Germany the guardian of peace

perseus

Active member
I have a fascinating book called a 'new' Geography published by Alfred Holden in London dated 1897. It provides an insight into the thoughts and feelings of (presumably British) writers at that time.

In the section describing Germany it begins

"Germany is the name of the great military power which stands in the middle of Europe, and which is the chief guardian and guarantee for peace between the large and warlike empires that flank it on three of sides"

Well I suppose they are talking about Russia (Poland was then part of Russia and referred to as a dead kingdom), Austria Hungary and France. According to some historians, from this period up to WW1 Europe was like a tinder box waiting for a spark, so perhaps it was Germany which prevented it from happening earlier?

P.S. Do you think I should update my collection of books?
 
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Yeah update your book collection. Try reading Massie's "Dreadnaught" and you'll get a very different perspective.
 
perseus said:
I have a fascinating book called a 'new' Geography published by Alfred Holden in London dated 1897. It provides an insight into the thoughts and feelings of (presumably British) writers at that time.

In the section describing Germany it begins

"Germany is the name of the great military power which stands in the middle of Europe, and which is the chief guardian and guarantee for peace between the large and warlike empires that flank it on three of sides"

Well I suppose they are talking about Russia (Poland was then part of Russia and referred to as a dead kingdom), Austria Hungary and France. According to some historians, from this period up to WW1 Europe was like a tinder box waiting for a spark, so perhaps it was Germany which prevented it from happening earlier?

P.S. Do you think I should update my collection of books?

Victorian era liturature is pretty entertaining stuff. It was usually mass produced which means large numbers survive, keeping the cost down and making acquisition affordable. I usually buy older books and use the library for current issues. The exception is usually photo-oriented publications although there are pretty interesting graphics in older books. There is also something reassuring about the smell, feel and heft of old books; held on your lap on a cold rainy day.
 
perseus said:
I have a fascinating book called a 'new' Geography published by Alfred Holden in London dated 1897. It provides an insight into the thoughts and feelings of (presumably British) writers at that time.

In the section describing Germany it begins

"Germany is the name of the great military power which stands in the middle of Europe, and which is the chief guardian and guarantee for peace between the large and warlike empires that flank it on three of sides"

Well I suppose they are talking about Russia (Poland was then part of Russia and referred to as a dead kingdom), Austria Hungary and France. According to some historians, from this period up to WW1 Europe was like a tinder box waiting for a spark, so perhaps it was Germany which prevented it from happening earlier?

P.S. Do you think I should update my collection of books?

Excellent thread Perseus. It was time that someone brought up this issue.

The Development & Consequences of Anglo-Saxon Anti-German Hatred

Basic Idea: Modern thinking concerning Germany owes a great deal to the revolutionary changes that accompanied the American-British Social-Darwinist revolution at the end of the 19th Century. Most people today think that the standard German stereotypes were a REACTION to WWI, Nazism, WWII or Auschwitz. This idea is false. The typical stereotypes of Hun, etc. developed after German unification and owed far more to a paradigmatic shift in American-British elite perceptions. The elite created a self-serving view of German unification that labeled Prussia an enemy of civilization. Why? The new stereotypes were a response to a perceived threat emanating from Germany and the elite employed standard racialist metaphors typical of the Victorian era. Anglophile Americans brought this Victorian hatred to the United States. In many ways, we can still see the substance of these views today.

The Argument: Perseus, the views of Holden were as you say characteristic of British and American academia during this period. The list of positive remarks concerning Germany was relatively long. Bliss Perry, the Harvard professor, for example wrote "[t]hat Germany possessed the sole secret of scholarship was no more doubted by us young fellows in the eighteen-eighties than it had been doubted by George Ticknor and Edward Everett when they sailed from Boston, boung for Göttingen, in 1814". A generation of American professionals were educated in Germany. "During the course of the century", writes Peter Novick, "thousands of Americans in search of advanced professional or academic training traveled to Göttingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Freibourg, Berlin, and other German university centers". It is a rather banal thing to point out that this ended rather abruptly.

I would argue that two factors (among many others) changed this.

(1) Anglo-Saxon Social-Darwinism & The "Frontier Thesis"

Since you have read Churchill's stuff, you know that even he wrote a fair deal concerning certain so-called German virtues and the linked British-German cultural heritage. Churchill and Roosevelt were representative of their age and the early fascination with Germany as represented by the so-called "Teutonic-germ theory". Michael S. Bell: "Franklin Roosevelt’s editorials in the Harvard Crimson in 1903 and 1904 reflected his positive regard for German culture and efficiency". Peter Novick: "Briefly summarized, the theory held that English and American democratic and liberal institutions had grown out of an institutional germ which developed in the forests of Germany in the remote past, and was transported to Britain by the Teutonic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries. They maintained these institutions (and their racial purity) intact by extirminating the racially inferior Celtic Britons".

