Gladstone for the million

I have a glass plate with that slogan moulded into it: an old piece of Gladstone merchandising. It bears out the point made in this BBC audio slideshow, which they should have held for December 29, his 200th birthday.

The unnamed house is Hawarden Castle in Flintshire. Present proprietor Sir William Gladstone, great-grandson. St Deiniol’s Library is nearby.

Having just googled this plate, it seems that it was made in 1869 to celebrate Gladstone’s election victory in the previous year, when he became prime minister for the first time.

This piece offers two theories on the meaning of “for the million”. The Irish one less convincing than the other. I had always assumed that it was just an old-fashioned collective noun.

The Unanswered Question

Charles Ives’s sublime The Unanswered Question, 1906. Toynbee’s cosmic rhetorical questions turned into music.

Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic. William Vacchiano, solo trumpet.

Happy Christmas to anyone reading this (“if you’re celebrating”, we’re supposed to say, but I won’t), and especially to Paul Arblaster, Robert Greaves, Richard Guy, Irene Hahn, Lance Knobel, Stephen Marsh, Adrian Murdoch, Bob Shingleton, Judith Weingarten and Robin Yassin-Kassab.

Arab

Privacies and protocols of the body.

Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340

“When I heard the terrible news, that Myris was dead,
I went to his house, although I avoid
going to the houses of Christians,
especially during times of mourning or festivity.

I stood in the corridor. I didn’t want
to go further inside because I noticed
that the relatives of the deceased looked at me
with obvious surprise and displeasure.

They had him in a large room,
and from the corner where I stood
I could catch a glimpse of it: all precious carpets,
and vessels in silver and gold.

I stood and wept in a corner of the corridor.
And I thought how our parties and excursions
would no longer be worthwhile without Myris;
and I thought how I’d no longer see him
at our wonderfully indecent night-long sessions
enjoying himself, laughing, and reciting verses
with his perfect feel for Greek rhythm;
and I thought how I’d lost forever
his beauty, lost forever
the young man I’d worshipped so passionately.

Some old women close to me were talking with lowered voices
about the last day he lived:
the name of Christ constantly on his lips,
his hand holding a cross.
Then four Christian priests
came into the room, and said prayers
fervently, and orisons to Jesus,
or to Mary (I’m not very familiar with their religion).

We’d known, of course, that Myris was a Christian,
known it from the very start,
when he first joined our group the year before last.
But he lived exactly as we did.
More devoted to pleasure than all of us,
he scattered his money lavishly on amusements.
Not caring what anyone thought of him,
he threw himself eagerly into night-time scuffles
when our group happened to clash
with some rival group in the street.
He never spoke about his religion.
And once we even told him
that we’d take him with us to the Serapeion.
But – I remember now –
he didn’t seem to like this joke of ours.
And yes, now I recall two other incidents.
When we made libations to Poseidon,
he drew himself back from our circle and looked elsewhere.
And when one of us in his fervor said:
‘May all of us be favoured and protected
by the great, the sublime Apollo’ –
Myris, unheard by the others, whispered: ‘not counting me.’

The Christian priests were praying loudly
for the young man’s soul.
I noticed with how much diligence,
how much intense concern
for the forms of their religion, they were preparing
everything for the Christian funeral.
And suddenly an odd sensation
took hold of me. Indefinably I felt
as if Myris were going from me;
I felt that he, a Christian, was united
with his own people and that I was becoming
a stranger, a total stranger. I even felt
a doubt come over me: that I’d also been deceived by my passion
and had always been a stranger to him.
I rushed out of their horrible house,
rushed away before my memory of Myris
could be captured, could be perverted by their Christianity.”

___

Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com. Spelling anglicised.

Compare Myris with his contemporary, the Syrian student in Dangerous Thoughts.

cavafy.com also gives the version from Stratis Haviaras, translator, C.P. Cavafy, The Canon, Hermes Publishing, 2004. It is slightly wordier, making the lines too long to fit well here, but here is the link. The word “dreadful” sits too ambiguously for me between correct and vulgar use to make for smooth reading, but in general this is as or even more involving.

Keith Taylor (Boston Review, November/December 2009) mentions this poem when discussing Daniel Mendelsohn’s new Cavafy translations. “In this particular case, I do not think Mendelsohn’s version (‘I flew out of their horrible house, / and quickly left before their Christianity / could get hold of, could alter, the memory of Myres’) adds much to Keeley and Sherrard’s [...].”

Laboremus

In a taped conversation in London in 1972 or ’3, Daisaku Ikeda asked Toynbee what his motto was.

In one Latin word, because I was educated in Latin and Greek: laboremus. Let us do our work. In the year 211 the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus died in the city of York in the north of England. A Roman emperor had every day to give a watchword to his troops, and on the day on which Septimius Severus died in York he gave the watchword laboremus. Let us do our work. He was a very sick man at the time. Also, he was a native of Libya, which is a warm country, and he was on campaign, military campaign, in a very cold country, the north of Britain. But though he was dying, he wanted to go on doing his work till the very end of his life, so this watchword he gave on the last day of his life I take as my motto. [...] He felt his responsibilities, at the head of this great empire.

He was campaigning against the Picts. Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 77, Section 15 says that before dying, on February 4 211, he advised his sons Caracalla and Geta, who were with him, to “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men”.

Toynbee died in a nursing home in York on October 22 1975, having worked until the day, in the previous year, when he was incapacitated by a stroke.

Taped conversation between Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda, London, May 1972 or May 1973

The published version, which does not contain this passage, was

Arnold Toynbee and Daisaku Ikeda; Richard L Gage, editor; Choose Life, A Dialogue, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Copenhagen

Isn’t this a conference that should go on for months in order to get real work done, like the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, flawed though many of its decisions were – or years, like the Council of Trent?

Random

Changing Japanese: Emily Parker, New York Times, November 5

Pastoralism in Mongolia: Sarah J Wachter, New York Times, December 8

Simenon and Camus

Boyd Tonkin, in the Independent, December 14 (thanks to Adrian Murdoch for the link), mentions Camus when discussing Simenon. I mentioned Simenon in the context of Camus in a post about, inter alia, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist:

“Yassin-Kassab writes that ‘the anguished first-person self-revelation is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground’. That’s also a style used in Camus’ La chute/The Fall (1956). Which (I guess) may have taken something from Simenon’s Lettre à mon juge/Act of Passion (1951).”

I suspect I am right about that direct Simenon influence on Camus. Tonkin writes:

“Best known for his Inspector Maigret [take out “Inspector”] series, the Belgian-born Georges Simenon not only published almost 200 books in an awesomely prolific career. [Make that well over 400, but I know how he is calculating.] In many novels, he scaled the literary heights of his contemporaries Camus and Gide, and his mentor, Colette. That much I thought I knew.

“Yet it took these four reprints [there are five others in this series] to persuade me once and for all that this supreme master of the detective thriller was also one of the great psychological novelists of his century. [Bathos, after the last paragraph.] As well as The Engagement (translated by Anna Moschovakis), the NYRB classics list has reissued Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (trans. Marc Romano & Lawrence G Blochman), Tropic Moon (trans. Marc Romano) and The Widow (trans. John Petrie). [...]

“And in The Widow, which André Gide thought a finer book than Camus’s comparable L’Etranger, a volatile vagabond turns up at a farmhouse and, in cold blood, inveigles his way into the affections of abused and bereaved Tati.

“[...] To spend a Christmas pleasurably sunk in the deepest shades of noir, look no further.”

Two and a half of these are new translations, not necessarily improvements on old. They have the inevitable “Introductions”. Tropic Moon is set in French Equatorial Africa.

More on Simenon in this blog here (in the context of Dennis Wheatley), here (the wonderful opening of a Parisian novel), and here (something about highrises). He is far more than a detective writer. I like the comparison in an old Paris-Match article to the Greeks.

I could do a whole blog on Simenon. I’ll return to him.

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Morning in November

A picture from 1922 by George Clausen, whom we met in the last post. A road near Duton Hill in Essex, where Clausen had had a country home since 1917. Not a high resolution image, but better when enlarged. There is some residual Victorian sentimentality in this landscape, but the early sky turning into day, the still intense frost in the field, the fog hanging over the road are as skillful as elements in any winter scene by Monet.

