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Ah yes this twee little meme is oft laughed about among Germans as they dribble flesh-salad down their chins, complain about Brexit and congratulate themselves on their successful Ostpolitik with Russia. It’s complete bollocks of course. In the 1870s, in the heat of the German nationalism movement when Germany was only just starting to become a serious industrial power (they had only just become a nation), they completely banned imports to Germany to try to stimulate their domestic economy.
Simultaneously, they were ripping off British ceramics for export abroad with inferior quality, some of which were reaching the British market. Britain, not being such a bunch of mercantile self-serving cunts looking to start a trade war, applied a law domestically requiring foreign goods to be labelled as such. Retrospectively, we can see that a better policy would have been to flatten the German North Sea ports with the British Navy and rip the Kaiser and Bismarck’s heads off before things went any further, leading to the timeline where Europe retained relevance in the 20th century.
The label “Made in Germany” wouldn’t gain any special value whatsoever until 100 years later, the 1970s and the so-called economic miracle… which was only really possible because Germans had become accustomed to abject poverty in the post-WW2 period and therefore worked for cheap, undermining post-war socialist government economic policies abroad. Remember, German mercantile policies like this one are considered by historians to be one of the leading causes of WW1. It’s amazing how whenever Europe is thrown into calamity and is impoverished by strife, Germany is never found too far away.
#Germany #label #Brit
