Urban internationalism in the post-war moment

The strategic bombing campaigns over Europe during World War II provided the immediate context in which urban internationalism emerged after 1945.Footnote ¹⁹ The first RAF raid against Germany took place on 4 September 1939, targeting Wilhelmshaven (Germany’s main naval base in the North Sea) and Brunsbüttel (the western entrance to the Kiel Canal some 100 km west of Kiel). This attack was often inaccurately represented in the British wartime press as an attack on the city of Kiel itself, albeit the first major raid on Kiel did not occur until 2 July 1940.Footnote ²⁰ Coverage in the British press of the aftermath of the Luftwaffe raid on Coventry quickly made the destruction of November 1940 a national event, not simply a local story. On 16 November 1940, the Birmingham Gazette carried the headline, ‘Coventry – Our Guernica’.Footnote ²¹ This comparison to the Luftwaffe’s bombing of civilians on 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War – an air raid made infamous by George Steer’s reporting in The Times and Picasso’s monumental monochrome painting – helped mark Coventry out as another seminal event in the new era of bombing war. The Times reported the ‘King’s visit to bombed Coventry’ and an accompanying photograph showed the monarch and the home secretary, Herbert Morrison, witnessing the aftermath.Footnote ²² Images of dignitaries seeing and being shown what had happened were repeated in the Illustrated London News with the provost of the ruined cathedral guiding the king and home secretary through the rubble.Footnote ²³ These representations tie the individual experience of Coventry citizens into a national script of the Blitz, and also stress the loss of built heritage as the defining characteristic of the event, over the loss of life or disruption of industry. In other words, ‘architectural casualties’ – the heritage of the British nation – became the focus of the news story.Footnote ²⁴

While parallels were drawn with Guernica in the English Midlands, in wartime Germany the results of Operation Moonlight Sonata were represented as unparalleled. National Socialist propaganda championed the attack on Coventry as an unprecedented success and demonstration of military might with a new verb coined – conventrieren (often translated into English as ‘to coventrate’ or ‘to coventrize’) – to capture the supposedly unmatched levels of destruction achieved by the Luftwaffe and to promote the devastating efficacy of aerial warfare.Footnote ²⁵ Thus, in Britain and Germany alike, the representation in word and image of bombing and its aftermath held a prominent place in media coverage of the war from the outset. The image of Coventry and the neologism coventrieren – both of which also circulated in the American illustrated magazine Life via photographs by George Rodger which were said to show the ‘Essence of Coventrizing…in this litter of rubble that once was a respectable street of houses’ – highlight the centrality of media representations of urban space and architecture to wartime experience.Footnote ²⁶

Allied air raids against Germany escalated substantially during the war, shifting from attacks on military and industry targets to raids on residential districts and workers’ morale. Such ‘morale bombing’ was to cause far greater destruction to German cities as the war continued, including to churches and cathedrals. As Allied bombing intensified, Operation Moonlight Sonata remained a key reference point. The thousand-bomber raids on Cologne and Hamburg in 1942 were widely supported, while the raid on Hamburg that induced a firestorm was billed by the Daily Telegraph as the equivalent of ‘60 Coventries’.Footnote ²⁷ By the end of the war, Kiel had experienced a total of 90 Allied attacks, the final raid being carried out on the night of 2 to 3 May 1945.Footnote ²⁸ British troops occupied Kiel on 4 May 1945 only days before the end of World War II.Footnote ²⁹ At war’s end, the popular British photomagazine Picture Post captured the impact of this sustained campaign in a cover story from October 1945 entitled ‘Kiel: Graveyard of German Seapower’.Footnote ³⁰ Located in the British zone of occupation, Kiel subsequently became the capital of the state of Schleswig-Holstein.Footnote ³¹

In the mid-1940s, with discussion of reconstruction gathering pace across Europe, urban space was heavily freighted with symbolic importance when it came to securing the peace that followed conflict. This resonance for questions of urbanism and architecture tapped into the tradition of world’s expositions of the early twentieth century that functioned as potential sites for showcasing ‘progress’ and promoting transnational communication and understanding.Footnote ³² It was also entangled with the inter-war discourse of architectural modernism as an ‘international style’ and panacea for various social and political challenges. The significance of the city was immeasurably heightened, however, by citizens’ experience of the urban destruction by aerial bombardment of World War II. Throughout the war years, public debate about reconstruction had been used to buoy nations’ commitment to the war effort across multiple countries. So, just as the city was a site of fear and loss in wartime, it was also a space of hope and opportunity post-war.Footnote ³³ Moreover, intellectual and emotional investment in urban spaces meant that towns and cities were symbolically important not only as a measure of post-war rebuilding; urban spaces were also mobilized in efforts towards reconciliation and the reconstruction of peaceful relations between citizens in former enemy nations. The image and idea of ‘the city’ in mid-twentieth-century Europe was a vital symbolic resource for the complex and interactive challenges of reconstruction in the wake of World War II.Footnote ³⁴ Towns and cities offered a culturally salient stage for the public performance of a range of reconstruction efforts – one imbued with post-war priorities deriving from the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter of humanitarianism, democracy and recovery. The salient role of urbanism and architecture in such mediated public diplomacy towards reconciliation and democratization is exemplified by the first issue of the photomagazine produced by British occupation forces for post-war German citizens, Blick in die Welt. A photo-story on ‘Destruction and reconstruction in Europe’ included a historic picture of a night-time service in ruins, the caption revealing that it showed a remembrance service held on the first anniversary of the Coventry bombing. Thus, after 1945 the image of Coventry was used to craft an image and script of post-war Europe, as opposed to a British wartime one.Footnote ³⁵

