Greeks vs Germans

by Mark Mazower

New Statement
December 6, 2011

As austerity bites in the Eurozone, the German press is portraying Greece as profligate – while the Greeks are terrified that the country which occupied them in the 1940s is again threatening their autonomy.

The eurozone crisis has reawakened old ghosts - in particular, the ghost of German mastery in Europe. In Athens, anti-German feelings have been running high for some time and it is not only protesters who reach back to the era of the Nazi occupation for analogies with the present. European Union officials in Greece are likened to the Gestapo; Greek ministers are lampooned as collaborators. Is this a temporary blip or a sign of something deeply awry?

One thing to bear in mind is that the connection between Greece and Germany goes back a long way - much further than the war. German liberals flocked to the Greek cause when the war of independence broke out in 1821. Greece's first king, Otto, was a Bavarian and his administration - with its imported technocrats and policemen - was pretty unpopular at the time, so unpopular that he was eventually kicked out and replaced with a Dane. That unpopularity is long forgotten; indeed, when a German, Otto Rehhagel, led Greece's football team to victory in the 2004 European Championship, he was affectionally dubbed "King Otto" in the national press. Before the Second World War, Germany was seen very positively as a cultural and intellectual magnet and many of Greece's most illustrious painters, photographers, archaeologists, doctors, lawyers and bankers were educated there.

As in so many places, Nazism and the Second World War broke this rich web of ties and connections and replaced the varied memories of the past with the violence and trauma of the occupation. No crisis in Greece's short history - and there had been many - could compare in terms of mortality or, perhaps even more importantly, of the shock of these years. The state collapsed, famine carried off thousands and the subsequent social breakdown and political vacuum opened the way for a resurgent left to take leadership of the resistance to the occupier.

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