Category: EU

Is King Charles’s visit to Germany important, irrelevant, or are you completely indifferent? 

angela findlay10 Comments

King Charles is in Germany for three days, his first overseas state visit as monarch after the planned trip to France was postponed. Many people in Britain will not take much notice of this news for a variety of reasons from believing the monarchy should be fundamentally abolished to thinking the whole trip is one big photo-opportunity. But media coverage of his and Camilla, the Queen Consort’s time in Berlin, Hamburg and beyond will show it is far more important in Germany than most of us here might understand. 

There are times I have felt saddened by Germany’s slightly unrequited friendship with Britain. A lot of Brits have wonderful personal or business relationships with our neighbours across the sea, but at Remembrance ceremonies, for example, I have lamented the stiff coolness of the British establishment towards their German counterparts that stands in stark contrast to the genuine warmth displayed by equivalent representatives of France or even Israel. This visit feels different. More relaxed and real. The Royals, at their best, have an uncanny ability to transcend all differences to reach parts other people, above all politicians, can’t, and with far more authentic and lasting resonance than mere symbolic gestures.

“Ah the Queen Mother… I love the Queen Mother!” Those were the unlikely words to come out of a scantily clad, barefoot, elderly Aboriginal man’s mouth on discovering I was English. It was 1986 and I had just wandered, equally scantily clad, into a spit-and-sawdust pub in the baking outback of Australia causing the intimidating head-turns and awkward silence seen in movies. Ever since this display of unreserved enthusiasm for a Royal broke the ice – most definitely the wrong idiom to use in a place where 40˚C temperatures would have melted ice within minutes – followed by the dear man’s insistence on buying me a cold beer, I have valued the role the Monarchy plays in the world. 

In some ways King Charles brings an even more special affinity than his revered mother because it is coupled with inspiration for Germans whose long-standing environmental awareness and action match his… apart from the rather glaring contradictions in their love of fast cars and belching factories. Like them, he has been advocating greener, more sustainable ways of working with the earth for decades, ideas for which he has been ridiculed here until mainstream politics recently and reluctantly began to acknowledge their common sense. It’s a happy sight to see our King throwing royal reserve aside to inspect potatoes at Berlin’s 150-year-old weekly farmers’ market, water a tree dedicated to the late Queen, play table football in a refugee centre or spend time at an organic farm (bizarrely owned by friends of a friend of mine) sharing their genuine passion for all that he too believes is good and right.

The intended role of our Royals, rather than the all too frequent ones that are mired in controversy, excess, wrongdoing etc. could be compared to that of the German President – currently Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who I always find carries out his brief superbly. Beyond the divisive party politics and in-fighting that brought us Brexit and what was experienced by many Europeans as a hurtful rejection, King Charles’s visit offers a heartfelt olive branch and reassurance that our countries are still indeed friends with both a shared history that extends way before the horrors of the two World Wars, and a deeply connected future.

Politicians rarely feel able to give credit or compliments to the achievement of others for fear of exposing their own failings. Charles (is that being over-familiar?) on the other hand, can. With no trace of defensiveness or inadequacy of his own country’s policies, he paid tribute to Germany’s “extraordinary hospitality” in hosting over one million Ukrainian refugees. “This,” he said, “seems to me, so powerfully demonstrates the generosity of spirit of the German people.”

Imagine a politician saying that! But if we want to break the insufferable ping-pong slagging matches that fill the House of Commons, this recognition and appreciation of good policies, ideas or actions surely has to be encouraged on all sides? Batting words to and fro, patting own backs and roaring unruly ‘Ayes’ or ‘Noes’ to drown out opponents’ voices is no way to get anything done. And when you look at the decline of so many of our services, institutions and already neglected areas of British society, it is clear that, for far too long, almost nothing has been done.

I am currently reading a fascinating book lent to me by a delightful 92-year-old friend who, after reading my book, treated me to some of her own stories from the Second World War. Her family lost their home to the bombs dropped on Bristol. And yet, in 1948 on hearing of the extreme hunger of the Germans, she and her church youth group, knocked on doors in their parish to collect donations to send to the very people that most around them (understandably) still regarded as the enemy. She remembers the quarter of a pound of tea she collected.

The book she lent me, ‘Darkness Over Germany’ was written by a remarkable British woman, E. Amy Buller, who visited Germany many times in the 1930s with a mission to understand the ideas that radicalised so many people, particularly the youth, in order to learn how to work with them in peacetime and prevent such things happening again. She saw how Nazism was a false answer to a real need and how foolhardy it is to fight a war without considering how to engage with the enemy once they were defeated. 

I can’t help feeling we could learn a great deal from these enlightened elders who operate with the kindness and innate wisdom of their hearts. And it is in that respect that I completely support visits such as the one happening as I write. With clearly genuine warmth, humour and interest, King Charles is re-building bridges, offering friendship and warming the hearts of a great many German people.

Uh-oh, I feel a little ‘God Save the King!’ coming on… I’ll stop here.

Just a few of a whole load of links recording his visit:

King Charles celebrates UK-Germany ties in historic address – BBC

For Hamburg, devastated by allied bombing, King Charles’s visit is so much more than a photo-op | Helene von Bismarck | The Guardian

From Meeting Scholz To Visiting Farmers Market; A Peek Into King Charles’ Germany Visit

King Charles III arrives in Germany for first overseas visit as monarch

In Pictures – The Telegraph

King Charles to lay wreath to German victims of wartime air raids. Planned visit to St Nikolai memorial in Hamburg contrasts with approach taken by his mother by Philip Oltermann

King Charles avoids mention of Brexit in speech to German parliament

Could the question to start 2019 be: What can we, Great Britain, put in? rather than: What can we get out?

