British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914

Abstract

"It was not part of their blood, It came to them very late With long arrears to make good, When the English began to hate. They were not easily moved, They were icy willing to wait Till every count be proved Ere the English began to hate." --Rudyard Kipling, 1915. It need hardly be said that Britain's relationship with Germany and the Germans has been of immense importance historically. In the twentieth century, the contest for power between the two countries helped to push the world to war in 1914; triggered a second more terrible conflict in 1939; led to Britain's imperial retreat and drove it by necessity into a 'special relationship' with the United States after 1941. The origins of this troubled relationship - the 1860-1914 period, which is the focus of this book is perhaps one of the best-known, but least understood, phases in Britain's association with Germany. ... Written as it was in 1915, the quotation from Rudyard Kipling which stands as an epigraph to this introduction encompasses much of what I seek to explore in the coming chapters. Kipling himself had settled upon Germany as an enemy from an early date; his letters speaking of a real fear at German designs on the British Empire. But it would be a mistake to take Kipling's attitudes as an exemplar of wider British attitudes. Indeed in writing 'The Beginnings', Kipling was expressing something of a frustration that his countrymen and women had not been prepared to imagine Germany absolutely as their enemy until no other course was left open, retaining the regard felt for their German cousins until the last possible minute. 'The Beginnings' suggests that widespread hatred of Germany was much more a product of the unique circumstances of the First World War than the period preceding it; and through an analysis of the work of Kipling's contemporaries, I will show in this book just how British attitudes were shaped by ongoing debate, before the British truly learned to 'hate' the Germans.