Anglo-German relations

In this essay, I examine the public discourse about Oswald Spengler's ideas in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the »cultural morphology« he developed in his two-volume work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (translated into English in the second half of the 1920s as Decline of the West). Previous work has suggested that Spengler’s work was greeted in Britain, overall, with measured scepticism, although there were some individual enthusiasts. Beyond such  generalisations, however, there has so far been no systematic analysis of Spengler's British public reception in the two decades following the publication of Der Untergang des Abendlandes. As signalled in my title, I focus on press sources. These provide insight into three questions: how were Spengler's ideas described? With what other concepts or characteristics were they associated? How were patterns in their reception related to the cultural and political context of inter-war Britain? There was a focus across the period on what can be labelled Spengler's »organicism«, »relativism« and »determinism«. Moreover, Spengler's reception was also shaped by topics that were not specifically methodological: his erudition, pessimism, Germanness, advocacy of »Prussianism« and associations with Nazism.

During the First World War, anti-German sentiments manifested
itself as riots in several occasions throughout the metropolis.
Several explanations and interpretations were put forward by contemporary
observers and later historians. This essay aims to provide
a more nuanced analysis of the causes of the anti-German riots.
Wang demonstrates that the popular anti-German violence was a
mixed product of press propaganda and local grievance caused by
food shortage and economic inflation. Moreover, in analyzing the
role of the state in relation to said riots, he argues that contrary to
popular belief, the British government played a limited role in the
promotion of anti-German chauvinism.

This MPhil thesis examines Anglo-German relations in southern Africa during high imperialism through the lens of multi-national business. Using the South West Africa Company (SWAC) operating in German South West Africa (GSWA) as a case study this paper dissects the cross section of industry, politics and colonialism as the British and German Empires worked to gain profit, build infrastructure and develop their own unique imperial aims. The paper furthers the argument put forward by some business historians such as Geoffrey Jones that the stateless, large global firm is an entity with its origins in the 19th century. Colonial companies are often seen as pieces of a larger imperial superstructure, but the following work displays that SWAC could move fluidly between colonial borders and in many cases shaped and influenced colonial governance. Sources are taken from the German National Archives and the Rhodes and Cawston Papers in Oxford. The history of SWAC illuminates key aspects of Anglo-German antagonism overseas, international business’s role in GSWA and globalization during high imperialism. Unlike past studies of the company, there is a focus on integrating British, German and South African perspectives into a multi-faceted analysis of the company’s rise in German South West Africa.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, British foreign policy shifted. From the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, Britain’s primary enemy had been France, and Britain had often been an ally of German states. However, by the first decade of the 1900s Britain was informally allied with France and its relations with the German Empire were deteriorating. The decline of relations between the United Kingdom and Germany was the result of Anglo-German rivalry which developed during the 1890s and intensified into the 20th century. Economic, industrial, and colonial competition from Germany irritated the British, but the most contentious issue was the rapid and costly expansion of the Kaiserliche Marine. This was seen as a threat to Britain’s national security, and so Britain responded with many reforms and expensive construction programs. This costly naval race was a result of Germany’s desire to enhance its own world influence and Britain’s desire to retain its naval supremacy, the high regard the Kaiser had for naval power, Germany’s desire to become a world power, and the importance of Britain’s navy to its own security. Neither side was willing to relent during the race, which resulted in an intense naval arms race and the construction of two powerful and innovative dreadnought battle fleets on either side of the North Sea.

My contribution to the body of knowledge consists of a delineation of representations of the German as temporally and spatially Other, as different in Time and Space, in literature, travel writing, and political cartoons, 1870-1914. I utilise the frameworks of imagology, semiotics, and the theory of temporalisation outlined by Johannes Fabian, in order to show how these literary and visual representations constructed the stereotypical German national character as existing in a different, more primitive Time than the civilised English. Additionally, I map how this projected national stereotype became, to use the terminology of Jean Baudrillard, hyperreal, i.e. perceived to be more real than the German individuals who supposedly possessed the imagined national character. This development was, I argue, achieved through the production and dissemination of national stereotypes through different mediums of late nineteenth and early twentieth century print media. The different modes of representations, I argue, were used as temporalising devices in order to encapsulate and contain the German in the Past, in a different Time. Before the German unification in 1871, Germany had been perceived as a backward, yet admirable culture, economically, politically, and colonially lagging behind Britain. However, the unified nation state’s subsequent economical and industrial prosperity, as well as its naval and colonial expansion, enabled Germany to emerge as a political rival to Britain, alternating between the role of ally and a viable threat. In order to neutralise such a threat, the perceived German national characteristics of efficiency and organisation, subservience to authority, and excessive militarism, were interpreted as symptoms of temporal distantiation. To the British observer, the German was no longer confined to a different Time, constantly lagging behind the Time of the English, but had reached and intruded into the present, posing a temporal invasion.

