When Matthias Matussek of Der Speigel interviewed the Booker-prize winning novelist Ian McEwan, in London, it was meant to be a liberal exchange of ideas – a salon, if you will. “We had a lovely dinner, but bumped into this famous director on the way out. I won’t tell you his name, but he was nominated for an Oscar. Anyway, when Ian introduced my wife and me as ‘friends from Germany’, the director gave us a Nazi salute. Then he laughed his arse off. I was in the West End of London in fucking 2006. What the hell was that all about?”

It was a joke, apparently. “And I laughed it away” says Matussek. “What else can you do?” But, when Matussek wrote about the episode, McEwan denied it. He said that Matussek should put his imagination to better use and become a novelist. “I didn’t make it up” says Matussek. “Nor did my wife. The willingness of Mr McEwan to call me a liar was very telling. He would rather trust an Englishman, who he happened to bump into, than a German he’d been with all evening. Is it any wonder that my fellow countrymen think there’s a deep well of anti-German resentment in Britain?”

Matussek worked as Der Speigel’s London correspondent for two years. He ranted about how the stoicism, education and humour of the British were being devalued by Big Brother, binge drinking and happy slapping. When he returned to Germany, to become the paper’s culture editor, the diplomatic corps must have breathed a sigh of relief. But, in pride of place, on the wall of his Hamburg office, is the goodbye column he wrote in the Evening Standard. It praises the British character after the London bombings of last summer. And it ends, “ Great Britain, I will miss you.”

Matussek’s love for Britain, it seems, isn’t shared by all his countrymen. In a recent survey to find Germany’s favourite European neighbours, the English didn’t do terribly well. “The French came top” says Matussek. Well, they’ve got lovely scenery, which is why the Germans are all buying second homes in the Alsace. “England was between the Serbians and the Croatians – number 29 or something.” And with 100,000 football fans in Germany for the World Cup, we’re unlikely to improve on that position anytime soon.

Fans in Germany 2006 will be singing from old English hymnal, with “ Two World Wars And One World Cup” and “ Stand Up If You Won The War” . And readers of the The Sun have been voting on a new song for the terraces. The winner, sung to the tune of Dad’s Army, is “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Jurgen Klinsmann?”. It comes complete with air raid sirens. You can understand why t he German ambassador to Britain complained, last year, that the British were still “obsessed with the Nazi period”.

Sven-Goran Eriksson (who has been on the wrong end of a few football songs in his time) wants the World Cup – with its s logan “time to make friends” – to be a new beginning. In Free Lions, a guide for England fans, he asks supporters to avoid anti-German songs. Especially ‘Ten German bombers’, which celebrates the RAF’s success against the Luftwaffe. And the lyrics to more appropriate songs, like God Save the Queen and You’ll Never Walk Alone, have been added to the Foreign Office website. Like England fans are going to look at a Foreign Office website.

But they should – the advice about what songs to sing is about more than PR. The German police have already warned fans that the Nazi salute, and the goose-step, will be treated as criminal acts – and not, as is traditional in England, “a bloody good laugh”. And whistling the Great Escape – if it’s whistled with intent – could actually be enough to get arrested. It feels like there’s an amusing contradiction buried in there somewhere. But the message from the German authorities is clear – don’t mention the war.

In a Harris poll, last year, 62% of Germans said they never talk about the war anyway. Visitors to Germany won’t find Hitler’s bunker on tourist maps. Colditz Castle is stuck out in a little village near Leipzig and requires two bus journeys to get there. And the tourist office in Nuremberg has no information on its Nazi history, except a tiny black and white booklet obliquely entitled ‘Germany 1933-1945’. They are more interested in pushing the Toy Museum and Business Tower than the Zeppelin Stadium and Courtroom 606.

That’s why, when there was a public vote for the greatest figure in German history, on the German public television network, the organisers felt obliged to introduce a “no mass-murderers” rule. No-one was allowed to nominate Hitler, or anyone associated with the Third Reich. When the votes were counted, Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor during the post-war reconstruction of West Germany, was declared the winner. It showed the lengths that Germany is prepared to go to to sanitise its troubled past.

