German in the UK

Key-note address by John le Carré at the opening of the Think German Conference at Whitgift-School, Croydon, 25 June 2010

The importance of the German language

Perhaps my usefulness this morning is that I am what in German is called freistehend, meaning I represent no institution or country, and can therefore make a fool of myself alone.

And that's a privilege that I owe quite largely to the fact that, at the age of sixteen, I decided that eleven years’ hard labour in the English boarding-school gulag was enough for anyone, and in 1949 - only four years then after the war’s end - I bolted to Bern in Switzerland, determined to embrace the German soul.

Why German? Because for most of my conscious childhood Germany had been the rogue elephant in the drawing room. Germans were murderous fellows. They had bombed one of my schools (which I did not entirely take amiss); they had bombed my grandparents’ tennis court, which was very serious, and I was terrified of them.

But in my rebellious adolescent state, a country that had been so thoroughly bad was also by definition worth examining.

Also, one of the few things I had enjoyed about my schooling had been the German language, with which my tongue had formed a natural, friendly relationship.

Best of all I had a teacher who not only loved the language but was always at pains to remind his pupils that there was another Germany, a decent one, far removed from the one we thought we knew about, and that was the Germany we would be able to explore once we understood its language.

He said something else, and he must have said it often, because it rings in my ear to this day. He said that the love we have for other languages intensifies and explains the love we have for our own.

He might even have said, with Charlemagne, that to possess another language is to possess another soul.

Whatever he said, it was enough to send me off to Bern determined to immerse myself in German language and letters, quite ignorant of the fact that, for a student who is fighting his way to the celestial heights of High German, going to Bern was a bit like going to New Orleans to learn classical French.

Professor Fritz Strich, a gentle Germanist, took me under his wing. Frau Karsten from Hamburg gave me extra tuition. Some Swiss students were kind enough to speak High German to me, but most wanted to practise their English.

So it was to the German students that I instinctively turned for the pure wine. Four years after the end of the war, their life stories, and the stories of their families were already an education.

And it was Frau Karsten who told me, in her severe way, that in order to know Germany I must go there, and not just stare at it from across the border:

‘Du kannst die Deutschen nicht länger von diesseits der Grenze betrachten. Du musst, selbst in diesen bitteren Zeiten, dorthin.’

With Bern as my springboard, and a German student as my guide and travelling companion, I visited the shattered Ruhr district, and shattered Berlin, and walked the empty alleys of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. And I tried to reconcile what I had witnessed with the cultural abstractions of Professor Strich. And I am sure that each of us in this place today, in our different ways, has tried to do the same.

Nothing I have ever written in my life has been free of the German influences of my youth. In my most formative years I had, as a result of a blind act of adolescent anger, forfeited my British sixth form education. Suddenly, instead of Keats I had Holderlin, instead of Byron, Heine, and for my narcissistic hours of self-adoration and impossible loves, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Dramatically lost and alone in the cobbled winter streets of Bern, I recited Hermann Hesse's Blutenzweig to myself: Seltsam im Nebel zu wandern, jeder ist allein, kein Baum kennt den anderen, jeder ist allein.

And because poetry didn't buy the bread, I took part-time employment at the Zirkus Knie, washing elephants.

After Bern, I served for two years in the British Army of Occupation in Austria, as an Intelligence Officer. Military Intelligence, a wit once said, has as much to do with Intelligence as military music has to do with music, but I did my best.

In the refugee camps where we trawled for information, the wretched inmates barely knew any more whether they were running away from the Germans or the Russians. But German was the only lingua franca.

At Oxford, I continued my study of German literature - if by German literature we mean the Bishop Ulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic, the Hildesbrandslied and the mysteries of Ablaut.

And from Oxford I went to Eton for two years, this time to teach German. In return, I received valuable instruction in the discreet criminality of the British upper classes.

And from Eton, by stages I gravitated to the British Foreign Service where, from inside its walls, I wrote my first novel - about Germany, of course, and the unreconciled heritage of its recent past.

And if, like all first novels, it was by turn mawkish, and self-conscious, and unsure of itself - apart from being a great work of genius, of course - it nonetheless foreshadowed many, if not all, of the novels I have written since.

Its protagonist, George Smiley, was unsurprisingly a Germanist. His chosen city, unsurprisingly, was Bern. His chosen period of German literature was its most terrible - until Hitler came along: the seventeenth century of Hans Grimmelshausen, and the Thirty Years War. His chosen protagonist was a German who had spied for him against Hitler - and was now spying for Communist East Germany.

But there was something else that was very German about that first novel - as there has been about many of my novels since - and something altogether less tangible.

I was young when I started writing about George Smiley - twenty-eight - and Smiley was already old, a proxy father. But Smiley's journey through the novel, despite his age, is the journey of a young man's self-discovery. Underneath his inconspicuous exterior, he is a sensitive man still growing up, still looking for answers, and for the experience that delivers them.

In short: he is secretly young.

And Smiley's private journey - from this first novel, right through to his last - for me at least, with the advantage of hindsight and no longer the responsibility of writing about him - is a single Bildungsroman that leads him through disappointments, mistaken loves, failures and occasional successes, to some kind of ultimate maturity: that is to say, to the point when he discovers that the object of his life's search is neither the absolute enemy of his imagination, nor the absolute answer to his quest.

And in describing this journey I seem, perhaps unconsciously, to have drawn on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, or Hesse's Demian, or on Mann's Magic Mountain.