The art market has not yet understood late Clausen, judging by the difference in price between a work such as this and some of his work of the 1880s, especially paintings showing peasant girls.

~~~

Back December 16.

1906

I’ll end this rather long sequence on Germany with two letters published in The Times on January 12 1906, which have a certain historical importance. The Liberals had formed a minority government in the previous month. The letters were published on the first day of the general election which gave them their greatest landslide. The election lasted until February 8. The Conservatives had signed the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904. Did Toynbee, who was still at Winchester, open the paper on that Friday morning? He tells us somewhere (I don’t have the reference to hand) that it was the Bosnian crisis of 1908 which made him into a lifelong reader of The Times. The sentiments of the letters were his.

HMS Dreadnought was launched on February 10.

On March 19, as we’ve seen, The Daily Mail would send its newspaper sellers onto the streets dressed as Prussian soldiers with spiked helmets, as it began to serialise a book by William Le Queux called The Invasion of 1910.

My great-grandfather, an English painter called George Clausen, co-signed the second letter. In an earlier post, we met his German-speaking father, Jürgen Johnsen Clausen, leaving Danish Northern Schleswig in 1843 to look for work in Germany as a decorative artist. In 1844 Jürgen migrated to England, via Rotterdam. His son was born in London in 1852.

Click the image; more below

On the German side there are five composers: Strauss, Humperdinck, Siegfried Wagner, Joachim (violinist and friend of Brahms; actually Hungarian) and Ansorge (pianist and pupil of Liszt).

From literature, Hofmannsthal, Dehmel and Hauptmann; and, less known today, Heyse, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1910.

From the fine arts, Liebermann and von Uhde, the presidents of the Berlin and Munich Secessions respectively; von Stuck, prominent in the Munich Secession; Klinger and others.

Others are from theology, philosophy, law, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, psychology, medicine, classics, archaeology, history, art history, economics. Furtwängler, the archaeologist, was the father of the conductor. Nietzsche’s sister is there. She lived to become a Nazi. Sombart, the economist, was accused later of Nazi affiliations. There are no clerics.

Count Harry Kessler (“the Red Count”) is there, as First Vice-President, Deutscher Künstlerbund, and is unclassifiable. He was one of the cultured cosmopolitans of his time and had many English connections. He organised both the German letter and the English reply. He used his “influence”, up to the end of the Great War, to mediate behind the scenes between Germany and England.

One or two of the signatories had English connections which are evident in their professional titles. Siegfried Wagner had not yet married his English wife Winifred, nor had his sister married Houston Stewart Chamberlain: neither exactly alliances in the spirit of this letter.

Here are links to the rest: Arthur Auwers, Ernst or Gustav von Bergmann (but I believe this is Ernst), Wilhelm von Bode, Lujo Brentano, Hermann Diels. Robert Eucken is, I am sure, a misprint, rare in The Times; this is Rudolf Eucken. Hermann Emil Fischer, Ernst Haeckel, Adolf von Harnack, Ferdinand von Harrach, Adolf von Hildebrand, Ludwig von Hofmann, Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, Robert Koch, Karl Lamprecht, Richard Muther, Walter Nernst, Robert von Olshausen, Wilhelm Trübner, Adolf Wach, Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Wilhelm Wundt.

I can find almost nothing, on a cursory search, about Adolf Lichtwark, but the article on Kessler, to which I have linked, does mention him. “After moving to Berlin in 1893, he worked on the Art Nouveau journal PAN, which was publishing literary work by, among others, Richard Dehmel, Theodor Fontane, Friedrich Nietzsche, Detlev von Liliencron, Julius Hart, Novalis, Paul Verlaine and Alfred Lichtwark. The short-lived journal also had published graphical works by numerous artists like Henry van de Velde, Max Liebermann, Otto Eckmann and Ludwig von Hofmann.”

I have linked mainly to English Wikipedia pages. The German equivalents sometimes give more information.

Is the German letter a degree more heartfelt than the English?

We offer one composer, Elgar, whose reputation was already established in Germany, and was about to grow. Later it faded.

Our literary signatories include only one important imaginative creator, Hardy. Margaret Woods was a poet. Zangwill was a novelist and Zionist and a friend of Herzl.

Bradley was a Shakespearean scholar. Furnivall, who is shown with a German academic affiliation, and Napier were scholars of English language and literature; Furnivall was for a time editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, Napier had lived in Germany. Pollock was a writer about law and philosophy. Murray was Toynbee’s future father-in-law. Waldstein was another classical scholar, and an archaeologist. He had been born in New York, the son of German Jewish immigrants, but he moved to England; he was a friend of Marx. Firth was a historian.

We have no fewer than nine painters: Clausen, Crane, Guthrie, Lavery, Richmond, Ricketts, Rothenstein, Shannon and Strang; and a sculptor, Frampton.

There is a clutch of Arts and Crafts figures. Emery Walker was a friend of William Morris, and was painted by Clausen. He designed typefaces for Count Kessler’s Cranach-Presse in Weimar. Webb was an architect and another associate of Morris. Jane was Morris’s widow. Mackail was his biographer. Lethaby was George Clausen’s son-in-law’s, my grandfather’s, teacher of design at The Royal College of Art.

There are various other pupils, relatives and survivors. Georgina was Burne-Jones’s widow. William Rossetti was the brother of the pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel and the poet Christina, and the family biographer. George and Francis were sons of Charles Darwin, respectively an astronomer and a botanist. Lord Avebury was a pupil of Darwin, and a biologist and antiquarian. Foster and Wallace were friends and followers of Darwin, respectively an anatomist and a naturalist.

Lockyer was an astronomer. Ramsay and Roscoe were chemists. Kelvin and Rayleigh were physicists. Frazer was the anthropologist who wrote The Golden Bough.

Cunninghame Graham was a socialist, activist and polymath. Religion is again, rather refreshingly, unrepresented. That would not be the case today.

The reference in the English letter to Helmholtz is to Hermann von Helmholtz. The honorary degree was awarded to Gerhard Hauptmann in 1905. The “famous composer” is presumably Strauss or Humperdinck.

War was already, in 1906, being written about as a world-calamity, a threat to civilisation itself. Nobody would have thought such a thing even ten years earlier.

What did George Clausen’s father Jürgen think as he read the letters at his breakfast in Wandsworth? He was a German-speaking Dane by birth: but the Germans were now in occupation of his birthplace.

His son writes in a similar spirit at the age of eighty-six, on March 2 1939.

A rough image of a Clausen painting, The Visit, shown at the Leceister Galleries in 1909: interior of his house at 61 Carlton Hill, St John’s Wood, which he had bought in 1905

Britain and Germany

One of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time discussions last year (BBC Radio 4, archive here) was called The Riddle of the Sands, after the novel by Erskine Childers. Panel: Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge; Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature, University College, London; Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History, University of Cambridge. I mentioned Rosemary Ashton in this post (below) before I noticed that she was in the discussion.

Synopsis: their words and mine.

Erskine Childers’s novel (1903) was about a German plot to invade England from the Frisian Islands. The plan is casually foiled by some English yachtsmen. I mentioned Childers here. The novel was a vision of two nations about to fight the First World War.

The British and the Germans had fought together at Waterloo in 1815, had influenced profoundly each other’s thought and art, and even shared a royal family. Yet victory at Waterloo and the shared glories of Romanticism became the tragedy of the Somme.

Daniel Maclise’s painting of Wellington and Blücher shaking hands on the battlefield hangs in the House of Lords. But Prussia was still not a great power. It got the Rhineland in the post-war settlement, bringing it to the border of France, but the dominant central European power in the post-war order was Austria.

Robert Southey’s poem on Waterloo is outspoken about the cruelty of the Prussians towards the French after the victory. The Prussians invaded France in 1814 and after Waterloo. Unlike Britain, they had been occupied and they wanted revenge.

Napoleon had invaded Germany at a time of a German literary renaissance. Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Kant, Lessing. Shakespeare appealed to the German Romantics. Translations by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, completed and edited by Ludwig Tieck. Shakespeare represented poetic freedom, a liberation from the influence of the rule-bound drama of France with its excessive attention to the Aristotelian virtues. Schlegel’s Shakespeare criticism was read in England.

Coleridge visited Germany in 1798-99. The German view of Shakespeare influenced him. So did Kant’s view of the transcending power of the imagination. A bursting free, connecting mind and matter. English empiricism from Locke to Hume had seemed unable to transcend the senses and individual impressions.

Gothic novels had German themes.

The English had a certain admiration for Prussian tolerance of Catholics, and for Prussian education. The architect of the Prussian education system had been Wilhelm von Humboldt. University College London was established in 1826 partly under the influence of Prussian ideas. Development of German universities. Science in education.

But Coleridge, Carlyle and others found Germany backward in some ways: poor and dirty. Henry Mayhew as well. The opposite of the late-nineteenth century view.

Thackeray’s satire on the small German principalities in Vanity Fair, 1847-48, but set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

What the Germans liked in England: its vitality, its parliamentary and constitutional traditions, its civil rights, habeas corpus. But in philosophy and music we were non-existent, though the phrase das Land ohne Musik was not coined until the early twentieth century. Yet the English took Mendelssohn to their hearts.

England saw Germany as cultured, but politically repressive and backward (especially after 1819, with the Carlsbad Decrees). Germany saw England as philistine but free. In Germany oppression but cultural riches, in England political liberty but cultural poverty.

The cultured Berlin as rebuilt by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Munich as rebuilt by Ludwig I and Leo von Klenze. George Eliot’s visit to Berlin in 1854. She admires Prussian education. So do Dickens, John Stuart Mill and others. But there are soldiers on every street corner. There was academic but not political freedom. Carlyle proselytised for German culture and admired Goethe. George Eliot’s essay A Word for the Germans, 1865. Matthew Arnold on culture.

Victoria married her cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1836. The royal family had been German since 1714. He was disliked, but then liked. He was Protestant and serious.

The exiles from 1848, including Marx and Engels, often showed an awed admiration of England. Albert played a central part in organising the Great Exhibition of 1851, which made a deep impression on Germans.

Prussian victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-71. Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. More Prussian crimes on French soil. Bonapartist threat eliminated. German Empire established in 1871. Industrialisation. Science in universities. How did the gap between research and industry open in England?

Suddenly Germany no longer appeared politically incompetent. Nor was it liberal. The pious Protestant Prussia of old was suddenly a major power. Even at the start of the Franco-Prussian War the British had shown the old responses: vainglorious French aggressor, Prussian underdog.

Benjamin Disraeli, House of Commons, February 19 1871:

“Let me impress upon the attention of the House the character of this war between France and Germany. It is no common war, like the war between Prussia and Austria, or like the Italian war in which France was engaged some years ago; nor is it like the Crimean War.

“This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century. I don’t say a greater, or as great a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future. Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope, at present involved in that obscurity incident to novelty in such affairs. We used to have discussions in this House about the balance of power. Lord Palmerston, eminently a practical man, trimmed the ship of State and shaped its policy with a view to preserve an equilibrium in Europe. [...] But what has really come to pass? The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.”

The Battle of Dorking, 1871, a novel about a Prussian invasion of Britain, a call to arms. Early example of the pre-1914 literature of warnings.

Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel, 1900, shows a prosperous, no longer dirty, authoritarian, excessively organised but still non-aggressive Germany.

Arrival of mass culture and the Yellow Press. Invasion literature appears in both languages. Stories are translated from one language to the other. William Le Queux’ quasi-documentary The Invasion of 1910. The Daily Mail (odious then as now) serialises it from March 19 1906 and has its newspaper sellers on the streets dressed as Prussian soldiers with spiked helmets. In the next post I’ll show a published protest by Germans against this type of sensationalism.

Eyre Crowe. From 1897 to 1916 the German Secretary of State for the Navy is Alfred von Tirpitz. 1904, Entente Cordiale. 1906, launch of the Dreadnought.

The Riddle of the Sands is, in fact, rather pro-German in tone. It displays admiration for Germany, while warning England. Contemporary commentators distinguish between the “good” and the “bad” Germany: Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven; Prussia, the Kaiser, militarism. Buchan’s Greenmantle is different. It was published in 1916. 1914 is the turning-point.

Abolition of Prussia in 1947 by Allied decree.

___

Afterthoughts. 1914 was not the first time Britain had opposed Prussia. If the post-Napoleonic settlement was a stage in Prussia’s rise, and the victory over Austria in 1866 the prelude to the next stage, then the previous stage had been the conquest of Silesia in 1740 in the War of the Austrian Succession, in which Britain had supported Austria. But I don’t think that British troops engaged directly with Prussian. They would fight on the same side as Prussia in the Seven Years’ War.

I have a book by Rosemary Ashton called Little Germany, Exile and Asylum in Victorian England, OUP, 1986, about the exiles from 1848. From the blurb: “Marx spent his time in London at work on Das Kapital, supported financially by Engels; other exiles found different spheres of activity. The ‘bourgeois’ refugees Gottfried Kinkel and Friedrich Althaus settled down to teaching and journalism; Lessner and Eccarius, tailors by profession, played a part in establishing the First International Working Men’s Association in the 1860s; and among the German women who fled to England, the remarkable Johanna Kinkel and Malwida von Meysenbug (sic) were forced to suffer the relative indignity of work as music teacher and governess respectively.”

The In Our Time discussion says that the phrase Land ohne Musik was coined in 1914. Some sources say 1904. It appeared in a book about England by an obscure writer called Oskar Schmitz. But Schmitz had not realised that an English musical renaissance was underway. The phrase could be used for the age between, say, Handel’s Jephtha (1752) and Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1899). Handel became an English composer. Was the soil around him thinning compared to what it had been in the century and a half from Tallis to Purcell? Do we fail to notice this because he himself looms so large? Of course, the more closely you look at the later century and a half, the more you discover there.

Germans have tried with Elgar – they performed him often in the first decade of the twentieth century (Mahler even conducted Cockaigne) – but not got him under their skin, Vaughan Williams and others still less. Britten is another matter: I would guess that the Britten estate earns more in Germany than it does in England.

PG Wodehouse contributed to the invasion literature genre with a comic novel called The Swoop!, in 1909.

If the exiles of 1848 regarded England with a certain awe, then the exiles from the German-speaking world in the 1930s were also charmed. I’ll do a post on them one day, especially on two friends, Fred Uhlman (1901-1985) and Roland Hill (born 1920).

In 2009 Germany was showing itself as in some ways a more mature democracy than England.

___

Taste

German Rhodes Scholars

The Rhodes Scholarship, for two years’ postgraduate work at Oxford, was the first large-scale programme of international scholarships. The first awards were made in 1904. Rhodes’s will provided for scholarships for the British colonies, the United States and Germany. No awards were made to Germans from 1914 to 1930. Then, in 1931-33, Adam von Trott zu Solz came to study at Balliol. On August 26 1944 he was executed for his part in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler.

The German awards were suspended again in 1939 and again were not immediately reinstated. In 1963 the trustees reviewed the matter, but decided to give priority to the Commonwealth. The Times objected in a leading article on October 5, quoting Rhodes’s advice to Sir Herbert Baker, the architect of his house Groote Schuur in Cape Town: “Don’t be mean”. (Baker was also the architect of Rhodes House in Oxford.) The article mentioned Count Albrecht Bernstorff, as well as Trott zu Solz. Bernstorff studied at Trinity in 1909-11 and was murdered by the SS in Berlin on April 24 1945. The scholarships were reinstated for Germans in 1970.

The Times, October 12 1963. The second letter is from Colin McFadyean. The following month de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s first application to join the EEC.

Revenge on Germany

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

German Africa

German Africa 2

German Oceania

German China

German Oceania and China

Toynbee was never more prescient than when warning of the dangers, according to the conventional wisdom after the event, of humiliating Germany in a peace settlement after the First World War.

I posted a clip a while back from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, where Michael Maloney portrays Toynbee in Versailles in 1919. Toynbee is made to say:

“My fear is that we do not have statesmen with enough courage to resist the public demand for revenge. [Woodrow Wilson] is a ‘fine man’ obsessed with forming his absurd League of Nations and meanwhile he’s giving way to every bloodthirsty demand. He’s completely outwitted. Clemenceau [is] a dinosaur baying for blood, Lloyd George a politician with no vision or morality at all. You can’t just wipe your enemy out. Years ago Rome could just wipe Carthage out, but now the world has changed. These men are trying to force Germany down, but it cannot be done without terrible tragedy. Push Germany down and you’ll pay a price. And one day it will once more rise to the top. But this lot are behaving like men with no memories. Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.”

What lessons exactly? His final words are an echo of George Santayana’s aphorism in his The Life of Reason (5 volumes, 1905-6): “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (I have no evidence that Toynbee had read Santayana.)

The speech sounds too good to be true as prophecy, but his first book, Nationality and the War, from which I have been quoting, does bear out those views, even more remarkably in that it was written in late 1914 and early 1915. I’ll quote the passages again at the end of this post.

The spirit of Nationality and the War had been, in McNeill’s words, “that of liberal, upper class Edwardian England, combining a concern for principle with a sublime confidence that enlightened English opinion, and the benevolent interests of the British Empire, would (or at least ought to) prevail.” But the outbreak of that war had already changed his view of history.

One of the failures of McNeill’s book is that he does not track Toynbee’s responses at Versailles to the emerging idea of the League. Perhaps the data does not exist.

In Nationality and the War, Toynbee had written that any future international machinery

cannot encroach upon individual sovereignty in any way that affects, or is deemed to affect, the sovereign right of self-preservation: in particular, it cannot aspire to the regulation of War, and it is waste of ingenuity to propound any international machinery for this purpose. The best-conceived arbitration or conciliation is bound to break down, when once a sovereign state has made up its mind that the surrender of its will on a particular issue is equivalent to annihilation. No international authority could ever prevent parleys like those of last July from resolving themselves into a conflict of arms.

What sources, other than that book, could the Indiana Jones programme-makers have used when putting those words into his mouth? They will hardly have gone to archives. McNeill’s biography is more helpful here than Toynbee’s autobiographical Experiences and Acquaintances. They may have used other published memoirs, or histories of the conference. Toynbee’s contribution, The Non-Arab Territories of the Ottoman Empire since the Armistice of the 30th October, 1918, in HWV Temperley, editor, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Vol 6, OUP, Issued under the auspices of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1924, might shed light on his feelings in early 1919.

The autobiographical volumes say nothing important about his attitude to Clemenceau and nothing that shows a particularly hostile attitude to Lloyd George (but see this post). In Acquaintances he calls Wilson’s “psychic radar” “inadequate”. In Experiences he says that Wilson,

concentrating on saving as many Yugoslavs as he could from Italy’s clutches, threw German-speaking South Tyrol to the Italian wolves. [...] This was one of the most inexcusable of the violations of the principle of self-determination in the 1919 peace settlement.

The Study is critical of Wilson. He regards him as not up to the peace-making job. McNeill quotes a letter from Toynbee to his mother dated November 12 1916:

I hope and sometimes dare believe, Wilson will be mediating between us this time next year.

But this is the only reference to Wilson in the book. He makes his antagonism against Lloyd George clearer. The gist is that in April 1919 Lloyd George disregarded his and Harold Nicolson’s (Nicholson according to McNeill) advice in a memorandum to “cleave” Europe from Asia, give Greece Constantinople and the European shores of the Straits and the Sea of Marmara, but give Turkey the whole of Anatolia and its shores. They were opposing the then-prevailing British and American views, which involved giving new-fangled League of Nations mandates to the US for an “independent” Armenia and also for Constantinople and its “adjacent region”, which presumably included a large part of Anatolia. Here we do have a sign of feeling against the League. You might have thought that he would favour any device that would protect the Armenians, after his championing of their cause in 1915.

This rejection is part of a narrative of failure which McNeill is keen to establish as one of the themes of his biography. Of course, Toynbee’s ideas later became even more pro-Turkish, and when Lloyd George got into trouble over the enforcement of the Treaty of Sèvres, he could not help gloating at his discomfiture. His views got him into trouble when he took a sabbatical from his Greek-funded professorship at London University to become a war correspondent in Turkey, and in 1924 they led to his retreat to Chatham House. They were partly a reaction against his early anti-Turkish writings.

In Nationality and the War he had felt that Smyrna was “marked out to be the capital of a diminished Turkey”. The book was, of course, premature. Many people felt that the war would end soon. That makes it interesting: we can look at each of Toynbee’s ideas and compare them with what actually happened, as I’ve been doing in recent posts in a few areas.

Lloyd George’s rejection of his advice, McNeill suggests, “spelled failure” for his effort to justify his personal role in the war. He had evaded the draft on what seem to have been spurious medical grounds and a feeling of guilt seems to have stayed with him. His whole life’s work was a kind of expiation. He comes close to saying as much, while maintaining that he had been spared from service by a medical accident.

