Wyndham Wallace profiles a 1980s German TV epic…

“History is written by the victors,” Winston Churchill once said, and as someone living in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s I grew up with the impression that the Germans were humourless warmongers whose crimes should never be forgotten; to the point where, in the playground, the word “Nazi” was virtually interchangeable with “German”.

The ‘propaganda’ of the war-associated films and comic books I consumed as a child was so deeply ingrained that even when my father’s job took him to the north of the country I remained suspicious of perfectly pleasant locals. But such attitudes are far from uncommon: even now English crowds chant “Two World Wars and one World Cup” at football matches against German teams. The most recent of these triumphs might have been 1966, but it seems that some of my compatriots are in little hurry to put the past behind them.

All the same (and perhaps, in hindsight, because of such attitudes), I moved to Berlin six years ago, possibly under the illusion that Berlin is a state of mind rather than the capital of Germany. I wandered its streets for hours at a time, eyes drawn to the pockmarked façades of houses that still bore the scars of war, head whirling at the photos of bombed-out devastation exhibited within the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, tear ducts threatening to leak within the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

I’d never looked at the city from this angle before. I revelled in its multiculturalism, its acceptance of Bohemian lifestyles and its willingness to accept its past. I devoured books like Christopher Hilton’s The Wall: The People’s Story, or Ian McEwan’s The Innocent, much of it set in Kreuzberg‘s Adalbertstraße close to my apartment.

I began to think of Berlin as a living organism, complex and contradictory, the sum of all of its inhabitants past, present and future, and slowly I realised that, as the 2001 film says: “Berlin is in Germany.” Like every race or ethnic group, the Germans are not a nation so much as a collection of people living within some arbitrary borders, their behaviour and opinions varied. My view of its citizens had been contaminated…