God knows, I am not equating myself with these great men: any more than I am equating myself with the anonymous writer of the Nibelungenlied, or Wolfram von Eschenbach and his Parzival, although each of these mediaeval masterpieces is a Bildungsroman in the purest meaning of the term.

And this habit of narrative, that began with George Smiley, did not end on the day I decided that he must hang up his cloak for good: or not for me it didn't. It persisted shamelessly through all the novels that followed it: take a life, subject it to a mishmash of experiences, good and bad, and see what comes out the other end. A Bildungsroman then, by any other name, and with a large 'Made in Germany' label attached to it.

In 1960 I was posted to the British Embassy in Bonn with responsibility for internal German affairs, and there I wrote a second novel, actually about Eton, but with the added spice of the comedy of diplomatic manners. And I was looking to write a third novel when the Berlin Wall went up, almost literally before my eyes. The result was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

That was nearly half a century ago. But over time, Germany has never lost its lure for me. As Germany changed, so I tried to change with it, to catch its history in the making. A Small Town in Germany was, thank Heaven, about a German nightmare that haunted a lot of us in the early sixties but mercifully never came true: a resurgence of right-wing nationalism.

My most recent novel A Most Wanted Man - Marionetten - is set entirely in the city of Hamburg, where I served briefly as British Consul, and addresses some of the many problems that Germany and Britain have in common: ethnic diversity, assimilation, the limits of national security and - most significantly - extraordinary rendition.

The denouement of the novel that I shall be publishing this September - start saving now! - is set in Bern and the surrounding mountains. And at the moment, that's where my Bildungsroman ends: where it began.

But why bother with the German language - today? Why go to the labour of learning it, reading it, thinking it? Why not let them speak ours? Don’t all Germans speak better English than we will every speak German? Isn’t English the new Esperanto?

NO to all of it.

NO, unless we wish to be second-class Europeans, leaning lazily towards America, and using language as our excuse. Sometimes I wish America spoke Polish or Urdu instead of English, so that we could consider her thoughts and actions objectively.

NO again, because Germany is an ever-growing part of our European destiny - actually the biggest part - just as our so-called Special Relationship with America dwindles into myth.

NO yet again, because Germany is no longer satisfied to play the gentle giant of Europe. Since her reunification Germany sees her role in the world quite differently, and we’d better know that. Not aggressively, not assertively. But differently. And we would be deceiving ourselves to suppose it is not in our national interest to take upon ourselves the building of a linguistic bridge to our most potent European partner, rather than, out of sheer laziness, and ignorance, and fear, leaving the job to them.

Anyone who has acted as an interpreter - as I have - anyone who has played a tiny part in the corridors of political power - knows that what people say to you in your language isn’t always what they say or even think among themselves in theirs.

I don’t need to tell you that we Brits in the large know almost nothing of the real Germany of today. And our popular media do precious little to enlighten us, quite the reverse.

And educationally?

Oh, our schools teach German history all right. But the history of which Germany? When?

No fewer than 50% of all GCSE students and 80% of all A-level students study the rise and fall of the Third Reich, last seen half a century ago.

Only a fraction of those students will have any idea of the price Germany itself has since paid, of the miraculous creation of the new German democracy, of the upheavals, the generational agonisings, the determination to tell herself the truth about her past, and to emerge as the strongest and most articulate, most altruistic champion of the original European ideal.

And I'll bet you not a dozen of them has any realistic picture of the tortuous and of often painful, winding path that led to the economic and social rejoining of the two divided Germanys under a single democratic constitutional system.

Instead, encouraged by our frequently appalling media, one British generation after another is encouraged to moulder in that vanished golden age when Britain was great and good and all alone, and Germany was awful.

The weaker the grip of our human memory on those times, the greater, it seems, our nostalgia for them.

And what is the real Germany, today? Different again, and changing all the time. As the old European dream dies, a new dream is shaping. The nation that traded the Deutsche Mark for reunification - and along with the Deutsche Mark it’s de facto role as keeper of Europe’s reserve currency - is today as unabashedly self-interested as Britain, or any other of our European partners.

When Nick Clegg, that rare thing, an English polyglot, recently addressed a press conference in Berlin, he spoke German. Beside him stood William Hague with his mouth open. Why? His headphone translation had been switched off.

Herr Westerwelle, the German Foreign Minister, congratulated Clegg on his achievement. Can you imagine a press conference in London where a British Minister of the Crown breaks off to congratulate his German opposite number on his spoken English?

Yet why should we accept it as a God-given right that others speak our language and we don't speak theirs?

Germany has for decades been our most important partner in Europe. Whether Britain has been able to accept that is another matter. But the time to cement that partnership has never been more ripe than now. Contemporary Germany’s appetites and insecurities, her problems of migration, ecology and the reshaping of her society, mirror our own, even if the shadings are different.

In Germany there is a new Generation M: M for multi-cultural. Who scored Germany's goals against Australia the other day? One Polish-German, one Tunisian-German, one German-German: and a Turkish-German set them up. They're all German now.

In a German television ad, a woman in a headscarf goes to a barbecue. A black African is cooking the kebabs. I read that in The Times. But this is not the Germany that our British media are in a hurry to portray.

Germany and Britain today have nothing to fear from one another, and much to learn, and now is the time to learn it.

By learn, I mean listen: listen to the real voice of Germany, listen to its subtext, relish its moods and regional variation.

And not only listen, but learn it and speak it: take a leaf from Charlemagne’s book, and acquire another soul.

All copyright: John le Carré