Germania

by Simon Winder

  However clean-limbed and magnificent this fresh surge of British might and main appeared to repulsive figures such as Cecil Rhodes and the imperial grandee Lord Milner (himself, very oddly, German in fact, from Hesse-Darmstadt), the effect elsewhere was less than happy, allowing politicians around the world to take out of the cupboard and give a polish to the standard figure of the violent and hypocritical Englishman. Kaiser Wilhelm and many others gagged with rage and disgust at this sort of piracy which they would themselves love to have engaged in but which British power ruled out.

  I won’t talk about French fighting in Morocco or south-east Asia, or the Italian invasion of Libya or the British revenge expedition to Sudan (where Mahdist prisoners were summarily executed and the Mahdi’s tomb dynamited) or the British invasion of Tibet. I have already talked about the International Expedition to lay waste to parts of China. These are all only interesting here because it is clear that European states were more than happy to use their armies and continued to see them as legitimate instruments of state will in a variety of circumstances which we would find surprising – or we would like to think of ourselves as finding surprising.

  In this context Germany certainly has a worrying enthusiasm for soldiers, but not to an excessive degree – a larger percentage of Frenchmen were in uniform, the British had a larger navy, the Russian rearmament plans after the defeat by Japan threatened to dwarf everyone. Only the Austrians, because of political division and their weak industrial basis, were unable to keep up, giving their stumbling pre-1914 presence a sort of poignancy celebrated by writers such as Joseph Roth. But as usual with incompetence, its pleasures only get you so far: if the Austrians could have been militarily more vicious then they undoubtedly would have been – indeed during the Second World War the German Austrians who briefly moved back to administer parts of their old empire showed no feebleness at all. All these were societies that worshipped uniforms, fawned on the reminiscences of those who had been in battle and taught their children about military glory and sacrifice. They expressed this with different emphases but not on any visible moral sliding scale that would put any specific country, like, say, Britain, higher. Nobody entered the war in 1914 with anything other than a strong sense of the seriousness of the situation – it was not a frivolous throw of the dice. But none, of course, had the remotest sense of the nightmare outcome and all viewed military conflict as a state’s highest test rather than as something which might destroy Europe.

  This is a personally humiliating story, but I may as well wade in all the way at this point. Aged nineteen I went on a walking holiday in the Lake District with some friends. An odd mixture of The Famous Five and sexual tension, we went up various hills and then came down them again before wandering into a newsagent for some snacks. There we were greeted with the news that Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands. I had hardly heard of the Falklands but – and I am not exaggerating – I wanted to volunteer to fight! Quite unknown to my outwardly scornful persona, a little Lord Milner had been nurtured within. Those years of sleeping in school dormitories named after Wellington and Churchill, those Commando comics, those history books, had been making me into a ludicrous sort of nationalist. I wanted Buenos Aires to be reduced to acres of smouldering and irradiated rubble – a lesson to the world for future generations that nobody but nobody could defy Great Britain, take over a small piece of sub-Antarctic scrub and get away with it.

  Now, separately I should say that I am not making light of what was a grotesque defiance of international law – the resulting war turned out to be in almost everyone’s best interests. But my more narrow point is that whenever I read about the opening of the First World War I tend to think of myself standing in the Lake District, trying to find a recruiting station. The cause there was remote and irrelevant, my desirability as a recruit zero and the possibility of signing up non-existent. The competitive imperial European framework which channelled and was channelled by such urges had disappeared years before, and yet as a feebleminded footnote, at just the right age to be recruited, here I was crazily chewing on nationalist uppers. This sort of response and the degree to which it could be fed by newspapers became something almost out of the control of European leaders as the nineteenth century progressed. It was something politicians were intimately aware of and which they manipulated but which created a substantial, patriotic public sphere of a kind that was fickle and powerful. The hysteria in Germany that greeted the battles of the 1860s was a mere taster for the public appetite by the 1910s. The political system was based around an emperor and a hierarchical military on one side and a restive but patriotic set of civilian politicians on the other. This arrangement had endured, at peace for a generation and with figures such as Wilhelm II or Moltke the Younger only dimly aware of the forces which too much stress on the existing system could unleash.

  A taste of the excitement felt in Germany at the outbreak of war (and there are comparable pictures for all the major belligerents) can be found in Heinrich Hoffmann’s famous photograph of the Odeonsplatz in Munich. This great public space was even at that time already so freighted with meaning as to invite total personal collapse. Along one side of the square is the Bavarian Electors’ palace from which so many generally ill-advised wars had been launched and so many dynastic deals scrooged over. Opposite is the Theatine Church, built in the late seventeenth century in thanks for the long-awaited birth of an heir to the Electorate, who turned out to be Maximilian II Emanuel – a great fighter of the Turks and patron of the arts, but famous in Britain as the Bavarian ruler crushingly defeated by the Duke of Marlborough at the battles of Blenheim and then Ramillies. The church built to celebrate his birth also proved to be the church in which he was buried, along with a mixed crew of often equally unfortunate descendants. The other, enclosed south wall of the Odeonsplatz holds the Field Marshals’ Hall, built as one of King Ludwig I’s enjoyable monuments of the 1840s. Only two field marshals are in fact featured, scraped together from Bavaria’s awkward history: Tilly (actually from Belgium), the unappealing ‘Monk in Armour’, hammer of Protestantism in the Thirty Years War, and Karl Philipp von Wrede (actually from Heidelberg), who in the Napoleonic Wars managed to fight first against the French, then for the French and then against the French again (when he was beaten one last time by Napoleon at the Battle of Hanau).