McNeill’s suggestion is believable in emotional terms, but really needs more than the rejection of a single memorandum to support it. He has, however, described previous clashes and tensions with old Foreign Office hands and military intelligence officers in the Foreign Office in London.

McNeill writes of his “growing radicalism [in 1918] and dismay at a social system that could provoke and sustain such a war”. He joined the Labour Party. We are not told in what month. Letter to his mother, no date, probably July 1918 from Castle Howard (aka Brideshead):

I find myself inclining steadily towards the social revolution. The middle class have had their fling for a century and produced this [war]; now let the working class have their try. I am for nationality at one end and internationalism at the other, as essential parts of reconstruction, and if existing states and their traditions cannot square with them, let them go to the devil, the United Kingdom and the Dual Monarchy and all of them.

Post-Second World War communists in western Europe would echo the second sentence more esoterically and substitute “bourgeoisie” for “middle class”.

Virginia Woolf, patronising as usual in her diary, January 1918, quoted by McNeill: “Arnold outdid me in anti-nationalism, anti-patriotism, and anti-militarism. … I like her [Rosalind] better than Arnold, who improves though, and is evidently harmless, and much in his element when discussing Oxford. He hasn’t much good to say of it and will never go back. … He knew the aristocratic heroes who are now all killed and celebrated, and loathed them; for one reason they must have thought him a pale blooded little animal. But he described their row and their violence and their quick snapping brains, always winning scholarships and bullying and … admitting no one to their set.” He never did return to academic tenure at Oxford. Who were those aristocratic heroes?

McNeill: “Having failed to ‘do his part’ in the war by enlisting in the army, he justified his personal behavior by condemning the criminal folly of war more violently than he might otherwise have done.”

The severity of the burden which reparations imposed is disputed, but we know that Hitler played on resentment of the Treaty as he rose to power. In Acquaintances, Toynbee writes of Smuts that

he has [...] been charged with being the main inventor of the ingenious devices by which the terms of the reparations chapter of the Treaty of Versailles were kept within the letter of the “no indemnities” stipulation in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points (to which the governments of the Western allies had committed themselves in the armistice agreement), while the spirit of the President’s stipulation was being flagrantly violated. [...] The morally unwarrantable inflation of the reparations bill was a breach of faith; and, for a statesman of Smuts’s standing, to advise that the fraudulent act was legally allowable was tantamount to recommending it and incurring responsibility for it.

Presumably the no indemnities stipulation was the third point, which asked for “The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance”. There was, in effect, no equality of trade conditions for Germany and serious economic barriers were erected against her.

As to a more general scepticism about the League of Nations, Paul Johnson called Toynbee “early League of Nations man” with some justification (The Times, July 15 1976). The tone of the first two volumes of the Survey of International Affairs is pro-League. The man behind the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Lionel Curtis, wanted to jettison the British Empire in its old form and substitute a free British Imperial Federation, or Commonwealth, of dominions, in alliance with the US, as the driving force in a new world order. What was his attitude to the League? The US, despite having formulated the concept and signed the Covenant, never joined the League of Nations. Toynbee seems to have embraced an idea of “world government”, all the vaguer for being free of Curtis’s ideas about the Commonwealth, after 1945, as the only alternative to mass-suicide in the Atomic Age, having, like almost everybody, become disillusioned with the League in the ’30s.

Curtis chaired a meeting for a group of British and American delegates at Versailles on May 30 1919 at the Hotel Majestic, the headquarters of the British and Dominion delegation, at which he proposed the idea of an Anglo-American institute of foreign affairs to study international problems with a view to preventing future wars. In the event, the British Institute of International Affairs was founded in London in July 1920, with Curtis as its joint Honorary Secretary, with GM Gathorne-Hardy, and received its Royal Charter in 1926. The Council on Foreign Relations, which had its own partially separate antecedents, was founded in 1922 in New York.

What influence did Curtis’s views have on Toynbee when they were in Versailles? If Toynbee found the idea of the League “absurd” for a time, did that reflect a phase of Curtis’s thinking? McNeill does not tell us exactly when Toynbee left Paris, but it seems to have been in April. This is confirmed by Toynbee in The Western Question in Greece and Turkey. Yet Chatham House’s book, Chatham House, Its History and Inhabitants, CE Carrington, revised and updated by Mary Bone, Chatham House, 2004, having given the May 30 date, publishes part of a letter from Toynbee to a Miss Cleeve, presumably of Chatham House, dated October 15 1958, in which he recollects an evening at the Majestic, with “L.C.” holding the floor, at which “the Institute was launched”. He tells a similar story, again with no date for the meeting, in Experiences, though not in Acquaintances, which has a whole chapter on Curtis. Neither account mentions the presence of Americans. McNeill certainly has Toynbee in England, and in a state of mental collapse, on May 30.

He recognised, in Experiences, that the League

did effectively intervene to prevent the inter-war Polish Government from evicting German agricultural colonists in Posnan (Posen) who had been planted, before the First World War, on lands in this Polish territory that had been expropriated by the Prussian Government, while Posen was still Prussian territory, as part of a policy of Germanization. This policy had been indefensible; yet, in the inter-war period, the League of Nations rightly held that the indefensible circumstances in which the German settlers had acquired their farms in Posnan did not justify their now being evicted from these, however unjustifiable their installation in them might have been. Eviction on political grounds was rightly held to be inadmissible, even in unusually provocative circumstances.

The first big lapse from the observance of this principle was the compulsory exchange of minority populations and their property as between [...] Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria after the débâcle of the Greek army in Anatolia in the Graeco-Turkish war after the end of the First World War.

No such humanity as the League insisted upon in inter-war Poland was shown by the Russians towards Germans in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the Second World War, whose numbers, received in West Germany, were

approximately equal to the number of European Jews murdered, during that war, by the Nazis.

In 1931 Japan invaded China in violation of the Covenant of the League, and of the Washington Treaty and the Kellogg Pact. The League did nothing. Hardly surprisingly, without America.

In 1935-6 Britain and France refused to support the League when Italy attacked Ethiopia.

The whole thing is so infantile, as well as so evil, that it makes me sick to think about it. [Letter to Veronica Boulter, April 17 1936, quoted by McNeill.]

But he continued, at least until Munich, to believe that some kind of accommodation with Germany was possible, and some of his views during this period, and a visit to Hitler in early 1936, just before the reoccupation of the Rhineland, caused some to think of him as an appeaser.

His disillusionment confirmed his belief that

the principal cause of war in our world today is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities or States. [...] People will sacrifice themselves for the ‘Third Reich’ or whatever the Ersatz-Götzen [“substitute Gods”; Götz is a diminutive] may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God.” [Letter to the Manchester Guardian published on April 9 1935, quoted by McNeill.]

The posts listed at the top take us through the beginning of the second chapter of Nationality and the War. The chapter is called Prussianism, or Germany’s Ambitions, and I have been quoting from its first section, called The German Empire. A sketch of German history led into a description of Prussianism and of the German overseas Empire. He recommended that, in accordance with a generally fair treatment of Germany after the war and respect for her commercial and industrial interests, Germany should be given back her African colonies. But the German colonies were a peripheral matter. After a concluding passage to the first section, which I will quote in a moment, he goes on to discuss how Germany should be treated in Europe. The four subsequent sections of the chapter are called The French Frontier, The Danish Frontier, The Polish Frontier and Prussian State and German Nation.

McNeill summarises his recommendations: “Treating Germany well meant partitioning the Hapsburg monarchy and allowing Austria and Bohemia to unite with Germany, while also shearing off portions of Alsace and Lorraine in the west and some Polish lands in the east, all in accordance with local opinion as indicated by plebiscites. Such a peace settlement would make Germany supreme on the continent of Europe, but that did not bother Toynbee since a generous settlement in accord with the principle of nationality might be expected to convert the Germans and other Europeans from ‘national competition’ to ‘national cooperation,’ particularly in view of the threat from China that he anticipated.” I will post the arguments in full in due course.

Great Britain’s true policy, then, is to allow Germany to retain all openings for peaceable, as opposed to forcible, expansion afforded her by her oversea dominions as they existed before this war broke out, and we shall have a particularly free hand in the decision of this question, because the command of the sea, and the world-wide naval operations it makes possible, fall almost entirely within our province, and not within that of our European allies. We must furthermore give just as great facilities as before to German immigration through all the vast portions of our empire that are still only in process of being opened up and settled, and we must urge our allies to adopt the same principle with regard to the territories in a similar phase of development which acknowledge their sovereignty. We must also respect the concessions which German enterprise has secured for its capital, with such fine initiative and perseverance, in neutral countries of backward growth. We shall find instances, similar to the coaling stations in the Pacific, where professedly economic concerns have an essentially political intention – certain sections of the projected Bagdad (sic) railway occur at once to our minds – and here we may be compelled to require Germany to abandon her title; but we must confine such demands to a minimum. Both we and our allies must take care that neither political panic nor economic greed induces us to carry them to excess, and in every case where we decide to make them, we must give Germany the opportunity of acquiring, in compensation, more than their equivalent in economic value.

If we meet Germany in this spirit, she will at least emerge from the war no more cramped and constricted than she entered it. This will not, of course, satisfy her ambitions, for they were evil ambitions, and could not be satisfied without the world’s ruin; but it will surely allay her fears. She will have seen that we had it in our power to mutilate her all round and cripple her utterly, and that we held our hand. Once her fear is banished, we can proceed to conjure away her envy: for to leave her what she has already would prepare the ground for an invitation to join us in organising some standing international authority that should continuously adjust the claims of all growing nations, Germany among the rest, by reasonable methods of compromise, and so provide openings for the respective expansion of their wealth and population.

Such an international organ would replace the struggle for existence between nations, in which each tries to snatch his neighbour’s last crust, by a co-operation in which all would work together for a common end; but many tangled problems strew the ground in front of us, before we can clear it for such a construction. The national foundations of Europe must first be relaid; and just as in the question of territories over sea the decisive word will lie with ourselves, so in the case of European frontiers it will lie with our allies, because the war on land is their province and because the national problems at issue affect them even more directly than us.

This does not absolve us from the duty of probing these problems to their bottom: rather it makes it the more imperative that we should do so, inasmuch as our influence upon their solution will depend principally on the impartiality of our point of view and the reasonableness of our suggestions, and very little on any power of making our will prevail by mere intransigeance (sic), or by the plea of paramount interests. Great Britain ought to come to the conference with very definite opinions about the details of these problems, even at the risk of annoying her allies by the appearance of meddling with what is less her business than theirs. The Allies have proclaimed to the world that they will wage this war to its conclusion in concert, and that declaration will not be difficult for them to observe: but they have also implied that they will negotiate in concert the terms of peace, and it is here that the separateness of their positive interests, beyond the negative bond of self-preservation, will be in danger of manifesting itself. They have morally pledged themselves to a settlement that shall subordinate their several, and even their collective, interests to the general interests of the civilised world, and it is on this ground that they have claimed the sympathy of neutrals in the struggle with their opponents. To fulfil their promise, they will need all the wisdom, patience and disinterestedness that they can command; and the supreme value of Great Britain’s voice will lie in the proposal of formulas calculated to reconcile the views of the Allies with each other and also with the relatively impartial standpoint of the non-nationalistic element that happily obtains some footing in all countries and in all strata of society.

The solutions we offer, then, for the national problems of Europe must not be conceived as demands which it is in Great Britain’s vital interest to propound and in her absolute power to enforce, but rather as suggestions compatible with British interests, and capable of acceptance by our allies. The satisfaction of all parties on whom their translation into fact will depend, is, however, only a negative condition: they must further be governed by the positive aim of dealing impartial justice to ourselves, our friends and our enemies alike. We must follow the principle that a “disinterested” policy ultimately serves the truest interest of its authors.

The first problem that confronts us is that of the alien nationalities included against their will within the present frontiers of the German Empire. The settlement after this war must bring justice to these populations by affording them an opportunity for choosing freely whether they will maintain their connection with Germany or no, and if not, what destiny they prefer. When we have estimated the probable results of their choice, we may proceed to consider what the effect is likely to be on German public opinion, and look for some means of cancelling the bitterness which cannot fail to be aroused in some degree. But this is essentially a secondary consideration. We have accepted the principle that the recognition of nationality is the necessary foundation for European peace; and peace is endangered far more by the unjust violation of the national idea than by the resentment due to the just reversal of the injustice, even if the wrongdoer be the most potent factor in Europe and his victim the most insignificant. We will proceed, therefore, to consider in turn the national problems within the German Empire on their own merits.

That concludes the first section of the second chapter of Nationality and the War. Here is a passage from the first chapter, which is called The Future.

[War] rouses the instinct of revenge. “If Germany has hurt us, we will hurt her more – to teach her not to do it again.” The wish is the savage’s automatic reaction, the reason his perfunctory justification of it; but the civilised man knows that the impulse is hopelessly unreasonable. The “hurt” is being at war, and the evil we wish to bann (sic) is the possibility of being at war again, because war prevents us working out our own lives as we choose. If we beat Germany and then humiliate her, she will never rest till she has “redeemed her honour,” by humiliating us more cruelly in turn. Instead of being free to return to our own pressing business, we shall have to be constantly on the watch against her. Two great nations will sit idle, weapon in hand, like two Afghans in their loopholed towers when the blood feud is between them; and we shall have sacrificed deliberately and to an ever-increasing extent, for the blood feud grows by geometrical progression, the very freedom for which we are now giving our lives.

Another war instinct is plunder. War is often the savage’s profession: “‘With my sword, spear and shield I plough, I sow, I reap, I gather in the vintage.’ [Footnote: The song of Hybrias the Kretan.] If we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill, our horses requisitioned and our crops unharvested, our merchant steamers stranded in dock if not sunk on the high seas, and our ‘blood and treasure’ lavished on the war: but in the end Germany’s wealth will be in our grasp, her colonies, her markets, and such floating riches as we can distrain upon by means of an indemnity. If we have had to beat our ploughshares into swords, we can at least draw some profit from the new tool, and recoup ourselves partially for the inconvenience. It is no longer a question of irrational, impulsive revenge, perhaps not even of sweetening our sorrow by a little gain. To draw on the life-blood of German wealth may be the only way to replenish the veins of our exhausted Industry and Commerce.” So the plunder instinct might be clothed in civilised garb: “War,” we might express it, “is an investment that must bring in its return.”

The first argument against this point of view is that it has clearly been the inspiring idea of Germany’s policy, and history already shows that armaments are as unbusinesslike a speculation for civilised countries as war is an abnormal occupation for civilised men. We saw the effect of the Morocco tension upon German finance in 1911, and the first phase of the present war has been enough to show how much Germany’s commerce will inevitably suffer, whether she wins or loses.

It is only when all the armaments are on one side and all the wealth is on the other, that war pays; when, in fact, an armed savage attacks a civilised man possessed of no arms for the protection of his wealth. Our Afghans in their towers are sharp enough not to steal each other’s cows (supposing they possess any of their own) for cows do not multiply by being exchanged, and both Afghans would starve in the end after wasting all their bullets in the skirmish. They save their bullets to steal cows from the plainsman who cannot make reprisals.

If Germany were really nothing but a “nation in arms,” successful war might be as lucrative for her as an Afghan’s raid on the plain, but she is normally a great industrial community like ourselves. In the last generation she has achieved a national growth of which she is justly proud. Like our own, it has been entirely social and economic. Her goods have been peacefully conquering the world’s markets. Now her workers have been diverted en masse from their prospering industry to conquer the same markets by military force, and the whole work of forty years is jeopardised by the change of method.

Fighting for trade and industry is not like fighting for cattle. Cattle are driven from one fastness to another, and if no better, are at least no worse for the transit. Civilised wealth perishes on the way. Our economic organisation owes its power and range to the marvellous forethought and co-operation that has built it up; but the most delicate organisms are the most easily dislocated, and the conqueror, whether England or Germany, will have to realise that, though he may seem to have got the wealth of the conquered into his grip, the total wealth of both parties will have been vastly diminished by the process of the struggle.

The characteristic feature of modern wealth is that it is international. Economic gain and loss is shared by the whole world, and the shifting of the economic balance does not correspond to the moves in the game of diplomatists and armies. Germany’s economic growth has been a phenomenon quite independent of her political ambitions, and Germany’s economic ruin would compromise something far greater than Germany’s political future – the whole world’s prosperity. British wealth, among the rest, would be dealt a deadly wound by Germany’s economic death, and it would be idle to pump Germany’s last life-blood into our veins, if we were automatically draining them of our own blood in the process.

But issues greater than the economic are involved. The modern “Nation” is for good or ill an organism one and indivisible, and all the diverse branches of national activity flourish or wither with the whole national well-being. You cannot destroy German wealth without paralysing German intellect and art, and European civilisation, if it is to go on growing, cannot do without them. Every doctor and musician, every scientist, engineer, political economist and historian, knows well his debt to the spiritual energy of the German nation. In the moments when one realises the full horror of what is happening, the worst thought is the aimless hurling to destruction of the world’s only true wealth, the skill and nobility and genius of human beings, and it is probably in the German casualties that the intellectual world is suffering its most irreparable human losses.

With these facts in our minds, we can look into the future more clearly, and choose our policy (supposing that we win the war, and, thereby, the power to choose) with greater confidence. We have accepted the fact that war itself is the evil, and will in any event bring pure loss to both parties: that no good can come from the war itself, but only from our policy when the war is over: and that the one good our policy can achieve, without which every gain is delusive, is the banishing of this evil from the realities of the future. This is our one supreme “British interest,” and it is a German interest just as much, and an interest of the whole world.

This war, and the cloud of war that has weighed upon us so many years before the bursting of the storm, has brought to bankruptcy the “National State”.

Here again are the passages in the second chapter in which he asks for lenient treatment of Germany in a post-war settlement.

Our ultimate object is to prevent war for the future, and the essential means to this end is to convince Germany that war is not to her interest. We and the French disbelieve in war already, but a minority of one can make a quarrel, in spite of the proverb. The only way to convince Germany is first to beat her badly and then to treat her well.

If we humiliate her, we shall strengthen the obsolete ideas in her consciousness more than ever – perhaps no longer the idea of “Plunder,” but certainly that of “Revenge,” which is much worse: if we deal “disinterestedly” with her (though it will be in our own truest interest) we may produce such a reaction of public opinion in Germany, that the curse of aggressive militarism will be exorcised from her as effectively in 1914, as the curse of political paralysis was exorcised in 1870.

“First to beat her badly and then to treat her well.” This was the approach of the Western allies, in relation to Japan as well as to Germany, after 1945.

One thing is clear: whether Germany’s feeling of constriction has good grounds or not, we must avoid deliberately furnishing it with further justification than it has already. It would be possible to maintain that the colonies and concessions Germany has already acquired give her room for expansion ample enough to deprive her of excuse for her envy, not to speak of the conduct by which she has attempted to satisfy it; but even this view would be rash in face of Germany’s vehement conviction to the contrary. Germany is likely to judge her own plight more truly than we can, and even if she has judged wrongly, her opinion is more important for our purpose than the objective truth. To give the lie to this national belief by taking from her even that which she hath, would be the surest means of deepening and perpetuating her national bitterness.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Experiences, OUP, 1969

William H McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Life, New York, OUP, 1989

Acquaintances, OUP, 1967

