WHILE on holiday in Belgium in 2014, German writer Alan Posener went to visit the First World War battlefields and cemeteries of Flanders.

He and his wife were the only Germans on a bus full of British and Australian visitors to Ypres, who had come to trace the names of lost great-grandfathers from headstones in the immaculate British cemeteries, or simply to pay their respects.

The Poseners later came across the cemetery which contains the graves of more than 10,000 German soldiers, many of whom were student volunteers, that died at the Battle of Langemarck in 1917. The difference was striking.

“The only visitors were us and a couple of British people,” says Mr Posener, a journalist and cultural historian who lives in Berlin. “There were no other Germans, no German flags, no flowers at the graves. Much of the cemetery was in need of repair or closed.”

The experience made him question his country’s complicated attitude towards a conflict that many in Germany would rather forget.

“I wrote an article about it and the only person who telephoned to congratulate me was Alexander Gauland, leader of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party,” adds the 69-year-old, whose uncle Karl survived the First World War – what Germans call der Grosse Krieg - after joining up aged 16 in 1914.

“What’s wrong with Germany? Why isn’t it capable of mourning the flower of its youth being cut down in such a way? You don’t have to be pro-war or anti-war to feel something. Why is it not OK to feel sad?”

For the most part, Germany chooses not to engage with this question. The country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, yesterday became the first German leader to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph in London in what the UK Government described as an “historic act of reconciliation”. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, was at commemorations in Paris. It is perhaps telling that neither stayed at home.

Germany does not mark Armistice day and did not stop as a nation to observe a silence at 11am yesterday. Neither has it spent the last four years commemorating the war with the sort of wide-ranging historical and cultural projects that have filled television and radio schedules in the UK. It’s fair to say this has not been a moment of national reflection in Germany.

The country has a remembrance day – Volkstrauertag, the “people’s day of mourning” – that commemorates all victims of violence and oppression, not only those killed in wars. War memorials do exist but there aren’t many – you will not see one in every town and village, as is the case in Britain and France - and they tend not to be given prominence.

According to Mr Posener, who was born in London to a British mother and a German Jewish father who fought for the Allies in the Second World War, this low-key approach highlights Germany’s complex and pained relationship with its past, since all talk of the First World War must always go through the filter of the second.

“The horrors of the first war have been totally overlaid by the horrors of the second,” he explains. “Talking about your own war dead is not something Germans are comfortable with, even with relation to the first war, when you could frame it in terms of millions being sacrificed on both sides.

“The First World War is seen as ancient history in Germany and I think that is a great pity. It has been caught up in a vitriolic politicisation – in any debate you are either blaming Germany or saying the country was treated badly.

“Through it all is the question of how to get over the Nazi past. Maybe people just don’t have room in their minds for the First World War.

"But I believe the dead of the first war have been victimised again in the way they have been politicised and that is awful.”

As anyone who has spent significant time in Germany will know, the Nazi past is confronted and commemorated everywhere, from big monuments such as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, to the Stolperstein, the small and very moving “stumbling blocks” in the ground that commemorate individual victims of Nazi terror all over the country. Time is taken to put events and locations into context and, it seems, remind themselves of their shame.

When the German Parliament, the Reichstag, was rebuilt in Berlin after reunification, the graffiti daubed by Russian soldiers who captured and razed the building in April 1945 was left on the wall to remind German politicians - and the people they represent - of the Fascism embraced by their predecessors. It’s hard to imagine Britain or the US taking this approach.

Germans even have a word for such monuments to national shame – Mahnmale – and children are taught about their country’s Nazi history from a very young age.

Stefanie Bolzen, UK correspondent for German broadsheet newspaper Die Welt, believes this has shaped her homeland's approach to all war and commemoration, for good or ill.

“We were not taught about the First World War at school, while the Second World War and the Holocaust were part of the curriculum for many years,” says the 45-year-old, who grew up near Dusseldorf and now lives in London with her English husband and children.

“I remember at the age of 10 being shown a photograph in a history book of a pile of naked dead bodies at Auschwitz. I can still feel the shock and anxiety of that picture today. Looking back, I think perhaps it was wrong to show us this picture at such a young age but like many millions of Germans I have carried it with me my whole life.

“This explains much about the national psychology of Germany today, why Germans do not like military intervention, why the pacifist movement remains so strong, why we reacted to the Syrian refugee crisis as we did.”

Living in the UK for the last 10 years, Ms Bolzen has experienced a very different approach to commemoration. She is impressed by the support shown to veterans of recent conflicts by organisations such as Help for Heroes but worries about about how past wars are being used in modern political rhetoric.

“At the Conservative Party Conference in October I was struck that the Prime Minister started her speech with a long passage about her father’s cousin being killed in the trenches,” explains the journalist.

“She linked that passage to the challenges ahead, including Brexit. It might sound blunt but as a European I felt irritated that the British Government refers back to a European war in looking to create a common European future.”

This different approach to commemoration in the UK first interested Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus when she came to this country from Germany as an exchange student in 2002.

She has since spent years researching British literary representations of remembrance of the First World War, driven by a fascination with how and why it has remained a cornerstone of British identity.

Now a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Northumbria, Ms Einhaus, 37, vividly recalls an Austrian exchange student struggling to understand the purpose of wearing a poppy to commemorate those who had died in the First World War.

“She responded that one ‘might as well commemorate people who died in the Stone Age’”, she says.

The academic, who originally comes from the North Rhine-Westphalia state in western Germany, retains a strong interest in what drives commemorations of the First World War in the UK but believes too much focus on the past can divert interest from current military actions.

“I feel deeply cynical that we are able to invest so much in a conflict that ended 100 years ago and so little helping the victims of conflicts in the world today, especially in the Middle East, where the consequences of First World War are a major contributing factor in the bloodshed,” she says.

“I’d be delighted if commemorations in Britain and Germany could establish this link and show a greater commitment to harnessing the memory of this devastating war to address issues leading us to armed conflict in the present.”