My Ypres survey: A new comparison between German and British remembrance

When I first visited Ypres in 2023, a Belgian city known for its importance during the First World War, I noticed that many British tourists visit the city, but I hardly encountered any Germans there. Therefore, I conducted a survey afterwards to find out how many people in Germany know Ypres. The result was: 95 percent never heard of it. I always planned to conduct the same survey in Great Britain and was finally able to do so when I recently travelled there.

In each country, I spoke to 100 people in different places. But even though I made sure to have a balance in factors like age, gender and education, the survey is not fully representative due to the limited number of participants.

In Germany, only 5 percent were able to localise Ypres in Belgium and to associate it with the war, and the ones who did were men and born in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast, the number in Great Britain was much higher: Here, 44 percent associated Ypres with the war, distributed across all age groups and genders. Strikingly, also many young people knew Ypres.

The number of British locating it correctly was even higher: 49 percent placed it in Belgium or France (I count France as a correct tendency due to the vicinity of the Somme battlefield, and more participants said France than Belgium). The participants in Germany who did not know Ypres would either guess its location in Scandinavia (presumably due to Ystad in Sweden) or in the Mediterranean area (probably due to the likeness between the words Ypern ‘Ypres’ and Zypern ‘Cyprus’). Interestingly, also some British who could not localise the city guessed Cyprus or Greece.

Zero percent of my German interview partners had ever been to Ypres, whereas 11 percent of the British had visited the city. That is one quarter of those who knew it.

When I asked people where they know Ypres from, British mostly mentioned a personal interest in history, TV documentaries, books and school trips. Germans mostly answered they knew it from a personal interest in history but hadn’t learned about it in school.

The findings correlate with my research experience that remembrance culture in Great Britain regarding the First World War is much stronger and the topic more present in society. Ypres seems like a place of pilgrimage for the British, with memorials and honouring ceremonies for the soldiers. Some British tourists even mentioned a feeling of pride when visiting Ypres. By contrast, in German society this war was overshadowed by the Second World War which is more present in the country’s remembrance culture. Some people said to me that they did not want to look back or have anything to do with it. For Germans, remembering feels heavier and darker, and not everyone wants to face that voluntarily.