That's why I'm inclined to think, as I was waffling about in one of my earlier posts, that EBD's reconciliation promotion attempts in Three Go didn't go down very well. There's a brief mention of Natalie Mensch in Peggy but, although she's 3 years younger than Peggy, she's shoved out of the way into Special Sixth, and the Austrian girls who were in Mary-Lou and Verity's form in Three Go vanish without trace.

I'm just guessing, but even EBD doesn't normally just mislay pupils like that, and it's telling that it's the Austrian pupils who vanish. I'd suspect that someone strongly suggested she stick (I didn't mean that to be so alliterative ) to writing about characters from Britain or other Commonwealth countries for the time being.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

My friend Inge told me recently that she was very scared of coming from Hamburg on the exchange with me in 1958 as she was sure that she would meet a lot of anti-German feeling from my friends.

I am glad to say that she didn't.......

I think EBD just meant that the days of speaking German all day were dropped, the language continued to be taught in the normal way for exam purposes which would have included conversation as well as reading, writing and literature.

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Cestina's dolls houses - Where has the week gone?

With so few native German speakers in the school, and no opportunity to practice when out shopping or on expeditions, it must have been much more difficult to achieve a reasonable standard of spoken German, whatever they managed in written work. And even in written work, I suppose they'd have had limited access to books etc. in German - probably had to make do with whatever they brought from Austria. I don't suppose new German text books would have been a priority for publishers.

Sorry for quoting myself. I think some instances fathers had been POWs.

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"Lack of planning on your part does not necessarily mean an emergency on mine"

"Association does not infer causality"

Not strictly on topic but a friend of mine who was a Japanese POW would not have anything made in Japan in the house and would refuse a lift in a Japanese car even in his late 70s
He was outraged when the Emperor of Japan visited the UK on a State visit
This was in the 1990s so was well after the end of the war
On the other hand an Uncle of mine was one of the liberators of Belson he married a Geman in 1949 and adopted her son but because of the age difference I didn't know he was not his son until I was about 16 My Uncle was in the Army and my dad in the RAF so we were rarely in the UK at the same time
Two different points of view on the same subject

My godfather's father had been in a Japanese POW camp, and long after he passed away, his wife was just the same - wouldn't have anything Japanese in the house.

I was a language assistant in France in 2001-02, and worked alongside a couple of German girls. They had to put up with some covert hostility and one or two snarky comments from the older members of staff in the schools where we taught.

A similar thing happened to one of my college tutors when he was a student; he went to visit his uncle in his new Japanese car and the uncle, who had been a POW in Japan refused to see him or talk to him until he got rid of the car.

I visited Germany in the early 80s on a school trip and I remember all of us being told before we went that we were under no circumstances to make any jokes/comments about the war while we were there.

That just made me think of Basil Fawlty in the "Don't mention the war" episode . Seriously, though, that was in the mid-'70s so after EBD was writing, and it was still a very delicate subject then.

There's definitely a big change from the internationalism and interest in "folk" culture of the Austrian years to the Splendid Isolation of the CS and the San as a British colony abroad in the Swiss years.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

This is all so interesting, because Dear German Friend has a huge problem with The War. She lives in London and has a British passport and tells me about her school education in Germany in the 70s. She says she is totally traumatised by it, and that she lives with the guilt of it all the time.

She had some friends to stay and they wanted to go to an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. She went, but couldn't actually go in. So she stayed outside while her friends went in. When they came out, she says that she was tearful and shaking ... we avoid talking anything 'war' with her, but I've always felt that her anxiety about the 2WW is just a bit OTT. As much as I love her.

But surely if she being educated in the 70s she can't have been born until years after the war....?

Isn't there a lovely comment from Bride about bad weather conditions being the result of "all these atom bomb experiments" or similar (quoting from memory, sorry). Its about the only hint of the Cold War I've spotted.

I have a German friend with a similar attitude - we Just Don't Talk About The War because it upsets her too much. Although there was an awkward moment once when we stuck a DVD of Father Ted on and it turned out to be *that* episode...

Of course. But apparently the standard education in Germany stresses the awfulness of the war in a way that has made DGF feel so guilty. Not expressing it very well.

Might the decline of interest in 'folk' culture in the CS books be in part because of the Nazi commitment to the German Völkisch movement? Or would that have been known about internationally at the time? Mind you, the 'British colony' stuff starts happening even in Tyrol, when Jem insists the school be moved to the Sonnalpe around the time of the Anschluss, so that it can be under the protection of the 'British colony' (or is it 'English'?), and the language gets all colonial.