This theory fell from grace by the 1890s and was slowly replaced by the "Frontier Thesis" and Kipling's hyper-nationalistic or jingoist Anglo-Saxon racialism. The British and Americans ultimately rejected any links to Germany. Academics forged a new idea that Britain represented the new Roman Empire and viewed Germany as a dangerous barbarian horde on the periphery. William Manchester offered the best passage reflecting this viewpoint that I have ever read and this in 1964: "Back and back, past the Friedrich Krupps and the Anton and Georg and Wilhelm and Heinrich Krupps -- and the Katharinas and Helenes and Gertruds and Theodras, the Krupp Valkyrie -- back beyond the first glinting razor-sharp bayonets, the first sluglike cannonballs, the agony of the Thirty Years War and the Black Death -- back past the early black-and-white Westphalian cottages into other times, older that the written record of Essen's original Krupp or even the Dark Ages, back to the jumbled terror of the Hercynian forest, when the Rhineland was a Roman outpost, and men believed in monstrous things, and the barbaric Ruhr lay dark under the moon, its oak and bloodbeech tops writhing in the evening wind like a gaggle of ghosts, and the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting".

Well, the Americans, goaded on by the Anglophile members of the academic world (probably the Oxford educated), copied the British. According to Michael S. Bell, American scholars followed their British counterparts and began to think in terms of "American exceptionalism and in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization over any found on the continent of Europe", that "France was in decline", that Germany was now a "nation in tension between the influences of the liberal and intellectual southern German states and militaristic and autocratic Prussia", and the Americans and British had "a responsibility to promote liberty and progress. Xenophobia, jingoism, Social-Darwinism and the Anglo-Saxon White Man's Burden characterized the new thinking.

Germany was now "out". Silas Marcus Macvane, another Harvard professor, "warned that the German Empire was "a daughter of Borussia," the barbarian land at the southeastern corner of the Baltic sea during the Roman era, "not of Teutonia (ancient Germany)." All the noble characteristics of the Teutonic association were wiped out by the Prussian unification of Germany. And this change in focus impacted other areas. Roosevelt, for example, "placed the greatest faith in the potential of the Russian people who he believed possessed a democratic character by virtue of their own frontier experience". By the way, according to 19th Century Anglo-Saxon racialist thinking, Prussians were considered to be infused with Slavic blood and therefore violent and autocratic.
 
(2) German Unification & Industrialization:

As can be seen in (1), the unification of Germany could only deepen the negative stereotypes that already resulted from the indigenous development of Anglo-Saxon racialism. German unification, however, led to the desperate search for a German-free heritage. All eyes looked at Prussia.

Prussia's defeat of France in 1871 emphasized the rapid German development of the late 19th Century. These developments also erased all previous German stereotypes of thinker or dreamy fool (expressed as the German Michael). All Germans were now soldiers and dangerous. They became the "Hun".

a) Harrison: "scratch the Junker, and you will find the lanzknecht [sic]"..."the fact that every German is a soldier, is itself a proof of a lower type of civilization".

b) Edwin Earnest William: "Edwin Earnest William’ s Made in Germany in 1896, a troubling discourse on Britain’ s eroded industrial base, rekindled
advocacy for educational reform along German lines, but resistance to the "tyrannical" Prussian model continued to reflect hostility toward the alleged evils of state control, deleterious effects on character, and the basic incompatibility of national temperaments".

c) Ford Maddox Ford: "We [the English] are the people who will win terrific victories against enormous odds—in the game of tennis, or in the other game of tennis that used to be played with stone balls. But in the end, some Prussian, some Jew, or some Radical politician will sleeplessly get the best of us and take away the prizes of our game." 124

Factor (1) is in any case far more important than factor (2). The wars of German unification did place a degree of pressure on the utterly egocentric "Balance of Power" conception. That is, the mere existence of a unified Germany threatened the paradigmatic belief that Europe should remain under Britain's heel. But academics and the elite made a conscious decision to portray the new German Empire in an incredibly negative light. Did simple geopolitical realities cause this development? No. The articulate elite rewrote history and wiped away centuries of good relations because of elemental fear. They created the myth of the "Hun".

Unification & WWI and the "New" German Typology:

Peter Novick: "In 1914 American historians had often blamed their European colleagues for promoting nationalism which had led to war. With the entry of the United States into the conflict, the locus of guilt shifted: American historians' task was "repentance" and "expiation" for having insufficiently promoted American patriotism". The Americans hoped to compensate and now attacked Germans with a vengeance.