In this article, we examine the priority given to urban space by civil society associations and non-state actors including municipal, intellectual and religious leaders as well as ‘ordinary’ citizens. We look at how reconstruction and reconciliation initiatives by secular, religious and political actors and groups mobilized the image and idea of the post-war city. After 1945, urban internationalism appeared to offer an antidote to state-sanctioned nationalism held responsible for bringing about two world wars within just decades.Footnote ³⁶ A bottom-up-approach envisaged towns and cities as chief agents for fostering international understanding, peace, European reconciliation and integration. The relationship between Coventry and Kiel formed part of a first cycle of town twinning that lasted from the end of World War II until the start of the new decade. During this period, twinning activity chiefly focused on restoring links between cities in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.Footnote ³⁷ As well as a nascent focus on European unity, what further differentiated post-war from inter-war town twinning was the fact that cities and towns like Coventry and Kiel sought to establish closer, more substantial social and cultural links than during the inter-war period.Footnote ³⁸ Albeit often led by urban elites, they aimed to cater for a wider social demographic than, say, Franco-German town twinning arrangements during the 1920s, giving rise to a distinctly post-war urban internationalism that offered an alternative route to transnational understanding and reconciliation.Footnote ³⁹

In the case of Coventry and Kiel, four distinct twentieth-century ‘internationalisms’ intersected. The Society of Friends of Coventry principally professed a secular type of internationalism that was based on ideas of a world government and human rights around the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations (UN) and that advocated early proposals for European social and economic integration.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this, the voluntary group followed ‘a popular emotional geographic turn…away from notions of the nation as a redemptive force and towards local and regional places as geographies of renewal that offered spaces of life after death and sources of early democratic and European identification’, as Jeremy DeWaal has generally observed for West Germany in the early post-war period.Footnote ⁴¹ By contrast, the Community of the Cross of Nails advocated what Abigail Green classifies as ecumenical ‘religious internationalism’.Footnote ⁴² A third type referred to ‘socialist internationalism’ and was based on transnational links between the two political parties, the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) that dominated Coventry and Kiel City Councils.Footnote ⁴³ Finally, towards the end of the period under investigation, the emergence of the bipolar world order – represented by the establishment of two German states at the end of the decade – precipitated Cold War internationalism which recast the relationship between humanist, religious and socialist internationalism that had unfolded in the immediate post-war years.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addressing the Kiel–Coventry dynamic between 1945 and 1949 in depth, we aim to articulate the mediated and interactive dimensions of the multifaceted and multidirectional municipal and ecumenical internationalist efforts – a layered and interactive phenomenon we term ‘urban internationalism’.

Religious internationalism and the meaning of ‘Coventry’

Images of destroyed or resilient religious buildings stood for the wartime experience of urban centres and their citizens – ‘ruined but…not beaten’ (as characterized in Life magazine’s coverage).Footnote ⁴⁵ Coventry’s ruined cathedral became one of the central architectural icons of the Blitz, along with St Paul’s, photographed by Herbert Mason during the bombing of London on 29 December 1940. These two images, the ruins at Coventry and the dome of St Paul’s, possessed complementary symbolism: ‘The former was a sign of sacrifice and the promise of resurrection; the latter, a symbol of resilience and right against wrong.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, the destructive impact of the bombing of Coventry was quickly ‘aestheticized as a crime against the city (symbolized…by its cathedral) and thus as a simultaneous blow to religion, architecture, and history’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The religious dimension of this symbolism was important because of notions of sacrifice and intimations of rebirth, but also because of the implications of moral rectitude. Indeed, Mason’s photograph of St Paul’s was the cover image of a 1942 pamphlet (They Would Destroy the Church of God) contrasting statements by Nazi leaders with British church leaders including a reprinting of ecumenical principles (originally published in The Times) supported by Free, Anglican and Catholic church leaders and prioritizing issues of human welfare, such as tackling inequality and education, over nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Coventry was referred to as a ‘martyred city’ – a phrase with obvious religious overtones that would later be used for other towns, like Caen.Footnote ⁴⁹ This ‘discourse of urban victimhood’ emerged in Belgium and France during World War I, as Pierre Purseigle observes, and ‘drew on the model of Christian and catholic martyrdom so familiar to French and Belgian, as well as to many neutral, societies’.Footnote ⁵⁰