Subject of the study is a little-known aspect of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, namely, the propaganda campaign towards the German public from September 1938 until May 1940. Although there is a vast literature about appeasement, Chamberlain’s efforts to reach the German people by way of propaganda have so far received no attention from historians. The thesis reconstructs for the first time the history of British German-language propaganda dur-ing Chamberlain’s premiership. The evolution of the institutional framework, the changing strategies and the contents of this propaganda campaign are described in detail, offering a deep insight into the thinking of the British Government about German society and exposing a naive belief in the power of propaganda.
In the thesis a new methodological approach is adopted by integrating the study of high poli-tics at the diplomatic level with the study of the propaganda campaign towards a foreign pub-lic. Whereas conventional interpretations consider appeasement a foreign policy strategy con-ducted exclusively on the diplomatic stage between the two governments of Britain and Ger-many, the author maintains that appeasement has rather to be viewed as a policy consisting of two equal and complementary pillars. The first pillar was the well-known dual policy of deter-rence and conciliation directed towards the Nazi regime at a governmental level. The second pillar was the propaganda campaign directed towards the German public over the heads of the Nazi regime. The propaganda campaign, while on the whole reflecting Chamberlain’s foreign policy on the governmental level, seems to have been regarded by the British government as an additional deterrent element to the diplomatic pillar: Hitler was to be warned that he would risk serious opposition from his own people if he provoked war, and thus be induced to seek a peaceful solution to his territorial claims. In this sense, the propaganda campaign was a safe-guard for the conciliatory part of appeasement, namely, the readiness to consider favourably Germany’s legitimate territorial and economic claims.
The thesis identifies five phases during which Chamberlain attached varying degrees of im-portance to the propaganda instrument in his dealings with Germany. Thus, the significance of propaganda increased in direct relation to the deterioration of Anglo-German negotiations on the diplomatic level. The propaganda pillar even outlasted the outbreak of war and the col-lapse of the first pillar: After negotiations on an official diplomatic level had come to an end on 3rd September 1939, Chamberlain sought to continue his policy of goodwill towards the German people by means of propaganda in the hope to stir up a revolution against Hitler.
In the end, however, British propaganda proved to be a failure. The author identifies two rea-sons for this. The first was a lack of credibility, i.e. the discrepancy between the picture of events as presented in British propaganda, and the reality as experienced by the German pub-lic. The second, and even more important, reason was, however, a whole host of unrealistic British assumptions about the Nazi state and the character of the German people. In particular, the British political elite unconsciously transferred British democratic traditions onto Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Chamberlain’s propaganda was based on the premise that public opinion did carry some weight in the Third Reich and that the German people, even though living un-der a dictatorship, would cherish similar political ideals of democratic participation and a dis-like of Hitler as British subjects.

La guerra se nutre de equívocos y, acaso, el mayor de ellos resulte ser el concepto que la historia le escriben los vencedores. Y es que vencedor y vencido no son categorías absolutas, y que “todos somos vencedores y vencidos al mismo tiempo al describir en nuestros éxitos, pues también exponemos el arduo problema de no olvidar el alcance de nuestras fuerzas ”• Creemos que esta frase, tomada del prefacio de las memorias de guerra del almirante alemán Reinhard Scheer (1863 – 1928), describe con justicia el carácter de la guerra naval durante la Gran Guerra y, en particular, la existencia crepuscular  de la Marina Imperial Alemana (1872 – 1919),  cuya historia merece ser mejor conocida y trascender el alcance de la cita churchilliana que constituye su lapida ante el tribunal de la Historia, “la flota alemana es un lujo, no una necesidad nacional”.