I'd think so, in terms of Austrian/German culture. The vaguely eugenics-sounding references - "high bred faces" and "came from a North German seaside resort and looked it" and so on - also disappear after the war years. The insularity of the school in the Swiss years is strange, though. The school never seems part of the community in the way that it did in Tyrol, and until Eugen Courvoisier comes along there don't seem to be any non-British doctors at the San, and there certainly aren't any local pupils with nice friendly parents who pal up with Jack and Joey, Phil and Hilary etc. You'd expect an outgoing, multilingual person like Joey to make lots of Swiss friends, but the only new friend she makes in Switzerland is Winnie Embury.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

Out of interest are we ever told how or when Verity's mother died? If she was killed in the bombing that may explain her feelings

The common feeling among young Germans isn't actual guilt about what happened but rather the sense that what their predecessors did was so awful that the stain will never been removed from the German people and they must take over the burden of it when their parents and grandparents die. During the period I was there, they told me that they had and would learn about that period of German history in every single year from years 7 to 13. It was compulsory and many of my friends believed that they, too, were being blamed for what had happened even though it had nothing to do with them. Hence their discomfort about the subject: "Oh, look, here's even more people blaming us."

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The writer's credo: 'Sometimes you've got to sacrifice the things you like' (Delta Goodrem - Born To Try)

Yes, I think this is exactly what DGF feels, all the time. But she also feels personally guilty. She says that that was the way they were taught it at school.

Am I right in thinking that in German schools after the war they didn't teach about WW2 and that they created a much more liberal and relaxed atitude in education, then the next generation they turned about and taught it? I seem to remember reading/hearing that at one time German children couldn't tell you who Adolf Hitler was.

Note: the following is a fairly simplistic version, but explains the bare bones. Oh, and my innate historian has come out to play, so this is loooong.

It reflected the changing attitudes of the Germans over time. It was very much a subject that Was Not Discussed immediately after the war by everyday Germans. In the historical and political sense, there was a big debate about whether what had happened was the work of a few extreme individuals and everyone else simply obeyed orders.

The new generations in the 1960s, along with prevailing attitudes of rebellion and revolution, changed this. Historians began to see the events of the 1930s and 40s as a reflection of the German character and thus many more Germans are seen as to blame for 'what happened.' (This is particularly in relation to the Holocaust, but extends to the war and other atrocities as well).

A big change occurred from 1986 with the beginning of what would become known as the Historikerstreit (historians' quarrel). Politicians and leading figures began to complain about the lack of anything in which Germans could take pride. There were plans for new museums to be built, and there was a fear that these would exclude the recent history in favour of the past and honourable events. Some German historians began to feel around for other events that could explain or pardon the Holocaust, such as the Russian Revolution. Touchy comparisons were made between those Germans forced to leave their homes in Czechoslovakia and Poland with those Jews forced into labour and death camps.

The controversy boiled down to the following key questions:
* Were events related to the Holocaust unique in history or could they be compared to other events like the Russian gulags?
* Had Germany followed a special path to get to the point in which such atrocities were committed?
* Could other genocides be compared to the Holocaust?
* Were Nazi-related crimes a reaction to those of Stalin in Russia?

Understandably, there is no 'right' answer to any of the above questions. Much of the debate died away by 1989, and the reunification of Germany certainly helped to hide it away under the carpet. Nevertheless, any history of Germany that describes the Holocaust and appeared during the late 1980s or early 1990s has to be viewed in light of the author's opinion on the Historikerstreit.

Another key issue is the change that saw the increasing importance of social history in the late 1990s and particularly in the 2000s. Prior to that, much of the attention had been focused on military and political decisions, but slowly the roles of individual everyday Germans who did not take part in extraordinary support of or opposition to the Nazi regime began to be seen as important. Diaries and memoirs that were originally published in the period from the 1940s to the 1990s are being re-examined, with a number of them being made into films and/or republished. As part of this, the idea of Germans being allowed to see themselves as victims is slowly become more acceptable. Hence formerly verboten topics such as the rape of German women and children by the invading Allied forces is being discussed openly for the first time.

Er, yes, I may have babbled a bit. Sorry.

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The writer's credo: 'Sometimes you've got to sacrifice the things you like' (Delta Goodrem - Born To Try)