For two years, I was Germany’s only Euro-sceptic columnist. The editor of Die Welt had approached me because, tellingly, he couldn’t find a single German writer prepared to criticise Brussels. The readers’ letters I got during those two years opened my eyes to a very different Germany. Die Welt is, as it were, Germany’s Daily Telegraph: intelligent, cultured, Right-of-centre. Its readers were cosmopolitan, and they loathed the Brussels racket. Every article I wrote provoked a crop of exasperated emails. “Why does it take a foreigner to write as you do,” they would ask. “Why won’t anyone in Germany say these things?”

So beginnt ein hervorragender Artikel von Daniel Hannan in der heutigen Ausgabe des Daily Telegraph. Darin erklärt er, dass die Deutschen im Grunde ihrer Seele mindestens genauso EU-skeptisch sind wie die Briten. Kein Wunder, schließlich sind sich Deutsche und Briten auch sonst nicht unähnlich, behauptet er:

Germans are our obvious friends, for Heaven’s sake: our chief trading partners and the one European country we can rely on to deploy serviceable troops next to ours. They even resemble us in character: brave, plain-speaking, morose, law-abiding, belligerent, occasionally drunk, much misunderstood.

Ob man Mr Hannan da zustimmen sollte? Zumindest zeigt die Aufzählung der angeblichen Nationaleigenschaften aber, dass Briten und Deutsche dieselben Vorurteile voneinander pflegen.