"Rival Blueprints for Post-War Europe: British Efforts to Counter National Socialist Propaganda on the „New European Order“, 1940-1941"

Following the defeat of France in June 1940, the Nazi regime announced ambitious plans for the economic and political reconstruction of Europe under German control. Simultaneously, Great Britain was attacked as the backward defender of the old order. The Churchill government, concerned about the evident decline of its political influence in Europe, decided to take on the challenge and try to offer a rival, and better, plan for post-war Europe. This article examines the British response to Hitler’s propaganda for a ‘New European Order’ during 1940-41. Particular attention is being paid to the treatment of the topic in the British propaganda campaign towards the German public.

Journalists and the media have not only played a role as political actors in Anglo-German relations, which was independent of their governments. Likewise, they have also worked in the service of their states, surrendering more or less consciously their journalistic independence for the ‘national interest’. One such example is the British propaganda campaign directed at the German public during 1938-1939 with the help of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The campaign is an interesting historical case that shows the enormous influence a government could exert on the media even in a democratic society. This article examines the relationship between the journalists of the BBC German Service and the Foreign Office and offers an insight into the mechanisms of British propaganda production between the Munich Agreement and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Since the early twentieth century, the notion of resistance became common currency in colonial language and anti-colonial ideologies to refer to military, political, and other forms of countering the authority of the colonizing institutions and agents in the colonies. After World War II and the boom of decolonization, it became an important tool in the critical and conceptual analysis of colonialism as a relationship of domination and opposition. Consequently, a wealth of studies was produced that focused on the ways though which indigenous people actively opposed, rebelled, or contested – militarily, politically, symbolically, culturally – the colonizing presence of Europeans. In the 1990s-2000s the validity of taking on “resistance” as a privileged concept and empirical topic was criticized for reducing the colonial phenomenon to a simplistic dichotomy – and since it appeared to have lost much of its early vitality in historical and anthropological research on empires and colonialism. Yet, since decolonization, ideas of “liberation” and anti-colonial resistance did not lose their significance as powerful tropes in retrospective nationalist readings of the birth of post- colonial nation-states. More recently, across the social sciences, “resistance” as a concept and a research trope seems to be revived, and a trans-disciplinary field of

‘resistance studies’ appears to come into emergence. What it means to study “resistance” both conceptually and comparatively in colonial and imperial history today? How can this notion be valuably re-conceptualized in current imperial and post- colonial studies? What are its potential and limitations? What phenomena should be considered under the notion of “resistance”? What specificities resistance(s) phenomena take over time and across spaces? How to address the plural manifestations of resistance comparatively, across different empires, different colonial situations, and different historical periods?



The conference Resistance and Empire: New Approaches and Comparisons aims at addressing these questions and rediscovering the vitality of resistance both as a concept and as an empirical phenomenon in the study of European empires, colonialisms, and their legacies. As such, it brings together students of French, British, Portuguese, German, and other European colonialisms to analytically address the multiple expressions of “resistance” in colonial history by engaging with empirical

material and theoretical explorations. The conference has two main purposes. On the one hand, it seeks to cross-fertilize the study of anti-colonial resistance(s) as a multiple historical phenomenon across the different geographies and temporalities of the European overseas expansion in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania since the sixteenthcentury. On the other hand, it will reassess the potential and limitations of “resistance” as an analytical concept in imperial history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies, relating it to other notions in these domains, such as “order”, “rule”, “protest”, “rebellion”, “subaltern”, “agency”, or “domination”. The conference will adopt a broad conceptual, geographical and chronological framework, encouraging a comparative examination of “resistance” in relation to diverse places and historical periods, acros distinct Western imperial formations, from the sixteenth to the twentieth-first century.

Please feel free to contact me if you should experience problems getting hold of one or more of my publications.

This is a collection of papers presented at the conference «Anglo-German Linguistic Relations», held at Queen Mary, University of London in November 2007. The papers cover a wide variety of topics about the relationship between the English and German languages or relate to cultural and literary contacts between English-speaking and German-speaking regions. Individual papers discuss Anglo-German linguistic interplay and affinities both as contemporary phenomena and from a historical perspective. Themes include codification, translation and discourse production from the 17th century to the Second World War; shared metaphors in English and German; political propaganda in English and German; and authorial positioning and perspective in a selection of autobiographical and literary works.

