Greek islanders who remember the German occupation. The British tabloid that shows an infant Elizabeth II giving a Nazi salute.
Scratch a little below the surface and you’ll find a stereotype about Germans somewhere.
Germany itself, physically, is always there, right in the middle of the continent. It doesn’t go anywhere, apart from shifting a bit here and a bit there in 1945 and then again in 1990.
It just gets richer and politically stronger as the rest of us slip back into a world of peripheral status.
But the history remains overwhelming.
A Polish film, In Darkness, directed by Agnieszka Holland, set in wartime Lviv, then a city in Poland, doesn’t show many Germans. It doesn’t have to. They are so ubiquitous in our imagination. The permanent ‘bad guys’.
The imagination works wonders. We all have our stories, our national tales, ones we tell ourselves are real and true.
Listen to Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” speech from 1940 and be stirred by his calmness and defiance.
We Brits, of course won the war, carried the flag for freedom in Europe.
But try telling that to a Russian of a certain generation, while most Americans will have a quiet giggle. In Poland a discrete silence is advisable on that one.
So, the Germans? Well, it’s a shame, but the stereotypes – despite 70 years of being on their best behaviour, a well-planned, peaceful place that makes things people need and like and want, calm on the international front and just getting on with things – still somehow cling to the wartime slaughter of enemies.
The Germans in this current crisis are the ones we can blame for the fiasco that is the single currency. The Germans created the whole set up in the early 1990s, didn’t they?
All that cheap money that flooded around the weaker economies on the edge, without Germany’s fiscal prudence and management, was a recipe for disaster.
Hindsight is brilliant.
Yes, the solid, steady, forward-thinking Germans. The problem is that the Germans haven’t really done anything wrong, except be better at doing politics and making things than most others. In fairness this is a Germany that has done its best to keep its stray children inside the family and bail them out when they spend a bit too much of daddy’s money.
Merkel’s austerity does not smell the same as Cameron’s in the UK. It does not smack of a pretext to scrap any last vestiges of the welfare state, social-democratic model of the post-war years. It is simply a German reaction to other countries’ often flagrant disregard for the rules, albeit German-set ones.
But the populist swing is turning and as austerity bites many people in Athens don’t care too much for complex historical arguments and ‘fairness’. They want to see their jobs back, their incomes returning to pre-crisis levels.
The last time we had such a crisis, in the decade and a half after the first world war we saw the rise of an earlier generation of radicals, left and right, populists and others. Each pursuing a national agenda, from Bulgaria to Ireland, from Poland to Spain. Most had their own currencies and many more mechanisms to beggar thy neighbour, something now off the table.
If we return to that game, however, we are all dead in the long-run, to misquote Keynes a little. It’s why Europe came up with the euro and euro-zone after all.
The problem today – as then - is one of fiscal imbalances. The Germans can’t oblige the Greeks, or thankfully anyone else, to raise or lower taxes. Theoretically at least.
The last war, when it came, was a way of wiping the slate clean. All bets were simply called off, demonetised, all debts and imbalances effectively erased or transferred into physical occupation.
You don’t pay your debts, well, ok, we’ll take your land, factories. It worked, but at the cost of 50 million dead, cities destroyed and countries shifted here and there.
The rapacious markets today smell blood and are never that keen on democracy when the people are so clearly ‘wrong’, as in Greece.
The lack of synchronicity between democracy and markets, the latter working for a few and without the wasteful and draining need to consult anyone, aside for a few shareholders (occasionally), makes for an ill-fitting European project.
Poland, meanwhile, sits on the edge, with Germany its main trading market. The country has used interest rates recently to deal with deflation. It still can do that, with euro-zone entry, once touted for 2015, now as unclear as the future of the currency itself.
But, bluntly, Poland’s fate is so closely tied to that of Germany that the stakes in the Greek drama couldn’t be much higher. If Germany has to pay to sustain the essentially political project that is the euro-zone, it will damage growth, reduce the capacity of the country to buy Polish goods and potentially damage Poland’s status as the only economy in Europe that has avoided negative growth since 2008.