  At the centre of the Field Marshals’ Hall was one further monument – a striking group of statues commemorating the Franco-Prussian War, which would have been stared at by everyone in the frenzied crowd in Hoffmann’s remarkable photo, a sea of waving hands and hats. To have been in that crowd, cheering the most exciting historical moment in generations, surrounded by reverent symbols of the Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars and the mythic war which had a generation before destroyed France and created the Second Reich: it must have been quite extraordinary. The photo is famous both as a quintessential image of the nationalistic derangement that swept Europe, but also because of a conversation after the war between Hoffmann and the local Munich agitator Adolf Hitler, who said that he had himself been in the Odeonsplatz on that day. After meticulously combing through each face in the picture Hoffmann indeed found Hitler – and there he is, with a long moustache, a dark hat and an ecstatic expression.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Failure » The British–German divorce » Disaster »

  Defeat and revolution » Remembering the dead »

  Some royal aftershocks

  Failure

  Franz Ferdinand spent some twenty-five years of his adult life waiting for the Emperor Franz Josef to die. As with Crown Prince Friedrich in Germany (or less dramatically Britain’s very own Prince Charles) he was cursed by the pampered longevity of the reigning monarch. Franz Ferdinand worked on elaborate and quite possibly successful plans for a United States of Austria to replace the existing chaos of the Habsburg Empire, using federalism to defuse nationalism. Through Franz Josef’s incredible staying power (ineffectuall
y on the throne since 1848), Franz Ferdinand was reduced to doing such time-filling things as visiting Sarajevo, the chief city of Austria-Hungary’s newest colony, the former Ottoman territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina. It turned out that, through incredible bad luck (the Serbia-backed assassins were barely competent), all Franz Ferdinand’s years of preparation turned out only to be for his own death.

  The outrage among other monarchs was immediate and genuine – many had known Franz Ferdinand well and shared his impatience with the dotard Franz Joseph. He was a serious and important figure and his death the single clearest outrage since the assassinations of King Umberto I of Italy and President McKinley of the USA well over a decade before, but with far more profound international implications. From the German point of view the killing had everyone excitedly brushing off military planning charts. The risk was that if the Austrians took military reprisals against Serbia then this would force the Russians to come to the latter’s assistance. This would then require France to honour its alliance with Russia and either the Germans could sit by and watch their major European ally get torn apart or they could face the inevitable and mobilize.

  The curse that hung over the German empire was that it was relatively less important than its neighbours. No matter how many giant smelting plants, dreadnoughts, chemical works or monstrous statues of Bismarck it built, Germany’s essential provincialism remained. The motor that ruined European culture was not the overbearing might of Germany but its relative marginality. France, Russia and Britain all had enormous overseas empires which they valued highly and were very sensitive about: Russia and Britain had settled their differences over Central Asia and Britain and France over Africa, and while Germany was slightly involved in some of these discussions she was never more than a fun extra. After years of mutual hostility Britain had also finally decided she could never realistically fight the United States and – in perhaps one of the twentieth century’s key decisions – downgraded her Canadian naval bases and thereby freed up many ships and staff for a future war elsewhere. This decision, among others, allowed for ever closer cooperation between Britain and America of a kind which Germany could not even start to interfere with. France could never work with Germany as long as Alsace-Lorraine remained in German hands and therefore took a great pleasure in its ostentatious alliance with Russia in the sure knowledge that this was Germany’s worst nightmare. Massive French investment in Russia oriented Russia under all circumstances away from Germany (with whom the Russians had often been entirely friendly in the past). So, far from being the monster of legend, Germany was left with an army that had not been used properly in most Germans’ living memory and which was aggressively encircled, with only Austria-Hungary and perhaps Italy and Turkey (another focus of German investment) as possible allies. Undoubtedly the Germans’ cheerless and futile diplomatic aggressiveness played a part in making the atmosphere worse in the years running up to 1914, but all these manoeuvres had gained for them was a cementing of all their European enemies’ relationships, and the cession to them by the French of a small area of the Congo basin (New Kamerun – a political entity even shorter lived than the French Revolutionary-era South Prussia).

  All the mainland European countries could see circumstances emerging when it would make sense to use their armies and they all ran through elaborate military plans to destroy their opponents. These would use resources swollen dropsically by industrialization to a level unimagined when Western European fighting had ended in 1871. But as to who would prevail, it was really anybody’s guess – nobody, except perhaps some of the Austrians, declared war thinking they would actually lose.

