Imagining Germany from Abroad: The View from Britain and the United States: A Joint Preface

Abstract

All nation-states are creations of physical topography, historical circumstance, political claims and cultural imagination. A country's identity may be the result of its material place, legal self-understanding and (invented) national traditions, but it is also defined by certain founding myths and historical associations born of dreams and distance. The histories of the United States, Liberia and Israel are obvious examples, in that their territories have become mythic ‘landscapes of memory’ in their own right for many around the world, even among those who have never been there. Germany is also a noteworthy case in this respect, having served as a protean figure of envy, friendship and horror in Anglo-American culture for the last one hundred and fifty years. To be sure, the Germans have served as a source of foreign curiosity ever since Tacitus, yet it was the nineteenth-century rise of Prussia, the creation of the Second Reich in 1871 and the new nation's growing industrial muscle that lent the Anglo-American gaze across the continent a decidedly new and nervous edge. And given the way that Germany a few decades later altered, threatened and summarily destroyed the lives of tens of millions of people across the globe in two world wars and the Holocaust, it is small wonder that Germany became a subject of relentless concern and commentary. Ever since the late nineteenth century the changing perception of Germany in the Anglo-American world has been held up as a dark mirror of civilization itself, in that the study of Germany apparently told us as much about ourselves as it did about ‘the Germans’. After 1945 Britons and Americans reworked German history both as a Cold War cautionary tale about the frailties of Western political culture and as a lens through which to examine the virtues and vices of their own cultures. Indeed, the task of understanding Germany and the Germans emerged as one of most vigorous academic cottage industries of the last century. Whatever its merits, this scholarly preoccupation was largely driven by the assumption that German history was far too important to be left to the Germans.