“You Brits dwell on the war because it was your finest hour” says Matussek. “The war constitutes modern Britain”. After the London bombings of 2005, a YouGov poll asked Britons to choose from a list of phrases which might be used to describe or define what it is to be British. In first place was ‘Our right to say what we think’. In second place was ‘Our defiance of Nazi Germany in 1940’. Matussek says that, when England fans chant about the war, they are simply reliving their glorious past. “Which is a healthy thing to do” he says. “But for us Germans, it’s sometimes tedious.”

Don’t expect the German fans to sit in silence. Chanting, after all, still offers fans another opportunity to practise their English. When Bayern Munich came to Manchester United, they ran through their entire repertoire – in English – including ‘Zing Ven You're Vinning’ and ‘Stend Ap If You Heit ManU’. And, if Germany meet England, they will also make sure to chant about BSE (with mooing noises) and ‘ inselaffen’. They should save their breath – England fans don’t understand insults in a foreign language. But do ordinary Germans really think of us as ‘island monkeys’? And do we really care?

The Inter City Express from Hamburg to Berlin has recycling bins, and wi-fi, and self-cleaning toilets. But it’s still a minute late leaving the Hauptbahnhof . Since trains and punctuality are so important in the German world, the Deutsche Bahn hand-out official ‘certificates of train tardiness’ ( Bescheinigung über Zugverspätung) if a train is late. A minute doesn’t count as too Zugverspätung, not even in Germany, but you can use the certificates as an official explanation of why you’re late for work or school. Or keep them as a souvenir of living the German way.

My guide book says that, to greet strangers in Germany, simply knock twice on the table. It means, “Hello, everyone”. I try it, but everyone on the train turns round to find out what all the knocking is about. I figure that my guide book is out of date, and try another approach. “Hallo, jeder”, I say. Everyone looks surprised at an Englishman speaking German. As one man says, “In Germany we have a joke. If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. If you speak two languages, you’re bilingual. If you speak one language, you’re English.”

The conversation is hesitant at first – like my German. So we start to talk about Anglo-German relations in English. The Germans will speak English at any opportunity. There are about 450 English words in the German vocabulary. They use them as often as possible, mainly to prove how sophisticated and educated they are. Many English verbs are ‘Germanised’ and absorbed into the language – ‘managen’, ‘involvieren’ and ‘e-mailen’ for instance – and it doesn’t seem to create a scandal the way it does in France.

Conversation on the train is in ‘Denglish’ – the wonderful mix of Deutsch and English.

A: Hello, Sir! How goes it you?

B: Oh, thank you for the afterquestion.

A: Are you already long here?

B: No, first a pair days. I am not out London.

B: Will we now drink a beer? My throat is outdried. etc

But there’s nothing self-conscious about it – the passengers just seem happy to practise their language skills.

They don’t like the non-democratic idea of private hospitals or public schools. But they talk, openly, about needing a German Margaret Thatcher to deal with the country’s unions. They declare an undying devotion to the German republic but, secretly, they love our monarchy. It represents continuity to a country full of discontinuity. They loved Princess Diana (or ‘Lady Dee’ as one passenger calls her), and German television still screens the “Queen’s Birthday Parade” – the Trooping of the Colour – in June.

They rather like the fact that the British are formal and old-fashioned. They tell a long-winded joke about two men and one woman, from different countries, who are washed up on an archipelago of desert islands. After a month, the French men are living with the woman in a menage a trois. The Greek men are sleeping with each other and letting the woman do the cooking. The Germans are organising a rota for marital access to the woman. And the English men are still waiting for someone to introduce them to the woman.

