Before the narrative of Len Deighton’s bestselling thriller SS-GB begins, there is a “reproduction” of an authentic-looking rubber-stamped document: “Instrument of Surrender – English Text. Of all British armed forces in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland including all islands.” It is dated 18 February 1941. After ordering the cessation of all hostilities by British forces, it sets down further conditions, including “the British Command to carry out at once, without argument or comment, all further orders that will be issued by the German Command on any subject. Disobedience of orders, or failure to comply with them, will be regarded as a breach of these surrender terms and will be dealt with by the German Command in accordance with the laws and usages of war.”
Written amid the anxieties of Britain’s early membership of the European Communities and published in 1978, Deighton’s thriller sets up two ideas that will become important in the rhetoric of Brexit. Since there is no sense that Deighton has a conscious anti-EU agenda, the idea seems to arise from a deeper structure of feeling in England. One is the fear of the Englishman turning into the “new European”, fitting himself into the structures of German domination. His central character is a harbinger of the “rootless cosmopolitan” who cannot be trusted to uphold English independence and English values, and who therefore functions as the enemy within, the quisling class of pro-Europeans. This is the treason of the elite, the puppet politicians and sleek mandarins who quickly accommodate themselves to the new regime.
Deighton was building on real historical memories of the appeasers whose prewar conduct makes the notion that they would have quickly become collaborators in the event of a defeat to the Nazis highly credible. This idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves.
The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)
SS-GB was in part the inspiration for an even more successful English thriller, Robert Harris’s multimillion-selling Fatherland, published in 1992 and filmed for television in 1994. Harris had begun the novel in the mid-1980s but abandoned it. He revived and finished it explicitly in the context of German reunification in 1990 and of fears that the enemy Britain had defeated twice in the 20th century would end the century by dominating it: “If,” Harris wrote in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition in 2012, “there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.”
In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication – the final working-out of the consequences of nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, “the triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.”
Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.
In fact, Britain not only did not move on in 1990 – with the resurrection of a united Germany, it moved back. Harris is no anti-European reactionary and would become one of the most furious critics of Brexit. Yet, like Deighton, he was tapping into profound national anxieties.
The real twist of the knife in Harris’s story is that the novel is set in Germany and the main characters are German. There is nothing of significance to say about England 20 years after its surrender. Except, that is, that is part of a European Union: “In the west, 12 nations – Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.”
A dystopian fantasy this may be, but in the English reactionary imagination, dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality. Rhetorically, it was commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent. In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Prof Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that “the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler”.
The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.”
The cover of that issue of the Spectator’s bore the headline “Speaking for England” – a conscious reference to one of the moments of high drama in September 1939 when Leo Amery in the House of Commons invited Labour’s Arthur Greenwood to “Speak for England!”, implying that the appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain did not do so.
Ridley’s remarks were dismissed by Lutz Stavenhagen, minister of state in the German foreign office, as the sort of thing that might be heard “in the pub after a football match”. And Ridley himself had to resign. But these were not the mere rantings of a marginal crank. As Peter Jenkins wrote in the Independent at the time, “it is widely supposed that Mrs Thatcher’s heart is with him, if not her head … It is no secret that she, like him, fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. She too instinctively mistrusts the Germans and finds it impossible to forget the experiences of the second world war.
The sheer volatility of public opinion in Britain was clear in the 1975 referendum on whether or not to stay in the common market: between January and June 1975, Harold Wilson’s government managed to turn a 57% leave preference in polls to a 67% remain vote on the day. The referendum was “the only really sustained debate the British had ever had on their role in the world” and, as the Daily Express put it, in a jubilant editorial: “Britain’s Yes to Europe” had rung “louder, clearer and more unanimous than any decision in peacetime history”.
Yet a result that seemed both decisive and conclusive proved to be neither – Europe continued to poison British politics. And perhaps one of the reasons it did so is that, as the 1975 referendum campaign showed, there was a very deep underlying division about the meaning of the second world war. The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975, many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters. But instead of this common experience creating a common emotional ideal of Britain’s relationship to Europe, it fed two completely opposite stories, each very deeply felt.
by Fintan O'Toole, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Francesco Ciccolella
[ed. I have exactly zero experience with travel, history or politics on the old continent and am just baffled by the undercurrents swirling around Brexit. Make of this what you will.]
