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Idealists and Realists: British Views of Germany,1864–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

P. M. Kennedy
P. M. Kennedy
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Extract

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 25 , December 1975 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1975

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References

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51 My colleague, Dr V. R. Berghahn, has pointed out that Hitler was also the ultimate expression of those fears expressed about Gerir: my by the British ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ in the 1860s, which were, respectively, of the rejection of liberalism and democracy and morality in politics, and of the attempt to dominate the continent. Thus British comments from 1864 to 1939 mirror in their own way the problem of ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity‘ in German history which has been the subject of so much recent debate.