The Italian prime minister, speaking in the European Parliament on 2 July as his country assumed its six-month presidency of Europe, immediately responded to vocal criticism from the German MEP Martin Schulz by suggesting that he would make a good kapo, or Nazi concentration camp guard in a film presently shot in Italy. A few days later, Berlusconis tourism minister, Stefano Stefani, compounded the insult with this characterisation of German tourists to his country: We do know the Germans... those uniform, supra-nationalistic blondes, these ten million tourist goody-goodies who come every year to noisily conquer our beaches.
After two days of rising embarrassment and a threat to Italys tourist revenues from its most lucrative source Stefani resigned. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the blonde beach beasts, Gerhard Schröder, decided to cancel his prospective holiday near Rimini. The shameless Berlusconi had talked to Schröder, denied apologising for his own offence, yet also pleaded that his remarks were intended as ironic the last resort of the desperate.
I know that in Italy, there is a man producing a film on Nazi concentration camps I shall put you forward for the part of guard (Silvio Berlusconi, to Martin Schulz MEP)
The defence of irony has a grain of truth, if irony is understood as an art which exposes the political enemy to general mockery; in this case, a funfair mockery that plays to the German cliché prevalent among Europes simpler souls. After all, Silvio Berlusconi had offered only a movie part to Schulz. The prime minister clearly thinks in terms of film scripts, as Ronald Reagan once did. It was thus, after all, that he made his fortune, and now stars in his very own action film: Quo vadis, Europe?.
A centurys stigma
But in a deeper sense of course, the Italian film about Germany that runs through Berlusconis mind is a dark one; and it also courses through the minds of many other Europeans. It is about the genocide of the Jews, and the horror that German soldiers, the Gestapo and the SS visited upon Europe from 1938 to 1945. Like the Mongols who have for centuries had to live with an association with Genghis Khan, Germany will carry the history of the Third Reich for a very long time.
Every German Chancellor discovers that, in routine political and media communication among its European allies, references to the Third Reich are still an everyday matter, and even used as a coercive force. (The German industrys compensation payments mainly to Poles over the use of forced labour in wartime, a decision that came morally far too late, is but one example). Even Helmut Kohls symbolic reconciliation meetings at Verdun (with Francois Mitterrand) and Bitburg (with Ronald Reagan) had the unintended consequence of restoring the past, rather than its overcoming, to foreign press headlines.
This is especially, but not exclusively, true in Britain. The memory is still fresh of Margaret Thatchers infamous seminar in March 1990 where eminent historians were invited to justify the then prime ministers violent dislike of reunification, in a discussion replete (according to the summary presented by her chief foreign policy adviser, Charles Powell) with perorations on the German character and its alleged dreams of world domination.
Over a decade and three European treaties later, a German minister of finance can quite easily be introduced as Gauleiter in an English tabloid. The fact that Krauts and Huns from the two world wars still feature prominently in a bizarre role as comic-book villains of the present day in Britains yellow press has (in vain) aroused and enraged every German ambassador in London.
Nor is this grim association between past and present confined to Europe. Every year, the German embassy in Washington files hundreds of Holocaust articles from the New York Times and Washington Post. In the United States, there are more than 300 Holocaust university chairs. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is among the most visited in the capital. Of course, nobody claims that it projects the history of the genocide onto modern Germany, on the contary; and it also represents a good hook on which to hang a century of totalitarism. But the one thing the museum cant deny is that the genocide was a German crime. It is the stigma of our nation.
A triple lesson
How should the Germans respond? For us, there are three lessons from this shabby affair.
First, keep a sense of proportion, and (the very quality the same tabloid press, as well as politicians like Stefani, always denies us) of humour. The use of scapegoats for propaganda purposes is, after all, one of the instruments of nationalism and totalitarianism. It serves political ends. That Hitler is still alive in a charcoal burners hut in the Black Forest or beneath a sombrero in Argentina was part of global mythology until the late 1950s. The political message was obvious: as long as Hitler was alive you couldnt trust the Germans, an idea best conveyed by Bertolt Brechts over-quoted phrase about the womb still being fertile from which such a thing crawled (der Schoss ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem das Kroch).
Second, discard any residual illusions about our helmeted and armed image abroad. For all the years of reflection on our criminal history, and all the efforts at home to address the past remorsefully, the image is alive and well even in a united Europe. Yet this state of things has its advantages too: German exchange students, confronted by the Nazi-cliché in England, suddenly know what it means to be part of a despised minority.
Third, continue to recommit ourselves to reasonable and democratic politics. Grotesque prejudices are also a reason to organise the world reasonably with the intention of banning crude populist power from politics.
Dont take it to heart
It was of course one of the psychological founding principles of the European Union to tame the stereotypical German and to incorporate his (then) terrifying economic power within the community of nations which, indeed, got to know us not only as noisy but also as dangerous.
In present circumstances, its stagnant economy and sober political culture make the Federal Republic and its 21st century citizens unworthy of the Berlusconi-style image of Germania projected onto it. However, it is at the same time a useful indicator of the true condition of Europe. A prosperous future for the continent will not be secured by a single currency, nor even by a constitution which regulates common standards of liberty and justice, but by overcoming the prejudices which disfigure the way in which the peoples of Europe talk to themselves and to one another.
Such a process is the work of decades. It presupposes that war experiences, shared values, the literary and artistic treasures of this band of peoples who are uniting on our continent cannot be regarded as mere frills on an economic contract. It will take more than serious common interests for Europes identity to prosper. It will take tolerant curiosity of our neighbour states, of their historical interpretations and of the beauty of their cultural achievements. The sinister soap-opera Germany that evidently runs in a continuous loop around Silvio Berlusconis head has nothing to do with such curiosity.
The Federal Chancellor will not visit Italy this summer. But let this be understood not as a refusal of Italy but of a populist politics that is as unworthy of beautiful Italy today as of the tolerant, united Europe of tomorrow.
