Reading the Guardian's report of Richard Desmond's anti-German rant in a meeting with Telegraph executives felt awfully familiar. Although those Telegraph execs were quite right to be outraged, and extremely commendable in their responses, I really can't say I was all that surprised. I've been putting up with the same sort of rubbish from my "liberal" friends for years.
Although I was born in London, my father was born in Dresden, a few years before it was reduced to rubble by allied bombers. Those allies transformed my father's Fatherland, from a monstrous tyranny into a liberal republic - but back here in Blighty, it often seems as if those last 60 years never happened.
Growing up a generation after world war two, my early school days were a kindergarten Battle of the Bulge. In the crude eugenics of my friends' comic books, my father's square-headed sausage-munchers were actually a step above slit-eyed rice-noshers, but it was the Hun, not the Japs, who were the favourite baddies in their playground wargames. I didn't complain. I didn't like shooting Krauts, but it was even less fun being shot at. When my father gave me an Action Man, I gave it away. I didn't want to play British soldiers. I didn't want to play German soldiers either.
Now my schoolfriends have grown up, those old wargames have hardened into a collective folk memory. English football fans are never happier than when they are singing the theme tune from The Dambusters. There is only one thing they would rather watch than Engerland, and that's The Great Escape. And whether you find it sad or funny, what makes this phenomenon so intriguing - and a little bit frightening - is that it's actually a couple of generations out of step.
My mother's family had every right to hate the Germans. My English grandfather fought the Germans in Africa, and so did his younger brother. He was killed at El Alamein. Twenty years later, his only daughter married a German and bore him a half-German grandson. Yet I never heard him utter a bad word about the Germans, and he wasn't the only one. None of the men I've ever met who actually fought in the war seem to share the same anti-German sentiments as my own mollycoddled generation.
So why do Englishmen (and it is mainly English men) feel such an atavistic allegiance to a conflict that ended 20, 30, even 40 years before they were born? Partly, it is borne out of genuine admiration for a better generation who faced a wicked dictatorship alone - but it is also fed by the realisation that we will never be required to perform the same heroics, and a sneaking suspicion that we might well fail if we were.
That's why our anti-German jingoism is so defensive. "Two world wars and one World Cup," sing England's football fans, as if war and football were interchangeable - and yet for our generation, they are. In our brave new virtual universe, there is very little difference between a televised football match and a war film. At the 1966 World Cup final, when England beat West Germany at Wembley, nobody booed the German national anthem. I wish I could say the same about England's Euro 96 semi final with Germany, which I attended 30 years later.
Of course, brighter Brits have been satirising this paradox for years. Its best exponent is John Cleese's Basil Fawlty, and the reason this paradigm of Anglo-Teutonic angst is so funny is that the joke's on us. Basil is the deranged demagogue, the German characters are quiet and conventional. The irony is, modern Germans are perfectly willing to mention the war. In today's Germany, sombre memorials to victims of the "Hitlerzeit" are an inescapable feature of daily life.
Yet in Britain we're still fascinated by the Third Reich, and rightly so. It's only natural to be transfixed by the tragic riddle of how such a civilised society succumbed to such a murderous regime. And it's fitting to learn about the Shoah, and remember all those it slaughtered. What's less laudable is that our inevitable interest in this awful mystery excludes virtually everything that's happened in Germany before or since.
Trawling our mass media, you'd hardly guess West Germany was our ally throughout the cold war, our front line against the Warsaw Pact - or that her peaceful reunification with East Germany was a triumph for the model democracy Britain founded, and defended for all those years. Outside Berlin's Tempelhof airport, there's a memorial to 39 Britons, 31 Americans and a dozen Germans who died keeping Berlin fed during the brutal Soviet blockade, just a few years after the war. How many British schoolchildren know about the Berlin Airlift? And how many know that thanks to those airmen's reconciliatory sacrifice, Berlin now has the fastest growing Jewish community in the world?
So what became of my German family? Well, my grandmother survived the destruction of Dresden. She caught the last train out of Dresden before the Red Army arrived. Her train was attacked by allied planes but she eventually made it back to her home town, Hamburg, where she fell in love with a British officer, and followed him home. My father came here too, and today he's as British as you or I.
My German grandfather finished the war in a British POW camp. There were far worse places for a German soldier to be in 1945. My dad only met him once. He wasn't much of a husband or father, but during the war he sheltered a Jewish friend who'd escaped from a concentration camp, and helped him flee the country. I never met my grandfather but I have met his Jewish friend. He's alive and well, and living in New York City. And thanks to his efforts, my grandfather has just been granted the title of Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs & Heroes Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
My grandfather's Jewish friend had to leave his parents in that concentration camp. Both of them died there, yet somehow he found the courage to return to Germany. Would it really take as much courage for my liberal friends (and Richard Desmond) to finally learn to forgive the Germans?