They're mostly dead now, and the war is now just a set of cliches that get trotted out when needed. As happened the other day with the German Football teams away strip. You know it's a World Cup year when...
It's black, you see. It's interspersed with bits of gold that to me were redolent of the flag of the liberal German movement of 1848, and of the Urburschenschaft, the first nationalist college fraternity, founded in Jena, whose colours formed the basis of the flag, now used by the democratic Federal Republic. They, on the other hand, thought that the new jersey looked like the uniform of the SS!
I forget that I can read. I forget that I, unlike some yobs the British media pander to, am reasonably historically literate.
One, the SS never trotted around in airtex shorts being told your glory days are behind you. Two, the guys wearing the kit at best had grandparents who were kids during the war. Why trot out this shit? Because there's a world cup, and it's what you do.
A friend of mine asked, what have England and the English media got out of this episode? Getting to annoy the Springer media in Germany, whose title Bild and Die Welt went to town on this story is certainly one significant but not very difficult achievement.
What puzzles me, though, is that this didn't happen when people who remember the war are extremely old. Stranger still, it's only really been going on with the English media since the 1996 European Championship. That time, it lead to the death of a Russian, mistaken for a German in Southampton after England crashed out to the old enemy.
Even still, that was 14 years ago, and little has deviated from this cycle of behaviour in the English press. Given that it's only January, more is set to come.
