The 'British' Germans the war left behind

16 November 2011

Mr McAllister, currently prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony, is one of the brightest prospects in Germany's Christian Democratic Union party.

His Scottish father, who had been in the British army during World War II, returned as a civil servant with the British occupying forces in Cold War Berlin.

He formed a relationship with a German woman, and they had a daughter in 1960.

But they were not allowed to marry until 1964 as in early post-war decades, marriage between Brits and Germans was much frowned upon by the British authorities.

Mr McAllister, born in 1971, recalls early confusion about his identity. His first years were spent in a kind of British bubble in West Berlin.

"I felt British", he recalls. Mr McAllister attended British schools, listened to British broadcasting and spoke English every day to his father, who read the Daily Telegraph rather than a German newspaper.

Later, when the family moved to what was then West Germany, Mr McAllister went to a German secondary school. He then took the key decision to do his military service with the German army - though he retains dual citizenship.

He later pursued a German political career, rising swiftly to his current post, where he sits in an impressively grand office in the Lower Saxony capital, Hannover.

I asked him whether Germans, hearing his name, ever doubted where his loyalties lay? Only occasionally, he said, did he get emails or even "nasty letters". They came mostly, he added, "from elderly men of the very far right".

His rise to prominence, he adds, reflects a new Germany that many outside the country have failed to appreciate. "Germany is becoming more diverse", he says.

He points out that the current German Vice-Chancellor and head of the Free Democrat Party, Philipp Rösler, is of Vietnamese origin.

And the national leader of the Green party is a Turkish-German, Cem Özdemir.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15737185