I realised, charming though she was, that she wasn't quite right for me and I wasn't quite right for her. It was a Sunday afternoon, on a baking hot summer's day in 1988.
We were sitting on the balcony of my flat in the Sudstadt, the studenty bit of Bonn, listening to the local pop station. The pips went, the two o'clock news came on, and my girlfriend swooped to turn the radio off. Gobsmacked, I asked what she was doing. "Ruhestunde," she replied. Quiet hour. Surely I knew, as I'd been living there more than a year, of the bylaw that entitled the elderly to an hour of peace each day?
I responded to this polite request to turn down the noise like any proud British bulldog. I jumped up and down, and ranted: "You stupid, sad people, haven't you got anything better to do than make up rules all the time? Just following orders, eh, eh? Well, I don't need to be told how to behave." My girlfriend just asked quietly if I had a social conscience.
I have never found a better tale to illustrate the essential difference between us and them (and, yes, in spite of my name I am firmly one of us - more of that later) which has so preoccupied us since the Glorious Victory on 1 September. This question of whether the British are inferior to the Germans, or they to us, is a most peculiar obsession - but only with us.
At the time of that exchange in 1988, Britain was in the middle of the Lawson boom, awash with champagne, inflated house prices and a brash self-confidence that came from the sudden (and in many cases temporary) acquisition of wealth.
Germany, and sleepy Bonn in particular, seemed distinctly old-fashioned. Yet it was a much gentler place to live. The word "community" actually meant something. The social safety net was stronger, and public services were, then as now, infinitely superior. And, yes, the older generation probably did feel less threatened; the idea that we act more responsibly if given more freedom doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I knew my girlfriend was right - and that made me angrier.
I now realise that all the time I spent in Germany (a year in Bonn for Reuters was followed by two years in Berlin for the Daily Telegraph) I saw things through this same prism - of inferiority and superiority. For all our free-market hubris, the Germans just got on with things in their comfortable way, making things such as cars that people actually wanted to buy, providing schools and hospitals that actually worked, and, just for good measure, absorbing their 16 million poor compatriots from the east. Which other country's taxpayers would put up with (no matter how much they moaned) a "solidarity tax" to pay for reunification? Which other economy could have withstood the economic and social shock and emerged only slightly battered from it? And which other country, year after year, won important football matches even when playing unimpressively?
Yet, just when I thought I'd got the hang of the place, just when I began to sing its praises, something would happen to wind me up. Such as the 2am incident when I ignored the red man down a tiny back street in Bonn, along which perhaps one car an hour would travel, only to be confronted with a big green-and-white Polizeiwagen. My response to a little polite lecture about social responsibility was another rant in which I suggested the English weren't so anally retentive about rules. Amazingly, the officer let me go. Then there was the note in my letterbox from the residents' committee asking "esteemed neighbour Mr Kampfner" if he wouldn't mind seeing to his lead-guzzling car as it was polluting the street and ruining the environment.
But take away these niggles, and the truth is far more mundane. Germany (postwar, I hasten to add) has never been terrible, nor has it been wonderful. What it lacks is extremes, though reading the British press you would never think so. I knew, as a foreign correspondent, that anything about some insignificant neo-Nazi demonstration was almost sure to make the front page. In fact, thuggery and racism in Germany are no worse than in Britain. As for the media, they may have excruciating game shows on TV, they may have adverts stuck in the 1950s, but there's no dumbing down and no hyperbole in most German newspapers. The same goes for their political discourse. You can introduce an earnest topic of discussion over dinner with German friends and not meet an embarrassed silence.
Lest I forget to mention the war, I should recall my Jewish father's visit to me in Germany. It was 50 years since he and his family had escaped Hitler, hiding on a train from their home in Bratislava just as he was invading. Several of his relatives stayed and died in the camps. He had expected his visit to be an emotional one. But we spent a fortnight travelling across the country, across the transit route to then-divided Berlin, and the experience left him with no strong emotions either way. "Quite pleasant," was his most-used phrase.
And that's just it. The jingoism of the past several decades, the animosities and the cheap little headlines, are products of our psychosis, not theirs. This warped cocktail of superiority and inferiority is all ours. Whenever I go to Germany, I see a sensible, well-meaning, less-than-exciting people coping with social, economic and political problems just like anywhere else.
To add to their woes, they now have footballing problems as well. At last, perhaps we can see that, on or off the pitch, the Germans are fallible and unremarkable. Yet it took a Swede to prove it to us.
Hunter Davies, page 58
