"Two Souls Dwell in the German Nation": British Historians and the First World War
Date
2018-09-14
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Abstract
Historical scholarship on British-German relations prior to 1914 often emphasizes mutual antagonism. This antagonism, supposedly, reached a nadir during the First World War, with ‘the Hun’ being demonized as the enemy to civilization, but was replaced with a more sympathetic narrative after 1919, rooted in a reaction against the allegedly punitive peace settlement. This conventional view is too simplistic. Pre-war British historians overwhelmingly adopted favourable attitudes towards Germany, and often used their professional writing to encourage congenial relations between the two countries. Conceptually, their arguments centred upon the ‘two Germanies’ thesis, an abstraction which enabled British admiration for German cultural and intellectual achievements to exist in tension with fears concerning Prussia militarism. This literature shaped demi-official British views on Germany before the war, which were anti-Prussian rather than anti-German in orientation. The ‘two Germanies’ thesis continued to influence how historians conceptualized Germany after hostilities erupted in 1914. Following the war, this continuity enabled Germanophile historians to retain an idealistic view of Germany. This conviction led them to embrace and disseminate revisionist interpretations which posited that the European Powers shared responsibility for the conflict. The idea that all the belligerent states were equally responsible for the war encouraged the view that the grievances which a relatively ‘guiltless’ Germany sought to redress were legitimate. Germanophile historians occupied a central role in supplying the vocabulary by which politicians could frame post-war reconciliation. Placed within this context, pro-German historians provided the intellectual and moral justification for sympathetic policies towards Weimar Germany. There can be no doubt that the appeasement policies adopted in the 1930s resulted in part from the conciliatory atmosphere that historians inculcated in the previous decades.
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Keywords
Historiography, British Historians, International Relations, Intellectual History, British-German Relations, World War One
Citation
Wainwright, S. G. (2018). “Two Souls Dwell in the German Nation”: British Historians and the First World War (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32953