Letter: Mention the war

Sir: Michael Naumann, the German Culture Minister, overlooks important facts when he accuses the British of an obsession with the Second World War. Britain neither started nor lost it. For Britain, the War was a question of the defence of democracy, and of survival, not an attempt at world domination. The former deserves to be remembered with pride, rather than treated as a mere footnote to the horrors of the Third Reich.

Since 1945 Germans have a horror of anything military. Any interest in matters military, in the German mind, gets all too easily confused with militarism and war-mongering. The difference, however, is important, even more so in the light of Germany's new and more assertive role of participation in UN-sanctioned military action abroad.

JULIA KRAEHLING-SMITH

Belfast