Martin Schramm. Das Deutschlandbild in der britischen Presse 1912-1919. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007. 598 pp. EUR 69.80 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-05-004422-4.
Reviewed by Thomas Weber (Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies, Harvard University & Department of History, University of Aberdeen)
Published on H-German (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
The British Press and Germany in the Era of World War I
The First World War was, in Niall Ferguson's words, the world's "first media war."[1] Indeed, in Mein Kampf (1925), Adolf Hitler famously attributed British success and German defeat in the Great War to superior British propaganda. Yet, our understanding of this media war, as well as of the role of the press in instigating the war in the first place, has been extremely limited. For starters, we know very little about the British press outside of London. When most historians speak about the British press, they really refer to the Times and a small number of other London newspapers. We know even less about the German press due to the extreme fragmentation of the German media. What is more, our knowledge of interactions between journalists on the one hand and politicians, the armed forces, the royal family, and the electorate on the other has been piecemeal. In other words, there has been little discussion, and even less agreement, over the question of how (and if) the press actually mattered. Martin Schramm's meticulously researched book now fills the first of these two gaps in the history of early-twentieth-century Europe in a superb manner, while attempting to address as well the question of whether and how the British press constituted the "fourth estate" of the British state.
With an admirable thoroughness and diligence, Schramm went through twenty-seven newspapers and six weekly papers across the political spectrum on his quest for articles covering either Germany or Anglo-German relations. He divided his attention almost equally between newspapers from London and the provinces, including papers such as the Yorkshire Post, the Scotsman, the South West Daily News, or the Irish Times. The almost six hundred pages of this book contain excellent summaries of the press coverage of Germany and Anglo-German affairs in these papers.
Schramm's findings on the prewar period fall well in line with results from recent research on the bilateral relations of Britain and Germany: namely, that Germany's reputation was not as negative prior to the Great War as has often been claimed since 1914. Indeed, many newspapers pointed to an improvement in Anglo-German relations prior to the war. As one would have expected, conservative papers were more critical of Germany than liberal ones. For example, in 1912 the Star, a London liberal daily, criticized the British Foreign Office for its "anti-Germanism" (p. 95), while the Chronicle observed in 1913 that Russia was actually spending more money on naval armament than Germany. Even conservative papers, however, were more nuanced in their coverage of Germany than much of the scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s suggested. In 1913, the Daily Express, a London conservative daily, described Wilhelm II as "the safest bulwark of European peace" (p. 76). For the Observer, still a conservative weekly at the time, Wilhelm was "the most modern and progressive of present rulers" (p. 130), while the conservative Yorkshire Post reminded its readers in 1913 that "had the Germans not made themselves strong they would not have enjoyed, as they have done, forty-two years of uninterrupted peace since the establishment of the Empire" (p. 107). Like others before him, Schramm argues that, during the July Crisis, liberal papers were initially not particularly critical of German behavior and that, in the days following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, most of the country was far more concerned about happenings in Ireland than in the Balkans. Schramm's wartime chapter chronicles in great detail the ever-worsening image of Germany in the British media, providing ample evidence that conservative papers were more likely to buy into atrocity stories than liberal or left-wing ones. His final chapter details, as did Thomas Wittek's Das Deutschlandbild in den Massenmedien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (2005), the gradual re-divergence of liberal and conservative images of Germany in the aftermath of the war.
One of the most significant and possibly surprising results of Schramm's research is that little regional variation emerged in the image of Germany across the British Isles. With very few exceptions, there was little to choose from between the press coverage of Germany and Anglo-German relations between the metropolis, the provinces, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
The real strength of this book clearly lies in Schramm's positivist account of how the British media covered Anglo-German relations and Germany. At the same time, we learn much less about the backgrounds and motivations of authors, journalists, and politicians who tried to influence the press. For the interaction between politics and the media and for an examination of personal networks that included both journalists and political and military decision-makers--in short, for the question of what difference the media image of Germany made--we have to turn to the work of scholars such as Dominik Geppert or Andreas Rose.[2]. Nevertheless, Schramm does not shy away entirely from engaging in scholarly debates on Anglo-German relations and on the histories of Britain and Germany. For instance, Schramm has used some published sources that give clues as to German responses to British press coverage of Anglo-German affairs, pointing out that Wilhelm sometimes scribbled approving marginalia onto British newspapers he liked. One of the most important of Schramm's findings is that only on August 4, 1914 did a majority of the newspapers under examination favor British intervention. This hesitant support of interventionist policies might well have contributed to the German impression that Britain would stand aside in a military conflict.