~~~

Back December 7.

German Oceania and China

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

German Africa

German Africa 2

German Oceania

German China

Toynbee had argued, in a book published on April 1 1915 whose Preface is dated February 1915, that Germany’s colonies in Africa should be returned to her after the war.

Germany has another group of possessions in the Pacific, and perhaps here she cannot succeed in coming out of the war unscathed. Her Pacific territories have little value as areas for settlement or commerce. Kaiser-Wilhelmsland in New Guinea is the only one of any extent; several archipelagoes of small islands only useful as coaling stations, and the notorious fortress of Kiao-Chao, planted like a piratical stronghold on the Chinese peninsula of Shantung, constitute the remainder. They are not so much an Empire in themselves as a strategical framework laid down for a future empire of indefinite extent, and as such have caused considerable uneasiness to the maritime states in this part of the Pacific, especially to Japan our ally, and to Australia and New Zealand, two self-governing members of our empire. The anticipations of these nations with regard to Germany’s designs are revealed by the energy with which they proceeded to attack these positions as soon as war broke out. New Zealand struck at Samoa, Australia at Neu-Pommern, Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, and the Solomon islands, while Japan undertook the severest task in the reduction of Kiao-Chao. Japan will emerge from the war in possession of the latter place, and she has handed over the Caroline and Marshall Islands, which she occupied in the course of her operations, not to ourselves but to our two Pacific Commonwealths.

The disposition of Germany’s Pacific dependencies will therefore not come into our hands at all. We may ensure that Japan keeps to her declared intention of consigning Kiao-Chao to its ultimate owner China, by offering to resign simultaneously Wei-hai-wei on the other coast of Shantung, which we only leased as an offset to Germany’s coup in seizing Kiao-Chao; but in any event Kiao-Chao will not pass back into Germany’s possession, and it is most unlikely that any of the other territories in question will be relinquished by their respective holders. Certainly Great Britain has no authoritative power to procure their retrocession to Germany, even did she desire it, and there is after all no reason why we should deplore Germany’s loss of them. It will involve no corresponding loss to her industrial and commercial prosperity, a German interest that we mean scrupulously to respect and if possible to promote, but will only cripple her design of a militaristic world-empire, a German interest that we intend, in self-defence, to remove from the sphere of practical politics.

“Japan [...] has handed over the Caroline and Marshall Islands, which she occupied in the course of her operations, not to ourselves but to our two Pacific Commonwealths.” That was a temporary arrangement. Japan was granted League of Nations mandates over them after the war, and also over the other former German possessions north of the equator, the Northern Marianas and Palau.

The possessions south of the equator were taken by “our two Pacific Commonwealths”. Australia was awarded mandates over New Guinea, the German Solomon Islands and Nauru, and New Zealand over Western Samoa.

Japan did return Kiaochow to China, in 1922, but Britain did not surrender Weihaiwei until 1930.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

German China

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

German Africa

German Africa 2

German Oceania

In 1897 Germany occupied Kiaochow or Kiao-Chao (Wade-Giles) (= Jiāozhōu pinyin = Kiauchau or Kiautschou or Kiautchau German) Bay on the East China Sea on the southern coast of the Shantung (Wade-Giles) (= Shāndōng pinyin) Peninsula.

Jiāozhōu is now a county-level city of Qīngdǎo sub-provincial city (pinyin) (= Ch’ing-tao Wade-Giles = Tsingtao postal map spelling = Tsingtau German), where the Germans built the brewery.

There were lesser German concessions and settlements in other places. I will look at the fates of nearby, non-German Port Arthur and Weihaiwei separately.

In 1898 the government of the Qing dynasty leased Kiaochow to Germany for 99 years. The lease would have expired in the same year as Hong Kong’s. In 1914 China cancelled the lease and Britain’s ally Japan occupied the bay. The failure of the allies immediately to return Kiaochow to China ingnited the May the Fourth Movement. Japan returned it to China in 1922 and occupied it again between 1937 and 1945.

Soldiers, Tsingtau (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

Sailors, Tsingtau, c 1912 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

Tsingtau, c 1912 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

Theatre, Tsingtau, May 1908 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

Christmas hunt, Kiautschou, 1913 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

Tsingtau harbour, c 1912 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

Tsingtau coolies, c 1912 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons)

German Oceania

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

German Africa

German Africa 2

Circa February 1915.

The largest place in the sun that Germany staked out in East Asia and the Pacific was German New Guinea (Deutsch-Neuguinea), 1884-1919.

Kaiser-Wilhelmsland was the northern half of the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. The territory below it was British.

German and British New Guinea (Wikimedia Commons)

The western half of New Guinea was part of the Dutch East Indies. You can see the border of Dutch New Guinea on the left of the map. In 1949, when the rest of the colony became independent as Indonesia, the Dutch retained sovereignty over western New Guinea, where there were many Eurasian settlers. It was placed under UN administration in 1962-3, and then under Indonesian until Indonesia annexed it in 1969. Indonesian names for it have been West New Guinea, West Irian, Irian Jaya (or Glorious Irian) and, unofficially, West Papua. In 2003, it was split into the provinces of West Irian Jaya and Papua. In 2007, West Irian Jaya was renamed West Papua.

In 1883, the British colony of Queensland (Australia) annexed the southeastern part of New Guinea against the wishes of the British government. It was administered from London as British New Guinea. In 1906 British New Guinea passed to Australia as the Territory of Papua. We’ve already seen different uses of the name Papua.

The British flag being raised by Queenslanders in Port Moresby (Wikimedia Commons and elsewhere)

This ignited German interest in the remaining third of the island. In 1884, the flag of the newly founded Neuguinea-Kompanie (New Guinea Company) was raised there.

The main part of German New Guinea was Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. The largest islands immediately to the east were Neu-Pommern and Neu-Mecklenburg in the Bismarck Archipelago. (Neu-Pommern was called New Britain and Neu-Mecklenburg New Ireland before and after the German period.)

In 1899 the German government took direct control of New Guinea and the area became a protectorate.

Australian troops captured Kaiser-Wilhelmsland and the nearby islands (including Bougainville and Buka) in 1914, after a short resistance. The only significant battle occurred on September 11 1914, when the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force attacked a wireless station on Neu Pommern. The Australians suffered six dead and four wounded, their first military casualties of the First World War. On September 21 all German forces surrendered.

Hermann Detzner, a German officer, and some twenty native police, evaded capture in the interior of New Guinea for the entire war. Detzner had been on a surveying expedition to map the border with Australian-held Papua and did not at first know that the war had begun. His claims in his book Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen (1920) were disputed by various German missionaries, and he recanted most of them.

After the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, Germany lost all its colonial possessions. In 1920 German New Guinea became a League of Nations Mandate Territory under Australian administration. Papua was an External Territory of the Australian Commonwealth, though as a matter of law it remained a British possession. (To Australians, New Guinea meant the formerly German part, and Papua meant their part.) The difference in legal status meant that Papua and New Guinea had separate administrations, both controlled by Australia.

From 1941 to ’44 Japan occupied the mandated territory, and part of Australian Papua to the south. In 1945 the two were merged to become the UN Trust Territory of Papua and New Guinea, administered by Australia, which became independent Papua New Guinea in 1975. There are still differences between the legal systems in the north and south of the country.

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With the exception of German Samoa, all German islands in the Pacific were eventually brought into an administrative union with German New Guinea: the German Solomon Islands, Nauru, the Carolines, Palau, the Marianas (except for Guam) and the Marshall Islands.

None of these places had been colonised by a modern power before the Germans arrived, though there had been a failed French experiment on New Ireland, and Germany fought Britain and the US over Samoa.

Solomons. The German Solomon Islands (Salomonen or Nördliche Salomon-Inseln; Buka, Bougainville and several smaller islands) lay beyond the Bismarck Archipelago. Buka and Bougainville are now part of Papua New Guinea. The smaller Solomons are an independent nation. The German New Guinea Company established control over the northern Solomons in 1885. The southern islands were placed under a British protectorate in 1893; the eastern islands were added to it in 1898. In 1899, Germany transferred its islands (except Bougainville and Buka) to Great Britain in return for British withdrawal from Western Samoa. The British Solomon Islands were occupied by Japan in 1942. They became self-governing in 1976 and independent in 1978.

Nauru. Germany annexed Nauru (Nawodo or Onawero) in 1888 and incorporated it into their Marshall Islands Protectorate, below. In 1914 it was captured by Australian troops, in 1920 granted as a League of Nations mandate to Australia, New Zealand and Britain (with actual administration by Australia), from 1942 to ’45 occupied by Japan, and in 1947 made a UN trust territory with the same arrangement as under the mandate. It gained independence in 1968 as the Republic of Nauru.

Carolines. The Caroline Islands (Karolinen) is now the independent Federated States of Micronesia. In 1885 Pope Leo XIII recognised the Spanish claim to the Carolines – hundreds of islands north of New Guinea – which then became part of the Spanish East Indies, along with the Palau, the Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands. They were all administered from the Philippines. After being defeated in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, Spain sold the Carolines to Germany. In 1914 they were occupied by Japan. After the war, the League of Nations awarded the Carolines to Japan as a mandate. From 1947 they were administered by the US as part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. In 1979 the four Trust Territory districts (Carolines, Palau, Marianas, Marshalls) ratified a new constitution to become the Federated States of Micronesia, but only the Carolines chose to participate. They signed a Compact of Free Association with the US, which came into effect in 1986 and marked Micronesia’s emergence from trusteeship to independence. The Trust Territory was dissolved in 1987.

Palau. The other element in Micronesia is Palau in the west, north of Indonesian West Papua. In 1885 Pope Leo XIII recognized the Spanish claim, but granted economic concessions to Britain and Germany. Palau then became part of the Spanish East Indies, along with the Caroline Islands, the Mariana Islands and the Marshall Islands. They were administered from the Philippines. After being defeated in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, Spain sold the Palau archipelago to Germany. In 1914 Palau was seized by the Japanese navy. After the war, the League of Nations awarded it to Japan as a mandate. Palau was a scene of intense fighting between American and Japanese forces in 1944. From 1947 it was administered by the US as part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. In 1979, Palauans voted against joining the Federated States of Micronesia because of language and cultural differences. The UN Trust Territory was dissolved in 1987, but Palau remained a US trusteeship. Independence came in 1994, when Palau (which has been called a Republic since 1981) voted freely to associate with the United States.

The Mariana Islands (Marianen). The Marianas are composed of two administrative units: Guam in the south, a US territory which was conquered by the US in the Spanish-American War and was never German (it had been a resting-stop for the Manila galleons); and the Northern Marianas, which were sold by Spain to Germany in 1899 after the Spanish-American War, occupied by Japan in 1914 and granted to Japan as a League of Nations mandate after the war. Japan invaded Guam from the Northern Marianas in 1941. America captured the Northern Marianas and recaptured Guam in 1944 (a Japanese soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, hid in the village of Talofofo in Guam until 1972). Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Marianas, was the scene of a major battle when the US marines landed. After Japan’s defeat, the Northern Marianas were administered by the United States as part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. They decided not to seek independence, but instead to forge closer links with the United States. Since 1978 they have been a Commonwealth in political union with the US. Guam is a US Territory.

The Marshall Islands (Marshall-Inseln) had nominally been under Spanish sovereignty and were sold to Germany in 1884 through papal mediation. A German trading company settled on them in 1885. They were taken by Japanese troops in 1914: Japan was an ally of Britain. After the war, the League of Nations awarded the islands to Japan as a mandate. In 1944 they were occupied by the US and in 1947 they became part of the US-administered UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. They gained autonomy as a republic in 1979 and signed a Compact of Free Association with the US which came into effect in 1986 and marked the Marshall Islands’ emergence from trusteeship to independence. The Trust Territory was dissolved in 1987.

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German Samoa (Deutsch-Samoa). Samoa was Germany’s easternmost possession. Three powers fought each other for possession of Samoa.

