Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890 [Hardcover]

I looked forward to reading this book after I had read the chapter titles and the introduction. Sadly, the book does not live up to the expectations it raised. There are too many lengthy quotes from newspaper articles, and not enough analysis. The quotes in themselves are interesting, but too often the book is just the addition of various quotes, which does not result in one coherent text.

A note to the publisher: It is outrageous that the note section is not part of the hardback book, but that readers are asked to find those on a website. I cannot imagine that the inclusion of the notesection at the end of the book would have really increased the production costs substantially - or that readers who are prepared to pay the cover price for the hardback would have protested at paying another pound or so for the notes!

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!

John Ramsden and the other British historians who have grappled with the difficult and delicate topic of the British view of Germany and its people must be thanked for their courage and their hard work. The period covered by the book starts in 1890, although it would have been worthwhile to go back a little further; after all, one of the earliest works of modern invasion literature,"The Battle of Dorking" appeared in 1871, right after the establishment of a (mostly) united Germany, and was to show the way to all future writers of this genre.

From what Ramsden describes, this reviewer gets the impression that, in Britain, the people in the limelight had trouble adjusting to the changing times, an attitude which the author of "Dorking", an engineer who understood the significance of technical progress, wanted to change. The initial actors were born well before the beginning of the period covered by Ramsden and were, for the most part, products of the British Public Schools, thoroughly acquainted with a view of history which used the Roman Empire as a yardstick. They entered active life with the idea that history consisted of successive collisions of nations, somehow independent of other factors, and that if you just played the game shrewdly enough you could always come out on top.

Seen from that point of view, any nation that became strong constituted a potential menace and care had to be taken to eliminate it before things got out of hand, but other changes were not needed. While these actors may have had the proper view of the jungle we live in, the horror scenarios they spread in the decades leading up to WW1 and the racist methods they used have polluted the mentality of the western world to this day. Worse, the writers and the politicians themselves became infected by their own propaganda, they could no longer view the world in a different way; in the end, the ugly mask which they had hung on their foe lay trampled on the battle-field, but somehow the foe had survived, whereas they themselves had achieved a series of Pyrrhic victories of epic proportions. The ideals which they had once touted and for which they had gone to war lay in shreds - Polish independence, European security, the British Empire.

Numbed by all this, after two world wars, the veterans soldiered on for a decade, until the Suez adventure put a stop to all this, but by then the world had completely changed and they spent the remains of the day trying to tell themselves and everyone who would listen that they had done the right thing. This insistence again fogged their own vision, though, and widened the crack in the Western world rather than filling it in and this situation is still very much with us.

In all this, there is a vicious circle: the public mind is fed fictional but somehow convincing and cleverly aimed ideas, the media exploit and amplify them and the politicians must play to the gallery or be voted out of office. At each stage, the momentum of the idea goes up, as in a cyclotron accelerator, and it becomes more and more difficult to slow things down.

Ramsden shows us again and again how British intellectuals like Rudyard Kipling were caught up in this avalanche of mud they had helped to launch. Modern Germans don't know much of what Kipling wrote, the Just-So stories perhaps, but they certainly behave in a way this man had admonished people to adopt - "or being hated, don't give way to hating" - perhaps that is why they applauded Churchill when he visited Berlin in 1945.

The subtitle of the book says that it is about the British and the Germans, but, seen in that light, it is really only half a book, because it does not deal with the other side of this coin, the way the Germans saw the British. This certainly is an area of history which has not really been explored in the same way as Ramsden and his colleagues have done it for their side of the Channel. It may turn out to be a thinner book.