Germany Becoming Anglicised

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1052, 16 August 1930, Page 28

Germany Becoming Anglicised

Berlin Like London

Writing from Berlin to the LondoD “Daily Express,” Dr. Wolf Zucker contributes the following interesting article showing how Germany is becoming Anglicised: Five years ago an Englishman told me that he was astonished at the way Germans looked to Paris for a lead in intellectual and artistic things. Although the occupation of the Ruhr had just been concluded and political relations were still strained, the French influence was supreme in cultural matters. It was fashionable to have been in Paris, to be acquainted with modern French art and literature. The Englishman, were he to visit me again, and let me show him the Berlin of 1930, Would be equally astounded at the changes which five years have wrought in German life and manners. Today you must have been in London to he abreast with the times; you must know the most recent English books to hold your own in conversation, and having an English tailor makes you the envy of all your friends. But perhaps the most striking example of the British influence on Germany is the esteem with which we regard the typical Englishman’s reserve and manner of living. We admire more and more the orderly way English street life moves. In England one takes it for granted that traffic will proceed without fuss and turmoil. Newspapers recently conducted a competition to find the best-behaved person in Berlin’s streets. Fifty marks were offered, and reporters spent a whole week observing the crowded tram ears, omnibuses, underground railways, and shops. You could almost believe you were in London—that week! But it is not only in the streets that we admire the Englishman. In our private life we seek to model ourselves on our conception of the British character. The time has gone when we thought of the Englishman as a cold fish, devoid of feeling and thinking only of himself. I think we have learned to recognise that the reserve is only a cloak thrown over a remarkable sense of fairness, an innate gentlemanliness, and a friendliness which he seems determined to hide.

This knowledge has come perhaps through the many books which have appeared here in the past few years describing England.