When the train pulls into Berlin Zoo, the station news-stands are full of one story. A picture of Chancellor Angela Merkel in her swimsuit appeared in The Sun – under the headline “Big in the Bumdestag” – and the German press are furious. “You are rotten to the core” says Bild Zeitung columnist Franz Josef Wagner. In Britain, the picture was an excuse for a few lame puns about Germany’s much improved ‘bottom line’, but in Germany it has been seen as something else. An act of gross disrespect. As Wagner writes, “ Where does this hatred come from?”

Germany’s ex-Minister of Culture experienced the hatred of the British tabloids first-hand. Michael Naumann’s comment on Anglo-German relations (‘There is no other country in Europe that hinges [its] identity as strongly as Great Britain does on the Second World War. And she has every right to do so’) was badly edited – the second sentence was missed out. “But my German sense of humour failed utterly when the hoodlums of the Sun followed up with a headline “That is why we won’t forget, Herr Minister!” showing a horrible picture of Bergen-Belsen.”

Naumann doesn’t need a lesson in the Holocaust – his Jewish relatives, who barely escaped the Third Reich, returned to Germany in British and American uniforms. And he doesn’t need a lesson in the ways of the British – he counts his time at Queen’s College in Oxford as the happiest of his life. “I enjoyed the absence of the bureaucracy,” says Naumann, “[and] a generally highly cultured tone of political discussion, much more tolerant of other people's views than over here in Germany.” Those aren’t virtues that Britain’s tabloids tend to celebrate.

Dr Ulf Poschardt, political columnist for Die Welt, has suggested we talk about Anglo-German relations over tea. Germans think we still drink afternoon tea. The English language text-books in German schools, which now focus on America, last focused on England in the 1960s. So they imagine we’re all tea, Miss Marple and How D’you Do. They take their pronunciation from the same books, which is why Germans still pronounce the ‘a’ as ‘e’. At McDonalds, a German will order a Big Mec, and say ‘thenkyou’. And sound like a Bavarian Brian Sewell.

Poschardt studies Notting Hill to improve his English, and his diction has a Hugh Grant quality about it – his friends call him ‘Posh’. His tailoring is bespoke, and he drinks sparkling water with lemon. He wrote a recent column for Die Weld from a park bench on Hampstead Heath. “The bench was inscribed ‘in loving memory of Sarah’, and nobody had tried to deface it” says Poschardt. “Everybody respected it, no matter what culture or background they came from – I thought that was a miracle. In Germany, somebody would have drawn a swastika or a penis on it.”

But, in other ways, Germany is more respectful than Britain. Politicians’ private lives are strictly off limits. And so is Angela Merkel’s bottom. Poschardt says that educated Germans completely understand the humour of our tabloid headlines. “It’s a ‘sprachspiel’ as Wittgenstein puts it” he says. “A role they are playing. A funny way of dealing with reality. But there’s no such culture in the tabloids here in Germany. And, because of our history, we don’t offend other countries like that. Or put them down. The only people we put down are anti-Israel. And pro-Fascist.”

Bild Zeitung is the only tabloid in Germany. It regularly has pictures of topless women on the front page. But, when it reprinted the pictures of Angela Merkel, it covered up the Chancellor’s backside with a red square. A big red square. But that’s because courts in Germany tend to rule in favour of privacy. Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, successfully sued a news agency for claiming he dyed his hair, and got a court injunction to prohibit newspapers from publishing rumours about his marriage.

Germany has had its share of sex scandals. The latest involved Michel Friedman, a talkshow host, in debauched cocaine binges with prostitutes. But the country’s politicians have always manage to stay clean. Der Spiegel takes great pride in the fact it has forced leading government ministers to resign after unearthing shady dealings. “But the revelations were about money or power” says Matussek. “Never sex. That was taboo. Everybody, for instance, knew that chancellor Kohl had a mistress – but nobody wrote about it.”

The Germans think that British tabloids reflect our arrogance. Matussek reckons we’ve got more arrogant since the British economy improved – and the Germany economy stagnated. “The best way to improve your image with us is definitely to lose your money” he says. “If we want to cheer ourselves up, we look at your NHS. And your education. But give us something new to laugh about, for goodness sake. How about a recession? Or Beckham sucking during a penalty shoot-out against the Germans? Or, worst of all, ‘Bridget Jones, Part III’.”