While wartime media representation of the bombing of Coventry in terms of ‘German vandals’ versus ‘resilient Brits’ may have constituted the dominant discourse surrounding the cathedral, from the morning after the raid a number of symbolic acts established alternative perspectives or ways of looking at both war ruins and Germans for British citizens. The immediate response of the provost of Coventry Cathedral, Reverend Richard Howard (who had held the post from 1933 to 1958) was centred on reconciliation – coming to terms with both the experience and the enemy. From the morning after the raid, a number of important gestures offered tolerant or compassionate perspectives or ways of looking at both war ruins and Germans. At first, these were marginal, but they were to become more central in the post-war period. The decision to rebuild the cathedral was announced by Howard in the Coventry Standard on 30 November 1940: ‘The Cathedral will rise again. It will be rebuilt and will be as great a pride to the generations of the future as to the generations of the past.’ Those associated with the cathedral also initiated a number of symbolic acts which were to become decisive ways of framing Coventry, forging its significance in the post-war period. These were simultaneously material interventions in the war-damaged fabric of the building and efforts to craft meaningful icons from what remained. They included the building of a ‘rubble altar’ (made from the rubble of the ruined church) in January 1941 on which was placed a ‘charred cross’ (made of charred beams from the medieval roof). Such gestures and symbols – using ‘relics’ from the bombed cathedral and communicated through pamphlets and media coverage – articulated notions of sacrifice and rebirth, reinforced by pertinent ceremonies held in the ruins, such as the Good Friday and Easter Sunday services in 1941.Footnote ⁵¹

Such public gestures and symbolic assertions took place within a wider British debate about post-war reconstruction that began early in the war in the face of uncertainty about the duration or outcome of the conflict. Mirroring the coverage of the Blitz – and frequently spliced with it – this discussion prioritized architecture and urbanism as the key site of renewal and reconstruction in the feted moment after victory. Early instructions from the Ministry of Information to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in March 1941 outlined optimum ways to frame the bombing raids, asserting that ‘[d]amage should never be minimised’ but that priority should be given to the discussion of reconstruction to ‘shift attention from the present to the future’.Footnote ⁵² While Coventry assumed a decisively central role in the picture of wartime Britain, this position was both further embedded and reconfigured in the cultural politics of the reconstruction debate. Donald Gibson, who led the City of Coventry Architectural and Planning Department, had been planning a radical modernization of the city even before its destruction.Footnote ⁵³ Prior to the raid, these plans had been publicized in a week-long exhibition, ‘Coventry of tomorrow: towards a beautiful city’ (6–13 May 1940) organized by Percy Johnson-Marshall and the Coventry Branch of the Association of Architects, Surveyors and Technical Assistants.Footnote ⁵⁴ Coventry’s chief architect and the plans for redevelopment along modernist town planning principles gained further publicity in the wake of the city’s destruction – an international prominence that would continue into the 1950s and beyond as the remodelling and rebuilding of Coventry proceeded.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, the debate about reconstruction was not simply focused on architecture and cities, but as with the reporting of the Blitz had a strong psychological dimension, offering a future different from the present and the past – a future worth fighting for.

The work of reconciliation begun by Provost Howard from the outset was also an internationalist phenomenon exhibiting continuity from the early to late 1940s, notwithstanding the war years. For instance, opposing division with reconciliation, the idea of a Chapel of Unity at the site of the ruined cathedral was proposed in 1944, and the first sacred space at Coventry to bear that name was built under the ruins in 1945. The following year, a Catholic priest from Hamburg led services in the subterranean chapel.Footnote ⁵⁶ Two years later, the words ‘Father forgive’ were carved into the wall of the ruined nave behind the rubble altar. Through such words, actions and symbols, Coventry became established as a site of unity and reconciliation, rather than destruction and division. Thus, those associated with Coventry sought to shape the meaning of architecture and the direction of international relations in the period of post-war reconstruction through efforts towards religious internationalism in which the image of the city and the materiality of the cathedral was key. This group of religious leaders and aspiring peace-builders sought to retool divisive representations and forge new symbols to support post-war initiatives to create positive post-conflict links and dialogue – Coventry Cathedral, having been central to wartime iconography was thus central also to the ‘iconoclash’ or contest of images which the movement from wartime destruction to post-war reconstruction exemplified.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Pieter Lagrou argues, reconstruction in post-war Belgium, France and the Netherlands was often conceived as a national project: ‘National recovery implied material reconstruction and economic growth, political restoration and national reconciliation, the reinvention of national identities.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The same is true for many contributions to public debate in post-war Britain and occupied Germany including religious leaders. Furthermore, that same debate also looked towards the establishment of transnational co-operation in Europe to secure the foundations of peace. The notion of reconstruction became freighted with metaphorical meaning, with arguments advanced for psychological reconstruction. In this context, work at Coventry Cathedral was about reconstruction, about reconciliation and about ‘peace-building’ – not simply about building peace but using buildings to secure peace; mobilizing the symbolism of cities to forge new relationships between citizens.

Actions, words and symbols worked to establish Coventry as a site of unity and reconciliation (even sacrifice and rebirth), rather than destruction and division.Footnote ⁵⁹ The most important material and visual symbol of this ecumenical peace-building initiative associated with Coventry Cathedral in the immediate aftermath of war was the Cross of Nails – a small cross made from the binding together of medieval nails scattered in the rubble when the beams in which they were lodged were incinerated.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Cross of Nails was first created by an associate of Howard who recalled its creation in the aftermath of the raid.Footnote ⁶¹ The provost also recalled placing a Cross of Nails into the hands of visiting German ‘pilgrims’.Footnote ⁶² Early recipients of a Cross of Nails in the 1940s included Winston Churchill and his wife (October 1941), Princess Elizabeth (May 1948) and the mayor of Caen (May 1948).Footnote ⁶³ The object of the Cross of Nails – as suggested by the provost’s anecdote about pressing it into the hands of visitors – was a sort of relic, providing a physical connection to the past in the same way that the ruins did. But like the ruins, this material connection needed to be made intelligible and to be communicated for it to have the intended impact on audiences.

