Those Bavarian inn conversations

This passage from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s memoir A Time of Gifts continues to haunt me, weeks after reading it.

At eighteen, Fermor traveled across Europe on foot. He walked through Germany in 1933, sometimes stopping at inns along the way:

Those Bavarian inn conversations reflected opinions which ran from the total conviction of party-members to the total opposition of their opponents and victims; with the difference that the first were loud and voluble while the second remained either silent or non-committal until they were alone with a single interlocutor. Being English was relevant to all this, for though the Germans’ attitude to England varied, it was never indifferent…. The War inevitably cropped up: they resented that we had been on the winning side, but didn’t seem to blame us—always with the proviso that Germany would never have lost if she hadn’t been stabbed in the back; and they admired England, in a certain measure, for reasons that were seldom heard in respectable English circles any more. For past conquests, that is, and the extent of the colonies, and the still apparently undiminished power of the Empire. When, with education and practice the colonies could rule themselves, I would urge at this point, they would be given their independence. Not at once, of course; it would take time… (This was the theory we had all been brought up on.) Looks of admiration, partly rueful and partly ironical, at what they considered the size of the lie and the extent of its hypocrisy, were the invariable response.