The causes were several. In the first place, Germany was where I went with my family on our first ever foreign holiday. I was eleven, and we had a great time. Thanks for reading Taking the Pearse! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Secondly, I was assigned to the set for learning German in grammar school and β by lowly, Anglophone standards β turned out to be at least moderately good at it. I liked it. At age seventeen, I did another such exchange β this time to West Berlin.
Another wonderful time. But what settled the matter was the fact that I spent a year between school and university this was working β as a sort of Gastarbeiter , if you will β at a German engineering factory in the Taunus region.
It was the making of me. Within a few months, I was fluent. Though I am now, after decades of rarely practising, merely competent. Back then, I had the local dialect, and everything. The forbearance and sound good sense of my parents through all of this was, as in so many things, exemplary. Though neither had lost close relatives in World War II, both had been evacuated from London as children, and so been separated from their parents for extended periods; my mother's brother had served in the navy.
Yet they showed no wariness about my Teutonic interests, and were polite and kind to the German lads who came to stay. Though I still love the food! Indeed, something else had already intervened before the s, or I would certainly never have been infatuated in the first place. But in the s, that all started to change. A new generation had grown up since the fall of Berlin β one with no reflex to get defensive about what had happened before they were born or, at least, fully sentient.
When they learned in school of the horrors of Nazism, their instinct was not to say "Well, we were bombed and lost millions of people too! By the time I came in, the things that had irritated Mikes, and British and American service personnel, had shrunk to a vestige. My school-age peers in Neuss and Berlin saw the world the same way I did.