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I’d like to focus my last blog of 2018 on a single question that arose out of a letter written by a German citizen and published in The Guardian. It is addressed to all of us here in Britain and I feel it captures the essence of the principles we celebrate and/or practice in some form or other over the Christmas period: family and giving.

It says: “Dear friends in Britain. Maybe you are not aware of what Europe will miss when you leave. We will miss your refreshing views, because living on the continent can give a blinkered viewpoint. We will miss your international experience and networks. We will miss your calmness and pragmatism. We will miss your long democratic experience in developing the future EU. Together we are strong! Please stay. We are waiting for you with open arms.”

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Brötchen and Brexit

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Just back from a trip to visit family and friends in Hamburg and Cologne. Whenever I am in Germany, I find myself indulging in the familiar, yet distinctly different, smells and tastes of fresh brötchen and good coffee; my body relaxes into the warmth of the modern apartments while my mind clicks into a different gear, re-structuring sentences and dusting down long-unused words and concepts that don’t exist in English. It’s a funny kind of home-coming feeling, away from home.

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I was, of course, asked about Brexit. It has dwindled in significance since the German elections, for Angela Merkel’s ensuing demise has given Germany a headache of its own. It felt strange being in a Germany that is punishing her for her open-arm policy to refugees. ‘Mutti’ has, after all, been such a solid rock and island of hope to us all in the choppy European waters. Nonetheless, the people I met – from bank managers to former colleagues and elderly relatives – all wondered how Brexit was going to work. “I don’t know, I can’t see it yet,” I’d say, trying not to be disloyal to the choices made by the ‘British people’. “The country is very divided on almost every issue involved,” I’d continue, and then change the subject. The impending split always pushes me into a bit of a national vacuum.

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‘Shame’ and ‘Britain’ aren’t usually words we put together, but is that changing?

angela findlayLeave a comment

I have been uncharacteristically struck by a form of blog-writer’s block this month. My usual (dark) themes seemed weirdly irrelevant in this sun and blossom-filled May and most other areas of life have been hijacked by the impending elections and Brexit. And added to that I feel like I’m flat-lining, like my political passions are all but extinguished by my successive losses in all the things I voted for… or against.

Inspiration came just in time though, in the form of a passing conversation with one of my studio neighbours. Totally unprompted he quietly confessed to me that he had begun to feel ashamed of being English, to feel increasing shame in relation to Britain, his own country. “Shame”, well that’s something I can do, it is one of my prime subjects in fact. And asking him further, I discovered his shame was very related to my involuntary growing despondency in the face of our politics.

170508152731-banksy-on-brexit-super-169.jpgBanksy Artwork in Dover, May, 2017

 

With so many hideous Tory attitudes and policies in almost unhindered free flow, with Brexit uncertainties hanging like fog waiting to descend on top of us, Britain has all of a sudden become like a docked ship whose destination we don’t want to reach; a country whose values we can no longer identify with, let alone fully respect. The rhetoric is too self-centered and self-serving, almost embarrassing in the face of the team- and solidarity-building discussions going on between our European neighbours. Theresa May’s aggressive and alienating approach to getting the best Brexit deal – “FOR US” – is sickening in these times when random terrorist attacks and unpredictable world leaders could instead be bringing us all closer together than ever. Neither of us like her indiscriminate, hand-holding alignment with the twitter/trigger-happy Trump. And I am baffled by the unashamed hypocrisy of our morally impoverished, profit-focused arms sales to Saudi, compared to our distracted, feeble lament of the plight of the Yemenis.

I understand my neighbour’s unwanted but encroaching sense of shame. I feel it in my strange longing for the Mutti (Mum) they have in Germany; for Angela Merkel, a genuinely ‘strong and stable’ leader who, in my opinion, makes brave decisions that are individual but not all about “us”. Just like the German Remembrance culture is not only about their fallen soldiers but about victims and the fallen everywhere. I wish we had some of her ideas for what makes a country great. I wish we had opted for her policy of shutting down all nuclear power stations rather than teaming up with the Chinese to build Hinkley Point…

So as we all approach June 9th, where should we place our crosses, my neighbour and I asked each other? Follow your heart knowing your vote will not win, vote tactically to stop the Conservatives…? Most of the main parties have sides that are either plain nasty, slightly lost, idealistic, unreliable or weak. They play tug of war with old policies, pulling and stretching them to fit manifestos that promise little more than to sticky-tape together some sort of status quo. All promise to chuck (often non-existent) money at the ailing areas of our society – the NHS, social care, prisons, schools, infrastructure, railways – while expensive debates on Trident, Heathrow, HS2 drag on unresolved. But where’s the long-term vision, the Grand Plan? I wish the humane ideas that some of the smaller parties have for spending time getting to the root of the problems in order to build up a fairer and more equal society, would become more prominent. The Tory emphasis on profit and wealth for a small minority continues to sicken but in so many areas this country needs to stop and reflect, to think more out of the box on what will really make us great. Because right now I don’t think we are and we need to change radically, above all in attitudes, so we can travel in a direction that really will benefit us all – as human beings.

I’m not angry like I was after Brexit; I’m not really horrified, sad or even disappointed either. I’m just slightly detached and a little deflated, maybe disillusioned, in relation to our politics and politicians. And I think if there was a box called “Wha’eva”, it’s probably the one I would now tick.