A characteristic element in the long, sorry story of Anglo-German encounters is the assertion that, finally, past stereotypes have been put behind us and we (the British) have moved on from the crass, backward-looking gurning of the past in favour of a mature embrace of the Federal Republic. But no sooner is this claim made than some bit of shamefulness materialises. With my own head still full of interesting ideas from Philip Oltermann's new book – a paean to modern German reasonableness – I was foolish enough to see War Horse at the cinema. Here was a film which, despite twisting and turning to be even-handed, simply could not help itself and, like some faux-reformed alcoholic, gorged itself on an entire miniature liqueur selection of Anglo-German clichés.
Almost a century after the terrible events initiated in 1914, here are the British as class-bound, gruffly proud, good with animals, and only really happy in beautiful rural scenery. At one point you could almost hear a cinema-wide gasp of satisfaction as that standby, the short-tempered yet golden-hearted army sergeant, was taken down from a high shelf and unwrapped once more. Meanwhile, the Germans in War Horse try so hard to be modern Europeans and yet, hands trembling, end up gunning down horses, executing teenage brothers and scaring a poorly French girl who just wants to make jam in a windmill with her grandpa. The movie makes all the Germans rat-like, pallid, with funny hair and festooned in sinister weapons. Yet what chance do they have against a row of bewhiskered British character actors and a rather odd horse?
Oltermann's charming mix of memoir, analysis and random facts has to struggle to stay upright in the sort of storm generated by such an elemental piece of Anglo-Hollywood lore. But it is he who is on the side of right. Everything that makes modern Germany so appealing – a sort of wryness mixed with tentative enthusiasm, a wish to be liked tempered by a genuine concern to engage with a terrible past – are all in this book.
Oltermann, when in his mid-teens, arrived in Britain from Hamburg with his parents and ended up staying. Keeping Up with the Germans switches between justifications for this decision, portraits of other Germans who have tried it too (Heine, Adorno, Schwitters), and analyses of some key Anglo-German encounters, particularly in sport and car design.
It is a risky way of creating a book as it relies on a high page-by-page level of interest rather than any real structure or overarching argument, but Oltermann manages it beautifully. There is a particularly good section on old-fashioned variety shows in Blackpool and the huge impact that one sketch – long-forgotten in Britain – has had on TV comedy in Germany.
He describes the sequence of events that made this happen in a way which is touching, curious and funny, then neatly clicks it into his own experience, and leaves the reader with a fine sense of the sheer oddness of the modern world. Indeed, the whole book can be compared to a series of expert variety turns, with the reader watching act after act and not really noticing or caring what is linking it all together. A long, excellent analysis of the Baader-Meinhof Gang is almost over before the reader realises that the only real Anglo-German element in the chapter is that Astrid Proll, hiding in London, once went to a concert by the Clash where the band were wearing Baader-Meinhof T-shirts. But this is late in the book and the whole tone is so winning that it seems sour even to point out the section's irrelevance.
Oltermann mulls over a number of often quite obvious Anglo-German subjects – differences in humour, factory skills, philosophy – and threads through them his own experiences growing up here. So he talks about Theodor Adorno's time at Oxford, focusing on the philosopher's obsession with Merton College notepaper, and links this to Adorno's cultic role in postwar Germany. He contrasts this with the parallel career of AJ Ayer and then his own much less towering interest in philosophy at school.
At times, Keeping Up with the Germans is frustrating in that he lets so much rich material go. On these occasions he scratches the surface, when his readers would be more than happy if he gouged it. What he says is fascinating – there is a perfect discussion of Bildung (self-cultivation) – but there could be a lot more and Oltermann blows his cover when describing how the word "pretentious" is hardly used in German and he needed to look it up. Clearly he has anglicised himself too much and, panicking that his curiosity about Adorno is making him pretentious, throws in laddish references to the Verve and Blur, derides an Adorno essay on jazz and then bales out completely.
After a while this Invasion of the Body Snatchers aspect of British culture becomes oppressive and the book can be read as a case history of how a decent, earnest and thoughtful citizen of Hamburg has had his personality altered by his host country. This is most striking in the chapter on football. Oltermann establishes at the beginning of the book that he managed to have no interest in sport while living in Germany. But then, having moved to England in 1996, he gets mired – even giving himself a false memory by feigning excitement about old Anglo-German soccer games. These he can only have watched as grainy videos, but he raves on about Keegan and Toshack and gives a detailed commentary on a 1977 Liverpool-Mönchengladbach game.
This entirely retrospective interest in Kevin Keegan's hair, height and playing style suggests that something terrible happens when foreigners settle here. Oltermann could have written interestingly about what had happened in his life that made it rational to watch an old Liverpool-Mönchengladbach game, but instead it seems to have become an unthinking part of his adoptive British brain patterns.
Yet Keeping Up with the Germans is filled with very enjoyable things – from a German newspaper called Hermann and printed in London to considerations of such lovely German terms as Elfmeter, Jamaika-Koalition and Siegesscham (you will need to read the book to find out what they mean), to Herder's Germanising of "Schäkespear" and a hilarious transliteration of Marlene Dietrich singing in English – and it should be read by anyone touched by its subject.
The traditional Anglo-German discussions of the Mini v the Beetle or Kevin Keegan v Berti Vogts plus a good word for Currywurst do suddenly, however, seem a bit antique in the light of David Cameron's recent "No" to a tighter European Union. As Cameron said that small word, London and Berlin were, for the first time in almost anybody's memory, circling protagonists with serious, different priorities, rather than the two neutered trading partners we have come to know and love. There is no reason why intelligent compromise cannot fix this crisis, but it is not unreasonable to say that the Anglo-German relationship could once again be the crux of Europe's future. As War Horse so carelessly and Keeping Up with the Germans more thoughtfully show, the two countries seem condemned, like two not very interesting immortals, to tumble, grappling with one another forever through infinite space.
• Simon Winder is the author of Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern.
