Göttingen

‘But the children are the same/ in Paris or in Göttingen’. So run the famous lines from Barbara’s 1964 hit ‘Göttingen’ (re-released in German in 1967). For those of you unaware, Göttingen is a beautiful university city in Lower Saxony. The university itself was founded by our very own George II and has produced, to date, 47 Nobel Prize winners. The Brothers Grimm worked at the university, and their Fairy Tales are set in the region nearby. Today, the city combines a thriving student population with bustling local culture. This beautiful city is immortalised today not only in its reputation but also in Barbara’s song.

The city museum is currently hosting an exhibition on Barbara’s life and work. The focus is, naturally, on the song itself, but it is fleshed out by biographical details. All of the information in the following two paragraphs is taken from this exhibition. ‘Göttingen’ is an intensely sweet musing on the similarities between the people in France and Germany, despite the war that had been fought between them. It focuses on the beauty of the city and the life that courses through it, offering up civil and cultural communion as a means to heal old wounds. That Barbara was Jewish makes the poignancy of the song all the more powerful. The lyrics demonstrate the spirit of repair that the song affected, and I have provided a link to them in French and English at the bottom of this page (the lyrics are at the end of the article).
While the song is undoubtedly beautiful and poignant, its origins tell a more interesting story. The little exhibition in the city museum explains its significance in light of Barbara’s biography. She came from a poor, French Jewish family, who spent the war years fleeing the Nazis. When she was older she was bought her first piano and, having tirelessly toured the music scenes in France, eventually gained international recognition. According to one of the displays she did ‘not want to go to Germany’ prior to the leg of her 1964 tour in the country, feeling resentment as a result of the war and the particular persecution of her people. This all changed, so the story goes, thanks to the preparation of her concert in Göttingen.

Barbara had been promised a grand piano for her performance. However, when she arrived at the city’s Jungen Theatre there was only an upright piano on stage. Being the Parisian artiste that she was, she refused to play unless she was provided with a grand piano. By fortune (or providence if you like), an old lady who lived above the theatre happened to have one in her room, which she permitted to be used for the duration of the concert. Ten young men rushed to dismantle and carry the piano, with immense difficulty, down the narrow stairs. They reassembled it on stage and the concert went ahead and was a great success. Barbara was so touched by the effort put in by the young men and the remarkably similar dispositions they bore to the young men who attended to her in Paris, that her resentment for Germany dissipated. She noticed how, in their own way, the people of Göttingen, like the people of Paris, were haunted by the devastating war they (or their parents) had lived through. Instead, she became a prominent catalyst for healing cultural relations between France and Germany. The song ‘Göttingen’ enshrines that shared sense of devastation and yearning for some form of cultural healing. It is not a form of musical recompense. Rather it is a monument to international contingency, to correspondences of feelings, interests, activities, and even future hopes and dreams that transcend the essentially arbitrary (though no less real) national boundaries which divide us at birth. Gerhard Schröder, who was a postgraduate student at Göttingen and attended the concert, quoted its lines in his speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty.

I could have chosen any number of German towns and cities in order to make this point. Göttingen is perhaps more internationally renowned for its university than it is as a symbol of Franco-German relations, but it serves the purpose beautifully. It is also of great personal importance: my partner and her family come from Göttingen, and my immediate personal and professional future will be closely tied to the city. It is also strikingly beautiful. For a place of around 100,000 people it has a grandeur and sense of historical gravity that matches most European capitals.

Now, taking ‘Göttingen’ as a symbol of Franco-German unity, let us contrast this to the sentiments outlined by the Leave campaign in recent weeks. I will take the two most prominent examples. First, a Tweet containing the sentence ‘and there was us thinking we won the war’ (for those of you not from Britain and unaware how the extremes of debate operate in my country, welcome). I mean, in a sense, you didn’t win the war. You weren’t alive then, nor was the European Union, nor was Angela Merkel. Britain was an integral part, perhaps the symbolic and tactical centre, of the Allied effort, and, more pertinently, subsequent attempts to bring peace and equilibrium to Europe after the war. Churchill’s enduring quality in this regar was not simply his ability as a wartime leader (we’ll forget what a disappointing peacetime politician he was), but his disposition towards rebuilding Germany as a social democracy. Whatever post-war failures there have been, this has been a success. Germany today would be almost unrecognisable to the nation that elected Hitler chancellor four generations ago. In just 80 years, it has changed from a racist, totalitarian regime responsible for the deaths of millions into the centre for asylum seekers in the Western world: a symbol of diversity and tolerance, a liberal democracy in the true sense of the word. The Germans today are not the intellectual heirs of the nationalist, totalitarian drive of the 1930s. That is, perhaps, Europe’s most enduring and touching victory. Perhaps its most remarkable, too.

