High life
Selfless act
Taki
I always have a great time chez anyone connected with Jimmy — my NBF being Ben, his 18-year-old son — the low point of the night being Princess Pushy yelling in German for people not to speak to me. It is obviously much too late for Marie-Chris- tine (who speaks with a German accent despite having spent 15 years in Australia where she was known as Christine Rollins) to learn manners at this point in time, but I shall nevertheless give her a hint: It is very rude to one's hostess and to other guests to wash one's dirty linen in public, and to demand that others don't speak to some- one she doesn't like. It is also lousy man- ners to always make a fuss and be hysterical and histrionic.
And speaking of hysteria, A.A. Gill has really gone and done it this time. Not even during the height of the London Blitz did an English newspaper publish such a brutal diatribe against a people as Gill did against the Teutons in the Sunday Times magazine (11 July). But unlike the Germans, who are no longer warriors but patsies (their gentle- manly ambassador Gebhardt von Moltke wrote a gentlemanly letter to the ST com- plaining about xenophobia; I would have preferred the reaction of another von Moltke, long ago), I plan to do something in defence of my favourite people. The next time I see Adrian Gill, even if the `blonde' is present, I will ram my great uncle's first world war helmet — the one with the sharp spike on top — right up his bum and force him to sing 'Deutschland Uber Alles' while I'm ramming it.
Having said this, I will now once again defend the Germans. So much opprobrium has come to be attached to almost every aspect of the German past, it is impossible to say anything good about it without being condemned as a Nazi sympathiser. But Wilhelmine society was the most philo- Semitic of Europe, and although the Nazis were Jew haters, the Germans were not. At least no more than most countries at that time. If it were not for Hitler and the Nazis the Jews would not have been persecuted. In 1933, 44 per cent of German Jews mar Tied non-Jews. The Goldhagen book was a great libel against a people, calling them willing executioners of Jews, conveniently forgetting other willing executioners like the Turks of Armenians, the Japanese of the Koreans, the Russians and Chinese of their own people.
If the Holocaust is the most shocking event of the 20th century, what are we to think of the 100 million souls those nice guys Stalin and Mao managed to do away with? But back to the Germans; 15 cen- turies of German contribution to European civilisation unequalled by any country were dismissed by A.A. (World-War-I-Helmet- Pp-His-Bum) Gill 'as the greatest disaster in our continent's history'. Albertus Mag- nus, Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Humboldt, Nietzsche, Weber, Mann, Rilke, Heidegger, Beethoven, Bach, Schiller, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Emil Nolde, Holderlin, Rundstedt, Guderian, Kleist, Manteuffel, Rommel, the list goes on.
And for every prominent German like von Treitschke who denounced Jews, one can find an equally prominent German like Mommsen or Hegel or Goethe who denounced anti-Semitism. The truth is it was Hitler who was pathologically anti- Semitic. Nazism was an insane ideology that preached class hatred, just as commu- nism was an insane ideology that preached class hatred. Yet I do not hear World-War- I-Helmet-Up-His-Bum saying anything about the filthy Marxists in academia still excusing Stalin.
Next week I shall be in Germany com- peting in a tennis tournament. In Munich. Not quite Manchester, I know, but what the hell. Alas, in the Fatherland we do not have a Sports Minister whose wife and sis- ter work for anti-hunting groups. We do not have a cowardly lefty as Home Secre- tary who has illegally detained a great man like General Pinochet, the saviour of Chile, while pretending to be concerned about justice. And here in Germany we do not let cold-blooded murderers of the IRA walk free. No nation on earth has suffered more slings and arrows than Germany. And now it is left to the poor little Greek boy (of German ancestry) to defend the Father- land's good name. Adrian Gill, wherever you are, you better learn to sing the old German national anthem well, otherwise I shall twist the helmet. Mind you, being an Englishman, you might like it.
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