Contributors: Ulrich Busse, Andreas Musolff, Markus Oliver Spitz, Fredericka van der Lubbe, Astrid Ensslin, Wim Vandenbussche, Geraldine Horan, Felicity Rash, Hanne Boenisch, Tamar Steinitz, Falco Pfalzgraf

In the early 1920s, the loss of the prewar German excavation concession at the site of Amarna in Middle Egypt to the British Egypt Exploration Society (EES) caused a severe rupture of the relationship of the leading Egyptologists Adolf Erman and Alan H. Gardiner, who had just resumed correspondence after the end of the War. This dispute, which very nearly put an end to the friendship of the two scholars, is discussed in detail in this contribution. It is also placed within the context of Anglo-German relations within Egyptology as a whole and, in particular, the importance of the excavations at Amarna for German practitioners of the discipline. Issues both of nationalism and of research and personal networks within Egyptology are therefore addressed.

On January 24 1863, the illustrated periodical “Once a week”, one of the leading magazines of its kind, published a commentary on recent political discussions concerning Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred (1844-1900). “Prince Alfred’s Romance” dealt with the Prince’s proposed election to the vacant throne of the troubled Kingdom of Greece. Signed “From the mountain”, the essay came from the pen of the famous professional writer and social thinker Harriet Martineau (1802-1876). With its idiosyncratic blend of critical, political judgment and feminine, domestic musings it lent a very peculiar touch to the theme of royal princehood.
Ever since the inglorious deposition of King Otto I in October 1862, the question who would succeed that unfortunate monarch on the Greek throne had been discussed with great ardour in Britain – not least since it was likely to recalibrate the European balance of powers in the intractable Eastern Question. But while Prince Alfred, the darling candidate of the Greeks, had been ruled out by the logics of international power politics, Martineau decided to ponder on his own “feelings and sayings”. She refused to believe in “a mere tame obedience to other people’s decisions”, longing instead “to know how the youth himself felt when a crown was offered him […] and he was not allowed to accept” it. After all, Prince Alfred was “eighteen – […] at the very age of enthusiasm and confidence, when all things seem possible to an heroic spirit.” He must have felt the romance attached to the prospect of kingship. In her short piece, Martineau set forth to uncover the “struggle at heart” she suspected to have taken place in the winter of 1862-1863.
In hindsight, it is safe to say that Prince Alfred never had the slightest inclination to become King of Greece. He was second-in-line to the English throne, loved his life as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, and had before him the prospect of inheriting the small, but idyllic duchy of his childless German uncle. But, nevertheless, it might be worthwhile to follow Martineau’s method of “personal talk” which allows us to follow closely the junctures in the biography of one single prince, and to scrutinize the intricacies of royal life-decision-making. As we shall see, the years 1863-1865 opened a ‘window of opportunities’ to Prince Alfred, the potential heir to three thrones, and there was indeed a “struggle at heart” going on at the time – though not the one Martineau imagined.
http://heirstothethrone-project.net/?page_id=1144

Between 1934 and 1939, pupils from the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (aka Napolas), the most prominent type of National Socialist elite school, engaged in a series of exchanges with boys from British public schools, including Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Lancing, and the Leys School in Cambridge. The Napola pupils who embarked upon these exchanges were seen as performing the function of ‘cultural ambassadors’ for the ‘new Germany’.

Using a mixture of contemporary documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony from former pupils on both sides of the Anglo-German divide, this paper analyses the development of the attitudes which the participating English and German boys bore towards each other during this period. Since the schools tended to carry out a number of reciprocal exchanges, with German pupils travelling to England one year, and English pupils returning in the next, the ways in which boys’ (and masters’) stances changed over the course of time can often be reconstructed in some detail.

This volume of British Envoys to Germany presents official reports sent from the British missions in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich and Vienna. The diplomatic correspondence selected for volume IV provides strong evidence that the period between the Dresden Conferences of 1851 and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 should be seen as more than just a time of transition between the revolution of 1848 and German unification. In addition to international affairs and Anglo-German relations, the dispatches cover the federal dimensions of German politics and the policies and societies of the federal states.