Göttingen is a symbol of this. It was known to have been enthusiastic in its support of the Nazi regime when Hitler came to power, a notion which makes Barbara’s success amongst the citizens and students all the more poignant, according to the exhibition in the city museum. Walking to the museum from the university, we passed by people of various different ethnicities and nationalities, heard various languages, all winding down the evening in relative harmony. Maybe it is that vision of Germany that disgusts the people who wrote that tweet most. Perhaps what ‘and there was us thinking we won the war’ condemns is not the idea of Germany as an oppressive nation attempting to conquer Europe, but modern Germany, one in which bureaucracy is employed to stabilise relationships between diverse people (fraught with difficulty and problems as this may be) and not in exploiting tensions between them. The intellectual heirs to the rampant nationalism, isolationism and fervent xenophobia would then appear not to be Angela Merkel’s government but the people behind Vote Leave and their intellectual allies on Europe’s political fringes.

The second instance of anti-German feeling are the billboards that went up alongside the M40 reading ‘Halt ze German Advance’. Aside from that the political implication is absolute nonsense, this is horrendous xenophobia masquerading as comedy. First, the characterisation of German people as speaking in an amusing way (unable to pronounce ‘the’ properly) appears to be a simple amusing observation, harmless fun, if you will. Well, the mockery of speech irregularities carries with it more sinister associations, doesn’t it? You very rarely simply index difference by representing linguistic differences: it has a purpose. ‘Ze’ recalls not simply the way Germans speak, but the amusingness of difference itself. It also recalls those places where that exaggerated mispronunciation has been heard before. War films, for examples. It thus binds German accents (along with identity, as implied by the billboard more generally) to the way in which Nazi officers spoke in war films: the identification being entirely one in which Germany is portrayed as equivalent with that murderous regime. Now Leave know that is inaccurate, they will probably point to their German holidays, friends, wives, and say it is all in good fun. But they also know that it speaks to a fear abroad, brought about by a combination of genuine grievance and utterly corrupt argument on the part of politicians, about German dominance. A fear that Leave have exploited, rather than attempted to dispel. Regardless of the result (and I imagine the people stupid enough to fall for this xenophobic trick number less than 1000), this is sheer moral corruption.

But let’s say it’s all just a joke, like Blackadder or Fawlty Towers. Let’s take the latter, since the ‘and there was us thinking we won the war’ tweet was clearly meant to refer to that beloved sitcom. In particular it recalls the scene in which Basil Fawlty, suffering from concussion, mocks the Nazi regime in front of some German guests, amusing himself with crass puns despite their obvious upset, and ends with him imitating Hitler. The purpose of the scene, they clearly believe, plays on the fact that we won the war, and as victors reserve the right to humiliate our opponents — a position that seems fair given the gravity of their crimes. Although it is awkward that the people in the episode were not actually involved in the war, all clearly being too young at the time, it is hardly a sin to make fun of fascists, and so the humour stands. All, as they say, in good fun. But a more discerning viewer would notice that is not quite what Cleese and Booth do in that scene. The final lines of the episode, delivered by one of the German guests, are ‘however did they win?’ In that one line, Cleese and Booth achieve a beautiful subversion. The joke is not on the Germans, but on the petty xenophobia of Basil Fawlty and the stubborn inability of the British to achieve some form of understanding about the nature of World War Two. And that is precisely the outlook that Leave are begging Britain to take: the unhinged prejudices of a concussed, sexually repressed 1970s hotel owner. The whole Leave campaign paints the world as if it is one unending episode of Farage Towers.

So, to return to Göttingen, there is an alternative vision of how we can treat different nations in the aftermath of war. Vote Leave seem to be wilfully stuck in a post-war period from which Germany and France have been so keen to move on, and so this point needs to be made: the children are the same/ in London or in Göttingen.

Here is a better article on the song:
https://songoftheweekblog.com/2013/01/23/song-of-the-week-35-Göttingen-barbara/