On Sunday night, I was watching Hungary play Belgium in a rowdy beer garden at Tempelhofer Feld, once a military airfield, now Berlin’s largest public park. Germany had just won their match against Slovakia 3-0, and men on their fourth pilsner were noisily reliving the highlights. But when the news came on at half time, the entire garden suddenly fell eerily silent.
“It’s a topsy-turvy world”, the news reader said. “From Brussels’ point of view, Great Britain is out of the EU … but suddenly London is not so sure.” Jaws dropped around my table. One person banged his head on the table in mock despair.
As great as the shock at Thursday’s result may have in been in the UK, it is greater still in Germany. In Britain, some had seen it coming, and at least half the country must have been looking forward to it. But in Germany the leave vote blew away the foundations of what people believed the British character to be.
For months, whenever I had tried to tell fellow Germans that a British vote to leave was entirely possible and even likely, they calmly assured me that this could not be the case. Britain was the home of pragmatism, of common sense – did I not know?
Historical experience has shaped that German notion of the British national character. In his essay Gardens in Wartime, the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig contrasts how the outbreak of the first world war triggered a fever of flagwaving and patriotic chanting on the streets of Vienna, with how calmly Londoners carried on pruning their hedges when news of the war against Hitler broke in 1939. The British were meant to be immune to all the neurotic romanticism that had played havoc with the German-speaking people’s imagination in the 20th century.
But on Thursday that nation of supposed pragmatists made a decision that seemed fuelled by some wildly idealised notion of “sovereignty”. A people admired by many Germans as essentially cautious, sceptical, small-c conservatives had flamboyantly gambled with their economic future. Until the feeling sets in that Britain has gambled with Europe’s future too, most Germans don’t hate the Brits for what happened – they pity them.
A couple of Germans will have raised a glass to the British flipping the bird at the EU establishment on Thursday night. But politically that sentiment has been voiced only in minority fringes, such as the Anti-capitalist Left group of the German Left party, or the wilder edges of Alternative für Deutschland, the party that was founded on an anti-euro ticket in 2013 and has since grown on the back of populist anti-refugee messages.
When a colleague and I interviewed the AfD’s deputy leader, Alexander Gauland, in his Potsdam offices a few weeks ago, we were struck not only by his strategic concerns about the economic consequences of Britain leaving the EU behind, but also his deep-rooted Anglophilia.
Gauland, often referred to as the “thinker-in-chief” behind the populist right party, wears tweed jackets, has written a book on the history of the House of Windsor and used to drive an original Mini even after the car was remade by BMW. His parliamentary office is adorned with portraits of British parliamentarians such as William Gladstone, William Lamb and the Duke of Devonshire.
The intellectual motor behind a party orchestrating a revolution against Germany’s “political elite”, I realised, nurtures a deep nostalgia for the British elites of yesteryear, of a world in which people read Country Life by the fireplace at their family pile. That is how deeply myths of Britishness are hardwired into Germany’s cultural memory.
When commentators try to calculate the negative impact that Brexit will have on Britain, they tend to talk mainly of exports and imports, financial markets and military muscle. People have so far talked little about the asset that most normal Europeans most admire most about Great Britain: the soft power that comes with cultural clout. Even those Germans who complain that Britain was never truly part of the European family anyway will concede that most of their compatriots don’t know who the French equivalent of James Bond is, or the Polish Mick Jagger.
An arch-federalist friend put it like this: “Britishness is all pomp and circumstance and no substance. Look at the Queen’s birthday, or Cameron’s whole mission to reform the EU – it’s all empty, all just show. But my God, are they brilliant at it.” British soft power used to be like some magical balloon animal: seemingly made of thin air but strangely flexible and resistant.
The question is whether Brexit will burst that balloon. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has recently argued, it is not just British soft power but the very idea of soft power that has, during the refugee crisis, gone from being every liberal democracy’s most sought-after asset to being seen as a source of vulnerability.
But given the image of itself that Britain has projected over the last month, I wonder if German students, creatives and businesspeople will still be as keen to flock to the UK as they have been in my lifetime. What if the much-hated “metropolitan liberal elite” who couldn’t make a difference at the referendum votes with its feet instead and moves to other open-minded cities around Europe? On Friday evening, once the shock had sunk in, the German foreign office pointedly tweeted that its staff were off to “an Irish pub” to get decently drunk. It felt like a hint of things to come.