Britain and Germany: Europe’s original special relationship

Great Powers: A History of Britain and Germany, Jan Rüger, Allen Lane, £40.

The Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ is well known, if often derided, but as Jan Rüger’s splendid new book reminds us, the original special relationship was that between Britain and Germany. As the author says at the outset, the story needs to be told not least to provide a corrective to the more familiar Franco-German partnership in Europe. Rüger is well qualified for the task, having written highly regarded studies of the Anglo-German naval rivalry and the little island of Heligoland in the North Sea, whose history was a microcosm of the relations between the two countries.

The author begins with the evolution of Anglo-German relations from the accession of the Elector of Hanover as George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1714 to the 1860s. George owed his throne to the British elites’ determination to have a Protestant successor to Queen Anne, shutting out the Jacobites and French. During this period, Britain and the German states, especially Prussia, were more often than not allied against France. During the Seven Years War (1756-63), Frederick the Great of Prussia became a popular hero in Britain. German migrants, such as the Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch), were prominent in the settlement of British North America. This political, human and dynastic symbiosis found its most visible expression in the King’s German Legion, a formation recruited mainly from the Hanoverian lands of George III, which served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars, especially at Waterloo.

There was always, though, Rüger stresses, something highly ambivalent about the relationship, which featured both attraction and repulsion. Britons in the 18th-century might have taken their monarch from Germany, but many of them were determined not to take his alleged absolutist ways along with him. Germans of the 19th century were in awe of Britain, though some, including the Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismarck and the scholar-politician Rudolf von Gneist, were determined not to repeat what they saw as the great mistake of Victorian Britain, where, so they believed, rash franchise reforms had compromised the integrity of the Westminster system.

We have become accustomed to think of what the historian Paul Kennedy called ‘the rise of the Anglo-German antagonism’ as something which inevitably followed from their growing commercial rivalry in the late 19th century. Rüger will have none of this, arguing that ‘there was no automatism that drove Wilhelmine Germany to challenge Britain’. Instead, he blames a series of decisions by a group of men, such as Admiral Tirpitz, appointed by Emperor Wilhelm II.

The latter’s belief that creating a substantial German navy would force Britain into an alliance against Russia and France, or at least to stay neutral, misfired badly. London outbuilt the Germans and the resulting ill feeling helped to deepen the estrangement from Berlin.

The next half century is well known. Britain and Germany went to war in 1914, a traumatic rupture for the very large German community in Britain, but also for the smaller number of Britons who had chosen to live in Germany, mainly for cultural reasons. After Germany’s defeat, Adolf Hitler failed to convince the British that they had been manipulated by Jews into a war with their Nordic brethren. When the other great ‘Anglo-Saxon’ power, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s United States, openly came out against the Third Reich, Hitler accelerated his quest for Lebensraum to balance the two colossi. This second contest ended even more disastrously than the first. By 1945, British forces had not only heavily damaged many large German cities, but advanced into the heart of the Reich.

Britain’s postwar occupation zone was the most populous one. Here Rüger describes the initial interactions well, though I would have liked to see more on the role of the British Army of the Rhine. This was a substantial force running exercises such as the massive ‘Lionheart’, which mobilised more than 130,000 British regulars, reservists and territorials for a simulated ‘invasion’ of Europe, into the 1980s.

Rüger’s penultimate chapter is aptly entitled ‘Reunion’. It describes the slow postwar rapprochement with the new Federal Republic of Germany. As Rüger reminds us, though, this process was punctuated with outbursts of anxiety on the British side about West Germany’s economic prowess. In 1989-90, Margaret Thatcher tried to halt German Reunification.

Much of the coming together was conducted under the auspices of first the European Economic Community, which the United Kingdom joined, with strong West German support, in 1973, and then of the European Union. Here the Federal Republic had some leverage, because its support was key to getting the French veto on Britain’s entry lifted.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Brexit – which Rüger predictably strongly opposes – should have been such a traumatic event for Germany and the Germans. None other than the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told Parliament in January 2017, seven months after the referendum, that ‘of all the countries in the EU and the rest of Europe that care about our departure, I would say that it is certainly the Germans who have been most psychologically and emotionally affected’.

All this is conveyed in lucid prose, with many fun facts. I didn’t know, for example, that the first bilingual German-English dictionary was published in 1716. There are also many compelling anecdotes and setpieces. My favourite is the fraught first visit of the eminent Jewish theatre critic Alfred Kerr – father of the children’s writer Judith Kerr – to Hamburg after many years of exile in Britain. He attended a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the city theatre, was mobbed by well-wishers afterwards, and had a stroke on returning to the iconic Hotel Atlantic. ‘It [the performance] wasn’t that bad,’ Kerr joked on regaining consciousness.

The historical judgements are generally sound. For example, while dealing with the aftermath of German Unification in 1871, when Disraeli referred to a ‘revolution’ in Europe, Rüger rightly remarks that this was intended to describe not fear of a united Germany but rather fear of how Russia would take advantage of the abasement of France. Though Rüger draws on archival material from across the centuries, he mostly relies on the voluminous secondary literature, which is cited as generously as is reasonable to expect in a book of this nature.

If one were to criticise this powerful book historically, it might be for not going back further at the start. England’s preoccupation with the Thirty Years War, for example, was a major contributory factor in the outbreak of hostilities between King and Parliament. The author’s argument that both Britain and Germany have been powers of broadly similar strength – ‘middle-sized’ powers – since the mid-1950s takes no account of the vast differences in terms of military reach and nuclear capability. With respect to the recent past, readers will differ on Rüger’s assessment of Brexit, but the only really questionable judgement is his claim that, in departing the EU, the UK has ‘not only left the world’s largest free trade zone’ but also ‘withdrawn from the most important safeguard of collective security Europe produced since the Congress of Vienna’. That safeguard is and was NATO, of which the UK is still the most important European member.

In the end, though, these are minor quibbles. Jan Rüger has written a work of remarkable scope, erudition and relevance, which should be required reading in boardrooms, ministries and chancelleries across Germany and the United Kingdom.