It is a mistake to think of the immediate post-war years as a period of religious decline; rather, as Callum Brown has argued, there was a post-war religious boom in Britain.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Western Germany, there was an effort to recuperate religion in the wake of the Führer cult inculcated by Nazism. Likewise, Peter van Dam and Paul van Trigt assert ‘the dynamic role of religion before and after the 1960s, its complex relationship to modes of social organization and the ways in which transformation of these modes come about, through both the development of competing visions of the social role of religion’.Footnote ⁶⁵ For instance, the British occupation forces also saw a valuable mechanism in the involvement of religious organizations in the management of welfare issues in post-war Germany. As Francis Graham-Dixon has shown, the idea of a Christian mission in post-war Germany became instrumentalized by British occupiers in the Control Commission of Germany (CCG). For church leaders, the ‘moral mandate’ was ‘a case of genuine self-perception’, while for the British government and its representatives, it was ‘a matter of rhetorical presentation or projection’: ‘interventions by the churches in Britain were used to present a moral face to an increasingly difficult military political occupation’.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is within this context that the religious internationalism exemplified by Howard and his work of reconciliation with the Cross of Nails should be viewed, since the religious interventions in occupied Germany were ‘unofficially encouraged in Whitehall to act as an acceptable face of British rule, and its Christian principles could be invoked to make occupation more palatable to both occupiers and occupied’Footnote ⁶⁷ – an initiative promoted via CCG publications, such as British Zone Review. The prominence of Christianity and the significance of church reconstruction in Western zones of occupied Germany were further heightened as the conflict with communism escalated, the Soviet Union being characterized as a godless enemy, just as Nazism had been a few years earlier. Indeed, as German municipal leaders became disgruntled with or distrustful of occupying forces following the handling of key issues such as displaced persons or dismantling industry, the church was instrumentalized to present a positive image of the British in Germany notwithstanding tensions and contradictions between the churches’ aims and rhetoric and the government’s policies and pitfalls.

Kiel, socialist internationalism and the discourse of political and private spheres

For municipal actors and stakeholders in Kiel, the Society of Friends of Coventry was crucial for starting the reconciliation process with Coventry. Amongst other things, it exercised a particular type of urban internationalism that related to the ideals of democratic socialism. Central to the group’s aims and objectives was the semantic reversal of the infamous creation by the National Socialist propaganda ‘to coventrate’ (coventrieren).Footnote ⁶⁸ ‘If in future we speak of “coventrating”’, elaborated Andreas Gayk on this objective in the context of the formation of the Society of Friends of Coventry, ‘it must mean cultivation of friendly relations between country and country, it must mean the overcoming of national passions for the benefit of the common tasks of all the peoples of Europe.’Footnote ⁶⁹ To achieve this, the group pledged to adhere ‘to the spirit of agile democracy, true humanity, practising international understanding and supranational political lifeforms’ that was based on ‘mutual respect between the nations’. At the same time, the group vowed to leave ‘political actions’ to political parties and governments and limit ‘its activity to the private sphere’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Gayk was a major driving force behind the establishment of the Society of Friends of Coventry. Kiel’s lord mayor had personal experiences of war: not only was he drafted into the German army in World War I but lost his two sons during World War II and witnessed the aerial bombardment of German cities and towns at first hand.Footnote ⁷¹ Elected to the office of lord mayor for the SPD in October 1946 that he held until his death in 1954, Gayk laid some of the programmatic groundwork for the Society of Friends of Coventry in an essay on ‘International understanding between cities’ (‘Völkerverständigung von Stadt zu Stadt’) in May 1947. Like senior members of the post-war SPD such as Erich Ollenhauer, Gayk represented a new type of party functionary who was recruited from a middle- rather than working-class background and who shaped social democratic policies in West Germany.Footnote ⁷² Unlike his predecessor, Lord Mayor Willi Koch (Christian Democratic Union), who had receded into a state of internal emigration during the time of National Socialism, Gayk had openly opposed the National Socialist dictatorship.Footnote ⁷³

What contributed significantly to Gayk’s popularity was his leading role in organizing the post-war reconstruction of Kiel’s social and economic life.Footnote ⁷⁴ In particular, Gayk’s opposition to plans by the British occupation authorities to demolish shipyards and industrial plants in Kiel between 1946 and 1949 proved to be very popular with voters and had helped him secure his election as lord mayor in the autumn of 1946.Footnote ⁷⁵ The protest even featured in the British national press.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, such demonstrations were not restricted to Kiel but were a common feature in all three Western occupation zones.Footnote ⁷⁷ Criticism of demolition plans also existed within Britain. After a visit to Kiel and other cities in the British occupation zone in August 1946, the economist William Beveridge (instrumental in 1933 in founding the Academic Assistance Council to support intellectuals fleeing Nazism, and the author of the ‘Beveridge Report’ that would later form the basis for the launch of the National Health Service) called for a major shift ‘from punishment to reformation’ in the British government’s approach to dealing with (West) Germany.Footnote ⁷⁸