Wikipedia: “The Samoan Civil Wars is a Western definition of political activity in the Samoa Islands of the South Pacific in the late 19th century. By this non-Samoan definition, the Samoan Civil Wars were a series of wars between Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ending in the partitioning of the island chain in 1899. The concluding event was the Second Samoan Civil War. The first Samoan Civil War lasted for eight years. The warring Samoan parties were supplied arms, training and sometimes even combat troops by Germany, Britain and The United States. The three powers were playing them off against each other as each country wanted Samoa as a refueling station for coal fired shipping [and for its copra and cacao]. They also wanted Samoa due to the scarcity of unclaimed territory from 1870 onwards to gain more power in Europe.”

In 1899 the eastern island group became a territory of the United States and is today known as American Samoa; the western islands, by far the greater landmass, became known as German Samoa after Britain vacated all claims and terminated German rights in Tonga and certain areas in the Solomon Islands and West Africa. New Zealand troops landed on ’Upolu unopposed in August 1914 and seized control from the German authorities, following a request by Britain for New Zealand to perform their “great and urgent imperial service”.

From the end of the First World War until 1962, New Zealand controlled Western Samoa as a League of Nations mandate and then as a UN trust territory. It became independent as Western Samoa in 1962, and the name was changed to Samoa in 1997. American Samoa remains a US Territory.

’Upolu, Samoa (Wikimedia Commons)

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German official (Wikimedia Commons; his name is Karl Kammerich; shown here in naval dress and from 1905 to 1910 a police official on Ponape in the Carolines)

Oceania (CIA World Factbook 2004)

German Africa 2

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

German Africa

Circa February 1915.

Let us make the unlikely assumption that, before the end of the war, every fragment of German territory overseas will have come into our power: there will certainly be a body of opinion in this country in favour of retaining the spoils of war.

Every fragment of German territory overseas did pass into British, French, Australian, New Zealand or Japanese hands. He argues for a policy of non-retention.

“The retention of German S.W. Africa,” they will say, “is essential, firstly in order to round off the frontiers of the South African Commonwealth, and secondly to prevent for the future the fostering, from this hostile focus, of the disloyalty against the British Empire, unfortunately still rife in the Dutch element.”

But it will be a perverse cure for Dutch disaffection to reinforce it by including a still more irreconcilable German population within the same community, unless we mean to abandon the liberal policy which has gone so far towards wiping out the memories of the South African War, and rule Dutch and German alike with a heavy hand.

Why necessarily the same community?

Such a disastrous course would lose us South Africa altogether, by a war of independence like that which severed from us the North American states, the finest colonies we ever had. If, on the other hand, we restore Germany her territory, and avoid disturbing the natural development of our own South African Commonwealth by the problems involved in the annexation, we shall see a new South African nationality grow up, which will first blend Dutch and British into one people, and in process of time exercise an attractive influence upon the territories adjoining, when they too have filled up with a white population drawn from their respective mother-countries, and have evolved a separate life of their own. If German S.W. Africa is not subjected to the South African Commonwealth now as a conquered province, she is more than likely to join the Federation, when she is ripe for self-government, as an independent member of her own free will, and so enrich the new nationality by adding a German strain to the Dutch and English basis. When this happens, the South African federal state will take its place by the side of Great Britain on the one hand and Germany on the other as a separate political unit, absolved from the control of either, but inheriting the tradition of cordial relations with each, and will become the strongest bond of good understanding between them instead of the bitterest cause of dissention.

Toynbee’s first book was propaganda as well scholarship. His later views on colonialism were not yet formed, though they are here in embryo.

The case of the other German possessions in Africa is simpler. They are not “white men’s countries,” and do not adjoin any great self-governing member of the British Empire, whose policy and interest must be considered as well as our own: they all lie within the tropical belt, and like most European protectorates in those latitudes, profit their owner, if at all, as fields for enterprise, sources for raw products, and markets for manufactures. Towards these too we may be tempted to stretch out a grasping hand. “They do not even pay their way,” people will declare; “and she has not learnt the secret of governing natives: it would save Germany’s pocket and her African subjects’ hides, if we took over the business instead of her. Perhaps Togoland and Kamerun might be passed over; every country in Europe, after all, has some little claim staked out on the West African coast, and they are hardly worth picking up: but German East Africa is another question; and think how satisfactory it will be to obtain an ‘all-red route’ for the Cape-to-Cairo Railway.”

Here we see the cloven hoof, and it is sufficient to answer that the profit and loss of Germany’s African possessions is emphatically her affair not ours, that the skill to govern native races is only acquired by experience (we ourselves, for instance, blundered into our present more or less satisfactory Crown Colony system through an unhampered century of experiments in misgovernment), while the all-red route, even if it could be achieved without alienating Germany (and it would be out of all proportion to obtain it at the cost of the alternative), actually presupposes the continuance of that national antagonism which it is our object to abolish. Not the monopoly of the chief trunk railway of the African continent, but the co-operation of all interested parties in its construction and utilisation, will open the way to the international entente we hope to call into being.

The most serious claim to German East Africa might be lodged by the Indian Empire. The population of India is suffering from congestion at least as acutely as that of Germany, and the East African coast that faces India across the Arabian Sea, offers the obvious field for her expansion. There has indeed been an attempt to convert into a “white man’s country” the highlands that, both in the German and in the English territory, intervene between the coast and the great lakes; but the experiment seems to be in process of breaking down in both provinces. India, then, might conceivably ask, as a reward for her loyal aid in the present war, that both British and German East Africa should be assigned to her as a specifically Indian colonial area.

This reflects concerns on both sides of the Atlantic about the expansion of Asiatic populations. See The Yellow Peril. There was already a large Indian minority in South Africa, and a growing one in East Africa, but the Indians had been brought in in the first place as indentured labourers. Later, many would turn to trade and the professions.

This, however, is asking for more than is in our power to grant. We shall be ill-advised if we do not in future offer the Indian citizens of our empire the most favourable openings we can, at least in regions whose climate renders them pre-eminently suitable for Indian immigration, like our own East African protectorate. We hope that our German neighbours on that coast will do the same, and we might even point out to them that the introduction of a civilised Indian population into a country where there is little question of their coming into competition with white settlers, will enormously increase its economic productiveness, which is its paramount asset to the white nation to which it belongs. Moreover, British government in India is building for the Future an immensely powerful Indian nation; and the exclusion of Indians from this territory would involve Germany in the same conflict that already threatens Canada and the U.S.A., unless they modify their policy in the meanwhile. But we must let our action rest at that. The problem of Asiatic expansion must be met primarily by every state concerned on its own account. It is probable that they will find the difficulty of its solution so great that they will organise in time some international authority to co-ordinate their policy on this question, and voluntarily submit themselves to its direction; but the solution cannot possibly be furthered by pressure of one individual state upon another, exercised as the result of a victorious war.

“The same conflict that already threatens Canada and the U.S.A.” refers in part to the movement in the US to close its borders to Asian immigrants. An Immigration Act would be passed in 1917 which would ban immigration from India. The Chinese were already excluded. See Angel Island.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

German Africa

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Prussianism 2

Germany’s colonial empire lasted for a generation. The places in the sun that Germany staked out in Africa were:

German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika), 1885-1919, including what are now Burundi, Rwanda and mainland Tanzania (Tanganyika) and governed by the German East Africa Company (Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft) until 1891, and thereafter by the German state.

British Imperial forces invaded during the First World War, led partly by Jan Smuts. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles broke up the colony, giving the north-west (where the German presence had been minimal) to Belgium as Ruanda-Urundi, the Kionga Triangle south of the Rovuma River to Portugal as part of Mozambique, and the remainder to Britain as Tanganyika.

Ruanda-Urundi was under Belgian occupation from 1916 to ’22, a Belgian-administered League of Nations mandate from 1922 to ’46, and a Belgian-administered UN trust territory from 1946 to ’62, when it became the independent states of Rwanda and Burundi. Rwanda was a republic immediately, Burundi a kingdom until it became a republic in 1966.

Tanganyika was under British occupation from 1916 to ’22, a British-administered League of Nations mandate from 1922 to ’46, and a British-administered UN trust territory from 1946 to ’61, when it became independent, as a dominion for a year, then as a republic. In 1964 it was joined by Zanzibar, which had been a British protectorate and was briefly an independent monarchy in 1963-4. The merged entity was called Tanzania.

Some German place-names in Tanganyika:

Bismarckburg (Kasanga)
Wilhelmsthal (Lushoto)
Weidmannsheil (Tabora)
Neu Langenburg (Tukuyu)
Neu Gottorp (Uvinza)

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Wituland (Deutsch-Witu), 1885-90. A coastal area in what is now Kenya, just south of the island of Lamu. (Lamu is still much visited by middle-class Germans in search of “Afrika”.) Governed for a period before 1888 by the German Witu Society, thereafter by the German East Africa Company.

Under the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, Germany gained Heligoland (Helgoland in German) in the North Sea, the Caprivi Strip (chieftainship of the Fwe people in Namibia), and a free hand to control and acquire the coast of Dar es Salaam that would form the periphery of German East Africa (later Tanganyika). In exchange, Germany handed to the UK the protectorate over the small Sultanate of Wituland and pledged not to interfere in the actions of the UK in relation to the Sultanate of Zanzibar. In addition, the treaty confirmed the German sphere of interest in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) and settled the borders between German Togoland and the British Gold Coast Colony, and German Cameroon and British Nigeria.

In fact, Germany had already lost the Scramble for Africa and never had any control over Zanzibar. It therefore was not able to swap it for Heligoland, though this had been Bismarck’s version of the story.

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German South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika), 1884-1919. Present-day Namibia and part of Botswana (southern edge of the Caprivi Strip). The early traders placed the territory under Imperial administration from the beginning.

South-West Africa was under South African occupation from 1915 to ’20, a South Africa-administered League of Nations mandate from 1920 to ’66, and under direct UN administration (not recognised by South Africa) from 1966 until 1990, when the territory became independent as Namibia. For the special status of Walvis Bay, see this post.

South-West Africa attracted more settlers than other German colonies, but it was still on a small scale. Most emigrants chose America. South-West Africa also saw the most serious rebellions against German rule, by the Herero and the Nama. The German reprisals have been called a genocide.

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German Cameroons (Deutsch-Kamerun), 1884-1919. Present-day Cameroon. The German West Africa Company (Deutsch-Westafrikanische Gesellschaft) exploited both Cameroon and Togo, but, unlike its counterpart in East Africa, did not actually govern them.

The colony was under French and British occupation from 1916 and from 1922 to ’46 was divided into separate League of Nations mandates, administered by France and Britain. In 1946 they became UN French and British trust territories. French Cameroons became independent in 1960 as the Republic of Cameroon. In 1961 it was joined by the southern part of British Cameroons (the northern part going to Nigeria), to become the Federal Republic of Cameroon. This was renamed United Republic of Cameroon in 1972 and Republic of Cameroon in 1984.

German Togoland (Deutsch-Togoland), 1884–1919, came under French and British occupation in 1914 and had a similar history from 1922. There were twin mandates and trust territories: French Togoland and British Togoland. French Togoland became independent in 1960 as the Togolese Republic. British Togoland, in the west, became part of Ghana when the Gold Coast became independent in 1957.

German West Africa (Deutsch-Westafrika) existed as a unit for only a brief period: the territories were too widely separated (by Nigeria and Benin).

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German surveyor in Cameroon, 1884 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Prussianism 2

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

Prussianism

Circa February 1915.

The [Prussian] machine is entirely unadaptable to the new [economic] task set before it. “Blood and Iron” could drive other nations off German soil; they could even, in Bismarck’s handling, cause a great psychological revolution in the political feeling of the German people. They could not possibly be made fruitful for economic progress.

Economic advance can only be made by economic effort. We are deeply conscious of this in England. War as a constructive national activity is for us essentially a thing of the past: between our warlike ancestors and ourselves there is a great gulf fixed, the Industrial Revolution, which has put us into a new environment. In the effort to adapt ourselves to that environment we are increasingly absorbed; we more and more recognise the vital importance of succeeding in this, and resent the unremitting “burden of armaments,” the distracting rumours of war, and now this destructive folly into which we have really been drawn at last.

The retort is easy: “England has all she wants. She got it by war a century ago: now she wants to be let alone to exploit it.” That merely proves that we have been more fortunate than Germany: it does not prove that the same military method will produce the same result now that the century has passed. The conditions have changed, and not, after all, in Germany’s disfavour. In spite of her bad start, she has developed such immense industries that her town population has increased at a greater rate than that of the U.S.A. during the same period: she has won markets for her manufactures, not only in her own protectorates, but in the colonies of other nations, and even in the homeland of industrialism – Great Britain itself. The surplus of her population, whose growth has even outstripped her demand for labour, [footnote: This is true in the sense that the home market for skilled labour is glutted. But while the skilled Gennan is seeking new openings abroad, the unskilled Pole is drifting into Westphalia to do the work for which the native German’s standard is too high, so that the Immigration statistics at present outbalance those of Emigration.] has found outlets, entirely satisfactory from the individual’s point of view, in North and South America, where they already form a very prosperous section of the population, and play an influential part in the self-government of their adopted countries. German enterprise has competed on equal terms with French, English, and American in China and Turkey, and obtained contracts that offer good investments for all surplus German capital for some time to come.

This has been Germany’s true victory in the environment of modern civilisation, and she has done it all without moving a single gun against her neighbours. She has not yet got abreast of England in wealth: that is not the fault of living England or Germany, but of dead history: but, so far as she has thrown herself into the economic field, she has, by her own merit, gained upon us to the utmost extent possible. Her only avoidable handicap has been the great Prussian fleet and army which she has deliberately imposed upon herself. Their creation, upkeep, and increase have steadily taxed her economic growth, and their existence has tempted her, in her foolish trust in their efficacy for her ulterior objects, to risk all her real economic gains by bringing them into action.

But their creation must also have driven economic growth.

This policy of Germany’s has been an immense mistake. It can work her no good, but it has a vast potentiality for working both herself and the rest of Europe evil. There is the sum of all evil in the fact that by attacking the rest of Europe with arms, she has forced us all to take up arms against her. It is only our subordinate object to beat her, because we know that if she beats us her public opinion will become more convinced than ever that her militaristic policy was right. But the converse by no means follows, that if we beat her we thereby convince her of her error. Masses of people are only converted from ingrained opinions about complicated questions, if they have every opportunity given them to be reasonable. It is always tempting to refuse to be reasonable: if you are being harshly treated, and at the same time presented with unanswerable refutations of cherished beliefs, you inevitably prefer to go mad rather than be convinced. Our ultimate object is to prevent war for the future, and the essential means to this end is to convince Germany that war is not to her interest. We and the French disbelieve in war already, but a minority of one can make a quarrel, in spite of the proverb. The only way to convince Germany is first to beat her badly and then to treat her well.

If we humiliate her, we shall strengthen the obsolete ideas in her consciousness more than ever – perhaps no longer the idea of “Plunder,” but certainly that of “Revenge,” which is much worse: if we deal “disinterestedly” with her (though it will be in our own
truest interest) we may produce such a reaction of public opinion in Germany, that the curse of aggressive militarism will be exorcised from her as effectively in 1914, as the curse of political paralysis was exorcised in 1870.

