When John Major, the former British Prime Minister best remembered for being unmemorable, came to Berlin in late 2014, he had a banner headline for the Germans. Or so he thought. The threat of Brexit — a British exit from the European Union — was real, he said, and the Germans had better take heed. Major’s warning, delivered with some pomp at the HQ of a big conservative think tank, fell on deaf ears. The German media didn’t so much as mention it.

Perhaps Major’s timing was awry. The British probably won’t hold their referendum on continued EU membership before 2017. There will be many more opinion polls before then, and many more brawls, with pros and cons hurled about ad nauseam. David Cameron’s Tory government will push for concessions from the EU and hope to convince voters to stick with a “new, improved” Brussels. EU leaders are wary of coming across as susceptible to British blackmail. And right now at least, in the midst of a major refugee crisis and heated debate over terrorism and border security, it all still seems pretty far off.

Let’s not forget, though, that we’re not talking about a small Mediterranean country with some of the world’s finest olive oil and staggering debt levels. This is Great Britain, the EU’s second-largest economy and third-most populous nation. In its four decades of EU membership, the country has been a consistent net contributor, paying far more into EU coffers than it has got out. Its military and intelligence services are still world-class, befitting a (former) global superpower. And on many economic issues, the Germans are closer to British market liberals than to French state interventionists.

So it would make sense, surely, for the Germans to be agitated about the loss of a fellow contributor and potential ally in their efforts to reform the EU. Why, then, don’t they seem all that worried? Do the Germans not care about Britain?

Germany is suffused with a “terrifically pro-British sentiment” — that’s what Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum poised to take over at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, said. And he’s right. We like Britain. But our views of Britain are muddled and not all that well-informed. Old stereotypes — bowler hats, afternoon tea and eccentric sense of humor— mix with glimpses of a contemporary society that strikes us as more ruthlessly capitalist than our own. Between the Britain of Margaret Thatcher and the Britain of Monty Python, most Germans would probably go for Monty Python. We even like the “Fawlty Towers” sketch about the hotel owner who tells employees not to mention the war in the presence of his German guests.

That the Brits do, inevitably, mention the war when they meet Germans is OK with us. We know what we’ve done and we’re grateful for the British support that helped us rebuild Germany into a thriving democracy after the war. It’s because of that history that we’re still keen to know what the British think of us. A new translation of “Instructions to British servicemen in Germany, 1944,” published by the Foreign Office in London during World War II, made the German bestseller lists last year. And when the Queen visited this summer that mattered too. We presented her with a gift, a painting of a blue horse. She didn’t like it. Joachim Gauck, the German president, looked terribly apologetic — even mortified. Our mistake, he seemed to want to say. We know that horses aren’t actually blue. Sorry about that.

So, yes, we care about Britain. But when it comes to European matters, German patience has run a little thin. In or out? The British people will soon vote on a question that isn’t exactly new. The U.K.’s relationship with the EU has been rocky from the very beginning. When the European Economic Community was founded in the 1950s, the Brits didn’t want to join. Then, in the 1960s, they launched EFTA, a free-trade association outside the EEC. Even after they finally joined in the 1970s, they negotiated for all kinds of opt-out clauses and special exemptions, resisting an “ever closer” political union. Most significantly, they chose to keep the pound instead of adopting the euro. This is particularly painful to many Germans, who wish in their hearts that Germany had kept the deutschemark instead of playing “Mutti” (Mummy, in the Queen’s English or Merkel, in the German political lexicon) to the euro family. Psychologists might have a field day studying this currency-envy. They have the pound and their opt-outs, and still they want more?

It needn’t have come to this. The British could have been more involved in Europe. It was Winston Churchill himself who, in 1946, called for the formation of a United States of Europe. But in that very same speech, he also clarified that the union would be based on a relationship between Germany and France, and that Britain would only act as a “friend and sponsor.”

Churchill’s reluctance to place the U.K. at the heart of Europe shaped British attitudes for decades to come. Having won the war, Britain deemed its economy strong enough to hold out on its own. Trade relations with the Commonwealth and its far-flung colonies seemed more promising than teaming up with Continental Europe. And the Brits already harbored the same fears of a supranational authority that fuel Euroskepticism today. Instead of helping to build institutions more to their liking, they watched from the sidelines as Brussels rose.

When the U.K. finally entered the EU in 1973, it was too late to Anglicize the place. The set-up was purely Franco-German by then, and, truth be told, more Franco than German. Up until today, the political culture of Brussels — all those strange DGs staffed with hundreds of anonymous career bureaucrats — is as alien to most Germans as it is to the Brits. Even Frankfurt’s European Central Bank doesn’t feel very Germanic these days, run as it is by an Italian on a bond-buying spree.