Given Gayk’s popularity and close personal relationship with SPD leader Kurt Schumacher, he also assumed a senior position in the party at the state level in Schleswig-Holstein.Footnote ⁷⁹ Gayk’s active role in the SPD had an effect on the Society of Friends of Coventry and brought a democratic socialist element into the group’s urban internationalism. For example, Schumacher ‘cordially welcomed’ its formation and hoped that its members were ‘inspired by a will towards an international socialism which has its source in humanity’.Footnote ⁸⁰ And, what is more, Kiel City Council, including many SPD members, officially joined the group, initially paying an annual membership fee of 5,000 Reichsmark and also providing physical space to the society in the city hall’s cellar.Footnote ⁸¹ Apart from Gayk, who acted as chairperson, the fellow SPD member and director of Kiel City Council’s press office, Friedrich Wendel, was amongst the seven members of the group’s ‘Advisory Council’. Like Gayk, Wendel had actively opposed the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship. In addition, the latter served as editor of the weekly paper Der wahre Jacob (The True Jacob) and published several books on caricatures.Footnote ⁸² Transnationally, Gayk and Wendel also attempted to promote the cause of the Society of Friends of Coventry through the Labour Party, the SPD’s British sister party. Above all, they liaised with Richard Crossman, the Labour MP for Coventry East, who in wartime was involved in producing propaganda for occupied Europe with the Political Warfare Executive and who was subsequently an important figure in the party at the all-British level.Footnote ⁸³

If Gayk played a pivotal role in the formation of the Society of Friends of Coventry, it was the British branch officer for building in Kiel and Coventry native, Gwillym Williams, who had inspired him to make the first proposals for a twinning of Coventry and Kiel. In a programmatic essay entitled ‘Message to Coventry’, which was first published in the local Kiel press in early January 1947, the Kiel lord mayor cited a personal encounter with Williams as his chief inspiration to forge links between his and Williams’ hometowns. What moved Gayk in particular was that Williams ‘from the first moment did everything within his power to help a town which had shared the fate of his native town, and to alleviate the distress which he had known from his own experience’. Footnote ⁸⁴ Williams then passed a copy of Gayk’s ‘Message to Coventry’ on to Lord Mayor George Briggs, who backed the internationalist ideas proposed by his German colleague, including the formation of the Society of Friends of Coventry.Footnote ⁸⁵

In April 1947, the Society of Friends of Coventry officially formed at a constituent assembly.Footnote ⁸⁶ The inaugural meeting was organized in close collaboration with representatives of the British military government who were sympathetic towards the society’s aims and objectives.Footnote ⁸⁷ Amongst the 1,200 invitees was Lord Mayor George Briggs of Coventry, who was unable to attend the meeting.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the end, some ‘one thousand persons from all classes of the population attended’, as the Journal of the Society of Friends of Coventry reported, adding: ‘There were present also representatives of the Government of Land Schleswig-Holstein, of the Municipal Administration, of the University and the Schools of Kiel, of the Political Parties and the Trade Union, of commerce and industry, of the clergy, and of youth associations.’ Plus, key members of the British occupying forces such as the deputy regional commissioner or the regional governmental officer attended the meeting.Footnote ⁸⁹ Membership of the society’s ‘Advisory Council’ reflected the group’s connections with the higher echelons of Kiel’s society: besides Gayk and Wendel, the other members included the former Lord Mayor Koch, now publisher of the influential local newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, Professor Wilhelm Hallermann, director of Kiel University’s institute for forensic medicine, and the theatre critic Alexander Kus.Footnote ⁹⁰ The logo of the Society of Friends of Coventry featured a cogwheel with the Latin word ‘PAX’ (peace) in single capitals superimposed on the cogwheel in a triangular shape. At the centre of the cogwheel were stylized grains.Footnote ⁹¹ Through its symbolism, the logo contributed to mediating the notion of ‘socialist internationalism’. Apart from Kurt Schumacher, the voluntary friendship society received prominent endorsement from the Kiel-born theoretical physicist, pioneer of quantum mechanics and Nobel laureate Max Planck.Footnote ⁹² At irregular intervals, the group published a bilingual Journal of the Society of Friends of Coventry (Mitteilungen der ‘Gesellschaft der Freunde Coventrys’) in German and English.Footnote ⁹³

Anyone over the age of 18 could join the Society of Friends of Coventry, provided that they held citizenship and accepted the group’s statutes. In addition, two referees and a special committee had to attest to applicants’ ‘correct attitude towards peace and democratic reliability’. The society’s chief decision-making body was its annual general meeting. An executive committee ran the group’s day-to-day business and was assisted by an advisory council of 15 members. Footnote ⁹⁴ At its constituting meeting, Gayk was elected president of the society.Footnote ⁹⁵ In spite of its supposedly apolitical agenda, a large number of senior city council officials and other influential citizens of Kiel such as academics from the Christian-Albrechts University, senior representatives from trade unions and local industry or banking held key positions in the group.Footnote ⁹⁶ Plus, the Economic Association of Building Industries, District Nordmark, Land Schleswig-Holstein, supported its work for reconciliation.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, the programmatic line drawn between the political and the apolitical by Gayk was in actuality fine and ambiguous.Footnote ⁹⁸

