The ITV drama Coldwater helps us take a good hard look at ourselves – and that can only be a good thing, argues Herald Writer at Large Neil Mackay

There's a curious avenue of literary scholarship that’s always intrigued me: how a nation, like Scotland, is "imagined" by the rest of the world; how the books, films, songs and plays about a country shape how others see it. When I was a student – back in what now feels like the Middle Ages – we explored this notion in texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and how it created an idea of the New World in the Elizabethan mind. Caliban, the play’s sorrowful "monster", captures the fear of the unknown that Renaissance colonists felt when they stepped foot in the Americas. Equally, Caliban symbolises the exploitation and demonisation of indigenous people: his name plays on "cannibal"; he’s enslaved by a white settler.

I was chatting to the well-known Glasgow University professor Alison Phipps recently. Among the many academic strings to her bow, she’s an expert on culture and language, with an interest in Germany. She told me that Germans, in particular, love Scotland – because of how they’ve been taught to "imagine" our country. More Germans study Macbeth in school, for instance, than British kids.

Scotland holds an especial appeal in the German cultural imagination. First, like many nations, they’ve a “shortbread tin” view of Scotland as “utterly romantic”, thanks to the likes of Walter Scott and Robert Burns. However, due to Germany’s horrendous past, they see us as a nation without the trappings of overt nationalism. The distinct lack of a history of militaristic nationalism in how Scotland is portrayed “is alluring” to Germans. The average German likes that culturally Scotland doesn’t come with much ugly baggage.

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