Welcome to England, Thomas Tuchel – where Germans can still be subjected to infantile innuendo

New York Times

28-03-2025

By now, most people will have seen the video.
They will have heard Harry Redknapp describe Thomas Tuchel as a 'German spy' and then, in front of an audience in London last week, say that Tuchel 'has been sent over to f*** us up'.
'I'm telling you,' Redknapp continues, 'he's like Lord Haw-Haw in the war — 'We have your best soldiers captured' and all that.'
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It is an appalling attempt at a joke.
Lord Haw-Haw was better known as William Joyce, a virulent antisemite who was once deputy leader of the British Union of Fascists. Joyce spent the Second World War broadcasting Nazi propaganda back to Great Britain from Germany before being captured, tried for treason and hanged in 1946.
In the video, first published by The Guardian, Redknapp is also seen raising his left arm, prompting a burst of laughter from the audience. When contacted by The Athletic, Redknapp denied that this was intended to mimic a Nazi salute.
The defence is on its way — the 'bore off and stop ruining the fun' response.
And it probably is too crass to be offensive. It's too ignorant to be taken seriously. It's not worthy of anything other than weary disdain, or of provoking more than toe-curling embarrassment.
The video has yet to surface in the German media. When it inevitably does, what Redknapp said and appears to do will make England look very, very small. As will the guffawing reaction heard in the background which describes how, for some, the German bogeyman remains alive, hilarious and a proxy for a war that ended 80 years ago.
It's been 50 years since Episode Six of Fawlty Towers aired, in October 1975.
In it, for those who do not know, shambolic Torquay hotelier Basil Fawlty welcomes a group of German guests. He begins the episode determined not to 'mention the war' and by the end of it has goose-stepped across his own dining room while they are eating in front of him.
In Britain, it remains a beloved episode within a cherished series. The joke is on Basil, though. The audience is laughing at him for his inability to disassociate with a war that, by then, had already been over for three decades.
By 1996, 51 years had passed and yet, on the morning of England's Euro 96 semi-final against Germany, the Daily Mirror — then edited by Piers Morgan — superimposed pictures of Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne with military helmets, printing them on its front page alongside the headline: 'Achtung! Surrender! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over!'
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To the side, in an editorial sidebar, The Mirror then 'declared football war' on Germany, writing, with a cringeworthy reference to Neville Chamberlain's address to the British public in September 1939: 'Last night the Daily Mirror's ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock, a state of soccer war would exist between us.'
A few years later, Morgan counted that headline among his greatest regrets. Though, during the 2010 World Cup when England met Germany in the last 16, he changed his tune again. He also admitted that he had wanted to hire a spitfire from which to drop his front page on a German training session, and to send a tank to 'invade' the offices of Bild, the German tabloid.
It could have been worse, but the front page still characterised the mood, describing how easily the country found that particular gear.
It became an issue for the British Foreign Office and was discussed in parliament. England's head coach, the late Terry Venables, condemned the behaviour and the Press Complaints Commission received several hundred complaints.
Hundreds, though, but not thousands, and those who remember those weeks will recall that the perception was of a tabloid that had gone too far, rather than having been wildly offensive.
In 2025, Thomas Tuchel has not walked into the same atmosphere.
Most likely, a headline like that would never run today — at least not in the same overt way. And yet the reaction to Tuchel's appointment has carried mild shades of Fawlty's unease and that same 'oooh, a German' sub-banter that must have made that Mirror front page seem like a clever idea.
Amazingly, parts of the country are still there. Still in that place. Still thinking that its appropriate to discuss a football coach in such terms. Still believing, correctly as it turns out, that references to Lord Haw-Haw, funny German accents and ambiguous arm gestures can light up certain rooms.
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It's so flippant. And country to country, it makes for an extraordinary contrast.
I do not know much about Germany. I have lived here for four years, in Hamburg, but that is not nearly enough time to understand a country in detail. Particularly not one with so many regional differences, state by state, and where the past is so complex.
But that past is more active here; it plays more of a role in the present.
In a literal way, because walk around many German cities and among the monuments, plaques and statues, you will find Stolpersteine — 'stumbling stones' — that are embedded within the pavements and engraved with the names of the Nazis' victims.
The rise of the far right Alternative für Deutschland party suggests a weakening of the country's 'never again' stand against fascism. The causes and implications of that go beyond the scope of this article and are still not properly understood, but Germany has significant societal and economic problems and denying that would be disingenuous.
What is still true, though, is that Germans grow up learning about the Nazi era in a way that forces children, from quite a young age, to confront that past. Most people educated in England will remember school trips to Roman villas and nature sanctuaries. Almost everybody, regardless of where they come from, will know what it is to be marched on a bus with an apple, crisps and a soggy sandwich, and then shown around a quarry or castle.
Germans no doubt do that, too, but their field trips pass through the darkness.
My wife, who was born in Hamburg, remembers being taken to Neuengamme concentration camp with her school as a teenager. She saw the gas chambers, the crematorium and the piles of shoes and, like millions of other Germans, came face-to-face with those horrors at a young age.
There is a word for this. Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It means 'the struggle of overcoming the past'.
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Many institutions and companies in Germany have inextricable links to the crimes of national socialism and are responsible for causing great suffering, and often far worse. That history cannot be denied. It cannot just be attributed to a different era and forgotten about.
Issues are still being navigated today. In February, Bundesliga club St Pauli suspended the in-stadium playing of its club anthem, Das Herz von St Pauli, after it was discovered that the author of the song's lyrics, Josef Ollig, had previously unknown links to the Nazi party.
So, it remains a solemn, unending task which requires vigilance and, in some cases, difficult, disruptive conversations. It is not funny. There is no comedic currency in any of it. And yet in England, bafflingly, it is something that some can never get beyond.
There are still rooms and contexts in which Germans — and now the head coach of the English national team — are subject to infantile innuendo. And that really is dispiriting.