Thinking back to shortly after I moved to England, this was the time before satellite TV, although England just got Channel 4 and therefore had one more TV channel than Germany. Still, Saturday afternoons were awful. All you could watch was either Wrestling or Snooker or black & white war films (at least that’s what it felt like). Those black & white films weren’t just black & white instead of colour, the topics were also very black & white. All American or English soldiers were good and all German soldiers were bad – always!!!
Knowing this, it came to no surprise to me when one day I stood behind my window (we lived in a ground floor flat) and watched some boys play outside the flat. They wanted to play World War 2 and one boy divided the roles, ” You and me are the English!” “Yeah!” “And you’re the German!” “I don’t wanna be the German, they are ALWAYS bad AND they lose!” wailed the last boy.
I was quite upset watching this and it made me think. As children we also copied films from TV, but we played Cowboys and Indians.
At least there were no Cowboys or Indians in the neighbourhood who we could have upset – I think!