Several Anglo-Saxon ideas already existed:

a) The German Danger: P.M. Kennedy: "The rise to imperial preeminence had put Britain in a less defensible position morally visa-vis Germany: was now Germany the new David and England the overgrown, decadent Goliath? This inversion of the imperial paradigm, which had formerly placed England as the heroic underdog, now cast England as the "weary Titan, staggering under the too-vast orb of his fate" or a "huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretched in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream."

b) German Militarism: "Charles Copland Perry, the same writer who called Germany the "touchstone of our conduct," described the attitude of most Englishmen: Germany is simply a country which, for reasons best known to itself, keeps a very large army, possesses a good many autocratic and boorish officials, which has once or twice, in the person of its Emperor, had the impertinence to interfere with our own affairs and which persists in flooding our labour-markets with cheap clerks".

c) German Barbarism: William F. Bertolette (1904): "Appreciation of the splendors of ancient Greece and Rome in an age of imperialism often led to identification with those ancient models of empire, a vantage point which placed Germany historically in opposition to "civilization".

By WWI, Americans wrote and did the following:

a) William E. Dodd (1915): "...almost ashamed that I have my doctorate from such a people...the enemy of mankind". He had obviously once thought differently.

b) Don Tolzmann: "An obvious target of the hate campaign was the German language. By the war's end, twenty-six states had passed laws against the use of German. Some of these forbade the use of German on the street, in public meetings or on the telephone...By January 1921 the number arrests nationally for those who were guilty of using German in public had reached a total of 17,903...these laws were [then] declared unconstitutional."

c) Don Tolzmann: "After eliminating German from the schools, it was only a logical step to address the problem of German materials in libraries. Numerous libraries decided to burn, destroy, or remove German materials from their holdings".

d) Don Tolzmann: "Any individual of German descent became a target. Ethnic slurs were a daily matter in the public and in the press. Terms like "Hun" and "Hunskunk" were used daily on the front pages of the press...A common act of harassment was tarring and feathering. Another favorite was dunking German-Americans in syrup. Homes, churches and German houses were painted with yellow signs on the door or with skulls and crossbones. Sometimes they were burned to the ground...Indeed, the first German-American killed was the Rev. Edmund Kayser, who was shot near Chicago in 1915. Other ministers were stoned, shot at, or had their homes broken into. At Bishop, Texas, a German Luteran minister was publicly flogged.

e) Don Tolzmann: "...war propaganda depicted England, France, and Russia as heroic and godly nations, while Germany and Austria were presented as the forces of evil...[in movies, etc.] the Huns were depicted as brutal, barbaric, bestial savages bent on worldwide conquest"

Conclusion: I hope that people understand what I am getting at. France had typically been England's main enemy for hundreds of years. Why did England ultimately side with France and Russia against Germany? A typical answer would point to the German navy, German imperialist ambitions, or even the wars of unification. I argue that this is rubbish. These points only justified a new way of thinking that viewed the very existence of a new Germany as unacceptable. Why? Victorian thinking (ie. racialism and Social-Darwinism mixed with balance of power notions) created an image of the "Hun" that subsequently influenced how the elite viewed their world. Without this change, it is impossible to explain the fact that most Americans and British first viewed German unification as a good thing.
  • Don Tolzmann, The German-American Experience (2000)
  • P. M. Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (1980)
  • F. Harrison, National and Social Problems (1908 )
  • Edwin Earnest William, Made in Germany (1896)
  • William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp (1964)
  • William F. Bertolette, German Stereotypes in british Magazines Prior to World War I (2004)
  • Michael S. Bell, The Worldview of Franklin D. Roosevelt: France, Germany and United States involvement in World War II in Europe (PhD)(2004) [some of the people quoted]
  • Russel Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred: German War Guilt and the Future of Europe (1953)
  • Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "objectivity question" and the American historical profession. (1980 ) [some of the people quoted]
 
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Ollie, thanks for such a comprehensive answer! I’ve obviously touched on a particular interest of yours. I am not very familiar with this particular era, so my views are very simplistic in comparison and are therefore not as detailed or well researched, but they go something like this:

Surly Germany in 1897 would not have been viewed as much of a threat to Great Britain since she only started building large battleships in 1898 and influenced the Boer war from 1899 http://www.friesian.com/dreadnot.htm.

Great Britain’s policy for hundreds of years up to 1945 was to maintain the balance of power by allying with the weaker group in Europe, thereby restricting any dominant power that could be a threat to Britain or her Empire. France challenged Britain’s position in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but she was usually defeated by Britain in alliance with Germanic states such as Austria and Prussia. It is therefore not surprising that Germany was viewed as an asset at that time. Even after WW1 France was seen as a natural enemy by some commanders e.g. "The French, they’re the fellows we shall be fighting next" (Haig 1919)

As you say, an anti German feeling was certainly much in evidence in America in WW1. This sometimes reached hysterical proportions. I understand there were ‘kick a Daschund’campaigns to remind these dogs of their Germanic roots!
 
