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Your starter for ten: talk about "Britishness" for a German friend ...

eisenach

eisenach

pfm Member
... and colleague who has to teach it to a sixth-form class at a Gymnasium near Kassel.

My own thoughts on the subject (below) are somewhat jaundiced and coloured by ten years of Tory "British values", so I thought you good people might like to join in a good cause and proffer some thoughts of your own. I'll send her a link to the thread, having first explained that we're a bunch of (mostly) midle-aged cantankerous HiFi enthusiasts, though not without erudition and certain expertise . :)

My first thoughts:

Britishness. Hmm, well that is a bit of a touchy subject at the moment, with Scotland furious about Brexit and wanting independence from nationalist England, and even Wales starting to think about independence. There's a lot made of "British" values, especially by the Tory right, but are they any different from the values of any mature democracy ? There's a lot of wishful thinking and would be "British exceptionalism" going on here.

Cynic's hat on.
Britishness (now degenerating into Englishness, as the UK dislocates) is a construct invented by the Public school (Eton) educated ruling class to subdue the masses by making out that they are a constituent part of something grand and exceptional.
It was exactly the same with the concept of the British Empire. Indians, Canadians, Australians were sold the myth that they were part of one great Imperial family, the better to exploit them for commercial gain. West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis soon found out the hollowness of what that really meant once they were no longer of any value, or even worse, in the way over here.
The English gentleman ? A cup of tea ? A useful, romantic Imperial myth, particularly taken on board in Europe, where that class of Brit was the only sort they saw. The rest of us were too busy down the mine or pouring the steel.
You could always dream, though. Thank you Monarch. A very British version of the American dream.
It's worked very well. Britain had far less societal unrest in the 19 and 20 centuries than many other European countries. When unrest occurred, it was usually in the empire (the Boer war, Afghanistan, India, Ireland) and was brutally, militarily suppressed, and thereby handily reinforcing the myth of British exceptionalism. We're competent. Only the British can make things work ! (Except make the trains run on time, but that's way beneath us, let's just get the Rolls out !)



Your chance to address German 17 year-olds !
 
Personally I think all this 'national characteristics' stuff is a load of cobblers. Maybe that's because I'm a heady mix of Scottish, Irish and English.

But, if cornered and threatened with a poke in the eye with a sharp stick unless I give some sort of substantive answer, I'd say, generalising like mad, that the British are, by and large, pragmatic rather than principled, un-intellectual (as some wag said many years ago, only in Britain is the word 'clever' regarded as an insult). We tend to be good at spotting the motes in everyone else's eyes and ignoring the beams in our own. We can be modest and self-effacing, unless we've had a few beers. Perhaps our defining quality (well, mine at any rate) is sheer bloody laziness. This is good (because it avoids extremism) but bad (because we can, and have, sleep-walked into disaster).

But Flanders & Swann put it best wrt the English:

'The English are moral, the English are good
And clever and modest and misunderstood!

And all the world over, each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practise beforehand, which ruins the fun!'
 
Britishness does not exist.

The British Isles may be tiny compared to somewhere like the USA, for instance, but how people see "life" within the British Isles varies about as much as it does across the USA but, thankfully, very largely skipping most of the extremes of the US.
 
Vinny said:
Britishness does not exist.

The British Isles may be tiny compared to somewhere like the USA, for instance, but how people see "life" within the British Isles varies about as much as it does across the USA but, thankfully, largely skipping most of the extremes of the US.
Click to expand...

Neither does 'German-ness'. One of my fellow students on my MA course was from what had been East Germany. Near Christmas, someone mentioned a particular German custom of the season. The German student frowned, and said 'That is only in Bavaria. They are all mad there'.
 
If they look for bad they will find it. If they look for good they will find it.

What they choose to focus on will depend on many variables.

The teacher, the parents of the pupils, the media that they have been exposed to, and lots more.

I am unable to answer the question of ‘what is Britishness?’ although I guess I could come up with a few stereotypes.

Probably just as interesting to identify the similarities twixt the U.K. and Germany.

I do hope the class have firstly looked at ‘what is Germany? Germaness (not sure that is a word?) because it would be odd to examine one particular country without first looking at one’s own country.
 
I wouldn't know where to start, so I'll defer. The depressing thing is that even if I wrote something in English, the German 17 year olds would understand it perfectly. Does that help?
 
Germany is about where the British Isles was about 1500 years ago - in the early days of not being numerous independant states. What is known as Germany today (ignoring the post WW2 split), is what? 150 years old?
 
Bob McC said:
Who won the war anyway...?
Click to expand...

USA shamelessly milked the situation to finally end any British aspirations to have an empire. They won, UK lost as much as Germany.

It was the final act in a campaign lasting nearly 200 years.

Maybe we still have a way to go as we welcome all that chlorinated chicken, hormone saturated beef and cough up the next lease payments for "our" nuclear deterrent.
 
Firstly, I won't tolerate a bad word said against my PFM eBuddies, but we are asked to generalise, so let the generalising begin.

The british are insular. That is pretty logical being as it's an island an all.

Britain is suspicious of outsiders, of foreigners, of change in itself. Again, a normal defence mechanism after multiple invasions throughout the centuries.

Incomers are more or less tolerated, be they irish, windrush, ex Empire etc. Any prejudice is generally held in check, below the surface, sometimes it bubbles over (Citation - Brexit). It is however, always there.

Scapegoating is rife. Instead of looking at its own home-grown problems, Britain will seek to pin the blame on lesser nations, on migrants, on external world events. Inward reflection is rare. Always the victim.

As individuals, great lads, as a nation, tribal.
 
America was touch and go as regarding being an ally to the UK rather than Germany. There was a significant majority of the US population that were of German heritage. So we missed out of being a rather organised sub nation that had an effective trainig scheme for civilian leaders as as well as militiary leaders.
 
It seems impossible to me to find a set of characteristics/ideals that anyone would agree on as Britishness, we are changing and evolving rapidly these days as the world gets smaller and smaller. The one thing that might be common to a lot of Brits is a hankering for a return to the ‘glorious’ past when we ruled the world and were paragons of virtue, which everyone knows is really a load of old cobblers.
 
I read a book last year about Britishness, written by an outsider. I wish I could remember what it was, or I would point the OP to it. It was going through the whole British thing, politeness, non-commitment, pub culture and so on. If you want non-commitment, the Japanese are hard to beat, endless ways to mean 'no' without actually saying it!. The book was rather interesting and not in the slightest bit political.

I do not agree that we are generally 'anti-intellectual'. There is a large underbelly of non intellectuals it is true, but equally there is a vast swath of highly educated people in many sectors. These people keep Radio 4, Radio 3, the TLS and so on going. The worst trait I see is of inverted snobbery from some (some, note) arts intellectuals about technology and science. Because they do understand it they regard it as inferior to their own knowledge. There used to be similar upper class snobbery about people 'in trade' too. Despite many traders perhaps being better off than the snobs.

I have worked in Germany some years ago - and I saw definite differences in ways and attitude to 'work' and 'play'. And they are definitely not short of a sense of humour as is often claimed - although you will typically not see it in the work place - no joshing around there!. There is a reason that they are good at making machines and cars. I noted that they would do a terrific piece of work, but only after being directed to it - not so much 'looking for stuff to do' more 'doing what someone suggested needed doing'
 
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