I’ve just come back to London from a far-flung suburb of Berlin, where the snow lay thick in the forests and ice covered the lakes and canals. Travelling through this landscape at night, down long, straight roads lit only by the car’s headlights, it was easy to imagine wolves in old fables, or scenes from Cold War thrillers in which Soviet bloc soldiers hunt down Western spies with fierce dogs. But the facts of my trip were quite otherwise. I was attending that most gentle of events, a literary seminar, where the worst that can happen, if you’re a speaker, is a question from a well-informed German professor about the novels of Virginia Woolf. About fifty or sixty of us were cloistered for three days in an old villa to discuss the state of British writing. Previously, the villa had served as the headquarters of some party organization in communist East Germany; now, as a privately owned hotel, it catered for the conferences that have become such a ubiquitous and luxurious part of cultural and commercial life.

The Berlin Wall came down more than 20 years ago and World War II ended nearly 65 years ago, but historical memory continues to colour British attitudes towards the most powerful country in Europe. This isn’t just a matter of the Holocaust. With some justification, Britain has come to believe Churchill’s estimation that World War II was its “finest hour”. In no other country in the world apart from Russia (which did most to win it) is that war so remembered and fetishized in books, films and the annual ceremonies that celebrate the dead. In other words, Britain likes to remember what Germany, with decades of agonizing over Nazism’s causes and consequences, would prefer to forget. And there is something else: jealousy. Not many years after its defeat, Germany had overtaken Britain in prosperity. Its industrial success was a bitter pill for Britons of a certain generation to swallow, as names such as Volkswagen and BMW beat their British rivals into the ground or simply took them over. “You wouldn’t know that we’d won the war, would you?” was a sorrowing statement heard often in British pubs and living rooms.

No matter how hard you try to leave it behind, some of this ancient mental baggage is bound to travel with you — particularly if, like me, you grew up in the 1950s and went weekly to the local cinema to watch black-and-white films where Spitfires blazed away at Messerschmitts and Royal Navy officers with binoculars scanned the horizon for treacherous U-boats. Of course, this psychological hangover has no place in the ‘new Europe’ of the European Union, which owes its very existence to the desire to banish European wars forever, nor in polite literary seminars. It came up only because the British writers — there were half a dozen of us — began to talk about what made up our national identity. The audience, composed mainly of German academics teaching English literature, was patient with our thoughts and I felt slightly ashamed that the subject had been raised at all. That Britain persists in honouring this part of its past, above all other parts, suggests a nation that’s uncomfortable with the present as well as the longer historical record.

Still, when I travelled from the villa into the centre of Berlin, I couldn’t help but be consoled. First I took a taxi down the wintry roads and then a couple of suburban trains on the S-bahn. Snow flecked the windows and the trains moved slowly — recently the S-bahn has had many technical problems because, Berliners say, it lacks investment. When I reached the city’s main streets I found the pavements slippery with snow and ice, because (again according to Berliners) clearing them would mean spending money the city doesn’t have. German efficiency and civic-mindedness are legendary in Britain, so it was cheering to discover a capital city beset by the same problems as London and coping with them no better and possibly worse. After 10 minutes treading through the slush of the Kurfurstendamm, one of the most fashionable boulevards in Germany, a national stereotype had melted.

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Differences remain. One of them is that Berlin is remarkably white. In the course of four crowded train journeys across the city, I don’t think I saw a single face that was black or brown. This doesn’t mean it lacks immigrants. It’s said to have the largest Turkish population of any city outside Ankara and Istanbul, and more recently thousands of Russians and Eastern Europeans have settled here. But these migrations are harder to detect visually than, say, the Asian and African populations of London and Paris or Amsterdam and Frankfurt. To the eye, the citizens of Berlin look thoroughly Germanic, and in the old eastern sector this may not be a misleading impression. At our villa, German men and women performed the humblest and hardest of jobs, waiting at table and cleaning the rooms. In Britain, you would go a long way before you discovered a hotel that didn’t have room-cleaners from Eastern Europe or Africa. Barmaids on even remote Scottish islands can come from Bucharest.

It was one in the morning when I began the journey back from my supper in the city centre. The trains were packed with white youths, many drinking from big beer bottles and on their way to the clubs and bars near Alexanderplatz and Ostbahnhof, areas of the old East Berlin that are reckoned to have some of the liveliest nightlife in Europe. I guess some of them were pretty drunk, but nobody vomited and an argument that threatened to turn into a fight was quickly calmed down by my fellow travellers. I never once felt threatened: that was another big difference to British towns and cities, which late at night can easily tip towards violent anarchy. I can’t, of course, say if a non-white traveller would have felt as safe — the former East Germany has a notorious record of racist riots and demonstrations — but even he, I think, would have been struck by a sense of underlying order.

Nowhere is this last quality more apparent than in a newspaper like the Berliner Zeitung. I picked up a copy that morning, not to read (my German stretches little further than bitte, danke and bahnhof for ‘station’) but simply to admire the elegance and orderliness of each page’s layout and typography. The Berliner Zeitung looked sober and intelligent, and therefore like very few newspapers of any kind — not just the tabloids — in Britain (or India). The biggest celebrity in this issue looked to be Salman Rushdie. There were no pictures of film or television stars. The height of the headline type was never more than three quarters of an inch. If the temperament of a society can be judged by how its newspapers look, then Germany is steady and serious and Britain on the edge of a nervous breakdown. On the one hand, a psychologist; on the other, his hysterical patient.

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A recent British example. The writer, Martin Amis, mentioned to an interviewer last month that he thought there should be “euthanasia booths” on British street corners, where the old and unhappy could terminate their lives with “a martini and a medal”. Amis made the remark in the context of a conversation about the growing proportion of old people in the British population and his own advancing age: the enfant terrible of British novelists is now sixty. The roof fell in. Newspapers know a good row when they see one and phoned around to get outraged reactions. Churches, medical charities and moralists of all kinds condemned Amis as “glib”, “offensive” and “inhumane”, and it became a big story. It was as though Amis was a bishop, a politician or an eminent philosopher rather than an imaginative novelist — as though he had thought long and hard about “euthanasia booths” and had some power or influence to make them happen.

His words were clearly satirical and off the cuff, and the interview was one of several arranged to publicize a new novel. But by conflating his remarks with a much more serious debate — about giving the terminally ill the legal right to arrange their suicide — British newspapers had seized another opportunity to excite their audiences. A good definition of the tactic came a few years ago from Matthew Taylor, who once worked in Tony Blair’s office. The British press, he said, was “a disorganised conspiracy to promote public outrage”.