Despite its obvious strengths, the book's tendency to conflate perceptions of reality with reality itself is not without its problems. In other words, Schramm dissects contemporaneous perceptions of reality in an attempt to approach not merely those perceptions but reality itself. For instance, the author tries to take the coverage of German behavior during the July Crisis as a test case for Fritz Fischer's thesis (that Germany had unleashed the war through her aggressive, reckless, and rash policies). In an attempt to dismantle Fischer and his disciples, Schramm demonstrates that the British (liberal) media did not share Fischer's characterization of Germany. The problem with this approach is that the British perception of German policies, positive or negative though they may have been, cannot possibly verify or falsify research results on German history. For an understanding of the real motivation behind German policy, of course, what the British media thought about it is neither here not there. Similarly, I remain to be convinced that the war aims of some British journalists are a good point of reference for a comparison of British and German war aims. Schramm indeed equates the late August 1914 demand of (the London daily) Sketch that the war "must end in the absolute beating down of one or other of the antagonists" and the September 1916 demand of the Liverpool Daily Post that "the killing of Germans is the only way to peace" (p. 454) with the infamous German September program with its annexionist war aims. From this material, Schramm concludes that German and British war aims were the same. Yet, he does not explain what makes him believe that a few outlandish demands from a couple of British newspapers would represent official war aims. At any rate, he does not explain how his argument squares with the demand of the Westminster Gazette, which Schramm quotes himself, according to which Britain "shall not dismember Germany, as they dismembered Russia, or take from her any purely German territory. But [Britain] shall ask her to restore what she has taken from others, and [Britain] must take guarantees that another militarist Empire does not grow up on the ruins of the old" (p. 469). Likewise, Schramm's argument that British newspapers are partially to blame for the stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende) because they supposedly played into the hands of German hyper-nationalists by asserting, as the Daily Telegraph did on Armistice Day, that "the German home front has utterly collapsed" (p. 460), is rather idiosyncratic.
Even more problematic is Schramm's assertion that British newspapers created an unprecedented anti-German sentiment that prominently created the problems of the interwar years. I would have thought that, first and foremost, German actions during and after the war fostered anti-German sentiment and was rather surprised at Schramm's unquestioned agreement with a 1936 German publication according to which Viscount Northcliffe "contributed more than any wartime contemporary of his to besmear Germany's good name in the world" (p. 513). The author of this 1936 publication was none less than Hermann Wanderscheck, whose antisemitism and anti-Anglo-Americanism lashed out at the "evils" of Bertolt Brecht and at "rootless international literati" (p. 5) and culminated in his 1940 propaganda pamphlet Höllenmaschinen aus England: Hinter den Kulissen der Londoner Lügenhetze (p. 6).[3]
Notes
[1]. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1998), 212.
[2]. Dominik Geppert, Pressekriege: Öffentlichkeit und Diplomatie in den deutsch-britischen Beziehungen (1896-1912) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007); and Andreas Rose, "Zwischen Empire und Kontinent: Zur Transformation britischer Außenpolitik im Vorfeld des Ersten Weltkrieges" (PhD diss., University of Augsburg, 2008).
[3]. Karl-Heinz Schoeps, "Bertolt Brecht and the Weimar Republic: Rebel with a Cause, or Between Bacchant and Bolshevik," in Brecht Unbound, ed. James Lyon and Hans-Peter Breuer (Newark: University of Delaware Press,1995), 59; and Hermann Wanderscheck, Höllenmaschinen aus England: Hinter den Kulissen der Londoner Lügenhetze (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1940).
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Citation:
Thomas Weber. Review of Schramm, Martin, Das Deutschlandbild in der britischen Presse 1912-1919.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23083
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