"Don't mention the war"

[Fischkoepfin 1]

Thought this was an interesting article, not only because I love Fawlty Towers...

June 2, 2006

London Journal

It's Springtime for Soccer, and for Rowdy England Fans

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, June 1 — They have been warned, as always, not to rampage through the streets, destroying things and attacking people. But as England's soccer fans prepare to visit Germany for the World Cup this month, another item has been added to their long "verboten" list: Don't mention the war.

"It's not a joke," Charles Clarke, then the home secretary, warned at a pre-World Cup briefing earlier this spring. "It is not a comic thing to do. It is totally insulting and wrong."

That means, basically, no getting drunk and goose-stepping in a would-be humorous manner. No Nazi salutes. No shouting "Sieg Heil!" at the referees. No impromptu finger-under-the-nose Hitler mustaches.

"Doing mock Nazi salutes or fake impersonations of Hitler — that's actually against the law in Germany," Andrin Cooper, a spokesman for the Football Association, which administers English soccer, said in an interview.

Even something as simple as wearing an ersatz German war helmet could violate German laws against inciting hatred and glorifying extremism, Mr. Clarke said at the briefing.

"The reason why the German Parliament passed these laws was because the era we are talking about was one of total horror and destruction in Germany," he continued. "Anyone who thinks it's entertaining to get involved in this sort of thing, I absolutely urge them not to do so."

The authorities in both countries have developed elaborate programs to ensure that England's fans behave themselves in Germany when the competition begins June 9. Some 3,200 people with histories of violence and hooliganism have been required to surrender their passports and are forbidden to leave Britain during the tournament.

Dozens of British officers are being dispatched to Germany to help keep order. Some English players have recorded advertisements exhorting the fans to respect their hosts, and fans' groups have arranged various communal activities with their German counterparts. One group plans to visit Auschwitz.

Getting the English to refrain from obnoxious references to World War II should be easy enough. The war ended more than 60 years ago. The Germans themselves seem to have moved on. Even Europe, with its history of chronic internecine conflict, has pulled itself together and found a common purpose, at least theoretically, in the European Union.

But for some perverse reason — intellectual laziness; the tendency of British schools to teach German history through the prism of the Nazi era; a yearning for a simpler time, when Britain had an empire and a clear set of enemies — many England fans seem stubbornly unable to let go of Germany's past.

"There's clearly more than 100 years of martial conflict between the two nations, and sport has a nasty habit of mixing up events off the pitch with events on the pitch," Matthew Perryman, a spokesman for the official England fans' club, said in an interview. (Pitch is English, real English, for soccer field.)

This obsession manifests itself in ways that are funny, infantile or offensive, depending on perspective.

During Germany-England matches, for instance, the fans like to sing the theme from "The Dam Busters," a 1954 film about how English bombers destroyed German dams during the war. Employing accompanying hand gestures, they perform a song called "Ten German Bombers," the upshot of which is that all the airmen are shot down.

They also shout "Stand up if you won the war!" and "Two world wars and one World Cup!" at the German fans. The second is a reference to the last (and only) time England won the World Cup, in 1966.

Perhaps the British are jealous of Germany's general postwar success.

"German supporters would be within their rights to respond 'Twice as many hospital beds and three times as many World Cups,' " or, alternatively, "Higher G.D.P. per capita than you," Paul Hayward wrote some years ago in The Daily Telegraph, in an earlier incarnation of the same debate.

Mr. Perryman suggested that there are plenty of non-Nazi-related ways to irritate the Germans, including bringing up England's 5-1 defeat of Germany in 2001, an incident that at the time inspired several British newspapers to use the headline "Don't Mention the Score."

"You know our joke in Germany," Mr. Perryman related, chuckling. " 'What time is it? Five to one!' "

Soccer-related Teutoniphobia does seem to reflect the resentments, fears and prejudices of society at large.

This is a country where Prince Harry, the queen's grandson, dressed as a Nazi officer at a costume party last year. It is a country where The Daily Mirror, reporting on the 1996 European soccer championships, used the headline "Achtung, Surrender!"

It is also the place where, in 2004, Richard Desmond, owner of the Express Newspaper group, greeted executives from the Telegraph Group, then facing a possible takeover by a German company, by saying "Guten Morgen" in a German accent.

As the executives looked on, agape, Mr. Desmond then asked them whether they were looking forward to being "run by Nazis." He swore and shouted at them, and goose-stepped around the room, emulating a Hitler mustache with his finger.

Britain's awkwardness on the subject was lampooned most famously in a television episode of "Fawlty Towers," when Basil Fawlty, the hotelier played by John Cleese, tries to attend to a group of German guests after suffering a concussion.

"Don't mention the war," he tells his staff, even as he descends into a xenophobic frenzy, repeating the Germans' lunch order of a prawn cocktail, pickled herring and four cold meat salads as "a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Göring and four Colditz salads," and then high-kicking his way around the dining room, à la Hitler.

"So it's all forgotten and let's hear no more about it!" he says of Germany's wartime past. But somehow, he keeps bringing it up. When the Germans ask him to stop, Basil says that they started it.

"We did not start it," one says.

"Yes, you did," he replies. "You invaded Poland."

Mr. Perryman, the fan club spokesman, noted that Mr. Cleese was making fun of English attitudes — not of Germany.

"The argument we've been having with the fans is, 'If you want to go to Germany and all you want to do is sing "The Dam Busters" and "Ten German Bombers" and the rest of it, then don't be surprised if you're not the most welcome guest at the party.' "

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Edited June 2, 2006 by Fischkoepfin