Why do we still laugh at Germany?
THE ugly spectre of Europe’s biggest power engaged in a battle of words with its welterweight neighbour over suitable behaviour on the beaches and in the bars would be funny, possibly even to Germans, if the joke hadn’t worn so thin.
Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, and his junior tourism minister, Stefano Stefani, tapped into a rich vein of post-war animosity this week: one that says it is tolerable to revile a generation that had nothing to do with the bombing of Rotterdam and the gas chambers of Treblinka.
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