This is overwhelmingly a book on how the British looked at the Germans, and gives the scantest account of how the Germans looked at the British.
The book's subtitle, `The British and the Germans since 1890' is a little misleading since the excellent first chapter has some useful references to the German influence on the English Reformation; to Shakespeare's scattered comments on Germans; to the 17th century opposition to the Stuarts, asserting that Saxon England was being oppressed by Norman oppression; and, above all, to the prestige that German literature, scholarship, theology, philosophy, music and administration enjoyed in England in the 19th century. Of course there was a love-hate relationship: some aspects of German attitudes were mocked; others - German efficiency and orderliness - were respected but not liked; and opposition to the Hanoverians and to Prince Albert was tinged with Germanophobia.
The political relationship between England and Germany during Victoria's reign was good, but not, the Kaiser thought, good enough. He wanted to force England out of her `Splendid Isolation' into a formal alliance. His coarse attempts misfired. They led Britain to ally with France and Russia rather than with Germany, and so into the First World War. We have a detailed account of how virulently anti-German public opinion had become ever since the Kruger Telegram of 1895. Doubtlessly this campaign was vulgar and jingoistic; but, though Germany's reckless Griff nach der Weltmacht is made clear, we are nevertheless almost left with the impression that it was this British hysteria which made the First World War inevitable.
The third chapter dealing with the First World War is particularly skewed. There is just one sentence mentioning Ernst Lissauer's Hymn of Hate (Hassgesang gegen England) on the German side, when the rest of the long chapter recounts the hymns of hate, often racist in character, for the stereotypical Hun and his atrocities, which were poured out on the British side from across the whole political spectrum from the rabid Kipling to the Liberal philosopher Gilbert Murray.
After the First World War Gilbert Murray (though not Kipling) became one of those who recanted, and who felt guilt at the harsh way Germany had been treated at Versailles. Ramsden lists many leading Britons who were enamoured of the democratic and progressive Weimar Republic, setting it against an England they considered stuffily conservative. Initially people like Vansittart, who sounded the alarm as soon as Hitler came to power, and Churchill were in a minority. Only when Hitler, irritated by Britain's feeble but unsuccessful attempts to thwart the seizure of the Sudetenland, launched press and radio attacks on Britain did public opinion begin to swing in a major way against Germany.
Once the war started, of course the Germans were again seen by most people as irredeemably aggressive. In his famous booklet `Black Record', Vansittart linked the barbarism of Hitler's Germany all the way back to the barbarians described by Tacitus. Against such views, which also figured in Churchill's speeches, the attempts by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to distinguish between the Nazi leadership and the average German, could make little headway. Nothing now would do other than unconditional surrender by the Germans, which would put no impediment in the way of crushing Germany `once and for all'.
With the threat from the Soviet Union, the British had to support American wishes to rearm Germany, but many cabinet ministers retained their visceral dislike and suspicions of Germany and feared that the EEC would eventually be dominated by an economically resurgent Germany. And when a younger generation of British politicians showed less hostility to Germany, `public opinion and government policy were dangerously out of step': the cheap press took every opportunity to keep stereotypes alive among the working class; and British historians, writing histories of the Nazi period, sought its roots in long-standing traditions.
The last chapter documents how the Nazi period still obsesses the British, to the exclusion of practically every other aspects of German history, and certainly to the exclusion of any knowledge of Germany since 1945. On every bookstall there are piles of books with the swastika on their cover. Thrillers in which Nazis or ex-Nazis play a part have had huge take-ups, whether in novels or in the films. So have counter-factual works, imagining what Britain would have been like if the Germans had won the war. British television is awash with programmes about Nazi Germany. For tens of thousands of British students the Nazi period is all they learn of German history. It is a popular subject with them, as they vicariously (but hopefully as a warning) experience its glamour, its violence and its brutality. (Strangely, Ramsden does not refer to the neo-Nazi skinheads who revel in what the Nazis did.)
Worst of all is the role of the populist xenophobic press in Britain. It can't stand France either, but for its dislike of Germany it can so easily summon up memories of the Nazi period and the war, as it does most viciously when reporting on football matches between Britain and Germany.
But, lest we are left with the idea that it is only vulgarians who exhibit such xenophobia, the book more or less concludes with describing Mrs Thatcher's enduring suspicion of the Germans and her unavailing efforts to prevent German reunification. Blair tried to make amends, but German opposition to the British policy in Iraq merely added fuel to Germanophobia. With all that, it is not surprising that public opinion surveys show that suspicion and dislike of Germany still predominates.
It is a sad and disgraceful story, and we can only be relieved that the Germans are merely pained by all this and do not reciprocate in kind.
The book is densely written. Its detailed analysis of individual books and films is rather wearisome; one must however admire the immense industry with which Ramsden has brought together thousands of incidents to illustrate his theme; but his publishers have introduced a real abomination: we have to go the Internet to read the footnotes!