No wonder, then, that British and German attitudes to the EU aren’t that far apart. An increasing number of Germans would prefer to see key political issues — like labor laws or regional aid — handled by national institutions rather than by Brussels. And conservative Germans in particular would prefer to rein in EU spending and limit the eurozone to a few North European economies. But unlike the British with their Brexit, the Germans wouldn’t even flirt with the idea of a German exit.

Europe is a key component of Germany’s post-war identity. More than 50 years after the end of World War II, we still want to be cozily embedded in a union that is bigger than us. We wouldn’t like to be out there on our own.

The term “special relationship” usually refers to the transatlantic bond between Great Britain and the U.S. But if you take “special” to mean “peculiar” rather than “privileged,” the Germans and the Brits have a special relationship, too, and it dates back to the Angles and Saxons who invaded Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire. Germans and Brits do like each other, a German saying goes, but never at the same time.

After World War II, the Brits watched with envy as the German economy soared and their own industry lagged behind, crippled by labor conflicts and chronic underinvestment. For a while, during the 1970s, the British Labour government tried to emulate the German business model and aimed for consensual labor relations. But the cussed British unions were having none of it. Asked to compromise, they simply went on strike.

Britain took a sharp turn when Thatcher took over as prime minister. She pulverized the unions, deregulated financial markets and privatized state institutions. And, my word, she didn’t trust the Germans. When Chancellor Helmut Kohl invited her to his native Rhineland-Palatinate, he famously treated her to a meal of stuffed pig’s stomach, or Saumagen. Thatcher hated the Saumagen, and that was fine with most Germans — they don’t like Saumagen either. What they did mind, though, was her successful lobbying for a British rebate on EU payments. “What we are asking is for a very large amount of our own money back,” Thatcher had said. The British thought it was only right. The Germans, who had paid their EU bills without ever complaining publicly, thought it was selfish and cheap.

Then came the ’90s, Tony Blair and Blur — a breath of British fresh air. Blair’s Third Way, a compromise between free markets and social justice, even inspired Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats. Then Blair decided to go to war in Iraq. And he failed to rein in London’s avaricious City, choosing instead to cultivate close ties to bankers and business leaders. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Germans decidedly cooled on Cool Britannia.

Interestingly, it’s now the Brits who have taken a liking to the Germans. In the latest twist in this bittersweet love story, 100,000 Britons made the trip to Germany for the 2006 World Cup. The sun shone for four happy weeks. Many British tourists have returned for subsequent trips. And there’s renewed British interest in all things German, ranging from the Bundesliga (where the ticket prices are far cheaper than back in the Premier League) to the particularities of Rhine capitalism (which helped the German manufacturing industry weather the crisis) to contemporary German artists like Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter (all of whom were honored with exhibitions in London last year).

Cool Germania.

Much thought has been given to the question of what Brexit would mean for the U.K. But what about Germany? Some British Euroskeptics, ever wary of German power, have suggested that the Krauts would rejoice in total EU domination. But that’s unlikely. Germany doesn’t want to dominate. When U.S., French and British armies go to war somewhere, the Germans prefer to sit back and provide moral support and first-aid kits. And with Britain missing in Europe, they might feel even more isolated than before. The cultural rift between Northern and Southern Europe has widened as a result of the euro crisis, and a British departure certainly wouldn’t help in that respect. You can bet it would reduce the EU’s clout on the world stage too, and that’s not in Germany’s interest either. Put simply, we don’t want to be left alone with the PIGS.

On the other hand, the economic impact might not be as catastrophic as doomsayers suggest. What are the Brits going to do, after all? Join NAFTA? Rev the Commonwealth back up? London’s mayor Boris Johnson suggested an economic alliance with Switzerland, to be called Britzerland. Or perhaps they’ll try Great Borway, a union with Norway. More likely though, the Brits will decide against severing economic ties. If the Eurocrats let them, they’ll replace the current set-up with comprehensive bilateral treaties along Swiss lines, and that shouldn’t hurt Europe all that much.

So, yes, a majority of Germans would like the U.K. to remain a member. But in the end, the German commitment to Europe is greater than to a nation of islanders who’ve been indecisive and standoffish from the beginning. We want them to make up their minds, once and for all. And we don’t want the EU to make significant concessions to keep them on board. In or out? The French foreign minister Laurent Fabius has said that there cannot be a Europe “à la carte” and that the British efforts to overhaul relations with the EU was like joining a soccer club and then deciding abruptly “that we’re now going to play rugby.” The Germans — who prefer soccer to rugby — are with the French on this one. When you warn the Krauts of Brexit, you won’t hear them say, “Please don’t go.” Our response is: “Dear Brits, we want you to stay. But go if you must.”

To read POLITICO 28 click here.

Konstantin Richter, a German novelist and journalist, is a contributing writer at POLITICO. He is the author of “Bettermann” and “Kafka was Young and He Needed the Money.”