Exploring the Anglo-German paradox: more than 300 years of co-operation and conflict

Great Powers: A History of Britain and Germany

Author: Jan Rüger

ISBN-13: 978-0241434376

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £40; 736pp

Shortly after the 2016 Brexit referendum that initiated Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, The Economist blamed “mutual incomprehension” between Germany and Great Britain for the referendum’s result. It was “one of the sad if perennial features” of their relationship that Britons and Germans seemed doomed to disagree at major historical junctures. Although “the two countries share so much, in interests and outlook ... their political cultures are so alien to one another”, the magazine wrote.

Jan Rüger, professor of history at Birkbeck College in London, disagrees with that verdict in his excellent new history of Anglo-German relations between 1714 and 2018. Although Britons and Germans often defined themselves in opposition to one another, they were also caught up in an association of “mutual dependence”, he writes.

“At the heart of their relationship”, according to Rüger, “has been the lasting experience of both close co-operation and violent conflict. One can call it the Anglo-German paradox: that two nations so closely enmeshed could simultaneously be each other’s most formidable enemies.”

Great Powers tells the story of this troubled relationship over 300 years, from the early 18th century to the present. The book begins in September 1714, when Georg Ludwig of Hanover travelled to London to be crowned as King George I at Westminster Abbey. He thereby laid the foundations of an Anglo-German dynasty that still rules over the United Kingdom today.

King Charles III is not known to be as overtly Germanophile as his father, but he is still able to address his audiences in perfectly passable German during his state visits to Germany and speeches to the Bundestag.

Rüger’s history of Anglo-German relations and cultural entanglements is organised in three sections – Allies, Opponents and Reconciliation – and suggests that the Anglo-German relationship may have been more significant in European history than the one between France and Germany.

Rüger is particularly strong on the immediate post-1871 period after German unification by Bismarck, and on the years leading up to the first World War. This is hardly surprising. His previous books have also focused on the period between 1871 and 1914, and include Heligoland (2016), an eye-opening study of the North Sea island that was once Britain’s smallest colony before it was horse-traded with Germany in 1890 for unopposed British access to Zanzibar.

Rüger is undoubtedly the world’s leading expert on Anglo-German relations in this period, and the sections in his new book on the rising tensions that eventually led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 are especially well conceived.

In relation to 1914, Rüger contradicts the key argument of Paul Kennedy’s influential Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987). Kennedy suggests that, as a general rule, nations that expand economically are bound to clash, whereas declining nations try to cling to the status quo. In his interpretation, that is precisely what happened in the case of Britain and Germany in 1914. Once Germany had overtaken Britain economically around the turn of the century, it was bound to launch a military challenge, culminating in the first World War with all its terrible consequences.

For Rüger, by contrast, there was nothing inevitable or accidental about 1914. Instead, he emphasises the role of multiple individuals and contingencies, and highlights that the war was the result of deliberate but dynamic decisions taken at the time.

King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II were, of course, first cousins through their shared grandmother, Queen Victoria, who had fluent German and was married to Prince Albert, a German. Victoria had long treated Wilhelm as her favourite grandchild. The familial ties did not, however, stop the two countries from heading into the largest military conflict in history before 1939.

Intriguingly, many Germans continued to admire Britain (as opposed to France) in the interwar years, despite widespread anger over the provisions of the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty. Rüger points out that this admiration was based partly on an ongoing sense of kinship, “underpinned by historic and dynastic ties with the British ‘brother nation’”, as well as racial ideas about the shared ethnic origins of Germans and Britons.

Just as important was the conviction, propagated by Hitler from the 1920s, that Britain and Germany were destined to form a strategic geopolitical alliance, “allowing the former to focus on its global imperial interests and the latter to achieve hegemony in continental Europe”.

Hitler was not the first German politician to hold that view. For generations German statesmen had tried to convince the British that their interests aligned with those of Germany. From Bismarck to the Kaiser, leaders in Berlin had appealed to Britain as their “natural ally”, who would be well advised to keep out of continental Europe’s wars. Even in early 1945, with the Reich in ruins, Hitler and the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, believed that a separate peace with Britain and an alliance against the Soviet Union was possible. For Churchill, however, an alliance with Hitler was never an option.