We have seen that Germany was led to pursue the policy which has culminated in this war, by the oppressive sense that her development [especially abroad] was being cramped by the action of her neighbours. At first she conceived their action as of a passive kind, as the mere automatic, “dog-in-the-manger” instinct of effete powers to cling to possessions they had not the initiative to utilise, and in which nothing but historical chance had given them their vested interest: her own mission, she thought, was to bend all her youthful energy and resolution to the task of evicting them, in order to actualise all the golden opportunities that they had missed. More recently, however, since her methodical pursuit of her aim has roused her victims to a sense of their danger and stimulated them to concert measures for their security, she has viewed their behaviour in a more sinister light, as an active, though veiled, campaign of hostilities unremittingly carried on to compass her destruction; and now that her ambition has combined with this undercurrent of fear to precipitate her into an aggressive war, so that she finds herself actually engaged in a life-and-death struggle with these neighbours whom she has envied, despised, and feared in one complicated emotion, she is more firmly convinced thanever that the aggression comes, not from her side, but from theirs.

We cannot dispel this obsession by discussions of the past: the only argument that has a chance of going home is our action in the future, that is, the attitude we adopt when we meet Germany at the congress that will follow the war. Assuming (what is the necessary presupposition of this book) that Germany has been defeated, and that the settlement, in so far as it depends on terms imposed by superior force, passes thereby into the hands of the Allies, on what principles shall we govern our clearance of accounts with the German Nation?

One thing is clear: whether Germany’s feeling of constriction has good grounds or not, we must avoid deliberately furnishing it with further justification than it has already. It would be possible to maintain that the colonies and concessions Germany has already
acquired give her room for expansion ample enough to deprive her of excuse for her envy, not to speak of the conduct by which she has attempted to satisfy it; but even this view would be rash in face of Germany’s vehement conviction to the contrary. Germany is likely to judge her own plight more truly than we can, and even if she has judged wrongly, her opinion is more important for our purpose than the objective truth. To give the lie to this national belief by taking from her even that which she hath, would be the surest means of deepening and perpetuating her national bitterness.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Prussianism

Germany to 1813

From Stein to Bismarck

The principle of cuius regio, eius religio, originally defined at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, helped to isolate the German political conscience. Was it that, as well as the clumsiness of German prose, which produced a flight into music?

In the last post, Toynbee described early national sentiment as something spiritual. It was disconnected, perhaps dangerously, from mundane political life. Perhaps one could call it unearthed. Bismarck tried to earth it. At the same time, in Toynbee’s words, industry offered

a new sphere where intellectual activity and disciplined organisation might co-operate to give German nationality expression.

But neither peaceful industry nor Imperial adventuring could absorb the aggressive spirit of Prussia. Toynbee continues, in a book written in the first months of the First World War and published on April 1 1915:

The commerce and manufactures that Germany has built up during the last forty-three years are among the most wonderful achievements in history: there is a vigour behind them that feels itself capable of inheriting the whole Earth. Perhaps if the Earth had lain untenanted for Germany to inherit, she would have found salvation in the achievement, and Prussian principles and German character might have hardened into steel of a temper that Bismarck, in idealistic moments, may have dreamed of.

But unfortunately the pleasant places of the Earth were occupied already. The tropical countries that supply Europe with raw materials her own climate cannot produce, were in the hands of England, France, and Holland: in the temperate regions capable of receiving the overflow of European population, new white nations of English, Spanish, or Dutch speech were growing up, one of them, the U.S.A., already a world power, the rest guaranteed an undisturbed development to maturity either by the United States or by Great Britain. In the partition of the waste places of Africa during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century Germany took her share, but she got little by it. Her tropical acquisitions seem not to pay their way from the commercial point of view, and the only colony with a temperate climate, S.W. Africa, was vacant simply because its soil was desert, while its one asset, the good harbour of Walfisch Bay, had been earmarked by Great Britain. In 1870 the Germans thought they had at last buried their unhappy political past, yet here in the new chapter they had magnificently opened, they were suffering for history still. This has been more than they can bear, and explains, though it does not excuse, their foreign policy ever since. With the brilliant success of the Prussian military machine fresh in their minds, they turned to Prussianism once more to accomplish their desire. Instead of purging out the alloy when once the metal was cast, the new industrial Germany has become Prussianised through and through.

In hoping to cancel by the use of military force the grave initial disadvantage with which they started their industrial career, they have made a miscalculation that has brought evil upon themselves and all Europe.

Portugal never formally claimed what is now called Walvis Bay. In 1878 Britain annexed it to Cape Colony to forestall German ambitions in south west Africa. In 1910 it became an enclave of the Union of South Africa. The Germans overran it early in the First World War, but South African forces ousted them in 1915. In 1920 the League of Nations awarded a mandate to South Africa to administer South-West Africa as an integral part of South Africa. In 1971, anticipating a ceding of its control over SWA, South Africa transferred control of Walvis Bay back to Cape Province. In 1977, to avoid losing Walvis Bay to a SWAPO-led government, South Africa reimposed direct rule and reasserted its claim of sovereignty based on the original annexation. In 1990 South-West Africa gained independence as Namibia, but Walvis Bay remained under South African sovereignty until February 28 1994.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

From Stein to Bismarck

Germany to 1813

In 1813 Prussia broke the French power in Germany. Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein (1757-1831) was not a Prussian by birth, but arrived in Berlin in 1780.

The transition Germany went through in this generation may be illustrated by the career of Stein. Inheriting the sovereignty of an Imperial knight (his little principality was absorbed in Nassau during his lifetime), he did not find his vocation therein, but took service in the Prussian administration. He came to the front after 1806, and was the inspiration both of the internal reforms and of the war of liberation they made possible. He was afterwards fired by the Romantic movement, and devoted his old age to promoting the collection and publication of documents for the origins of German history, a historical interest that really looked towards the future.

But the débris of the middle ages could not be cleared away in a moment, and the next fifty years were a period of flux and indecision. Two factors were striving to harmonise and never succeeding. On the one hand, the intellectual and artistic growth of Germany was gathering momentum: in music, philology, philosophy, and theoretical politics the nation had not only found itself but achieved the primacy of Europe. On the other side stood the political organism of Prussia, far stronger than before, for the Vienna congress had greatly increased her territory, and far more representative of Germany as a whole, for she had exchanged the greater part of her alien Polish provinces in the East for the German Rhineland on the West, which made her a Catholic as well as a Protestant state and the bulwark of Germany against France. She used the fifty years to unite [from 1818] all North Germany in her customs union; but her ruling class kept within its mediæval traditions and only came into hostile contact with the spiritual movement in which German nationalism still concentrated itself. The Prussian governing class aspired to rule Germany, but it did not wish to merge itself in the growth of the German nation.

Between dissolution of Holy Roman Empire and establishment of German Empire: Confederation of the Rhine (1806-13), German Confederation (1815-66), North German Confederation (1867-71).

These two discordant elements were welded together by a genius, Bismarck. He persuaded the German people that the Prussian machine alone could give them what they wanted, and that to make the machine work effectively they must conform themselves to its action: there must be no more liberalism. He persuaded the Prussian government that irresponsible absolutism could only survive by “giving the people what it wants,” and that if it took the plunge, from which other obsolete institutions, like the Pope and the Hapsburgs, had shrunk to their ruin, it had a great future before it. He worked with titanic tools. In the blast-furnace of three great wars with Denmark, Austria and France, he poured the whole energy of the German nation into the Prussian crucible, and successfully drew out [in 1871] a solid mass of metal, molten in just the form he had intended, the German Empire.

To those who look at his work from outside after a generation has passed, it appears that the task was too gigantic even for his powers. The metal shows a flaw. The Prussian machine has not proved itself adaptable enough; it has not learnt to understand and work for the needs and tendencies of the German people. The nation on the other hand has lost in success some of the qualities it preserved in adversity, and taken a Prussian alloy into its soul. Bismarck’s harmonisation was sovereign for achieving the immediate result he had in view. If his material had not been men but stone, the statue of Germany he carved would have been a monument to him for ever. But living material is always growing, and those who work in it must direct their eye less upon the present than upon the future.

Bismarck brought Germany into line with France and England. Her national question was solved at last, and she was free to throw herself into industrialism. She threw herself into it with all that concentration of energy of which Bismarck had first mastered the secret. Here was a new sphere where intellectual activity and disciplined organisation might co-operate to give German nationality expression.

Berlin, Stadtschloss, from the tower of the Rathaus, 1891; beyond, Unter den Linden, looking in the direction of the Brandenburger Tor

Schlossbrücke, 1880s

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Germany to 1813

From a book published on April 1 1915 whose Preface is dated February 1915.

The living generation of Germans is suffering for a thousand years of history. They started in the race to emerge from the Dark Age with a smaller fund of civilisation than France had accumulated by her thorough Romanisation, and than the Norman conquerors carried from France to England; and they further handicapped themselves by the only Roman tradition they did inherit, the ghost of universal empire. The Hohenstaufen dynasty, Germany’s chance of a strong government, spent its strength warring in Italy, on the impossible quest of bringing this ghost to life again. When they failed, Germany fell to pieces into a debris of principalities, of every size and character: self-governing trading-cities, often more in touch with foreign traders across the sea than with the serfs at their gates; Imperial knights, the landlords of these serfs, ruling their estates with practically sovereign power; prince-bishops, who governed some of the most civilised districts of Germany in the valley of the Rhine; and lay princes small and great, from the Thuringian dukes, whose dominions were subdivided equally among the whole male issue of each generation, to the strong military lords of the marches, Brandenburg and Austria, and the compact, steadily-growing duchy of Bavaria. When the Reformation brought religious war, even unified France and England were riven by the conflict: German particularism fought out the issue to an inconclusive compromise in the devastating War of Thirty Years, which paralysed the growth of Germany for a century, just when England was working out her internal self-government and preparing for the immense development of her colonies and industry. During the Thirty Years’ War Germany’s consolidated neighbours began to fish in her troubled waters: in the eighteenth century she had become the plaything of the powers, her principalities pawns in their game: at the end of the century she fell completely under the dominion of France, and had to endure the merited ridicule of the conqueror for her particularism and its results, a “second-handness” and a helpless inert stolidity.

This was the more bitter in that she was not merely feeding upon memories of a past dawn that had never become day: she was conscious of an immense vitality in the present. While Napoleon was annexing or humiliating her principalities, Germany was giving Europe the greatest philosopher and the greatest poet she had yet known, Kant and Goethe, while the succession of German masters who were creating European music was represented by Beethoven. Germany was already a nation: the spark had been kindled by intellect and art. An intense desire followed to build up all the other sides of national life.

Germany’s striking defect was her political disintegration: this delivered her into the hands of the French, who preached their creed with drums and bayonets. Civilised Germany turned again to the ideal of the Dark Age, which more fortunate nations had long realised and transcended, a strong military government. An organisation of just this type presented itself in the kingdom of Prussia. Its nucleus was the march of Brandenburg, the old frontier province against the Slavs across the Elbe, which had grown by conquest Eastward and been united, after the Reformation, with the colonial territory carved out by the Teutonic knights among heathen Prussians beyond the Vistula. Its history expressed itself in the character of the population. The rather thin soil was well cultivated by a hard-working submissive peasantry of German settlers or Slavs conquered and Germanised, bound by a system of serfdom little modified from the extreme mediæval type, under a ruling class of landed proprietors who remembered that they had come in as conquerors.

The government had all the virtues of European absolutism. By the middle of the eighteenth century it had built up an administration and an army extraordinarily efficient for the size and wealth of the territory. Frederick the Great used this instrument to double the extent of his dominions and raise Prussia to the status of a European power. [Footnote: Invasion of Silesia, 1740.] [Silesia had been under the control of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which in 1526 became a constituent state of the Hapsburg Monarchy.] The debâcle at Jena in 1806 and the unwise humiliations to which Napoleon subjected her, only roused the Prussian state to a thorough reconstruction: serfdom was abolished and universal military training invented. The rising of the Prussian population in 1813, when they cast out force by force and broke the French power, really stood for a national movement of the whole German people; and its success was achieved under the leadership of the Prussian government. 1813 marked out Prussia as the tool which was to fashion a new political structure for Germany.

From the Ulmer Münster (14th to 19th century; it survived the bombing raid of December 17 1944); picture credit: Rudolf Schuerer

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Historical novels: Somerset Maugham

I’m glad he has a good word to say about Moravia. Selina Hastings’s new biography of Maugham has had very good reviews and joins several fascinating predecessors, including the reminiscences by his nephew Robin. iTunes has an album of the old man reading two stories, The Three Fat Women of Antibes (the cover art says Ladies) and Gigolo and Gigolette, from a collection called The Mixture as Before (1940).

There are three historical novels that no one reads: The Making of a Saint, A Romance of Medieval Italy (1898), set in the fifteenth century; Then and Now (1946), another Italian novel, about Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia; and Catalina (1948), set in late fifteenth-century Spain under the Inquisition. He more or less disowned The Making of a Saint, although it comes after Liza of Lambeth (the second novel problem). The other two are his final novels.

The Popes

The Catholic Encyclopedia list to Pius X. Wikipedia article on the Encyclopedia.