Under its internationalist remit, the aims and objectives of the Society of Friends of Coventry included ‘an extensive exchange of correspondence’ between people from Kiel and Coventry. In addition, the group sought to set up exchange programmes, especially for youths, promote peace education and share knowledge about urban reconstruction as well as propagate liberalism in global trade to create peaceful relations between nations.Footnote ⁹⁹ For example, it helped people from Kiel and Coventry to become pen pals and featured articles on the histories, sights and personalities from the two cities in its journal.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But the group also advocated international understanding beyond Kiel and Coventry. In this, the society drew inspiration from the UN Association, the National Council of Women or the National Peace Council.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, its officers liaised with foreign organizations such as the Union of Democratic Control in Britain or the Labor League for Human Rights in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰² As part of its commitment to internationalism (and crucially its public demonstration of that commitment), the Society of Friends of Coventry reprinted the ‘Declaration of Human Rights’, which the UN General Assembly passed on 10 December 1948, on the cover of its journal’s May 1949 issue.Footnote ¹⁰³ In this context, the group also called for gender equality and underlined the contributions by female politicians to internationalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The internationalist outlook and orientation of the Society of Friends of Coventry – unequivocally a social democratic ethos, given its progressiveness and egalitarianism – exemplifies Glenda Sluga’s observation that the immediate aftermath of World War II marked ‘the apogee of twentieth-century internationalism’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Peace-building, ‘world citizenship’ and the role of cities in promoting ‘internationality’

The Society of Friends of Coventry engaged with a multifaceted urban internationalism by addressing a distinct set of issues pertaining to cities as hubs of peace-building and promoting ‘internationality’ and ‘world citizenship’. In his speech at the constituent meeting in April 1947, Willi Koch pointed to the recent atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to stress the urgent need for the work of the Society of Friends of Coventry. ‘“Into the hands of us humans the decision has been placed whether our Earth is to be the bearer, in future, of life and happiness, or whether this planet is to describe its orbit through the aeons, empty and dead and laden with the vestiges of crime”’, he warned.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Koch’s dire warning echoed more widely held concerns over the atom bomb in early post-war Germany and the shadow it cast over the future of humanity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

At the same time, Koch’s justification of the need for the reconciliatory work of the Society of Friends of Coventry also tapped a contemporary internationalist discourse that had emerged in the United States shortly after World War II: in response to the experience of two world wars and the recent use of atomic arms against two Japanese cities, a number of nuclear scientists, most of whom had been involved in the development of the first atomic bombs during the World War II, promoted the idea of a world government to avoid another global conflict that was likely to be fought with nuclear weaponry.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As a step towards creating a world government, the Society of Friends of Coventry supported the idea of ‘world citizenship’, which gained currency in the immediate post-war period. Against widespread distrust in political elites, it was down to ‘ordinary citizens’ to create a world government.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Therefore, Friedrich Wendel argued that ‘the national principle’ was arbitrary and temporary and would eventually give way to the superior ‘principle of internationality’. In Wendel’s eyes, this was due to the fact that ‘[t]he sole purpose that a nation state has to serve in these circumstances is the naturalization of its citizens into an international community’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While the bottom-up approach to world citizenship found expression in the Society of Friends of Coventry’s vow not to meddle in high politics, the fact that Gayk, Wendel or Koch held political offices made the group’s approach seem somewhat ambivalent.Footnote ¹¹¹

Apart from a world government and citizenship, the group advocated free trade and European integration as antidotes to what it perceived as the threat of nationalism. A fair and peaceful world economic system formed an integral part of its urban internationalism.Footnote ¹¹² Such notions were based on the principles of the Bretton Woods Agreement that sought to establish a fairer global economic system in the immediate aftermath of World War II.Footnote ¹¹³ In an article on ‘World peace and world economy’ in the Journal of the Society of Friends of Kiel, the economist Anton Zottmann of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy elaborated on this programmatic point in October 1947. Zottmann made the liberal case for frictionless global trade, emphasizing that ‘Peace and World-Economy are functionally inter-related.’Footnote ¹¹⁴

Closely related to its promotion of free trade was the Society of Friends of Coventry’s backing of European integration and co-operation. At its annual general meeting in September 1947, the Heidelberg sociologist Alfred Weber, the younger brother of the famed sociologist Max Weber and a critic of National Socialism, proposed a move towards a ‘“European Federation”’ as a promising way to prevent war. At the same time, he warned of the Soviet Union engaging in ‘“a dry war”’ with the United States and urged that ‘“Europe must be activated”’ and ‘“abandon its passivity”’ to ensure that it would not be controlled by either superpower. ‘“Only a free, humanitarian socialism, based on democratic principles and realised as a whole in Europe, can save the continent”’, concluded Weber, stressing: ‘“That socialism should not, however, seek salvation in exaggerated planning and nationalization, but must make humanity the starting point of its deliberations.”’Footnote ¹¹⁵ Weber’s words exemplify early manifestations of a democratization process that occurred across Western Europe during the first two decades or so after 1945 that also led to such institutions as the social market economy and included the European project.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Alongside setting a programmatic agenda, the Society of Friends of Coventry endorsed channels and fora for disseminating urban internationalism. Education represented a chief conduit for bearing the association’s message and handing it down to future generations. Above all, this included proposals for a chair in politics and international law with a special focus on peace studies at Kiel University.Footnote ¹¹⁷ What is more, the Society of Friends of Coventry called for the foundation of a special school in ‘which the young generation will be educated in a cosmopolitan spirit of true humanity’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ If these educational institutions provided main channels for spreading ideas of reconciliation, the annual Kiel Week, an internationally renowned sailing event that had been discontinued during the war, was to become a chief public forum to promote this internationalist spirit of reconciliation. Consequently, the Society of Friends of Coventry advocated the re-launch of the annual Kiel Week.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As envisaged by the group, Kiel Week would ‘strive to form a live relationship between the rehabilitation of…[Kiel] and the cultural and social life of its citizens’.Footnote ¹²⁰

