Stuart Jeffries is so right about Brits’ infantile and ignorant obsession with Germans (Freud and the home front, G2, 2 February). The corollary of the Heil Hitlers in an intellectual London bar as soon as someone says “Brian lives in Berlin” is the near universal UK view that Germans have no sense of humour. Germans have seen John Cleese goose-stepping many times, and one more inadequate impersonation of it by a drunken British oaf doesn’t make them laugh, because it literally isn’t funny, not even as schadenfreude.
Brian Smith
Berlin
• So Stuart Jeffries believes that Britain was, and perhaps is, disgusting as a nation and an empire. One cannot help but recall Orwell’s remark that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” Could Stuart be living in the wrong country?
Joshua Schwieso
Spaxton, Somerset
• Fiat sent a senior executive to London in the 1970s to try to revive the car firm’s fortunes in the UK. He gained a clear idea of the enormity of his task, he told me later, when, on the way from Heathrow airport for his first day in the new office, the car radio was tuned to Wogan’s breakfast show. Terry started the programme saying: “Sure, it’s a miserable day out there, there’s drizzle filling the air and you can hear the Fiats quietly rusting.”
Ken Gooding
St Albans, Hertfordshire
• Lynne Reid Banks (Letters, 2 February) is entitled to her views on the relative levels of publicity afforded the deaths of David Bowie and Terry Wogan, but to describe the Bowie demographic as “yoof” is somewhat over the top.
Bill White
Leeds
• Jonathan Jones observes (correctly, no doubt) that Prince Charles’s art sells mainly for the name of the artist (Opinion, 2 February). So, nothing like Emin, Hirst, Lucas and the rest then?
Rupert Besley
Newport, Isle of Wight
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