F-B-F.org -

And, thanks to Johan Denner, the clarinet.ART AND CULTUREHigh culture is shot through with German influences. Here is a map (Germans have always been great cartographers, the British geographers).RELIGIONOur Protestant religion was given to us by Martin Luther. The beginnings of the decline of Christianity in Britain can be traced directly to David Strauss, whose Life of Christ was deeply subversive of belief in early Victorian England. Latterly, English theologians have acknowledged their debts to such as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann.NATURISMBrighton beach would be breast-free had not the Germans pioneered innocent exposure of private parts to the sunshine Ditto environmentalism. The history of ideas is marked by the greatest of disjunctions – the expulsion of so many leaders of German science and letters because they were Jewish.

The lines become difficult to trace: were Herbert Marcuse or Hannah Arendt American or German?But the pattern of mutual Anglo-German influence remains. Their seriousness, their precision engineering – Vorsprung durch Technik – and their scholarship take what we also do and concentrate it, apply rigour. Without German influences British 20th-century archaeology and theology are inconceivable, let alone physics and chemistry And vice versa. Across the sciences and technologies Germany has learnt from Britain.

Since they were first awarded in 1901, British and German physicists and chemists have won virtually the same numbers of Nobel prizes.The movement of ideas and people between the two countries has latterly been mediated through the United States. And what would a Battenberg cake taste like without marzipan originated in Lubeck, served for preference on Dresden china.Great slices of our intellectual and cultural life are shared from Luther to Kant to von Karajan No Germans, no Wigmore Hall. No German (in the shape of the chemist Albert Niemann, who first synthesised cocaine), no Irvine Welsh.The Franco-Prussian war marked a break, a century of political and diplomatic tension and rivalry, streaked with cultural suspicion. Despite the fall ing out between the states at the turn of the 20th century, exchanges continued No Gottlieb Daimler, no William Nuffield No Max Weber, no sociology.

And the other way round: no Ernest Bevin, no Mitbestimmung – the great post-war understanding between German unions and the bosses which still, just about, lasts.The Germans often represent our better selves. The Kaiser called on the same God to punish England, which gave the First if not the Second World War aspects of a civil strife.Our royal family are Battenbergs and they would not have the throne if Brunswickers had not repulsed the Stuart insurgents at Culloden. They have borrowed massively from English, true, but we still rely on them for Weltschmerz and Zeitgeist. We call the days of the week by the same gods, except Wednesday.