Why the King’s address to the German parliament was so significant

It may have been chance that made Germany the destination for King Charles’s first and only state visit before his coronation. But the seeds of a new special relationship may have been sown, writes Mary Dejevsky

On the second day, the King was invited to deliver an address to the Bundestag – an honour never accorded to the Queen (AP)

That King Charles should be making the first state visit of his monarchy to Germany is a diplomatic accident of the sort that is not supposed to happen. It could, though, turn out to be a happy one.

The King had planned to make what were essentially “twin” visits to France and Germany. It was a careful orchestration, designed at once to start fence-mending with the EU after Brexit and to signal that the two countries are of prime significance to the UK – but that France might have the very slightest edge, by virtue of history, geography and defence ties.

Then France dropped out. Or at least, Emmanuel Macron judged – correctly – that the unrest triggered by his effort to raise the state pension age was hardly conducive to a successful state visit, especially when the schedule was to include a full-dress state banquet at Versailles.

At which point, it is not hard to imagine the urgent discussions on this side of the Channel between the palace and the government as to whether the Germany visit should be rescheduled, too. The King’s warm reception in Berlin more than vindicates the decision to proceed.

Germany had already prepared to pull out all the stops for the new King, starting with an official welcome at the Brandenburg Gate – the first time this symbol of Germany’s division and reunification has formed the backdrop for any state visit. On the second day, the King was invited to deliver an address to the Bundestag – an honour never accorded to the Queen on any of her four state visits. He did so, what is more, in German – a mark of respect, but also a rare public acknowledgement of the House of Windsor’s German lineage.

The visit also recognises the King’s trademark personal interests, with trips to ecological projects in the former East Germany and to Hamburg, where he might be tempted to contrast the bold but sensitive restorations with the many “monstrous carbuncles” that, despite his best efforts as Prince of Wales, disfigure many British cities.

So the German visit was always intended to make a statement, by both sides. With the postponement of the France leg, however, Germany has stolen a bit of a diplomatic march on its neighbour – and claimed a primacy among the UK’s prospective post-Brexit partners that it might not otherwise have had.

What is also true, however, is that the UK-German relationship has been in need of sprucing up for some time. It has arguably never really flourished since Margaret Thatcher became one of very few national leaders to make known her misgivings about German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

More recently, political relations wilted in the face of the UK’s growing Euroscepticism. In 2009, David Cameron destroyed a productive alliance between Conservative MEPs and their German counterparts when he ordered them to leave the centre-right bloc in the European parliament, in a vain attempt to boost the Tory vote in the following year’s general election.

Relations languished again after the Conservatives narrowly won the 2015 election, and Cameron banked on Germany’s then chancellor, Angela Merkel, to deliver the concessions he believed would secure a Remain vote in the EU referendum. Not for the first time, he had underestimated the zeal of the Eurosceptics at home, and overestimated what Merkel could or would offer as a staunch defender of the EU.

The long and fractious path to Brexit followed, with Germans among those most shocked by the referendum result. Britain’s relations with Germany soured, as they did with France and many other EU countries. The pandemic, along with the turmoil that attended the tenure of Boris Johnson, hardly made for a productive or even stable sequel.

But, of course, there is far more to the UK-German relationship than the ups and mostly downs of the past three decades. Relations at state level are haunted by the spectres of the past to a greater extent than Britain’s relationship with France or perhaps any other country.

Almost 80 years on, the continued British preoccupation with “the war” is almost the least of it. There is the German background of the Windsors, unusually made explicit by the King this week. There is the sympathy for Nazism once harboured by parts of the English aristocracy, including (it is reputed) the Duke of Windsor. Watching King Charles meeting the people in Berlin, it was hard not to note the physical resemblance to his two male predecessors on the throne, and be reminded of those complex, if long past, times.

I say complex because it is often forgotten how close the two countries were at many levels between the wars – in culture, in science, and in social ties that went far beyond the elite. It is an aspect that has been largely written out of the British – that is, the victor’s – version of history.

And perhaps because of these blank pages, relations with Germany are something UK governments all too frequently misjudge. I would even venture that the British understanding of Germany was superior in the two decades immediately after the war to what it is now.

There was still, from the 1920s and 1930s, a residual knowledge of the country and the language. There had been an extensive programme of community exchanges that lasted right up to the war. Then a school-leaver, my father returned home from his German host family just days before war was declared.

The two countries knew each other well, which may be one reason why the British did the creditable job that they did in helping to build the post-war West German state. All these years on, the structures, institutions and services established then have largely worn better than ours.

Today’s Germans have been brought up with a strong sense of the country’s war guilt, and an equally strong sense of civic responsibility. They tend to show more compassion than we do towards the less fortunate; they are mostly better at integrating outsiders, and more protective of the natural world that surrounds them. There is something to learn.

But too much has been written out of the script about what we have in common, both as relatively large and diverse countries and as northern European ones. Too much of the good from our shared past has been forgotten, even as we have comprehensively jettisoned the bad. Now could be the time to discover – or rather rediscover – the beneficial affinity we once had.

It is often said that Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, must tread carefully as he steers his fragile coalition. Less remarked upon is that his three-party government well reflects the complexion of German opinion, and that, within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he had executed one of the most complete policy U-turns any country has managed in recent years. He took office as the continuity chancellor, but now Merkel’s 16 years in office have been virtually erased.

His government has moved to end energy supplies from Russia, and reversed track on abandoning nuclear power. It has undertaken to raise Germany’s defence budget to Nato’s prescribed norm of 2 per cent of GDP, and overridden constitutional constraints in order to supply military hardware, including tanks, to Kyiv. It has opened the borders to more than a million Ukrainian refugees, and it has ended a half-century of routine dialogue with Moscow that began with Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik.

And one effect of these changes is that many long-standing points of friction between Berlin and London have been eliminated almost at a stroke. There can scarcely have been a time in recent years when the UK and Germany were more naturally aligned. There is also, now, more interest in Germany and things German beyond “the war” than I can remember.

Some question how much the Scholz government’s policy shift, known as the Zeitenwende (watershed), has really changed Germany. However, to the extent that it coincides with a new bout of soul-searching in the UK – about our place in the world post-Brexit, about the deficiencies of our state, and about some less comfortable aspects of our history – there could be an opening for a radical improvement in relations.

It may have been chance that made Germany the destination for King Charles’s first and only state visit before his coronation. But the seeds of a new special relationship may have been sown.