouldn’t be still asking, because I’d never had the nuts to ask in the past.
Pity my poor German neighbour, who I saw again the following day. It was time. Cringing apologetically, I got everything off my chest – and learned a fantastic amount in a short space of time. Initially he laughed and nodded, recognising the problem. That was a relief. He recalled coming to the UK as a language student when he was 16 and finding war films on the television “every bloody night”. He spoke about what his family had told him, how his grandfather had fought in the war, and how his grandmother occasionally “said about Hitler building good motorways or something”. Also about how he might talk to his children about it.
Perhaps it’s just me and Basil Fawlty with these hangups. But I don’t think so. It’s a British squeamishness about asking Germans about the war. If there’s not a magnificent German compound noun for that, there should be.
