Fake bogeys

I enjoyed Al Murray's not-too-solemn history of Germany. Together with Misha Glenny's take on the subject for Radio 4, it made me realise how little I had really absorbed in sixth-form German lessons.

Murray is a descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray and a history graduate, so he is well equipped to front a programme on the History Channel attempting to answer the question: "Why does everyone hate the English?". In his preview in the Radio Times, he poses another question, more pertinent to the current mood in England and Wales: why have British newspapers and the Tories not moved on from the 1939-45 war? He writes of a visit to Hamburg during the making of his series.

Germany, which tipped the world into war, its leader in pursuit of his own racial bogeymen, has a lot to teach us. And in Germany it's taken time and effort to process this history. In the history museum in Hamburg, the story of the wartime firebombing is told dispassionately. The city was destroyed over a few days and nights by Allied "area bombing", a firestorm raging in residential areas. Tens of thousands of people were killed.

You might think this would be a reason to hate the English. Instead, the tone was one of "you reap what you sow". Rather than shaking their fists at the English the way we might at the Germans, what was on offer was a sober assessment of how it had happened. And part of that display? A bust of Hitler, presented not as a bogeyman, but as a warning.

After all, what he did was to gather every grievance, ancient and modern, real and confected, serious and glib, heartfelt and unjust, bundled them all together and pile them onto a bogeyman himself. Warning enough.