This article offers an overview on Benedikte Naubert’s translation practice and the way it evolved through the years : while in her first translations the author tended to adhere closely to the originals, her later production presents a growing number of creative traits, which testify to her increased sensibility as a mediator as well as her confidence as a writer. In translation Naubert found a means not only to earn money, but also to hone her literary skills and actively participate in the European cultural exchanges circa 1800. Especially in her later translations Naubert seems to express her will for emancipation as a writer. However, she does not exploit her role as a translator of "female fiction" in order to spread a progressive view on women’s role in society. On the contrary, she occasion- ally inserts passages or short remarks that confirm the gender stereotypes of her time, instead of promoting alternative concepts of femininity. Naubert’s translations may thus be innovative regarding her approach to foreign texts, but they are quite conservative in the portrayal of women and the elaboration of gendered clichés.

FULL TEXT: https://angles.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/angles/index.php?id=2095

When British soldiers and civilians entered the Allied-occupied Rhineland after the First World War, they were often surprised to discover that the individual Germans they encountered had little in common with the image of the enemy promulgated by British propaganda during the war. While face-to-face encounters with an often disconcertingly friendly civilian population inevitably forced the British to re-evaluate their wartime visions of the enemy, certain negative stereotypes of the German enemy nevertheless persisted in the context of the occupation. Several British commentators even found it necessary to fall back on these stereotypes when trying to explain the friendly attitude of the local population. To some, German friendliness only served to demonstrate the servile disposition of the Germans towards any form of authority; to others, it confirmed the existence of a supposed division in Germany between a liberal, peace-loving and civilized south and west and the "real" enemy, an autocratic, militarist and expansionist Prussia. Moreover, the British self-image in the Rhineland was frequently constructed in opposition to a real or imagined German enemy. The attitude and behaviour of the occupiers was regularly presented as characteristically "British" and measured not only against how the Germans had treated the populations of occupied regions of France and Belgium during the war, but also against how the stereotypical "Hun" would have behaved in the case of a German victory.

This chapter examines the links between classical scholars working in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century against the background of the Enlightenment. It discusses some of the rich intellectual and cultural connections between the two countries which developed in the era of the Personal Union. Above all, the chapter argues that the traditional view of the relationship between classical scholars in Britain and Germany in this period, based on the teacher-pupil model, needs to be rethought; in particular, that a more flexible idea of mutual exchange and collaboration provides a more satisfactory tool for understanding this important aspect of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Anglo-German scholarly relations. In particular, it suggests that classical scholars based at the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge played a more important role in Anglo-German scholarly networks in this period (and indeed in the Republic of Letters more broadly), than many historians have previously allowed.

In 2018 the outgoing German ambassador to the UK, Peter Ammon, suggested that a sense of national identity based on how Britain had “stood alone” during the Second World War, combined with a negative perception of Germany’s supposed domination of the EU, had fuelled Euroscepticism and contributed to the success of the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum. While recognising that references to Britain’s wartime past and fears of German power in the present-day EU are by no means identical issues, this article traces the frequent convergence of these two themes in Eurosceptic rhetoric during the decade preceding Britain’s exit from the EU on 31 January 2020.
It reveals that concerns about Germany’s “domination” of the European project, an important theme in British Euroscepticism since Thatcher, resurfaced in the early 2010s, particularly in the context of the Eurozone debt crisis. The Second World War was subsequently a frequent point of historical reference during debates on Brexit, primarily though not exclusively among Eurosceptics. While specifically anti-German uses of the Second World War were less common during the 2016 referendum campaign, they re-emerged with particular bitterness during the difficult post-referendum negotiations.

This paper investigates the important role of English women translators in the reception of German literature in London around 1800. Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Plumptre and Fanny Holcroft were members of close-knit but outward-looking dissenting networks. These women were able to develop their intellectual powers and knowledge of modern languages in order to work as professional writers and translators. Wollstonecraft propagated her own ideas about moral education in her 1790 translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Moralisches Elementarbuch. Plumptre translated German scientific and travel literature (Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein’s Reisen im südlichen Afrika), as well as seven Kotzebue plays. Holcroft travelled to Germany with her father in 1799, gaining a knowledge of the language before translating plays for the Theatrical Recorder (1805-06). I consider the significance of Unitarian beliefs and networks to the responsiveness of English women to German culture by examining how the translated texts and paratexts contributed to wider debates that were of particular concern to Dissenters.