The second World War changed the relationship between the two countries, but not always for the worse. British troops occupied parts of Germany, but their occupation regime was perceived as much more benign than the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany.

Within 10 years of Nazi Germany’s collapse, Britain and West Germany were Nato partners, forming an alliance that obliged them to co-operate closely in opposing the Soviet Union and its allies, including East Germany. Student exchanges resumed, as did trade partnerships and a gradual process of reconciliation. Coventry and Dresden, both severely damaged during the second World War, became twin cities and thus chose partnership and peace over hatred.

When Germany reunified in 1990 after the end of the cold war, there was an uneasiness in Britain about the re-emergence of German hegemonic power in Europe. Margaret Thatcher had actively tried to sabotage German reunification, but by that time, the most important geopolitical decisions were taken in Washington, not in London, and US president George HW Bush was strongly in favour of a united, western-oriented Germany.

Thatcher’s scepticism about a reunited Germany was not shared by her successors. By June 2016, at the time of the divisive referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the two nations had grown closer than ever before. More Germans – more than a quarter of a million – lived in Britain than in any other European country. Trade relations were close and the British imported more from Germany than from anywhere else.

The historic reconciliation achieved by Britain and Germany after the second World War was a gradual process, not a single symbolic moment comparable to that of chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling in front of the Monument of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970, or that of Helmut Kohl and French president François Mitterrand holding hands over the graves of Verdun in 1984.

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If there was such a moment, Rüger contends, it came relatively late, namely on November 11th, 2018. On the centenary of the end of the Great War, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, flew to London to take part in Britain’s commemoration of the armistice in 1918. In the company of Queen Elizabeth II, prime minister Theresa May and four of her predecessors, Steinmeier laid a wreath at the steps of the Cenotaph. He was the first German head of state to do so. The wreath bore a handwritten message: “Honoured to remember side by side. Grateful for reconciliation. Hopeful for a future in peace and friendship.”

Undoubtedly, however, Brexit has had an impact on Anglo-German relations. Many Germans who spent years in Britain – this reviewer included – felt a sense of betrayal when a majority of the British public voted for Brexit and turned its back on continental Europe. Back in 2016, I was genuinely surprised by the outcome of the referendum. But then again, I had spent my time in the UK in the liberal bubbles of Oxbridge and London. And it seemed I had been naive in thinking the internationalist outlook I experienced there was indicative of the general mood in the country.

Although this is much more than just a prehistory of Brexit, readers looking for a historical explanation of Britain’s relationship with Germany would do well to start with Rüger’s book. His account of Anglo-German relations from the 18th century to the present draws on an impressive range of primary sources to explain how Britain and Germany entered into an unusually close but ambiguous relationship; why they became bitter enemies in two world wars; and how they were reconciled in the decades after 1945.

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It skilfully combines political, cultural and intellectual history to demonstrate that – Brexit notwithstanding – Britain’s ruling and political classes will continue to have close ties with Germany and the rest of Europe. Indeed, the latter part of the book has important resonances for UK and European solidarity today, as Europe faces a variety of economic and political threats from outside the region.

Robert Gerwarth is professor of modern history at University College Dublin and founding director of its Centre for War Studies.

The classic study of Anglo-German relations, now surpassed by Rüger’s work, is Paul M Kennedy’s The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (new edition, Prometheus Books, 2001). A very different take was offered by Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War (Penguin, 1998), in which he argued that Britain should have stayed out of the war, which only replaced German continental hegemony with a French one and that Britain had far closer economic and cultural ties with Germany than with France. A more lighthearted and partly autobiographical book based on observations on modern Britain by a German living in the UK is Philip Oltermann’s Keeping Up with the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (Faber & Faber, 2012). For an excellent microhistory of imperial rivalry between Germany and Britain, see Jan Rüger’s Heligoland: Britain, Germany and the Struggle for the North Sea (Oxford University Press, 2016)