So baiting Germany about defeat, whether on the battlefield or the soccer pitch, became as much part of being British as drinking tea or complaining about a wet summer. From a constant diet of World War II films on TV to excruciating jokes about vacationing Germans always seizing the best lounge chairs by the pool, anti-German chauvinism was stitched into British culture.

Both the idea of Britishness and Britain’s sense of itself in the world have, however, been transformed in recent decades. The old-fashioned notions of race and empire in which British identity was traditionally rooted have been all but eradicated.

The recent debate over Scottish independence and its implications for England have brought the very idea of Britishness into question. A corollary of this change is that in place of the old “Kraut bashing,” Britons have gradually developed a less antagonistic view of Germany. Even as anti-German chauvinism has softened, though, Britain has remained myopic about the place of Germany — and of Britain itself — in history.

A century ago, most educated Britons would have had a deep appreciation of German history, music, philosophy and literature. Today, the role of Germans from the Enlightenment to Modernism in constructing our very conception of the world is barely acknowledged and little understood.

It is not just German history about which Britain lacks insight. While the enormity of the Holocaust has forced Germany to address the darkest aspects of its past, Britain has never had to think about its history in that fashion. From the Opium Wars to the Bengal famine, the shameful episodes of Britain’s imperial past are rarely discussed.

Perhaps nowhere is this blind spot more obvious than in the current debate about World War I. There has been much discussion in Britain about the role of German militarism and imperial ambitions in fomenting war. Rarely acknowledged is that all the great powers of the time had expansionist aims; that in the decades leading to the war, they had carved up the globe among them; that at the center of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain.