In Our Time - The Riddle of the Sands

Episode Date: June 12, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the prescient thriller ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ about the decline Anglo-German relations before the First World War. In 1903 an Englishman called Charles Caruthers went sailing in the North Sea and stumbled upon a German military plot. The cunning plan was to invade the British Isles from the Frisian Islands using special barges. The plucky Caruthers foiled the plot and returned to his sailing holiday.This is not history but fiction, an immensely popular book called ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ by Erskine Childers. It was a prescient vision of two nations soon to fight the First World War but it went against the spirit of the previous century. Brits and Germans had fought together at Waterloo and had influenced profoundly each other’s thought and art. They even shared a royal family. Yet somehow victory at Waterloo and the shared glories of Romanticism became the mutual tragedy of the Somme.With Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge; Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London and Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European history at The University of Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1903, an Englishman called Charles Carruthers went sailing in the North Sea and stumbled on a German military plot. The cunning plan was to invade the British Hours from the Frisian Islands

using special barges. The Plucky Carruthers foiled the plot and then returned to, his sailing holiday. This isn't history but fiction, an immensely popular book called Riddle of the Sands. It was a prescient vision of two nations soon to fight the First World War, but it went against the spirit of a previous century. The British and the Germans had fought together at Waterloo in 1815, and had influenced profoundly each other's thought and art. They even shared a royal family. Yet somehow, victory at Waterloo and the shared glories of romanticism became the mutual tragedy of the song. With me to discuss the highs and lows of British-shore

relations across the 19th century at Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. Rosemary Ashton, Quine Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London and Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Richard Evans, can we start with the Battle of Waterloo?

The British and Prussian Army has jointly defeated the French in 1815, and that's represented in that huge painting in the House of Lords of Wellington, shaking hands with Boucher on the field of battle at the time of victory. Can you explain the geopolitics behind that alliance? Yes, well, of course, Napoleon had conquered the greater part of Europe and there are various coalitions and alliances that were put together to try and defeat him,

and finally a large one succeeded, drove him out of France, 1814. He came back the next year in 1815 after the restored French monarchy had proved very unpopular. And so another coalition was put together, and Duke of Wellington was put in charge of the armies, to defeat Napoleon's hastily raised forces. And he was able to hold the field for the day, but couldn't actually drive Napoleon off

until the Prussians arrived under General Blusha, and that was the signal for the general advance. And of course, subsequently to that, Wellington rather cleverly persuaded everybody. It was just the British who'd won the Battle of Waterloo. But, in fact, the Prussians were the decisive factor towards the end of it. So they're part of a much larger coalition.

And I think we often read back later history into this period and think of the Prussians as being extremely important and powerful, but actually a rather small, not very wealthy nation in 1815. It's really the Austrians who are calling the shots in this kind of thing and who dominate the first half of the 19th century in the kind of restructured central Europe. The great thing that happens to Prussia is in the peace settlement it gets the Rhineland, which is a wealthy area,

and proves then decisive, I think, in giving them resources later on in the century to push forward. to German unification. So that's the kind of general picture and general pattern. We're going to have to tell this, so we're going to call this place Germany for this programme, but if you explain that it wasn't Germany as we... Yeah, Germany was not united until 1871. It's a set of

different independent states which are in a loose kind of confederation. But British people who talked about Germany, of course, were well aware of this, and often distinguished Prussia as a rather military state from other parts of Germany like Faria or southwestern Germany, which they thought would have been less military and perhaps even in some ways more civilised. And all the little principalities, there's scores of them, weren't they? Yes, they're satirised memorably in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, of course,

where Becky Sharp, the heroine or anti-heroine ends up in Pomponicle, and Thackeray has great fun with talking about the vanity and snobbery of the people in this tiny state who take themselves fombo-serious, than they ought to. Nevertheless, returning to this painting, the Lord, which perhaps I shouldn't, but it's interesting. You say there are a small force

that came towards the end, but they were given equal prominence. Was there a feeling that there was an important kinship here that should be exemplified in this great memorial painting? I'm not sure. I mean, unlike you, Melvin, I don't visit the House of Lords very frequently,

so I don't only very dimly recall this painting. It's very big. I think it symbolises the moment of victory, That's what it's really about. It's not about some larger kind of kinship or affinity between Britain and Prussia. Though there were, of course, people in Britain who did think there were very strong affinities,

particularly in terms of religion, of a certain kind of Protestantism and certain kind of tolerance of the Catholic minority as well within Prussia. Prussian education was thought to be advanced and rational and worth imitating and importing into Britain. So there's a lot of kind of ideas about things that the British can borrow from the Prussians.

Let's turn to that and develop that a bit with Rotemey Ashton. By the time of Waterloo, there'd been a huge renaissance in German literature, particularly the work of, say, Goethe and Schiller and Herda and. Now, a lot of this was inspired by Shakespeare. Can you tell us why the Germans took so energetically and enthusiastically to Shakespeare and brought him into their culture with a very great translation, which some people say is better than the... Of course they were better than the original.

Anyway, there he is, a massive figure there. What attracted them about him? Well, the main thing, I think, is that there is this renaissance of German culture and literature and philosophy in the latter decades of the 18th century. And in a way, there's an anti-French measure of this culturally as well as politically because the German culture, such as it was, or literature, was pretty well under the yoke of French. neoclassical rule-bound drama and literature.

And it was Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and others who thought that they should break free of this French cultural hegemony. And Shakespeare seemed to offer the perfect model because Shakespeare was not bound by the rules that said you couldn't mix tragedy and comedy, unity of action and time, that everything had to take place in a short time.

All these Aristotelian virtues which the French had turned into a really restrictive kind of practice. So there was a sense of a kind of breaking free culturally from the French yoke and looking to England and to English literature and to Shakespeare in particular as a sort of model of freedom. So it was a question of freedom. And it went alongside French revolution and revolutionary ideas politically. But it was a cultural breaking free.

And Shakespeare was the sort of natural genius, wild, could transcend the rules. didn't need to obey the rules. And this seemed to be kind of liberating for the German nautics who all wrote their Shakespeareian dramas in imitation of Shakespeare. But written on German soil and about German subjects, which was also one of the important things to reclaim German history. This is quite difficult to reimagine the force of the French example

of taking up the classical ideas of the unity of time and space, Cornet, Racine, and so on, and imposing that this was the proper and great way to do theatre. But also there was a... Let's just talk for one second about this translation, which you hear about how magnificent it was. That was obviously a huge enabling factor, wasn't it? Yes, it was. This was mainly done by A.W. Schlegel,

who was one of the great German romantic critics. He wasn't an original writer, but he was one of the first to recognise the importance of the very cultural literary renaissance that he was seeing at the time with Goethe and So, and Schlegel translated with the help of Teak, Ludwig Teak, who finished it, but Schlegel translated most of Shakespeare's plays in a kind of spirit, it's rather good, blank verse following the Shakespearean model with this idea that you could have this kind of cultural freedom.

And Schlegel, of course, was the great critic of Shakespeare. He gave lectures and so on, which were translated into English and came over in the 18thens into England as a kind of example of how to appreciate Shakespeare. Yes, and there's a circle beginning to perform because Coleridge goes to Germany A lot of English and British intellectuals go to Germany and he is entranced by various particularly the notions, the romantic notions

and the notions of the imagination. The romanticism is fed by Shakespeare the notion of imagination is fed particularly by Kant. Can you just develop that and how it impended on Coleridge, who then came back to England and talked about Shakespeare in the terms of the Germans have talked about it?

Yes, well, Kant is, also involved in this larger cultural idea of finding freedom. Now, Kant is interested particularly in the freedom of the mind, the freedom of the mind to range across the phenomena that are given to the mind through the senses, but the freedom of the mind to transcend ordinary experience, as it were, and make something more than just the sum of the parts of the things that happen to you, the impressions that come to your senses. And particularly the notion of the imagination You feel very much to Coleridge.

Absolutely, because the imagination then can be seen by Kant and then by Coleridge as a kind of bridge between mind and matter, between reflecting what is, or what seems to be, and creating out of the mind. And so it's a kind of, again, originality, freedom, the freedom of the mind are at issue here. And that's what Coleridge valued very much, especially since the English empirical philosophical tradition

from Locke through to David Hume was rather intent on minutiae and building up knowledge from the things that we know but not really being able to transcend individual impressions and understandings. And so there was a kind of bursting free that Kant offered. We're talking about a very influential contact here which spread into the 19th century

through the works of colour, through the works of other people. What about the German view of Britain at the time, Tim Blanning? What did they think of those British strengths and weaknesses at say the beginning of the 19th century? Well, to give you an honest stance, I have to go back to what you were saying earlier, and Richard too, about the diversity of Germany.

The Germans didn't really have a very clear idea of what the Germans were, so one can't really expect the Germans in inverted comments to have a clear view of what the English or the British were, and I think they usually use the word English. Just to give you one example, Bismarck famously defined a Bavarian as a cross between a human being and an Austrian. Well, you wouldn't get anything analogous to that inside the United Kingdom.

So I feel obliged to say that when we're talking about Germans, we're probably talking about really quite a small number of Germans, that is, educated Germans, probably Protestant Germans, Germans who have been able either to travel to England or have gained access to knowledge about England through travel reports and newspapers and periodicals. We're talking about quite a literate, a very literate society. In fact.

All right. Well, with that reservation... We are talking about a very few English people, too, in this particular context, in this cultural interchange context, just to... I suppose we are. Yes, we are. Although in both countries at the time, I think there wasn't the great organ periodicals, monthly and weekly periodicals,

there's a sort of golden age of periodicals in both countries. So there's a real dialogue going on between educated groups in both in both countries. I wouldn't play that down too much. No, I was just trying to bring a perspective on the numbers involved in this exchange or the percentage involved in both areas. I haven't time to rattle off the 300 states, but let us call it Germany and the English and British. Anyway, that's by the by.

With those provisors, what did those who we are calling Germans for the sake of ease think of the British at the time? Well, there were things there, I'm sorry, It was sort of splitting hairs, but it has been done for the sake of intellectual integrity. This is the splitting hairs program. Exactly. Well, okay, good. Well, what do they like about the English?

What they liked was the vitality, the modernity, the prosperity. They liked the parliamentary tradition. They liked the constitutionalism. They liked the civil rights, civil liberties. There were still habeas corpus unrestricted to any number of days. So all those things they really liked. On the other hand, there were aspects of... Most of those little states in January were censored.

There were little free speech, if any free speech. There was no freedom of the press. So it was a different land they were looking at. Absolutely. There are 39 German states after 1815, which will correct me. Sometimes they count 38, sometimes they count 39. And some of these are really big states. I mean, this is not a state like Bavaria, for example,

which is as big as Belgium. I mean, this is not Pomponicle. I mean, this is a big state, and the king of Bavaria regarded himself as a major European sovereign, not without a reason, I think. Anyway, there are things that they don't like about contemporary England, and that comes out loud and clear, I think. They don't like the materialism. They don't like the arrogance.

Those who travel to England don't like the diet. They don't like the constant diet of beef and overcooked vegetables. That's quite important. They don't like the imperialism. They don't like the image of the British astriding the world and dictating terms through the Navy. And I think above all, this feeds into our central concern about cultural exchange. They don't like what they regarded as being the Philistineism of contemporary English culture. Of course they admired Shakespeare.

They admired much English literature. Some English painting they admired, Turner, for example. but they thought that in two, as the Germans saw it, two key areas of cultural activity and intellectual activity, that is philosophy and music, England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, however you wanted to define it, was simply not existent.

The land without music. That actually wasn't coined, I think, until 1914. But the opinion which lies behind that particular formulation was there right from. in the 18th century indeed. But it is fascinating that in the 18th century, the great British composer was Handel, who came over from Germany and stayed here for 49 years

and had a state funeral and was buried in Westminster Abbey, and he was the great man who wrote all that wonderful English music, the Messiah and the water music and so on. And we, Byron then, he, in Child Harold, goes down the Rhine, so I'm just trying to get the flow going. Before I move on, you want to say something, Richard? Yeah, there's a kind of things, because Mendelsohn was another,

great German composer who made a huge hit in Britain and introduced a lot of German music into Britain. But what Tim was talking about, I think, is, at least in the political sense, was especially German liberals who looked around and saw the first half of the 19th century, freedom was restricted everywhere and looked to Britain as a kind of model. And this is sort of reciprocated in a rather backhanded way by British liberals, of course, who regarded Germany really condescendingly, as somewhere where there were very restricted freedoms,

they were struggling in a way to become British politically. And that went hand in hand with an extraordinary contempt in many British observers for what they saw as the poverty and backwardness of Germany. It's interesting when when Coleridge and Carlisle, the great admirers of German culture, go to Germany, they're absolutely appalled by the miserable material conditions they find the terrible hotels, the smelly towns. So there's a lot of condescension about German backwardness in these circles.

When Henry Mayhew, of London Life and London poor, goes to Germany to escape his debts, he writes excoriatingly, one could say snobbishy or accurately, I don't know about them. So there's that element in it too. You want to say, I just want to say that. I pick up on what Richard said. There is this paradox right through the 19th century, I think, in terms of the view both ways between England and Germany. because English is just to Germany.

Yes, they complained about the poor roads and the poor hotels and the poverty. They also complained George Elliott when she, which it was Marian Evans, went over to Germany in 1854 with her partner, George Henry Lewis, who was going to research his life of Goethe in Berlin. And in Berlin, they had wonderful conversations with professors of philosophy, and they talked about art and literature, and they saw Prussian education, which everybody, Dickens, John Stuart Mill, everybody, Arnold, they all admired Prussian education as in Berlin. But they also noticed that there were soldiers on every street corner

and that people, the general populace, had no freedoms at all. So there was this strange freedom of the mind, but not political social freedom. The trouble is that there's a dichotomy here, and it was picked up on by contemporary Jones and by contemporary British observers. That is, on the one hand, in Great Britain you have political liberty but cultural poverty.

In Germany, certainly you have oppression after 1815, more especially after 1819, when the screw is turned much tighter with the Karsbad decrees. This is clearly a repressive, a reactionary regime. On the other hand, British travellers who go to Berlin, which is being rebuilt under the Aegis of Schenkel, or if they go to Munich, which is being rebuilt under the Aegis of Ludwig I, the First, the king and Leo von Clenzer, the architect, they find cities which in terms of their physical appearance,

in terms of their architecture, in terms of their public institutions, art galleries and museums and so on and so forth, they find a richness, a cultural richness, which simply could not be found back in London, even though London was five times the size of Berlin. So I think this dichotomy is something which is quite important. And German becomes a repository of an English, the Gothic fantasy,

doesn't it? Frankenstein might be part of it, might be said. Yes, I mean, early on, one of the sort of popular cultural aspects of the relationship between the two is gothic novels and dramas in the last decades of the 18th century. You know, lots of Sto Montrang, storm and stress, ruined abbeys, cruelty people stuck in dungeons, starving and that kind of thing. Cruelties are the fact that we haven't mentioned. I mean, I suppose this is, will you tell me, because after Waterloo, the British condemned the German, the Prussians, for being excessively cruel

to the French looting, all the pillaging and all that sort of. And this is a constant theme about the cruelties in war. It goes on and on. Can we pick that up neatly before we move on? Well, there's a literary reference in Southie's poem on Waterloo, which celebrates the victory, of course, but it also is quite outspoken about as he saw it. And, of course, he wasn't a first-hand observer,

but he was relying on many, many first-hand accounts of it. which was that the Prussians had behaved after the victory with, as British observers saw it, with unnecessary brutality that the pursuit of the French army after the victory turns into a rout. And there probably were good military reasons for conducting the pursuit in this way. But tens of thousands of French prisoners were not, they weren't prisoners, they weren't taken prisoner. No quarter was given. They were killed in the pursuit after Waterloo. and when the Prussians moved into France, in fact, invaded France after Waterloo,

they lose and they pillage, they break everything they can find. And I think that this is actually quite an important distinction to draw that the British had never been occupied by the French. The Prussians had been occupied and had been ripped off good and proper after their defeats of the Hansom Napoleon in 1806. So when they go back to France in 1815, 1814 and then again in 1815, they are thirsting for revenge. Abluchia was particularly blood-firsty.

Can we before... I've got to drive it on him because it's absolutely fascinating this, but we've got to move on. And one big factor is the marriage of Queen Victoria to her cousin, Prince Albert of Sackacoburgotha, I can't pronounce it probably, Saxicoba...

Anyway, there, of course. Rather disliked when he arrived and then he endeared himself to the British public and was a driving force behind the great exhibition which was a major cultural moment, almost luckily for us, in precisely the middle of the 19th century. Would you like to take that up?

How important was Prince Almond? Are you, Richard? Well, you're also capable of answering every question. I don't know, in terms of Anglo-German relations, I think it's very easy to exaggerate his importance. After all, the British royal family had been German through the 18th century, and a good deal of anti-monicist sentiment

had taken hold of this. And there were some aspects of Prince Albert, his priggishness and his tendency to interfere in things that did raise people's hackles and aroused a little bit of anti-German sentiment. But on the whole, I think, he was important in spreading German culture and German ideas into Britain in a rather different way from the people,

the literary circles that we'd be talking about. Yes, I think that's right. I think one ought to add that he had certain positive virtues, which did appeal to a wide sector of British public opinion. I don't think they ever took him to their hearts. I mean, he wasn't a cuddly kind of person. On the other hand, he was Protestant,

he was religious, he was, in terms of his personal morality, as upright as it's possible to be, no hint of scandal, I believe, crossed his, affected him. He gives the Queen numerous children. I mean, he does all the important tasks, and if you look at what had been happening in the 18th century,

that wasn't actually so very self-evident. Well, I think he appealed to the serious side of Victorian culture. He certainly did. And he was very fond of music. He was a good composer. The great exhibition was a massive thing culturally for this contrary, and he was a big figure in it, Richard. So I think he...

I mean, who am I of it? I think he did have a big influence there because the world came to admire. I mean, it drew to the attention of the world, not only the massiveness of the British industry, way, punching way above its weight, but it's ingenuity, it's intellectual cleverness, this exhibition was not anything to do with one politician whatsoever.

It was the engineers and inventors and the sort of big philanthropists. And it was a huge event, Rosemary. Well, that was it, I think, really, because I suppose if the British people did take Albert to their hearts, generally speaking, it would be then, because he wasn't proselytising for things German in the great exhibition. He was showing off the industry of the world, but with Britain at its heart. And also British freedoms, because 1851 is only three years after the 1848 revolution. all across Europe, where a lot of the repressive regimes sent their exiles, political exiles, Marx and Engels amongst them, scattering, and most of those came to Britain. And there was a great deal of sort of awed admiration in the capitals of Europe to see that London was daring to put on this great exhibition and letting everybody from the whole world come in at a time when...

And everyone from Britain. And everyone from Britain at a time when people feared riots and... revolutions. It was a kind of British thing. And one aspect which appealed, always appealed to the British public, it made a profit. It made a very large profit. And the profit from the great exhibition was then invested in the

great exhibitions, the great exhibitions, the great museums and galleries of South Kensington. Crucially for our story, German representatives came and looked at this and thought, we can do that. And I thought if I few years later we'll come back

in a moment. Well, not in a moment. Richard Evans, in 1871, Benjamin Disraeli said, you know this, but I'll read it out for the listeners, because it was a crucial statement. This war, the Franco-Prussian War, this war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of the last century. The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the contrary which suffers most and feels the effect of the great change most is England. What had happened to cause him to say that, and was he right? Well, I mean, we must mention the revolutions of 1984. It's when the Germans tried to unite themselves on the basis of a liberal parliamentary constitution and failed. And this underlined widespread British belief that the Germans were politically completely incompetent.

They couldn't organise their own affairs. And I suppose in a way the Great Exhibition actually reinforces this sense of British superiority. But then you got Bismarck's Wars of Unification, ending up in 1871 with the creation of a united German empire. And this completely changes British views. almost overnight, the Germans are no longer politically incompetent, but they've united themselves in a way which is not entirely liberal in its political arrangements. There's a strong dose of authoritarianism. Of course, the Prussians have taken the lead in it with this military power and prior.

So there's a little dose of fear and apprehension comes in as well. And that's what really Israeli is expressing. It's the notion of the balance of power, the idea that all the European powers are roughly in some kind of equilibrium, suddenly you have this large new military power appearing in a large chunk of northern Europe and that's and Israelis really expressing, I think, an extraordinary, prescient way. Yes, extraordinary.

The fears of the consequences of this. Consequences that really don't come through for another few decades. And of course there's a figure of Bismarck around, isn't there, who becomes a sort of somebody to really worry about. Yes, I mean, the British opinion was on the whole very much in favour the Prussians until the war, began. I mean, they were pious, Protestant and all the rest of it. They were thought of this. They were the underdogs, and the British always liked the underdogs. The French were thought

of being as vanglorious, and were Catholic. They were thought of the aggressors, quite wrongly as it turned out, but Bismarck had cleverly manoeuvred the situation to make them appear to aggressors. But once again, Prussians occupied France. They committed all kinds of crimes, atrocities, and so on. They were shooting civilians. They behaved rather badly in Alsace, Lorraine. British opinion was shocked by the annexation of the... Alsa Serene by Germany. And so opinion really turns around. Of course, the French, then Napoleon III is thrown out.

There's a republic. There's more liberties are installed. So the French scene then in a somewhat more sympathetic light. And that is, incidentally, when you get the first novel about an imaginary future war of the sort of Erskine Childers' Riddle of the Sands, namely Chesney's The Battle of Dorking, which is published in 1871, and it has the Prussians invading Britain.

and it's a call to arms to the British to organise their defences in the face of this new threat. And it's not followed up by any other similar novels. Very quickly, this kind of writing goes back to imagining the French or the Russians as the enemy, but it's a kind of warning sign. I just want to pick up on something which has just said about the relationship between the Germans, the French and the English or the British. And I think that's so important.

Why did the British admire the Germans so much during the first part of the 19th century? Why did the Germans admire the British so much during the first part? of the 19th century, because they weren't French. And on the basis of my enemy as my friend, that was a real bonding agent. But then it all changes in 1871. All of a sudden, the French have been revealed as giants with feet of clay.

They no longer, Napoleon III has been defeated. The Bonaparte's threat has gone away. And all of a sudden, what had previously been for a millennium or more, the soft centre of Europe has become very hard indeed. And that, I think, alters. in an indirect but very powerful way, the way in which the British feud the Germans. But there's another engine,

just like before we move on, just been driving through the second half of the 19th century, which is very important. The German educational system, which was way in advance, we had Oxford and Cambridge at the beginning of the century, they started with the University of Berlin to have universities which taught much more than theology

and law, they taught science, they taught languages, and these universities, and the British, from the beginning, of the century, really admired these. But then what happened to these universes in the second half is that they developed the best case in the world ever for advanced university education because they totally changed the economy, a small area of Europe which had been way behind.

And by the end of the century, they'd overtaken one of the greatest economies in the world through that. Now, can you tell us what, did that factor into our view of, British view of Germany? We apprehensive because they're getting to be too powerful. I think certainly what you said last is absolutely right by the 1870s and 80s. But you're right also early on. It's all positive view on the side of the channel of German education.

Wilhelm von Humboldt had been Prussian education minister and founded the University of Berlin in 1810. And freedom of learning, it's back to that paradox again. There was freedom of learning. So you could, as a professor of philosophy like Hegel, for example, you could emit quite free views from the professorial chair, which you couldn't have done in the political arena. So there was this kind of split, really, but what was admired was the freedom of education.

This was picked up. And the development of science education. And the science technology, which led to their great industries, the electronic industry, the chemicals industry, which went way past what we were doing. And we were way behind, mainly. mainly because Oxford and Cambridge still was still stuck in their medieval theology,

classics, mathematics and so on. I had to say University College London, which was founded in 1826, partly on the German model. You're brilliantly cast this morning. They're the flag. It was partly on the German model and it was the first university in this country to teach modern languages

and the sciences, geology, various subjects of that kind. But we were way behind. So we've got a lot of things in place. We've got the cultural lectures. changes, we've got the pros and cons, we've got the anti-French put very pithily by Tim there, and we've had 1871, which has been sea change, got the streak of worries about German cruelty, got the

growing envy of that, economic strength and so and so forth. And the grass of that, they're trying to build a bigger navy than the British of God, they're building a big army, and right, Richard Evans, the riddle of the sands, I'm just using as a base, right, I know we really don't need to analyse it, but that reflected a real fear, the beginning of the 20th century, this was a force that people were worried about. Erskine Child's novel was a big worry. Yes, there's a mixture of apprehension and admiration and a bit of consension.

Right through the 1890s, we think of Jerome C. Jerome's three men on the bungle, where the three men of three men in a boat go to Germany. And it portrays a Germany that's similar and, both similar and different to earlier portrayals. It's very interesting that the Germans are seen as clean, orderly, I mean, the complete contrast to this views of the Germans are sort of dirty and backward of the early part of the century. It's seen as a prosperous country. The three men get into all sorts of scrapes with the police, and it's seen as a very authoritarian, well-organised country. But it's still seen as fairly peaceful.

The people are seen as docile and non-aggressive. And this changes again, particularly from 18908. In 1898, the Kaiser Wilhelm prompts the building of a large navy. And this is a navy that consists mainly of battleships, and it's clearly designed to engage the British in a huge Trafalgar-type battle in the North Sea, blast them out of the water and clear the way for Germany then to build a great overseas empire. And this comes to the attention, of course, of the British fairly soon. So in 1903, this is the Erskine Childa's novel, The Riddles of the Sands.

And what's interesting about the novel is that the Germans have seen an extremely positive life. They are, right there's a good old... Don't blame them, we've done the same. There's a good old salt called Bartels who helps them. The Kaiser is praised as a tremendous splendid chap who's working hard for his country. We should have someone like him. The villain, Dolman, turns out to be an Englishman

posing as a German. So it's saying the Germans have got their act together. They're building a big navy. They have a right to colonies and a world empire, but they haven't got anywhere. Very important. We can quite understand it. but we must do something about it.

And it sparks off a whole series of very similar novels warning the British that they have to do something about this menace across the North Sea. Tim, and then Rosemary, sorry. Yes, well, I think that's very true. And one thing that struck me when reading Riddle of the Sands was just how different the way in which the Germans are presented there

is from the way in which Germans are presented in, let's say, John Buckin's Green Mantle, where they are presented as being a mixture of being slow, and stupid and in von Stum as being probably rather effeminate as well whereas as you say in Riddle of the Sands they're presented very very favourably and what has happened there I think

is 1914 Green Mantle has written after 1914 Riddle of the Sands is written before 1914 so I would say that 1914 is the watershed and everything was Not 1871 No I in terms of attitudes towards Germans and German attitudes towards the British

I think the real turnaround You can see it beginning in 1870 but the real turnaround the real watershed comes in 1914. It's not cause of the war. It's a result of the war. Can we just go back to culture? I know you want.

If you say what you want to say, then I'll ask you a question I want to ask you. I just wanted, before we leave a little of the sense, I just wanted to say that towards the end, the narrator says of Germany, she has a peculiar genius for organisation, and thinking militarily here, of course, but organisation both for detail

and for a coherent whole, And that seems to me to pick up on the sort of militaristic engineering front on the idea that we talked about earlier about German philosophy and on the positive idea of German culture as being an all-embracing kind of activity. And here it is with admiration, really, on the part of Erskine Childers in Riddle of the Sands. That's a question I was going to bring you to it, because the 1871 wasn't a cut-off, the German culture, the idea of Goethe, for instance, or the notion of Goethe's greatness, which is now faded massively from this country,

were still being pursued. It wasn't a simple chasm, was it? No, it wasn't because... Matthew Arnald, as I say, they're bringing... It's all coming together still. Yes, on the cultural front, you have, all through the middle of the 19th century, you've got Carlisle's amazingly prophetic

and rhapsodic and well-received articles and books on proselytising for German culture and for Goethe in particular as a great genius. visionary, spiritual, aesthetic, and all kinds of things all put together, kind of veld literatur, world literature that Goethe espoused and that Carlisle wanted to follow in.

You've got George Eliot, proselytising a word for the Germans. What I'm saying is it doesn't stop in 1871, which is through. It doesn't. So it isn't as easy as that. No, because you've got Matthew Arnold with Bildung, culture. That whole notion goes back to Goethe and others, and the idea of self-culture,

sort of self-learning at being important. Richard Evans. Well, Tim is absolutely right in saying that kind of visceral, rabied anti-germanophobia, really, hatred of Germany is something that's created in 1914. But there are changes that go on before that, and of which riddle the sounds, I think, is an indication. One of the things is happening is that the arrival of mass culture, the arrival of mass newspapers, of mass literacy,

so that this very sort of really bourgeois culture, which we've been talking about in terms of Carlisle and Elliot and so on their readers. This widens out a lot. So it's interesting, for example, that William, the pulp fiction writer William McHugh wrote a book called The Invasion of 1910, published in 1906. This is another scare story about a German invasion. It's serialized in the Daily Mail, which is one of the first great mass newspapers. The Daily Mail has its newspaper sellers on the streets of London,

dressed as Prussian soldiers with spiked helmets, carrying placards, with maps showing which part of Britain is going to be invaded by the Germans the following morning in the Daily Mail. And there's this sense of sort of mass, it's building up not quite mass hysteria, but it's certainly mass alarm. And interestingly, these books get translated into German. The Germans write rather similar books, with the bits about German atrocities taken out

and all in a positive light, these get translated into English. So there's a kind of dialogue goes on of scare stories about mutual antagonisms and mutual invasions and battles and so on. Can I just direct our attention to the one thing before we sadly come to end of this? It takes a different turn in the sense. Night and fours the Antoine Caudiardier, Edward the 7th, Paris is his favourite city. Largely we're told because of the brothels, but there we are.

He is in Paris. We have the Antoine Cordial. That's a real bringing together after Waterloo. And the Cromamorandum comes out a few years later, which says, well, these are dangerous people, the Germans. They're after something and we'd better watch out. And then it seems as if it is presented often as inextrably we go to war. Well, isn't that true?

That's what I want to, because I think it's the most worst event of the trigger of the worst events of the whole 20th century. I still can't see what was inevitable about it. Tim. I don't think it was inevitable at all. Not until really one second to midnight. I don't believe it was inevitable. And if we want to be controversial, I don't think, in retrospect, or indeed at the time, I would have thought that it was necessary or even desirable for this country.

to have got involved in the war in the first place. It wasn't our quarrel. So, no, not inevitable. Going back to Crow, the ironic thing about Air Crow who wrote this memorandum was that he was half German and married to a German. It's a very odd kind of psychological love, hate. Well, the memorandum said that German power is increasing

and it must be directed against Britain in one way or the other they're going to create an empire. One of the great paradox, of course, is that ties cultural, economic, intellectual, educational, ties between Britain and Germany become actually closer towards 1914. But I do think we need to look to things like popular culture, to the great naval displays of battleship launches, huge publicity, all of this sort of thing does create, I think, an atmosphere.

But in the atmosphere, isn't it? It doesn't come wholly as a surprise. And picking up on that statement, Disraeli, the British government in 1914 thinks that the balance of power seriously threatened, that Germany is threatening, threatening it, a British interest of seriously law. Rosemary, then, Tim. Yes, I find some verses in Punch in 1914 just at the outbreak of the First World War,

which I haven't got with me and not in my head, but roughly speaking, to paraphrase, you gave us, you Germans, you gave us art, literature, philosophy and music, and now you give us the Prussian Juncker to stamp on our heads and threaten our freedoms. And that kind of encapsulates how it looked in 1914, but still including all the good things

that had been thought to come from Germany. Yes, atmosphere, rhetoric doesn't cause wars. And what you've just said could equally be said about, or about the Daily Mail, for example, could equally be said about the EU. But the fact that there's a torrent of anti-EU propaganda to be found in many of the popular prints doesn't mean that we're going to go to war against the EU. I wouldn't support that either. So do you think it was, we were working towards it, was going to happen? I think atmosphere and rhetoric in a democracy do play a very important role.

when you can discuss it on the way back to Cambridge you too, couldn't you? Two professors of history toddling by the Cambridge. We're always disagreeing about these things, well, but. So, how did completely run out the Anglo-German respect? There was all sorts of things, but there's also a lot of respect. There's a doctrine that comes in,

that you can see emerging in 19th century, it comes to 1940s, the two Germans. There's a good Germany of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, culture, all of those things. There's the bad Germany of, Prussia, the Kaiser, militarism and so on. And this is the doctrine that carries right through then until 1945 and ends, of course, with the abolition of Prussia in 1947 by Allied decree.

Tim. It was the carnage of the First World War that meant that the image of the bad German becomes uppermost in everyone's minds. And I do believe that that was, the turning point comes after 1914 or not before. And it's unfortunate, isn't it, that Hitler's favorite composer was Wagner? Yes, that was unfortunate. Well, we'll end on that note. Phew.

Thank you all very much, Richard Evans, Rosemary Ashen and Tim Blanning. Next week we'll be discussing the music of the spheres from Pythagoras to Kepler. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.com.