the national interest

Everybody Loves Germany Now

BAYWATCH, Nicole Eggert, David Hasselhoff, Alexandra Paul, David Charvet, Pamela Anderson, (Season 3, 1992), 1989-2001
The poll may have heavily oversampled cast members of Baywatch. Photo: Everett Collection

In what has to be history’s greatest public relations turnaround, a BBC poll finds Germany to be the most admired country in the world. There are still plenty of people alive who fought that huge war they started. Not to mention the huge war they started twenty years before that, or the comparatively smallish but still unpleasant war they started in 1870.

And let’s not forget — let’s not forget, dude — that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city — that ain’t legal either:

Everybody Loves Germany Now