The eurozone crisis has reawakened old ghosts - in particular, the ghost of German mastery in Europe. In Athens, anti-German feelings have been running high for some time and it is not only protesters who reach back to the era of the Nazi occupation for analogies with the present. European Union officials in Greece are likened to the Gestapo; Greek ministers are lampooned as collaborators. Is this a temporary blip or a sign of something deeply awry?
One thing to bear in mind is that the connection between Greece and Germany goes back a long way - much further than the war. German liberals flocked to the Greek cause when the war of independence broke out in 1821. Greece's first king, Otto, was a Bavarian and his administration - with its imported technocrats and policemen - was pretty unpopular at the time, so unpopular that he was eventually kicked out and replaced with a Dane. That unpopularity is long forgotten; indeed, when a German, Otto Rehhagel, led Greece's football team to victory in the 2004 European Championship, he was affectionally dubbed "King Otto" in the national press. Before the Second World War, Germany was seen very positively as a cultural and intellectual magnet and many of Greece's most illustrious painters, photographers, archaeologists, doctors, lawyers and bankers were educated there"............READ MORE
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