We live in a deeply divided world, but when was it any different? One of Europe’s most ingrained divisions has been between the so-called Teutonic spirit and the Mediterranean spirit. It was a contrast that exercised the mind and the pen of artist Emil Nolde, who saw the Germans as the embodiment of all things good, brave and true, and the southerners as a group of shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells.

History was not kind to Nolde, a Nazi sympathiser who found himself stigmatised as a “degenerate artist” by the party he admired. The moral of the story is that people who champion racial and ethnic stereotyping should not be surprised when they, themselves, are negatively stereotyped. Nevertheless, there are few Europeans today who don’t hold fixed views about the differences between Northerners and Southerners.