In the biggest shadow of all

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanjahu's recent idiocy, blaming the Jewish Holocaust not on the Nazis but on a former Palestinian leader, has forced Germany, and particular Chancellor Angela Merkel as the global representative, into a strange and awkward position.

Merkel is working with US Foreign Secretary John Kerry at the moment in attempts to end the latest round of violence in the Palestine/Israel conflict, so the Chancellor had to move quick to stamp out this particular fire before Netanjahu's words set the region even more aflame. 

Das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas
(Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), Berlin

Germany doesn't hide or fudge its responsibility for the Holocaust. So, in response to Netanjahu's screaming about Palestinians and the Holocaust making global headlines, the world looked to Germany.

And then, once everyone was looking , they had to basically say, 'That Holocaust. Yeah, that was definitely still us.'

In international diplomacy, Merkel's response was as admirably definite as it was solemn: “Germany abides by its responsibility for the Holocaust. We don’t see any reason to change our view of history.”

So button it, Benny big balls.

However, this event has highlighted a recurring symptom in Germany that I've noticed since arriving here. Aspects of the country's behaviour – its politics, its media, its citizens – is still partly informed by its role in World War II, 70-odd years ago.

Wilmersdorfer Witwen

Just a few days after arriving in Germany, my wonderful flatmate took me to see the play Linie 1 (with English subtitles projected on the walls). Written in the 80's, the play used the central U-Bahn (tube) line through the heart of west Berlin – the Orient Express to Kreuzberg - to explore the culture, politics and people of 1980s Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FRD) Berlin. It's a wonderful play, but the scene I remember most vividly is the hilarious Wilmerdorf Widows – Wilmersdorfer Witwen – song.

Die Wilmersdorfer Witwen

Four self-righteous widows, all played here for comic effect by male actors, have a go at the young heroin of the play, when a middle-aged lady intervenes. The widows insult the lady, whose father was a "socialist degenerate" and "red rat", who replies "Better a red rat than a brown blowfly".

The widows, declaring themselves "German nationalists" and a preference to be "brown" than "red", go on to sing about the advantages of the Third Reich, and that they are fighting "for purity and discipline, as fifty years ago". Their deceased husbands had high positions in the Nazi party and consequently for the rest of their lives pick up their fat government widower pensions.

It's an extremely funny performance (you can watch it below, sieg heils and all, but unfortunately I can't find any English subtitles anywhere online).

Linie 1 is from the 80s, but 30 years on it is still massively popular in Germany, with secondary school teachers regularly dragging their classes along to see it.

That a film like Linie 1, that ostensibly comments on modern-day Berlin (in the 1980s), should delve into the city's terrible past with Wilmersdorfer Witwen, and feel the need to poke fun at a lasting but marginal relic from that dark period, and that Wilmersdorfer Witwen is still so popular in 2015, I think speaks volumes about Germany's insecurities. 

Er ist Wieder Da

A new film came out in Germany a few weeks back simply called Er ist Wieder Da , or 'He's Back'. The film basically has Hitler returning to modern-day Berlin, bemused to find a peaceful multicultural city and a woman in charge of the country.

It's a satire, and even in German looks hilarious, but where people in most other countries I think would rightly laugh at the film and its extraordinary premise, in Germany it seems to have really touched a nerve and caused some controversy.

Our modern-day Hitler, for instance, meets real life members of the UKIP-style Alternative for Germany party and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), while the final scenes show news footage of far-right protests and a rally by the nasty PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), a sort of EDL but without the charm.

As Berliner Morgenpost, one of Berlin's major newspapers, said, "A fake Hitler, a small moustache ... allowed insights into Germany's dark side." Hitler, it said, in a figurative sense, "never really left...The far-right ideology smoulders to this day and has found new forums... in the form of the Alternative for Germany and the PEGIDA movement.”

Indeed, one viewer, who gave her name as Angela, complained: 'It was all a bit too forced. The film is playing too hard on the fear about Nazi ideology, and they only picked out the worst sequences.' 

Tell me again about the better parts of Nazi-ism?

As the AFP reports

'In the real-life scenes, lead actor Oliver Masucci - replete with Hitler moustache and uniform -- is seen getting rousing receptions from ordinary people, many of whom pose for "selfies" with him.

'Tourists and football fans cheer the fake Hitler at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, in a Bavarian village and elsewhere, and elderly people pour their hearts out to him, often voicing extremist views.

'"Yes, bring back labour camps," says one citizen to the dictator.'

'Frau Merkel. Here is the people!'

PEGIDA

Speaking of which, according to reports, tens of thousands of people cheered at a PEGIDA-organised anti-refugee rally last week in Dresden when some tool with the microphone said 'It's a shame the concentration camps aren't up and running.'

It's the specificity of the language used here that is interesting. Above all the usual far-right brain-farts you get from these numpties, in Germany they casually and approvingly talk of specific places where millions of people were murdered.

Concentration camps? Really?

from the good, good people at Ballspielverein 
Borussia 09 eV Dortmund (Borussia Dortmund FC)

Refugee crisis

Even Germany's heroic response to the Syrian refugee crisis is haunted by World War II.

Willkommenskultur , a word really invented by the Government in essence to create an open and warm welcome that would attract skilled workers from other countries to Germany, has been hijacked and used as a much better application to encourage help from German citizens for the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving here by the month.

According to a recent opinion poll commissioned by the TV channel ARD-DeutschlandTrend, a simply stunning 88% of Germans have donated clothes or money to refugees, or are planning to do so.

But, it's quietly acknowledged by Germans that their efforts in the crisis are, at least in a small part, a response to the events of the WWII.

Petra Bendel, of the Central Institute for Regional Research at Erlangen, in Bavaria: “German citizens know that the regulations of the Geneva Refugee Convention stem from the historical experience with Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.”

The self-aware bank man

And finally, on a more personal note, I went to open a German bank account here in Berlin last week. The process involved me sitting down with a nice man from the bank and, over a cup of tea (German people, it's really not that funny to splash a little milk in a cup of tea!), go through the process.

Like a lot of Germans I've met since I arrived, he was mad keen to talk to me, in flawless English, about Britain, our culture and, particularly, in a 'are you people nuts?' sort of way, British politics. My man here brought up the 2017 UK referendum on EU membership.

'The EU is so important,' he said to me. 'If only to stop us invading France...'

That a stranger, a bank worker of all things, should want to talk to me about the war while opening a bank account is remarkable enough, but to be straight to the point about his country's role in invading their neighbours, is astounding. Could you ever imagine an Englishman saying how important the 1707 Acts of Union was because 'it stopped us from invading Scotland?'

I had absolutely no idea when I arrived, but am fast learning, that Germany is still a country where guilt over World War II and the Holocaust still has substantial influence in shaping the national discourse.

Of course, history like Germany's in WW2 should never be forgotten, and walking around Berlin it's clear that Germany goes to great lengths to ensure they, and we, never will. But examples like these make me wonder when, if ever, the German people, no matter what their age, will ever be able to live free of the biggest shadow of all.

UPDATE 28/10/2015: Here, at last, are the subtitled trailers for Er ist Wieder Da