  The Germans had created a plan that would allow them to defeat France quickly, as they had done in 1870, but on a much grander scale – and then switch to defeat Russia in turn. What had not been planned for was how Britain might feel in the event of such a war. The Germans worked on the basis that British declarations of neutrality were genuine. They were aware that Britain was not obliged by treaty to assist France, that Britain had been benignly neutral in the 1860s and 1870s and that the numerous links between the British and German royal families implied a community of interest. This assumption was shared by many British too, but neither side fully realized just how much damage Tirpitz’s naval arms race had done and how, in a serious crisis, this corrosive sense of German hostility had brought Britain and France very close. A universal recklessness and a specifically German itch to take on Russia and France before they became even more powerful lies at the centre of 1914, but Britain’s failure to show her hand until too late was also fatal. It is probably fair to say that with British involvement the German battle plans simply made no sense. Germany was stuck in the middle of Central Europe and indeed among the first British hostile acts of the war was cutting the Germans’ cable links to the rest of the world and the effortless destruction of their global radio network, leaving the planet’s communication system in British hands. Germany had managed to antagonize Britain through her naval and colonial ambitions but never had a serious plan to deal with the result of such – as it turned out – futile posturing. Military planning for a British intervention was a sub-set of the plan to defeat France and Russia: and the hope that this latter could be done so fast that Britain’s ability over the long-term to use its navy to starve Germany to death would prove irrelevant.

  The endlessly interesting Museum of the First World War, a sub-museum of the immortal Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt, dramatizes the autumn of 1914 in an appealing contemporary map, not as the story of the Schlieffen Plan (by which the Germans failed to defeat the French army), but as the story of the successful defence of Germany against simultaneous French and Russian invasion. This Looking-Glass Land epic is deeply confusing to those such as me, brought up on the Look & Learn Book of the First World War. As soon as war was declared, the French hurled themselves into Alsace-Lorraine and the Russians into East Prussia – the exact situation which the Germans had been having kittens over for a generation. As it turned out the Russians were able to mobilize armies with such speed that the whole German idea of defeating first France and then Russia was reduced to rubbish within days. The small bits of German territory held by the French and Russians proved delusive (although mass panics in East Prussia had Germans in wagons streaming down the roads in a sneak preview of 1944). The French managed to spend a couple of days in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse/Mühlhausen, provoking hysterical scenes of joy in Paris, but were then pushed out again. The total failure of the French invasion (the unconfident, havering-sounding ‘Plan XVII’) in practice doomed the German army, as the French survivors (who might with success have otherwise carried on marching off into a fairly pointless corner of Germany) were then redeployed back into France to contribute to the Battle of the Marne. The series of devastating encounters in the east known as the Battle of Tannenberg, after early anxieties, wound up destroying two entire Russian armies, removing any threat of invasion from the east. The battle made the reputation of the two commanders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who were ultimately to become the military dictators of the latter part of the war and at different points crucial, both unwillingly and willingly, in easing Hitler’s path to power.

  In a fit of the medievalism that makes Germany so unappealing it was called Tannenberg, despite that town not really featuring in the fighting, to match the titanic Battle of Tannenberg fought between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish-Lithuanians in the early fifteenth century and which broke the power of the Knights. Through some insane logic this battle was therefore seen as righting an ancient wrong, as the Germans at last conquered the Slav hordes. Tannenberg implied to the Germans that they were living in a new heroic age – that annihilatory battles of the old Königgrätz/Sedan type were still possible and that everyone could buy into a war which promised further such heroics. It also fatally distracted many Germans from the full meaning of the Battle of the Marne in the following week, which in practice ended any such prospect of future heroism and
aborted the invasion of France. Tannenberg lived on in all kinds of ways – as an event marked with fervour by East Prussians as their deliverance from Russian slavery, as a key piece of the Nazis’ mythology on the Eastern Front (soon overlain by their own victories) and in all kinds of nooks and corners – from a beautiful but disturbingly Nazi ‘Tannenberg’ typeface designed after Hitler came to power to the Tannenberg Street in Berlin where Nabokov forced the Russian émigré protagonist of his novel The Gift to live.

  Ultimately, as the First World War progressed, Russia was devastated, humiliated and cut apart by German troops before falling under communist dictatorship. Russia therefore appeared to be a long way from the superpower envisaged by German military planners before 1914, although on the way down she did manage to destroy the Habsburg Empire. If the First World War wound up being lost by the Germans, it had not been lost in the east and the temporary appearance of immense German-run colonies in places such as Ukraine in 1917 implied a might-have-been future which was to have a delusive and misleading effect on Nazi planners who, on the basis of what seemed like good evidence, felt they could achieve the same or better in 1941.

  The British–German divorce

  The alienation between Britain and Germany turned out, to everybody’s surprise, to be the disastrous main theme of the first half of twentieth-century European history. Nobody involved in any of the fighting from 1914 onwards was in a position to think like this, so it is a useless supposition: but nonetheless if Britain had been neutral in 1914 it is hard to see how Germany could not have won the war in a fairly conventional way in a couple of years, thereby sparing Europe the unlimited disasters that followed. After all, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War almost everyone just got on with their lives, buying stuff and having families – and a Europe dominated by the Germany of 1914 would have been infinitely preferable to a Europe dominated by the Germany of 1939.