BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

8. CONCLUSION
The 2011 European Union debt crisis, and Germany’s imposition of economic austerities
on the eurozone for saving the currency, generated taunts of a “Fourth Reich” and references to
appeasement by Europhobic populists in France and elsewhere. 64 That the crisis prompted
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s veto of tough fiscal measures under German leadership,
and gave rise to German worries about being isolated and saddled with staggering costs
reminiscent of war reparations, indicates the persistence of stereotyped views about Germany’s
role in Europe and Anglo-German relations. Something similar occurred two decades earlier.
The destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, symbolizing both an end to Cold War tensions and
the impending reunification of divided Germany, brought cheers throughout the free world, but
in the wake of initial celebrations dissenting voices could be heard in the press. In his mildly
alarmist “Uneasy About the Germans,” playwright Arthur Miller sensed “something factitious
about German society in the minds of Germans” and a less “transcendent” feeling among
Germans toward the Federal Republic than that shown by French, British or American citizens
toward their respective governments. For Miller, West Germany’s tolerant, democratic
government lacked “consecration by blood,” and the knowledge that many Germans had
sacrificed their lives actually fighting to prevent it, “keeps sucking the life out of German
protestations of a democratic faith and casts suspicion on the country’s reassurances that its
64 “As the Dust Settles,” The Guardian (9 December 2011), 6, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
business/2011/dec/09/dust-settles-cold-europe-germany?intcmp=239.
243