Can't pretend I am anything like an expert in this particular subject but it is interesting nonetheless. I may be going out on a limb here but this sounds, in many ways, like the current Anglo-American attitude towards Islam in general and Arabs in particular. It can't be quite the same because there are some reasons why the Anglo-American viewpoint is understandable but still..

Like most extreme attitudes in humans it seems to me that the attitutde towards Germans desctibed by Ollie is borne out of fear, but for different reasons than we are taught at school.
 
Doppleganger said:
Can't pretend I am anything like an expert in this particular subject but it is interesting nonetheless. I may be going out on a limb here but this sounds, in many ways, like the current Anglo-American attitude towards Islam in general and Arabs in particular. It can't be quite the same because there are some reasons why the Anglo-American viewpoint is understandable but still..

Like most extreme attitudes in humans it seems to me that the attitutde towards Germans desctibed by Ollie is borne out of fear, but for different reasons than we are taught at school.

Hi guys,

Here is a great quote by Nietzsche:"The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power."

I don't really see any connections between Wilhelmine Germany and the Muslim world: (I might be wrong, of course)

1. Modern institutional anti-racist dogma preaches the goal of religious and racial tolerance. The media takes great pains to argue that Muslims are basically a good people corrupted by a small group of evil men. Late Victorian racialist thinking on the other hand embraced the concept of a general German assault on civilization that used the Roman methaphor as an explanatory model. All Germans were basically barbarians irregardless of verifiable evidence to the contrary. This prediliction, it was believed, related to a long list of factors including smaller brain size brought on by racial mixing with the inferior Slavs. [Oh yes, Eugenics was quite popular in England and the United States. Historians love blaming Hitler and Nazism, who took Eugenics to a logical conclusion, but even Roosevelt and Churchill believed roughly the same thing...except that Germans were themselves slightly inferior, unfit to rule, and a danger to the Anglo-Saxon Master Race. Hitler's "Übermensch" was destable in their eyes because he inverted their own argumentation. That is why the Anglo-Saxon world found Nazism so repugnant. The lesser Germans cousins were trying to usurp the Anglo-Saxon world order using Victorian logic.] German culture, something a Mary Shelley would have praised, became "Kultur"...something essentially dark and evil.

2. The echoes of racialism do not impact Muslims in the same manner as Germans. The old colonial perspective viewed Arabs for example in a romantic light that emphasized the essential barbarian desires for autonomy and freedom. While this perception is sleeping, and we now look on Islam as essentially reactionary and oppressive, the dominant American version of the White Man's Burden (democratization) still emphasizes the possibility of accessing the noble spirit encountered by Lawrence of Arabia...this is the propaganda line of the Bush government and I see no evidence that the press rejects it. Only fundamentalist American Christians -- incidentally the greatest epistemological danger the west has ever known -- believe in the inherent evil of Islam using the eschatological image of the False Prophet from Revelations to divide the west and middle-east into rigidly opposed factions. I do not want to sound modernist...there is no conspiracy theory here.

I fear the ideology of fundamentalist Christendom. Not because I am a liberal who supports Islam against European values. I am just another postmodern "git" who is trying to understand what it is that we actually believe as a society. Most of the "revelations" are frightening, to say the least. Hannah Arendt: "...the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." [The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) p. 172]

By the way, I hope you guys are not getting bored with this stuff. While I am no expert, the issue of Victorian thought as a explanation of the rift with Germany prior to WWI seems so important that I have devoted the last few months reading a bit about the subject. A lot of the material can be found at "Project Gutenberg"...it is free and accessible. The material can help us understand what the elite actually thought about a whole range of subjects like Eugenics. I see few differences between Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany. I see no differences between the Kaiser's Germany and the Queen's England.
 
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I was wondering? Are you German? I'm highly impressed by your knowledge and the way you express yourself.
I do have to say though, that comparing Roosevelt's America with Hitler Germany is not really fit.

Regards,
Il
 
Is he German!!! Wow. Is the Pope catholic?

Now Ollie, you have set some very good posts there - you are working well. How are you BTW?

However, I have been working hard too, and the opening post of this thread reminds me of something you have pushed , in the long -ago:-



"HISTORY IS IS ALWAYS WRITTEN BY THE VICTOR" -( which is why the German history book is blank, they say) joke of course.LOL


Anyway, I am not going to give you any trouble this time, because it makes my head hurt. Shouting, that is. So all you have to worry about is Kunikov staying away.

Cheers.
 
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When you look through history Britain and Germany had fought more wars as Allies than probably any other two Countries up to this time. I have always considered it a shame about the rift that the two world Wars caused. Together we had seen of France with Malborough and German help and we together had brought an end to Napoleon
 
It just makes me sick that in every major combat in how many years the Germans proved to be militarily superior to the French and still...at the end the French won.

Regards,
Il
 
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