1. St. Peter (32-67)
2. St. Linus (67-76)
3. St. Anacletus (Cletus) (76-88)
4. St. Clement I (88-97)
5. St. Evaristus (97-105)
6. St. Alexander I (105-115)
7. St. Sixtus I (115-125) Also called Xystus I
8. St. Telesphorus (125-136)
9. St. Hyginus (136-140)
10. St. Pius I (140-155)
11. St. Anicetus (155-166)
12. St. Soter (166-175)
13. St. Eleutherius (175-189)
14. St. Victor I (189-199)
15. St. Zephyrinus (199-217)
16. St. Callistus I (217-22) Callistus and the following three popes were opposed by St. Hippolytus, antipope (217-236)
17. St. Urban I (222-30)
18. St. Pontain (230-35)
19. St. Anterus (235-36)
20. St. Fabian (236-50)
21. St. Cornelius (251-53) Opposed by Novatian, antipope (251)
22. St. Lucius I (253-54)
23. St. Stephen I (254-257)
24. St. Sixtus II (257-258)
25. St. Dionysius (260-268)
26. St. Felix I (269-274)
27. St. Eutychian (275-283)
28. St. Caius (283-296) Also called Gaius
29. St. Marcellinus (296-304)
30. St. Marcellus I (308-309)
31. St. Eusebius (309 or 310)
32. St. Miltiades (311-14)
33. St. Sylvester I (314-35)
34. St. Marcus (336)
35. St. Julius I (337-52)
36. Liberius (352-66) Opposed by Felix II, antipope (355-365)
37. St. Damasus I (366-83) Opposed by Ursicinus, antipope (366-367)
38. St. Siricius (384-99)
39. St. Anastasius I (399-401)
40. St. Innocent I (401-17)
41. St. Zosimus (417-18)
42. St. Boniface I (418-22) Opposed by Eulalius, antipope (418-419)
43. St. Celestine I (422-32)
44. St. Sixtus III (432-40)
45. St. Leo I (the Great) (440-61)
46. St. Hilarius (461-68)
47. St. Simplicius (468-83)
48. St. Felix III (II) (483-92)
49. St. Gelasius I (492-96)
50. Anastasius II (496-98)
51. St. Symmachus (498-514) Opposed by Laurentius, antipope (498-501)
52. St. Hormisdas (514-23)
53. St. John I (523-26)
54. St. Felix IV (III) (526-30)
55. Boniface II (530-32) Opposed by Dioscorus, antipope (530)
56. John II (533-35)
57. St. Agapetus I (535-36) Also called Agapitus I
58. St. Silverius (536-37)
59. Vigilius (537-55)
60. Pelagius I (556-61)
61. John III (561-74)
62. Benedict I (575-79)
63. Pelagius II (579-90)
64. St. Gregory I (the Great) (590-604)
65. Sabinian (604-606)
66. Boniface III (607)
67. St. Boniface IV (608-15)
68. St. Deusdedit (Adeodatus I) (615-18)
69. Boniface V (619-25)
70. Honorius I (625-38)
71. Severinus (640)
72. John IV (640-42)
73. Theodore I (642-49)
74. St. Martin I (649-55)
75. St. Eugene I (655-57)
76. St. Vitalian (657-72)
77. Adeodatus (II) (672-76)
78. Donus (676-78)
79. St. Agatho (678-81)
80. St. Leo II (682-83)
81. St. Benedict II (684-85)
82. John V (685-86)
83. Conon (686-87)
84. St. Sergius I (687-701) Opposed by Theodore and Paschal, antipopes (687)
85. John VI (701-05)
86. John VII (705-07)
87. Sisinnius (708)
88. Constantine (708-15)
89. St. Gregory II (715-31)
90. St. Gregory III (731-41)
91. St. Zachary (741-52)
92. Stephen II (752) Because he died before being consecrated, many authoritative lists omit him
93. Stephen III (752-57)
94. St. Paul I (757-67)
95. Stephen IV (767-72) Opposed by Constantine II (767) and Philip (768), antipopes (767)
96. Adrian I (772-95)
97. St. Leo III (795-816)
98. Stephen V (816-17)
99. St. Paschal I (817-24)
100. Eugene II (824-27)
101. Valentine (827)
102. Gregory IV (827-44)
103. Sergius II (844-47) Opposed by John, antipope (855)
104. St. Leo IV (847-55)
105. Benedict III (855-58) Opposed by Anastasius, antipope (855)
106. St. Nicholas I (the Great) (858-67)
107. Adrian II (867-72)
108. John VIII (872-82)
109. Marinus I (882-84)
110. St. Adrian III (884-85)
111. Stephen VI (885-91)
112. Formosus (891-96)
113. Boniface VI (896)
114. Stephen VII (896-97)
115. Romanus (897)
116. Theodore II (897)
117. John IX (898-900)
118. Benedict IV (900-03)
119. Leo V (903) Opposed by Christopher, antipope (903-904)
120. Sergius III (904-11)
121. Anastasius III (911-13)
122. Lando (913-14)
123. John X (914-28)
124. Leo VI (928)
125. Stephen VIII (929-31)
126. John XI (931-35)
127. Leo VII (936-39)
128. Stephen IX (939-42)
129. Marinus II (942-46)
130. Agapetus II (946-55)
131. John XII (955-63)
132. Leo VIII (963-64)
133. Benedict V (964)
134. John XIII (965-72)
135. Benedict VI (973-74)
136. Benedict VII (974-83) Benedict and John XIV were opposed by Boniface VII, antipope (974; 984-985)
137. John XIV (983-84)
138. John XV (985-96)
139. Gregory V (996-99) Opposed by John XVI, antipope (997-998)
140. Sylvester II (999-1003)
141. John XVII (1003)
142. John XVIII (1003-09)
143. Sergius IV (1009-12)
144. Benedict VIII (1012-24) Opposed by Gregory, antipope (1012)
145. John XIX (1024-32)
146. Benedict IX (1032-45) He appears on this list three separate times, because he was twice deposed and restored
147. Sylvester III (1045) Considered by some to be an antipope
148. Benedict IX (1045)
149. Gregory VI (1045-46)
150. Clement II (1046-47)
151. Benedict IX (1047-48)
152. Damasus II (1048)
153. St. Leo IX (1049-54)
154. Victor II (1055-57)
155. Stephen X (1057-58)
156. Nicholas II (1058-61) Opposed by Benedict X, antipope (1058)
157. Alexander II (1061-73) Opposed by Honorius II, antipope (1061-1072)
158. St. Gregory VII (1073-85) Gregory and the following three popes were opposed by Guibert (“Clement III”), antipope (1080-1100)
159. Blessed Victor III (1086-87)
160. Blessed Urban II (1088-99)
161. Paschal II (1099-1118) Opposed by Theodoric (1100), Aleric (1102) and Maginulf (“Sylvester IV”, 1105-1111), antipopes (1100)
162. Gelasius II (1118-19) Opposed by Burdin (“Gregory VIII”), antipope (1118)
163. Callistus II (1119-24)
164. Honorius II (1124-30) Opposed by Celestine II, antipope (1124)
165. Innocent II (1130-43) Opposed by Anacletus II (1130-1138) and Gregory Conti (“Victor IV”) (1138), antipopes (1138)
166. Celestine II (1143-44)
167. Lucius II (1144-45)
168. Blessed Eugene III (1145-53)
169. Anastasius IV (1153-54)
170. Adrian IV (1154-59)
171. Alexander III (1159-81) Opposed by Octavius (“Victor IV”) (1159-1164), Pascal III (1165-1168), Callistus III (1168-1177) and Innocent III (1178-1180), antipopes
172. Lucius III (1181-85)
173. Urban III (1185-87)
174. Gregory VIII (1187)
175. Clement III (1187-91)
176. Celestine III (1191-98)
177. Innocent III (1198-1216)
178. Honorius III (1216-27)
179. Gregory IX (1227-41)
180. Celestine IV (1241)
181. Innocent IV (1243-54)
182. Alexander IV (1254-61)
183. Urban IV (1261-64)
184. Clement IV (1265-68)
185. Blessed Gregory X (1271-76)
186. Blessed Innocent V (1276)
187. Adrian V (1276)
188. John XXI (1276-77)
189. Nicholas III (1277-80)
190. Martin IV (1281-85)
191. Honorius IV (1285-87)
192. Nicholas IV (1288-92)
193. St. Celestine V (1294)
194. Boniface VIII (1294-1303)
195. Blessed Benedict XI (1303-04)
196. Clement V (1305-14)
197. John XXII (1316-34) Opposed by Nicholas V, antipope (1328-1330)
198. Benedict XII (1334-42)
199. Clement VI (1342-52)
200. Innocent VI (1352-62)
201. Blessed Urban V (1362-70)
202. Gregory XI (1370-78)
203. Urban VI (1378-89) Opposed by Robert of Geneva (“Clement VII”), antipope (1378-1394)
204. Boniface IX (1389-1404) Opposed by Robert of Geneva (“Clement VII”) (1378-1394), Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) (1394-1417) and Baldassare Cossa (“John XXIII”) (1400-1415), antipopes
205. Innocent VII (1404-06) Opposed by Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) (1394-1417) and Baldassare Cossa (“John XXIII”) (1400-1415), antipopes
206. Gregory XII (1406-15) Opposed by Pedro de Luna (“Benedict XIII”) (1394-1417), Baldassare Cossa (“John XXIII”) (1400-1415), and Pietro Philarghi (“Alexander V”) (1409-1410), antipopes
207. Martin V (1417-31)
208. Eugene IV (1431-47) Opposed by Amadeus of Savoy (“Felix V”), antipope (1439-1449)
209. Nicholas V (1447-55)
210. Callistus III (1455-58)
211. Pius II (1458-64)
212. Paul II (1464-71)
213. Sixtus IV (1471-84)
214. Innocent VIII (1484-92)
215. Alexander VI (1492-1503)
216. Pius III (1503)
217. Julius II (1503-13)
218. Leo X (1513-21)
219. Adrian VI (1522-23)
220. Clement VII (1523-34)
221. Paul III (1534-49)
222. Julius III (1550-55)
223. Marcellus II (1555)
224. Paul IV (1555-59)
225. Pius IV (1559-65)
226. St. Pius V (1566-72)
227. Gregory XIII (1572-85)
228. Sixtus V (1585-90)
229. Urban VII (1590)
230. Gregory XIV (1590-91)
231. Innocent IX (1591)
232. Clement VIII (1592-1605)
233. Leo XI (1605)
234. Paul V (1605-21)
235. Gregory XV (1621-23)
236. Urban VIII (1623-44)
237. Innocent X (1644-55)
238. Alexander VII (1655-67)
239. Clement IX (1667-69)
240. Clement X (1670-76)
241. Blessed Innocent XI (1676-89)
242. Alexander VIII (1689-91)
243. Innocent XII (1691-1700)
244. Clement XI (1700-21)
245. Innocent XIII (1721-24)
246. Benedict XIII (1724-30)
247. Clement XII (1730-40)
248. Benedict XIV (1740-58)
249. Clement XIII (1758-69)
250. Clement XIV (1769-74)
251. Pius VI (1775-99)
252. Pius VII (1800-23)
253. Leo XII (1823-29)
254. Pius VIII (1829-30)
255. Gregory XVI (1831-46)
256. Blessed Pius IX (1846-78)
257. Leo XIII (1878-1903)
258. St. Pius X (1903-14)

Popes since 1789

The heart has its reasons

In the field of Psychology [...] the post-Modern Western scientific mind was verifying by observation Pascal’s intuition that “the Heart has its reasons, of which the Reason has no knowledge”. [Footnote: “Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point” (Pascal, B.: Pensées, No. 277, in the text as arranged by L. Brunschvicg). In Pascal’s vocabulary, “the Heart” includes “intuition” as well as “feeling”.]

Post-modern, or -Modern, is a term which may have been coined by Toynbee.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

Amritsar and Lahore

Minnesotan reader, imagine, if you can, that the perversity of human nature has split your splendid state in two, by driving an international frontier in between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Imagine that every Catholic in the United States, north-west of that outrageous line, has had to flee for his life, leaving home, job and professions behind him, and cross the line to live the wretched life of a “displaced person” on the safe side of it. Imagine that every Protestant south-east of the line has had to make the same tragic migration, in the opposite direction. And then imagine that the road traffic across the new frontier has been entirely cut off (there is a no-man’s land, two miles broad, that is forbidden ground for cars traveling in either direction). Railroad traffic still survives, but it has been reduced to a single train a day. The armed guards on board it change, as the fearsome border is crossed. Imagine all this, and you will have pictured to yourself what has happened in real life to that unfortunate country the Panjab and its historic twin cities, Amritsar and Lahore.

Amritsar is a creation of the Sikh religion. The Golden Temple was planted in the wilds, and a secular city grew up around it. But, till the deadly partition in 1947, a Sikh who lived in Amritsar never dreamed that he might be debarred from carrying on his profession in Lahore, while a Muslim who lived in Lahore never dreamed that he might be debarred from owning and cultivating a field in the district of Amritsar. Lahore was the Sikhs’ and Muslims’ common capital; the broad Panjab countryside was the common source of their livelihood.

Why has the rankling memory of an ancient feud impelled these once intermingled communities to sort themselves out at such a dreadful cost to both of them? The fate that they have brought on themselves seems ironic to the foreign inquirer who feels sympathy for both alike; for, as it appears to the outsider, the Sikh faith and Islam have a close affinity with one another. The atmosphere of Amritsar strikes a Western observer as being decidedly Islamic and, indeed, almost Protestant. Hindu worship is a casual, disorderly affair; Sikh worship is as precise and as highly disciplined as the proceedings in a mosque or in a Calvinist church. The Granth Sahib, which is the Sikh Khalsa’s holy scripture, is an anthology in which selections from the works of Kabir and other Muslim mystics find a place beside the works of Guru Nanak, the father of the Sikh faith. And the veneration paid to the Granth Sahib goes beyond the furthest extremes of Protestant Christian bibliolatry. Why could not Sikhs and Muslims – and, for that matter, Hindus as well – go on living side by side in an unpartitioned Panjab? The perversity of human nature is the greatest of the mysteries of human life.

We took that international train and arrived at Lahore, without incident, in advance of the scheduled time. How strange to see Ranjit Singh’s tomb shouldering its way between fort and mosque. It was certainly a provocative act to plant the Sikh warlord’s sculpture at the most sensitive spot in the Muslim quarters of Lahore. But then, who built that magnificently austere imperial masjid, whose courtyard is bigger than that of any other mosque in the sub-continent? The builder was Aurangzeb. And who committed the provocative act of razing the principal Hindu temple in Benares and planting a mosque in its place? Aurangzeb, again. Who else could it be? And so, the tale of wrong and counter-wrong stretches back through a long chain of generations.

As a result of Partition, Lahore has gained in political importance. It is no longer the capital of a unitary Panjab, but it has now become the capital of a unitary Western Pakistan. Yet it is no longer what it was when Kim clambered over the famous cannon (which still stands in its place) in a city that was then still a common home for the followers of three faiths. Amritsar has a surer future, for it will remain the religious centre of the Sikhs so long as the Khalsa endures; and the Sikhs, in losing the Panjab, have gained the world. Today, they are established all over India (above the wheel of every second bus and taxi, you spy that unmistakable bearded and turbaned head). And they have not kept within India’s frontiers. They have made their way eastwards, through Burma and Singapore and Hong Kong, to the Pacific slope of Canada. They are the burliest men on the face of the planet – tough and capable and slightly grim. If human life survives the present chapter of Man’s history, the Sikhs, for sure, will still be on the map.

Amritsar was founded by the fourth Sikh guru, Ram Das, in 1574. The Lahore built by the Mughals, up to the austere Aurangzeb, must have been one of the greatest cities on earth. You can still feel that greatness, although the green city has fallen a long way. The Shalimar Gardens look neglected. The decline is heart-breaking, because it is so obvious what Lahore should be today: a city of open, enlightened Islamic culture and of intellectual and artistic activity generally, on the edge of India, and simultaneously Pakistan’s centre of energy-, IT- and health-related industries and advanced research. It may be all of these things partially.

Lahore was the capital of the province of the Punjab in British India. When India was divided, it went to Pakistan and became the capital of West Punjab. In 1955 the provinces, states and tribal areas of the western half of Pakistan were merged into a unitary province of West Pakistan (Toynbee says Western) and East Bengal was renamed East Pakistan. The capital of West Pakistan was Lahore and of East Pakistan Dhaka. In 1969 Yahya Khan dissolved the one unit system and restored the provinces of West Pakistan. West Punjab became simply Punjab. In 1971 East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh.

With the loss of Lahore to Pakistan, Chandigarh was built as the new capital of the Indian Punjab, with the help of Le Corbusier. In 1966, a Hindi-speaking state, Haryana, was carved out of the eastern and southern part of the Punjab. The western part retained a Punjabi-speaking majority and remained as the Punjab. Chandigarh was on the border and was made a Union Territory in order to serve as the capital of both states.

