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Elizabeth’s own first experience of the land of her ancestors was a ten-day tour of the
then Federal Republic of Germany, planned in 1963 as part of Macmillan’s European
policy but undertaken only in 1965. It would be the first state visit by the royal family
to Germany since before the First World War, a fact which was becoming
embarrassingly obvious. By 1963 the Queen was the only head of a major state not to
have visited the Federal Republic, nor had she returned the visit to Britain of President
Heuss. Kennedy had made his famous speech at the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1963,
while de Gaulle had made frequent visits, on one of which he had made much of his
partial German ancestry – a field in which, as the British Ambassador pointed out, ‘the
Queen could outplay him with ease’. In comparison with Franco-German relations,
particularly the two countries’ collaboration in the EEC, Anglo-German relations were
very much in eclipse.
The state visit took two years to organize, one not negligible difficulty being the royal
couple’s numerous German relations. Philip warned the British Ambassador, Sir Frank
Roberts, 7 of the protocol problems which had arisen during a recent visit to Germany by
the King of Greece and Queen Frederika. Princely Germans who had no status under
republican protocol had none the less taken severe umbrage at finding themselves
seated below relatively junior government officials at dinners for their ‘Greek’ cousins.
To avoid trouble, Philip had suggested that Roberts should explain the position to the
German President, Herr Lübke, and say that the Queen would understand if her relatives
were not invited on formal occasions. Lübke absolutely refused to countenance this,
explaining in his down-to-earth way to the Ambassador that in his native Sauerland,
when a girl of the country returned after no matter how many years, her relatives must
be invited to meet her and, therefore, he certainly intended to invite them. Prince
Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine, married since 1937 to a British woman, Margaret
Geddes, one of the few German relations frequently invited to stay at Windsor and
Buckingham Palace and therefore accepted as an authority on the British royal family
by the others, produced the solution. German ‘royals’ should be invited only when the
Queen visited their particular area of Germany; this would reduce the previous protocol
difficulty of having hordes of them attending functions at the same time. That, however,
was not the end of delicate situations. Philip’s relations, whose estates were principally
in West Germany, still had their castles and large houses in which to entertain the royal
couple, whereas the estates of some of Elizabeth’s relations had been in the Communist
East.
The Queen’s first visit to the land of her forefathers would be an emotional experience
for her which she was not at all sure she was going to enjoy. She did not speak the
language, and through her most impressionable years when she was growing up during
the war, anti-German feeling had been strong, even within her own family where her
fiercely patriotic mother had experienced not only the Blitz but the First World War and
the agony of having one brother killed and another wounded and captured. Elizabeth,
like most people of her age, had been taught to hate the Germans and had, in the ATS,
been trained to fight them. Her father had not been keen on his German relations and