The September 1947 visit, Kiel Week and public performances of urban internationalism

Various strands of this post-war urban internationalism – religious and secular, socialist and non-political – coalesced during a visit by a delegation from Coventry to Kiel in September 1947. In January 1947, an editorial in the Kieler Presse asked the rhetorical question, ‘Is it really so utopian to believe that in the very near future city councillors, politicians, trade-unionists, artists and scientists of Germany and England will be visiting one another? Our ravished world can only be regenerated in a spirit of humanity and peace.’Footnote ¹²¹ Later that year and central to the formation of closer ties between the two cities, a visit to Kiel by just such a delegation from Coventry took place. The Society of Friends of Coventry had invited Lord Mayor George Briggs and other members of the Association of Friends of Kiel, along with other city officials and representatives from the trades council and clergy, notably Provost Richard Howard and secretary of the Coventry Trades Union Council Wilfred Spencer, to attend the 1947 Kiel Week that focused on the theme of ‘Rebuilding Kiel’.Footnote ¹²² The Society of Friends of Coventry and its English sister organization, the Association of the Friends of Kiel, shared a pacifist outlook, ‘reject[ing] war as a means of policy’. Amongst other things, this manifested itself in their support for Albert Einstein’s proposals for a general strike by atomic scientists to push politicians to pledge not to use nuclear weapons. ‘The two sister associations proclaim the necessity of an understanding between man and man’, reported the Journal of the Society of Friends of Coventry in autumn 1947, that ‘will start with an exchange of letters and mutual visits and will end in a friendship which thrives on internationalism and has nothing to expect from nationalism except the interest taken in foreign languages.’ The article added: ‘While abroad, we should like to move about really without let or hindrance!’Footnote ¹²³ In recognition of their service to promoting reconciliation between the two cities, all members of the delegation from Coventry received the status of honorary members of the Society of Friends of Coventry.Footnote ¹²⁴

Although some of the most enduring images of the 1947 visit related perhaps to the presentation of the ‘Cross of Coventry’ by Provost Howard to members of Kiel’s clergy, the involvement of religious representatives was not a foregone conclusion. As late as 5 August 1947, Provost Howard received a letter expressing concern about the church’s involvement in building bridges between the two communities; Richard Gutteridge (who had been lecturing to theological students at Kiel University) wrote that

Ultimately, the delegation’s visit featured a range of events that were at least as important for improving relations between the two former foes as the exchange of the Cross of Nails, and which highlight the multifaceted nature of urban internationalism as exemplified by the Kiel–Coventry association. According to a diary kept during the visit by Howard, it lasted from 14 to 21 September with a programme of meetings, events and tours laid on by the hosts. Starting with a ceremony of remembrance at the town hall and the laying of wreaths at the British Cemetery on the Monday morning, urban space and acts of commemoration were central to the performance of reconciliation that this landmark visit instantiated. The visitors met with representatives of various Christian denominations to discuss reconstruction (including reflections on the churches’ role, although this was apparently beyond the capabilities of Howard’s interpreter).Footnote ¹²⁶

It was at this meeting on the first day of the visit – during which Howard spoke of the ‘primary importance’ of the church to the nascent twinning initiative – that the provost gifted a Cross of Nails. In his diary, he recalled explaining its provenance and how it was made before gifting it to Propst Johannes Lorentzen of St Nikolai, ‘for his church as a symbol of divine forgiveness and of our mutual joyousness, and of God’s power through the death and resurrection of Christ to turn all our sin and tragedy into good’. In turn, on the Friday, Howard visited St Nikolai with Propst Lorentzen and witnessed the uncleared rubble in the bombed building. The German clergyman returned the gesture to his British counterpart: ‘He gave us a piece of stone from the church to place in the Chapel of Unity.’Footnote ¹²⁷ As early as August 1945, Lorentzen had envisaged the church taking up the role of serving as ‘advocate of the people’ (Anwalt des Volkes).Footnote ¹²⁸ Thus, this exchange with Howard was not simply gift-giving by two religious leaders, but rather a transnational gesture of reconciliation and peace-building between urban communities centred on architectural relics from their respective war-devastated buildings.