When he was London correspondent for Der Speigel, Matussek enjoyed dinners with leading British intellectuals. But one in particular – with Dame Antonia Byatt – sticks in his mind. “Over dessert, she asked me for my opinion on the European Constitution. I said, ‘It’s interesting – I think all states should agree on common principles. What about you?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we British are the oldest democracy in the world. We don’t need constitutions. But for young nations like yours it might be very helpful.’ I could have killed her. So arrogant.”

It was British arrogance that prompted Matussek to write a new book about what Germany has given the world – “Wir Deutschen - warum uns die anderen gern haben können". The is “We Germans - why other people should like us”. But it also means “why they can kiss our arse if they don’t”. “The Germans have a problem with patriotism” says Matussek. “The English don’t. You have a great past. You never lost a war. It’s easy to look back. If we look back we see one catastrophe after the other. Germany gets defined by the 12 years from 1933.”

It is ridiculous to reduce the country of Goethe and Beethoven to the Nazi years. Hence the book. To cheer up his countrymen. “The title expresses how I feel about the British” says Matussek. “You have good reasons to like us, because we brought something to mankind. Like the car. And the computer. And Heidi Klum. And it’s not very funny when my son is chased through Richmond Park by British teenagers yelling ‘Nazi! Nazi!’. Or Prince Harry wears a swastika to a party. My good-humoured book says ‘Please stop with that Hitler-Thing - or you can kiss our arse.”

The new German Ambassador in London still hasn’t finished unpacking – he only left his posting in Washington last month. But Wolfgang Ischinger has decided to leave the Bismarck portrait up on the wall. Given the sensitive nature of Germany’s relationship with England, it feels like he’s got a tough job to do. But Ischinger reckons he’s has had tougher. He arrived in Washington just before 9-11. And was there throughout the Iraq war. So London is a walk in the park. “Yes, I like to walk in your parks in London…..”

He is judging an essay competition for British students called ‘But don’t mention the war’. It’s an obvious reference to Fawlty Towers. But thirty years after the comedy was first screened, Britons still find it difficult to talk about the Germans without mentioning the war. When Richard Desmond wanted to buy the Telegraph Group, he was in competition with Axel Springer. He ended up goose-stepping round the room and asking Telegraph executives if they were looking forward to being “run by Nazis”. Only John Cleese has ever managed to make the goose step funny.

Ischinger is aware that Ambassadors have an image of being earnest, formal government types. “And not only am I an Ambassador” he says. “I happen to be the German Ambassador, representing a country that has an image of being disciplined and not much fun.” He can’t help being ever so slightly jealous of the Italian Ambassador (“everybody thinks of spaghetti and red wine”), but he’ll do things his way. He’ll be the first one to take off his tie. “Or show up, where possible, without a tie.” And he doesn’t rule out the use of the joke.

Germans know the problem with German humour. They make fun of it in their adverts. In one, a young blonde man walks on stage at a dimly lit comedy club. He steps up to the microphone and says in a dull German accent, “Good evening, ladies and gents, I just flew in from Berlin. And, boy, are my arms tired.” Silence. He flaps his arms like a bird. More silence. As the comedian prepares to continue, the voiceover intervenes, sparing the audience any more routine. “Germans don't do comedy,” says the voiceover. “They do beer.” It was an advert for Beck’s.

The English have their own version of jokes that they imagine Germans might tell.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
The police. I'm afraid there's been an accident. Your husband is in hospital.

A man walks into a pub.
He is an alcoholic whose drink problem is destroying his family.