Written amid the anxieties of Britain’s early membership of the European Communities and published in 1978, Deighton’s thriller sets up two ideas that will become important in the rhetoric of Brexit. Since there is no sense that Deighton has a conscious anti-EU agenda, the idea seems to arise from a deeper structure of feeling in England. One is the fear of the Englishman turning into the “new European”, fitting himself into the structures of German domination. His central character is a harbinger of the “rootless cosmopolitan” who cannot be trusted to uphold English independence and English values, and who therefore functions as the enemy within, the quisling class of pro-Europeans. This is the treason of the elite, the puppet politicians and sleek mandarins who quickly accommodate themselves to the new regime.
Deighton was building on real historical memories of the appeasers whose prewar conduct makes the notion that they would have quickly become collaborators in the event of a defeat to the Nazis highly credible. This idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves.The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated. (Boris Johnson, in the Telegraph of 12 November, claimed that “we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony.”)
SS-GB was in part the inspiration for an even more successful English thriller, Robert Harris’s multimillion-selling Fatherland, published in 1992 and filmed for television in 1994. Harris had begun the novel in the mid-1980s but abandoned it. He revived and finished it explicitly in the context of German reunification in 1990 and of fears that the enemy Britain had defeated twice in the 20th century would end the century by dominating it: “If,” Harris wrote in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition in 2012, “there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.”
In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication – the final working-out of the consequences of nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, “the triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.”
Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality, but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. “Europe,” Barnett writes, “moved on from the second world war and Britain didn’t.” One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.
In fact, Britain not only did not move on in 1990 – with the resurrection of a united Germany, it moved back. Harris is no anti-European reactionary and would become one of the most furious critics of Brexit. Yet, like Deighton, he was tapping into profound national anxieties.
The real twist of the knife in Harris’s story is that the novel is set in Germany and the main characters are German. There is nothing of significance to say about England 20 years after its surrender. Except, that is, that is part of a European Union: “In the west, 12 nations – Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.”
A dystopian fantasy this may be, but in the English reactionary imagination, dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality. Rhetorically, it was commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent. In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Prof Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that “the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler”.
The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” Boris Johnson told the Telegraph on 14 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and “various people” were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was “pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate”. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European monetary system being introduced by the EU was “all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.”
The cover of that issue of the Spectator’s bore the headline “Speaking for England” – a conscious reference to one of the moments of high drama in September 1939 when Leo Amery in the House of Commons invited Labour’s Arthur Greenwood to “Speak for England!”, implying that the appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain did not do so.
Ridley’s remarks were dismissed by Lutz Stavenhagen, minister of state in the German foreign office, as the sort of thing that might be heard “in the pub after a football match”. And Ridley himself had to resign. But these were not the mere rantings of a marginal crank. As Peter Jenkins wrote in the Independent at the time, “it is widely supposed that Mrs Thatcher’s heart is with him, if not her head … It is no secret that she, like him, fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. She too instinctively mistrusts the Germans and finds it impossible to forget the experiences of the second world war.
The sheer volatility of public opinion in Britain was clear in the 1975 referendum on whether or not to stay in the common market: between January and June 1975, Harold Wilson’s government managed to turn a 57% leave preference in polls to a 67% remain vote on the day. The referendum was “the only really sustained debate the British had ever had on their role in the world” and, as the Daily Express put it, in a jubilant editorial: “Britain’s Yes to Europe” had rung “louder, clearer and more unanimous than any decision in peacetime history”.
Yet a result that seemed both decisive and conclusive proved to be neither – Europe continued to poison British politics. And perhaps one of the reasons it did so is that, as the 1975 referendum campaign showed, there was a very deep underlying division about the meaning of the second world war. The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975, many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters. But instead of this common experience creating a common emotional ideal of Britain’s relationship to Europe, it fed two completely opposite stories, each very deeply felt.
by Fintan O'Toole, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Francesco Ciccolella
[ed. I have exactly zero experience with travel, history or politics on the old continent and am just baffled by the undercurrents swirling around Brexit. Make of this what you will.]
