ABSTRACT
World War II against the despised German enemy is being fought, and won, every weekend on British television as fifty-year-old films get repeated on the various channels and their late-night movie shows. Occasionally a news item makes the morning newspaper which suggests that the battle is still raging, if with cooler emotions. The ideological opposition to Pat Buchanan's candidacy for president in the Republican primaries mixed with, and contributed to, preexisting ethnic hostilities: to the Irish, to the German. One enthusiastic British newspaper referred to Jiirgen Klinsmann as "the blonde Aryan hero," quite innocent of the fact that this for the Germans was no compliment—indeed an embarrassing reminder of the dark past, so much so that it is practically a taboo word in the Germany of today. Paradoxically enough, good news does not go down well at all, for postwar Germany has grown to live with the foreign image of "the Ugly German.".