This isn’t a recent thing – Mark Twain said “German humour is no laughing matter”. A little unfair, maybe. After all, schadenfreude – humour that comes from the misfortunes of others – is a German invention. Like the oompah band, Werner Herzog (who ate his shoe, after it was cooked in hot oil for 24 hours), and 1500 different varieties of sausage, so it’s no surprise that Germany has its own, unique, take on the world. But when the first ever laughter school opened its doors in Berlin, it was considered enough of a story to make headlines all round the world.

HumorCare Germany employs humour trainers to teach Germans to clown around and discover the art of being funny. There is a World Cup joke doing the rounds at the moment. Dr Titze, the founding president of HumorCare Germany, and an author of 10 books dealing mainly with therapeutical humour, found it interesting on two counts. First, it’s a joke about the English. Which is rare in Germany. Germans don’t make jokes about the English because of what’s called war guilt. And, second, it shows that, whatever the rest of the world might think, the Germans do appreciate irony.

“England is going to play against Germany” says Titze. “Beckham says to his comrades: ‘Go to a pub, I'll win the match on my own’. So they go to a pub and listen to what is said about the match in the radio:

2nd minute: 1:0 for England.

8th minute: 2:0 for England.

21st minute: 2:1 for England.

27th minute: 2:2.

33rd minute: 2:3 for Germany.

67nd minute: 2:4 for Germany.

The surprised English players leave the pub and go to the stadium. After arriving there the match is finished. They go to the dressing room where Beckham is sitting. ‘We thought you were going to defeat the Germans’, they say. ‘I would have done so’, Beckham replies. ‘But I got the red card in the 15th minute’.”

The Germans didn’t take easily to satire. “It was difficult” says Maren Kroymann, a German alternative comedian “German people were used to these huge carnival parades in Cologne where everyone claps in time. They’re funny, but on a basic level, and appeal to the lower instincts. That’s what one would associate with German humour. Not very refined. I love the British for the variety of their humour. You have women, foreigners, intellectuals, everybody, all doing humour. And that’s normal. Not in Germany. Well, it’s become more normal, but only in the last 10 or 12years, and that was because of British and American comedy.””  

If anything sums up German humour, it’s Dinner For One. Screened every year, on December 31, this 18-minute black and white sketch from 1963 features Freddie Frinton as drunken butler James and May Warden as his elderly Miss Sophie. It is Miss Sophie’s 90th birthday, but all her party guests are imaginary friends who have died. So the pair get more and more sloshed, and the sketch ends with James taking his inebriated boss up to bed and delivering the immortal line: “Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?”

A professor at Bremen University reckoned Dinner For One would upset the British class system. What he was actually saying was that we didn’t have a sense of humour. “You don’t” says Matussek. “Not about yourselves. The British are rude. But you don’t like it when people are rude about you. When I wrote about the Olympics being awarded to Great Britain, I said that it was the path to war. I said ‘The Brits are so full of themselves now that they’re going to attack Schleswig Holstein’. It was funny. But the result was a page in The Daily Mail saying ‘German envoy savages Britain’.”

Whether or not the humourless German stereotype is accurate, stand-up Henning Wehn has made a good living playing up to it – on the London comedy circuit . The character he plays on stage says he’s not good enough to cut it in Germany. “You need singing, dancing, magic and juggling over there. The jokes don’t really matter.” He wears a cardigan, and a stopwatch around his neck to time, exactly, the two minutes of audience interaction before comedy can begin. He then proceeds to explain every joke. Only then does he like the audience to laugh.

Wehn actually came to England to work in sports marketing. On his first day, he found a colleague had completely covered his desk with pictures of Spitfires and Hurricanes. “There was another fellah” says Wehn, “dressed in an RAF shirt, who asked ‘Where are you from in Germany?’ I said ‘Argen’. It was completely flattened in the war. He said ‘I know Argen. But only from the air’. He felt guilty about it later so, to make amends, he gave me a tape of British war music. But he meant it in a nice way.”

