Keeping Up with the Germans

England and Germany are two countries divided by philosophy, English Empiricism versus German Rationalism (and sometimes Romanticism). Philip Oltermann investigates what makes the English so very English and the Germans dourly Germanic through encounters between representative intellectual and cultural figures from Heinrich Heine and Kevin Keegan to A J Ayer and Marlene Dietrich. A fascinating subject, told partly through Oltermann's own memoir as a German teenager who moved to London and found himself embracing Englishness through Britpop and football. 

Germany and England are not so much separated by 'Two World Wars and one World Cup' as divided by centuries of misunderstanding and suspicion. From the Romantic poet Heine being insulted by the drunken swearing of the English Radical, William Cobbett, to the remarkable popularity of a 1960's Blackpool comedian, Freddie Frinton, in Germany to this day the cultural and philosophical differences depict, wittily, the differences between national archetypes.

Like a good episode of QI Philip Oltermann has an uncanny ability to draw significance from meetings as stiffly uncomfortable as Helmut Kohl ordering sausage and potato wrapped in pig's stomach with sauerkraut for Margaret Thatcher.

By turns cultural history (and a snappy history of Germany) and memoir, Keeping Up with the Germans is an education for those who have ever wondered if there's a connection between why England always lose penalty shoot-outs and the post-Thatcher economy.