The visiting delegation were also given numerous tours of displaced persons camps (where Howard was struck by the poor conditions of the huts housing 500 inmates), of Kiel harbour (during which Gayk and Howard discussed how ‘the Churches might become more democratic and proactively Christian’ and how the new association might work to bring religious representatives and the working classes ‘closer’) and of course of the ruined city itself (prompting Howard to remark on how ‘The desolation everywhere is momentous, the destruction complete…like the centre of Coventry extended everywhere’).Footnote ¹²⁹ They partook in a service with university students and theology Professor Heinrich Rendtorff, as well as attending concerts and a reception hosted by Mayor Koch. Furthermore, Spencer, Briggs and Howard were guests of honour at a special meeting of the Kiel City Council which included the ‘distribution of certificates for merit in removal of rubble’. Speeches by Briggs and Gayk at the council meeting, alongside the military governor of Schleswig-Holstein, Vice-Air Marshall Hugh Vivian Champion de Crespigny, generated further publicity including photographic coverage.Footnote ¹³⁰ In addition, public interest was evident from the 800 members who attended the ‘Festival of Friends of Coventry’ on 18 September.Footnote ¹³¹

Howard, Briggs and Gayk also attended the launch of an exhibition on Kiel’s reconstruction, ‘Destruction – Clearing – Rebuilding’, at the Kiel town hall. The exhibition contrasted Kiel before and after the destruction, as well as laying out principles of town planning for the city’s rebuilding. That the exposition included a section entitled ‘“Kiel – Coventry, Two Towns, One Fate”’ stressed once again the bond between the two cities in the face of their shared experience of aerial bombardment.Footnote ¹³² It also, as Howard noted in his diary, included comparative photographs of St Nikolai and Coventry Cathedral, underscoring the centrality of urban space – and crucially cultural representations concerning its post-war reconstruction – in the orchestrated work of reconciliation and international relations.Footnote ¹³³

Alongside symbolic and public relations events, both sides engaged in discussing practical matters around the reconstruction of their cities and how they could deepen their relationship. In line with the theme of the 1947 Kiel Week, Mayor Briggs shared plans for the urban reconstruction of Coventry with Gayk and members of Kiel City Council, for example. During a trip onboard a steamer in Kiel Bay, members of the Society of Friends of Coventry and the Association of Friends of Kiel discussed possible ways to improve their co-operation. Since the two delegations spent most of the time under deck, the Journal of the Society of Friends of Coventry quipped ‘[t]he Bay of Kiel did not mind’, commenting on the constructive atmosphere that ‘the busy interpreter was not to be envied – he first took off his jacket’.Footnote ¹³⁴ The final choreographed activity of the visit was a trip to the top of the Rathaus tower for a view over the city, and the local Die Brücke cultural institute in which German citizens could come to learn more about Britons and the British way of life.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Kiel branch of Die Brücke, which opened in 1946, was one of 50 such institutions that the British military government set up in its occupation zone from 1946 to 1949.Footnote ¹³⁶ Thus, this visit, and the witnessing of the visit in situ and in mediated form, were vital performances of post-war intent and peace-building efforts. Moreover, they were staged in public spaces in an effort to help create new public discourses – the urban setting, the symbolism of the post-war townscape and the image of the city in coverage of these public performances of reconciliation were instrumental, not incidental.Footnote ¹³⁷

Implying how the 1947 visit was at least in part staged for its image, Howard recalled in his diary the familiar invocation, ‘Gentleman, please smile. Your photograph is being taken.’ However, regional tensions owing to the implementation of the de-industrialization policy and the subsequent loss of jobs in the British zone meant that the 1947 visit was ‘nearly cancelled’, according to Howard. The previous year, on behalf of all Kiel church leaders, Lorentzen had backed a petition by the state parliament of Schleswig-Holstein (Landtag) calling on the British military government to abandon its plans to dismantle local industrial plants to secure employment for the war-struck population of Kiel. More recently Howard’s chaperon, Group Captain Thompson, implied that Gayk had nearly been arrested over his opposition to the policy. It seems both British occupiers and Kiel dignitaries hoped to regain equilibrium between German citizens and British forces as a result of the September visit. Indeed, during his final meeting with Provost Howard, Group Captain Thompson had even asked if the delegation might be in a position to ‘counterbalance’ some of the negative press coverage of the occupation in the Daily Mail and Daily Express, perhaps approaching the BBC or at least the Coventry press to convey an alternative view on the work of the CCG.Footnote ¹³⁸

The 1947 visit had played a crucial role in laying down key foundations of the twinning arrangement. After the first post-war Kiel Week in September 1947, the annual event was held in June from 1948 on.Footnote ¹³⁹ Representatives from Coventry also attended the subsequent two Kiel Weeks. The motto of the 1948 Kiel Week – ‘For International Understanding and Friendship among Nations’ – echoed the key objectives of the Society of Friends of Coventry.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ While a growing number of Scandinavian delegates participated in this event, the Journal of the Society of Friends of Coventry stressed: ‘It was but natural that the list of the guests of the Town of Kiel from abroad was headed by representatives of the City of Coventry.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ Alongside Gayk and the heads of the foreign delegations, including Briggs’ successor as lord mayor of Coventry, William Hodgson Malcolm, the deputy regional commissioner de Havilland addressed a special session of Kiel City Council to mark the opening of Kiel Week.Footnote ¹⁴² Cultural and social events took up an important part of the 1948 Kiel Week. These included an exhibition entitled ‘“Kiel-Readjusting-Itself”’ that focused on the de-militarization of the local economy from war-time to peace-time products such as radios or medical instrumentation.Footnote ¹⁴³