Wehn doesn’t get offended by British humour. Well, he’s heard all the jokes before – whether they’re about Germans bombing things, invading things or occupying things. “I used to work next-door to a Polish restaurant. Every single day, when somebody asked ‘Where shall we go for lunch?’ somebody else would say, ‘Not the Polish place – Henning will never leave’. Every single day. And if I go to the pub, it’s always, ‘Ah, does Mein Fuhrer fancy ein pint?’. The jokes aren’t bad-natured. Tedious, yes. But not bad-natured.”

And by making jokes about Nazi Germany, on stage, Wehn shows that attitudes are changing. “Why did my grandfather cross the road?” he asks the audience. “To occupy France”. And “My grandfather died in a concentration camp – fell off the watchtower. No. Only kidding. He broke his leg.” That sort of thing. Henning isn’t actually laughing at Nazi Germany. And he isn’t making jokes about the Final Solution. He’s laughing at the fact that we shouldn’t be laughing. The way we laugh at flatulence.

The gradual dying out of the Nazi era generation – over 80 percent of Germans today were born after 1941 – has given the country a more detached view of its past. First there was the intimate – if unsympathetic – portrayal of Hitler in ‘The Downfall’. And soon we’ll be able to watch ‘Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler’. In the film, by Jewish director Dani Levy, Hitler lives and tells the story of what he was really like – a weakling who only made it to the top with the help of a Jew.

Ariadne von Schirach is one of the younger generation who think differently about the war. She loves to visit her friends in London to see the way they gossip – and ask for directions. “And, to be honest, the beer festival – and the World Cup – is more of a topic than the Second World War. Young people these days are very global. A generation that has liberated itself from cliches.” And she’s more sensitive than most because of her family. Her grand-father, Baldur von Schirach, was the head of the Hitler Youth.

“It’s important to make jokes about the Nazis” says von Schirach. “ The Prince Harry thing [Germany 's newspapers all carried front-page photographs of the Prince in what they described as his ‘El Alamein look’] was a bit tasteless, but he has to rebel somehow. I can understand. I’m writing a book about love, and when I was in London I saw a burlesque show where one of the singers was wearing a swastika. They were really into it. Taking it seriously, and from the seriousness making a good joke. I totally adore that.”

It certainly makes it easier if the Nazi jokes are made by Germans. Like To Be Or Not To Be, directed by the émigré Ernst Lubitsch. “And cabaret artist Werner Finck,” says Kroymann, “who opened his show after getting out of the concentration camp in Dachau by raising his arm in a Nazi salute. There was a lot of whispering in the audience. Then he said ‘The snow at Dachau was this high’. Brilliant. Lubitsch and Finck did funny things about Nazism without offending the German people. They differentiated between the Nazis and the Germans.”

Not like Jeremy Clarkson. He caused offence when he bemoaned the fact that the Mini, a British icon, was now being made by the Germans. Whatever next? “Give it trafficators that go like that,” he said, with a Nazi salute. “And a satellite navigation system that only goes to Poland.” Clarkson offended many people, including top German industrialist Lanbert Courth, head of the Bayer Corporation in the UK, who found his onscreen antics ‘unpleasant and disturbing’. As Kroymann says, “He was just implying that all Germans are Nazis.”.

It’s not that the Germans have an inferiority complex. It’s just that, after years of hand-wringing and self-analysis, they feel, finally, that it’s time to move on. The modern German view of history is that they – like the rest of Europe – were liberated in 1945. And that May 8, the day they were freed from Nazi oppression, is their V E day too. If Germans mention the war these days, they are now confident enough to talk about their own suffering – particularly the relentless Allied bombing of German cities such as Dresden.

The merchandise for the World Cup 2006 isn’t all official. There are orange plastic Stahlhelm – or steel helmets – with Dutch flags and ‘Attack!’ printed on the side. And fake Hitler moustaches. The Germans are a formal, law-abiding people. Their public transportation in the major cities is run on the honour system. And most people stand at traffic lights until the man turns green because they want to set a good example for children. My out-of-date guide book says they would never be rude to foreigners. In World Cup 2006, that might be about to change.