Reich On
‘LET’S play a quick word association game. We’ll write down a word and you respond by screaming out the first thing that comes into your head. Here goes. Germany…
| ”And who are you, pray?” |
Hang on a moment. Steady on. You’re only embarrassing yourselves by screaming out ”Nazis”, ”Hitler” and ”Murderers” and marching about in that ridiculous goose-step with one arm raised high and a finger stuck under your nose.
Especially you, Mr Richard Desmond and the other members of the Express team, who write for a paper which leads with the headline: ”QUEEN HAS TO EAT IN HITLER BANQUET HALL.”
Let’s be sure of one thing before we go on – the Queen was not made to eat in the hall, she was merely invited to.
She could have declined, but to have done so would have been most impolite, so, indeed, yes, she did break pumpernickel in Berlin’s Zeughaus, where Hitler’s henchman and Herrenvolk ”raged against Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill”.
We do not get to hear what was eaten – although a meal of enormous sausages served on bed of roast gypsies cannot be ruled out – but we do learn that Sidney Goldberg, of the Normandy Veterans’ Association, found it ”absolutely disgusting”.
Sure, German food is not to everyone’s taste, but let’s not be presumptuous.
Just because Her Majesty ate in Hitler’s hall and stayed at the Aldon Hotel, ”infamous as a haunt of Hitler’s secret police”, doesn’t mean it was all bad.
For one thing, the Queen doesn’t want us to hark on about the war. What she wants is for the bloodthirsty Bosch and plucky Britishers to move beyond ”simplistic stereotypes” of one another.
As the Mail says in its headline: ”It’s time to stop being obsessed about the war, says the Queen.”
Stopping short of apologising for her country’s blanket bombing of Dresden and other German towns all those moons ago, the Queen used her speech to say that the time is ripe to move on.
”Stereotypes,” said Her Majesty to a room full of pink-faced, chin-jutting krauts and descendents of the Nazi war machine, ”wither when human contact flourishes.”
Amen to that.
So, rather than harking on about the war (that we won twice), and the World Cup (that we won once), Britishers and their sausage-munching European partners should realise that the post-war partnership between Britain and Germany has been, as the Queen puts it, one of the ”bedrocks” of peace.
And so long as we continue to work together, there will no more need for war – well, so long as we can agree what to do with Poland and the Jews, that is…’
Posted: 3rd, November 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