In 1959 Ayub Khan moved the capital of Pakistan from Karachi, which had been founded as the capital of Sindh by the British in 1843, replacing Hyderabad, to Rawalpindi in the Punjab. He had taken power in the first army coup in the previous year. There was a feeling that too much attention was going to the south. But Rawalpindi, which is about 160 miles from Lahore, was not the capital for long: a site immediately to the north of it was selected for the building of a new city, Islamabad. Work began in 1960 and it became the capital in 1967, but the government did not relocate fully until the ’80s. It was designed by Toynbee’s friend Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis.

How did anyone for a moment believe that the two halves of Pakistan could be a single country or that the western half could be made into a “unitary” province?

Toynbee’s piece on Amritsar and Lahore is quoted in full at sikhchic.com. IJ Singh (New York) says: “One comment by Toynbee should make us sit up and take notice. He says, ‘And the veneration paid to the Granth Sahib goes beyond the furthest extremes of Protestant Christian bibliolatry.’ Yes, this is exactly what we do when we are unable or unwilling to engage the Guru by reading the Guru Granth, but are content to worship it by lamps, air conditioning, ornate rumallas, incense and aarti. This tells us how far we have departed from the message of Sikhi. A telling comment by an astute observer; now, the onus is ours.”

Prem Singh (London) comments: “‘Slightly grim’? Strange to read how others perceive you, isn’t it?”

The Golden Temple (Wikimedia Commons)

East to West, A Journey Round the World, OUP, 1958

A casual affair

Hindu worship is a casual, disorderly affair [...].

East to West, A Journey Round the World, OUP, 1958

Anxiety

Ever since I can remember, I have been conscious of being anxious; my anxiety has prompted much of my action, including many of my creative acts. My anxiety has two causes; I am anxious to play a good and useful part in the society in which I am a participant [is that a cause?]; but I am also anxious for fear that, if I am not preoccupied by mundane activities, I shall find myself spiritually naked and unscreened in the presence of the Ultimate Spiritual Reality that I have encountered, so far, only in two brief experiences. I am taking refuge from a recurrence of these experiences when I immerse myself in work; and this is just as cowardly, and just as frivolous, as turning on the television (a form of escapism which I arrogantly despise). Here I am confessing my agreement that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” [Hebrews 10:31]. This is strange because, when I am thinking rationally, I am a religious agnostic.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, second edition, with a previously unpublished essay, Gropings in the Dark, written in September 1973 after the completion of Mankind and Mother Earth, and a new Preface, May 1978, by Veronica Toynbee, OUP, 1979, posthumous

Funeral march

On 11 11 1918 at 11 am, Paris time, the Armistice treaty between the Allies and Germany came into effect. The tectonic plates of history had moved. And at that moment in the day on the nearest Sunday in all subsequent years there has been a two-minute silence in a ceremony at Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall.

And there, afterwards, a mysterious march is played.

The silence is marked by a field gun on Horse Guards Parade at the beginning, as Big Ben strikes eleven, and at the end. The wind thuds against BBC microphones. Then Royal Marines buglers sound the Last Post. The royal family lays wreaths in silence. When the time comes for politicians and Commonwealth representatives and others to lay theirs, something called “Beethoven’s funeral march” is announced.

Here is part of the 2009 ceremony last Sunday. The march starts at 3:00. It’s played a little faster than usual.

Anyone who grew up in England in the ’60s, when there were only two channels and few live events, will have seen or heard this moving broadcast. Many veterans of the Great War took part. That war’s last survivor living in the UK died this year.

It was presented as a public, a state, occasion. I think it still is. There are still no cuts to grieving mothers.

What is the march?

I was struck by much of the music as a boy, but especially by “Beethoven’s funeral march”. But for as long as I’ve had a sense of what Beethoven wrote, I’ve asked myself “what Beethoven funeral march, for heaven’s sake?”. If this is by Beethoven, why do we never hear about it on any other occasion? Why was it not included in the Deutsche Grammophon edition in 1970? Why is it never recorded? It’s a remarkable piece of music, a sort of funereal fantasia, with its commanding opening upbeat and haunting refrain. But Beethoven wrote only two funeral marches that anyone has heard of. The famous one is in the Eroica. The other is in the twelfth piano sonata, from a year or two earlier, which is a kind of dry run for the tune, before he split its atom in the symphony.

You can hear sketches for the Eroica march here at a site (you can’t spend less than an hour there) called The Unheard Beethoven. (This is the march, if it wasn’t an orchestration of Chopin’s, which used to interrupt normal radio broadcasts in totalitarian countries when a leader died, before the nervous apparatchiks had steeled themselves to make the formal announcement.)

There is a third march, but it is never called one. It is a fragment of a funeral march, which Beethoven throws in, with hair-raising effect, in the coda of the first movement of the ninth symphony. It appears in the woodwind, and is overwhelmed by falling and rising chromatic cellos and basses and then full strings before the conclusion.

In the BBC broadcast this year, the Cenotaph march was still being announced as “Beethoven’s funeral march”. I googled this a few years ago, before the Internet was up to much, and couldn’t solve the problem. Now I can. It isn’t Beethoven, though it used to be attributed to him as WoO Anhang 13. Even then, it was never recorded. It was sometimes called “Beethoven’s funeral march no 1”. (What was no 2?) It was played as such at the funeral of Edward VII.

The march is actually by Johann Heinrich Walch. Walch wrote many marches. The allies marched into Paris in 1814 to the tune of his Pariser Einzugsmarsch and the Germans used it in their victory parade there in 1940. It’s a rather trivial piece. You can find it on iTunes, but you can’t find the funeral march which is worthy of Beethoven. Nobody knows who wrote the Last Post, but that could be Beethoven too.

The War Game 3

I predicted that the YouTube clips of The War Game in my November 1 post would not be available for long and they have already been removed. This is petty-minded of the BBC, which has earned enough by now by licensing the film it refused to show on television, while the film’s maker, Peter Watkins, has earned nothing. The BBC’s public service remit alone should require it to disseminate it free of charge. You can probably get it on other sites.

The War Game

The War Game 2

A place in the sun

As well as “Yellow Peril”, Kaiser Wilhelm II coined the phrase “place in the sun”, Platz an der Sonne, which Toynbee quoted.

It came into a speech on June 18 1901 during the Lower Elbe Regatta, addressed to the Bürgermeister of Hamburg and others on board the passenger steamship Prinzessin Victoria Luise of the Hamburg-Amerika line.

“In spite of the fact that we have no such fleet as we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun [in Africa, the Pacific and China]. It will now be my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed possession, in order that the sun’s rays may fall fruitfully upon our activity and trade in foreign parts, that our industry and agriculture may develop within the state and our sailing sports upon the water, for our future lies upon the water. The more Germans go out upon the waters, whether it be in races or regattas, whether it be in journeys across the ocean, or in the service of the battle flag, so much the better it will be for us.

“For when the German has once learned to direct his glance upon what is distant and great, the pettiness which surrounds him in daily life on all sides will disappear. Whoever wishes to have this larger and freer outlook can find no better place than one of the Hanseatic cities. … We are now making efforts to do what, in the old time, the Hanseatic cities could not accomplish, because they lacked the vivifying and protecting power of the empire. May it be the function of my Hansa during many years of peace to protect and advance commerce and trade!

“As head of the Empire I therefore rejoice over every citizen, whether from Hamburg, Bremen, or Lübeck, who goes forth with this large outlook and seeks new points where we can drive in the nail on which to hang our armour. Therefore, I believe that I express the feeling of all your hearts when I recognize gratefully that the director of this company who has placed at our disposal the wonderful ship which bears my daughter’s name has gone forth as a courageous servant of the Hansa, in order to make for us friendly conquests whose fruits will be gathered by our descendants!”

Alfred von Tirpitz had been appointed Secretary of State of the Navy in 1897 and held the office through the naval arms race with Britain, until 1916.

On the night of December 16 1906 the Prinzessin Victoria Luise had departed from Kingston, Jamaica, while on a cruise, when her captain mistook one lighthouse for another and grounded her. The passengers were safely disembarked on the following morning. The captain remained on the vessel after the evacuation, retreated to his cabin, and shot himself. A German Admiralty court posthumously found him negligent in May in the following year. Salvage operations began immediately after the grounding, but waves caused further damage. The ship was declared a total loss on December 19.

Consecrating a memorial to German sailors, January 4 1891, Samoa. The territory became a German protectorate in 1900. Flickr credit: National Library of New Zealand.

~~~

In Saudi Arabia, where access is difficult. Back November 10.

The Yellow Peril

The first ripples of Chinese migration are already striking upon the East Indies, Australia and the Pacific sea-board of North America, and the brutality with which these states are repelling this peaceful, casual invasion shows how terribly they dread the pressure to come. Forcible exclusion will succeed for the present, because China still lies in the grip of a thousand years’ political paralysis; but the power of movement is already returning to her limbs. The fundamental factor of world-politics during the next century will be the competition between China and the new commonwealths. China will strive to reorganise her national life, and to bring all her immeasurable latent strength to bear on the effort to win her “place in the Sun” (a more titanic struggle this than Germany’s present endeavour): the others will make haste to swell the ranks of their white population till they can muster enough defenders to man the wide boundaries of the inheritance they have marked out for themselves, and become strong enough either to fling back China’s onset or to deter her from making it at all. All the threatened nations – Canada, the U.S.A., the South American republics, New Zealand and Australia – will draw together into a league, to preserve the Pacific from Chinese domination. Japan will probably join their ranks, for she is the Great Britain of the China Seas, and, just like ourselves, would be menaced most seriously by the emergence of a World-power on the continent opposite her island country. Russia, who has not even a strip of sea to protect her, but is China’s immediate continental neighbour along a vast land-frontier, will actually be the chief promoter of this defensive entente, for she will be exposed to the first brunt of the Chinese attack.

This was a common set of predictions in the early twentieth century. Toynbee does not use the phrase Yellow Peril, which seems to have been coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895. He commissioned a picture with this title from Hermann Knackfuß depicting the Archangel Michael leading an allegorical Germany against an Asiatic threat represented by a golden Buddha and ordered it to be hung in ships of the Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher Lloyd lines. Strangely enough, I can find only a low resolution image of it online: here it is. The phrase was often used in English in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. I am told that my German grandfather (1886-1964) occasionally used it.

Angel Island

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Welshmen and Bretons

A Welshman resident in Jersey once told the author that he was able to carry on a Keltic conversation with the Breton peasant women who came over from the mainland for a fair; yet though the Welsh and Breton dialects are so little differentiated, there is no common consciousness whatever between the populations that speak them.

The Breton is as good a Frenchman as the Welshman is a “Britisher.” The Welshman is distinguished within the general British mass not so much by his language as by his Nonconformity, which he shares with an important class of the whole English-speaking population: the Breton is a clerical, like his French-speaking Vendéan neighbour, not because of his Keltic speech, but because he is a peasant [as the picture below suggests] and inhabits a district remote from the centres of French national life.

Why dialect, not language? Because a dialect can be a different language which is culturally or socially subordinate to a standard language. It does not have to be a variant of a language (was he thinking about a meta-Celtic?).

Breton traders travelled further than Jersey. From the early nineteenth century until the 1960s many toured England as onion sellers or johnnies. Seventy onion johnnies died when the steamer SS Hilda sank at Saint-Malo in 1905. There’s a photograph online of one in Renfrewshire. They were often from the area around Roscoff. They used to call on us on their bicycles in the London suburb where I grew up.

Of course, the whole of Europe was a pattern of itinerant traders, which could be mapped.

Secondary picture source: Telegraph

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Historical sentiment

Above all we must be on our guard against “historical sentiment,” that is, against arguments taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but which are no longer real at the present moment. They are most easily illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the annexation of Tripoli as “recovering the soil of the Fatherland” because it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of Macedonia is claimed by Greek chauvinists on the one hand, because it contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ohhrida, in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the tenth century A.D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the “Emathian Conqueror,” on which the modern Greek nationalist insists so strongly.

And see Zionism. Emathia was the Homeric name of lower Macedonia.

Nationality and the War, Dent, 1915

Tusa’s 1989

1989: Day by Day. BBC Radio 4, from news archives. Doesn’t cover the whole year. Started on October 5 and runs until January 3 in 91 5-minute segments. There is a Sunday omnibus edition. He did something similar with 1968 last year.

The War Game 2

Citizens of West European countries were haunted [in the post-war world] by fears that some American decision, in which the West European peoples might have had no say, might inadvertently bring Russian atomic missiles hurtling down on Dutch, Danish, French, and British heads. Such West European fears of dire consequences descending upon Western Europe as unintended by-products of some impulsive American retort to some provocative Russian act of aggression were anxieties that might or might not be well founded, but their currency in Western Europe was a fact, and this psychological fact exposed a constitutional flaw in the structure of a commonwealth of Western nations in which all the partners, with the crucial exception of one partner whose “fiat” was “law”, were exposed to the risk of being involved in a perhaps irretrievable catastrophe as a consequence of decisions in which they might have had no voice, on issues in which, for them, the stakes were life and death.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

The War Game

The films about the possible end of human life that we are being asked to watch now (October 29 and 30 posts) are divertissements compared with the docudrama that I was made to watch at school in 1968 or ’69.

Peter Watkins’s The War Game (UK, 1965) was intended for the BBC, but “The effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.”

The final passage must be the bleakest ever filmed. More below.



The War Game had been scheduled for transmission on August 6 1966, the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack. The BBC decided in November 1965 not to show it. Watkins asked it to allow a limited release in cinemas. This compromise was approved in March 1966. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament arranged many of the early screenings in the UK, and the film was seen on US college campuses in 1966 and ’67. It represented the UK in the 1966 Venice Film Festival and won an Academy Award in the same year. The BBC did not show it until 1985.

Watkins left Britain soon after making The War Game. He has been forgotten there and now lives in Sweden. Wikipedia links are at the top of this post. Here is his website.

The BBC retains all rights to the film, wherever shown. Consequently, these YouTube clips may not survive for long.

The scenario.

The US authorises tactical nuclear warfare against the Chinese, who have invaded American-occupied South Vietnam. Russia and East Germany threaten to invade West Berlin if the US does not withdraw that decision. The US does not acquiesce. Two US Army divisions attempt to fight their way into East Berlin, but the Russian and East German forces defeat them. The US launches a pre-emptive, NATO tactical nuclear attack on the eastern bloc. We are not told on what targets. Russian missiles strike Britain.

The story’s centre is Rochester in Kent, which is struck by an off-target missile aimed at Heathrow airport. Other targets mentioned are RAF Manston and the Maidstone barracks. The credits at the end tell us that much of the film was based on information obtained from the bombings of Dresden, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from the 1954 Nevada Desert nuclear tests.

The film contains a quotation from Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem Song for Three Soldiers:

“Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,
With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,
With weapons so deadly the world must grow older
And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?”

(It was a line of Benét’s poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown’s history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.)

The other anti-war film we were shown in the same school hall at roughly the same time was Joseph Losey’s King and Country (UK, 1964).

Watkins