1

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German Historical Institute London
Bulletin
Volume XLVI, No. 1

May 2024
CONTENTS

ArticlesGerman Zeitgeschichte from the Margins:
The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum3
A Common Vision of Geography?
Pëtr Kropotkin and the Royal Geographical Society, 1876–1921
by Pascale Siegrist26

Book Reviews
Bernhard Jussen, Das Geschenk des Orest:
Eine Geschichte des nachrömischen Europa 526–1535(Charles West)

48

Isabella Chwalka, Kein Interesse? Fremd- und Selbstwahrnehmung
in der deutschen und englischen Historiographie des 12. Jahrhunderts(Ryan Kemp)

53

Franziska Klein, Die Domus Conversorum und die Konvertiten
des Königs: Fürsorge, Vorsorge und jüdische Konversion immittelalterlichen England(Jörg Schwarz)

64David Blackbourn, Germany in the World:
A Global History, 1500–2000(Paul Nolte)

70

Jonathan Parry, Promised Lands:
The British and the Ottoman Middle East
(Wolfgang Egner)

76

Contents
Andrea Gräfin von Hohenthal, Griff nach der Psyche?
Psychologie im Ersten Weltkrieg in Großbritannien und Deutschland(Jens Gründler)

83

Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History(Isabella Löhr)

89

Andrew Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich:
Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations(John Carter Wood)

94

Rotem Geva, Delhi Reborn:
Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital(Deborah Sutton)

101

Ronny Grundig, Vermögen vererben: Politiken und Praktiken
in der Bundesrepublik und Großbritannien 1945–1990(Nicole Kramer)

105

Sarah Colvin, Shadowland:
The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners(Annelie Ramsbrock)

109

Reet Tamme, Wissenschaft und ‘race relations’:
Repräsentationen von Multiethnizität in Großbritannien 1950–1980(Stephanie Zloch)

114

Conference Reports
Thirteenth Medieval History Seminarby Stephan Bruhn

121

Social Data on Inequality in Historical Perspective
by Pia Kleine129

Noticeboard

135

ARTICLESGERMAN ZEITGESCHICHTE FROM THE MARGINS:
THE POST-WAR EXPERIENCE OF NAZI VICTIMS
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
About ten years ago, a remarkable film had a short moment of glory inGerman cinemas: Lore, by Australian director Cate Shortland. It is set
at the end of the Second World War and describes the journey of Lore,
the eldest daughter of a Schutzstaffel (SS) family, through Germany—from the Black Forest to the island of Föhr in the North Sea. When her
parents flee, the young girl, a fervent member of the Bund Deutscher
Mädel (League of German Girls), is instructed to take her younger
brothers and sisters to her grandmother in North Frisia. The film
tells the story of this march across a destroyed country and througha destroyed people in deeply impactful images: displaced persons
and forced labourers on their way home, bombed-out civilians, Jews,
former prisoners of war, Nazis, and concentration camp survivors
all crowd the streets, stations, villages, and forests. The film is about
violence and rape, trauma and death. By the end, when the siblings
arrive on the island, the taciturn Lore has profoundly changed: inthe final scene of the movie, at her grandmother’s, she throws up therich, hearty food across the festive dinner table. And she does so at
the very moment when her grandmother asserts that the Germans ingeneral, and Lore’s parents in particular, are of course not to blamefor everything that is happening to Germany now—and although she
leaves it open as to who really is to blame, it is not hard to guess.
In the meantime—in the past decades, that is—this tenacious
post-war assertion has been refuted, deconstructed, and also morally
condemned time and again; the literature on it could fill a library.
This article is the edited version of my Inaugural Lecture as Gerda Henkel
Foundation LSE/GHIL Visiting Professor, given at the LSE on 28 Nov. 2023.

3

Articles
Until recently, contemporary history research in the Federal Republicof Germany focused on the years between 1933 and 1945: initially its
pre-war history, then the persecution of Jews and others, until grad­ually—with increasing distance—its post-war history came into view.
This research, however, was primarily directed at Lore and her family,
including her parents and siblings, and not with the same intensity at
the people she met along the way. The famous ‘coming to terms withthe past’ and the historiographic assessment of this process were—and for good reasons—primarily a German–German debate in which
other perspectives were only included very slowly and very late.
Moreover, I would argue that this process is still far from complete.
We have so far heard just as few of the voices of the men andwomen vagabonding on German streets in 1945 as we have of thosemen and women who migrated to the country in the following decades, and who came for very different reasons; they helped to build
up Germany’s destroyed economy and with it a welfare state that isstill considered the foundation of its ‘functioning democracy’ today.
To bring the experiences of former victims of Nazism into the foreground is thus a venture in its own right. But apart from mere ethicalconsiderations and blunt historical curiosity, I would eventually liketo ask what all this could mean for the historical narrative of the Federal Republic as a democratic success story.
I will concentrate on four victim groups: Jews, Sinti and Roma,
Eastern European forced labourers, and German homosexuals. I will
leave out other groups, either because there is little to no researchso far on their post-war experiences, or because, as is the case with
political opponents of the Nazi regime, this would lead us far into
the post-war politics of the two German states during the Cold War.
For the sake of focus, I will concentrate on West Germany, moreor less until the 1960s—and for the sake of legibility, I will apply
a different structure than is normally used when analysing victim
groups, since to list their experiences one by one would run the riskof repetition, as well as a certain déjà vu. Because surely anyone
reading the title of this article will share the same understandingthat the post-war experi­ences of former Nazi victims were quite
awful. So what exactly is new here? I am convinced that by readingthese experiences together, we will see a panorama that has so far
4

The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
been amazingly absent from the leading interpretations of post-war
German history. In order to facilitate this, the article is divided into
three main sections: homecoming/homemaking, compensation, andpersecution.
But first, let us take one last look at the overall context and at Lore’sfamily. From their perspective, the central message of April 1945
was: ‘We have lost’. The war was over and so was the dream of the‘thousand-year Reich’, of world—or at least European—domin­ation,
including a colonial and settlement empire in the eastern part of thecontinent. Furthermore, the country was occupied and now partly
ruled by people who, until a few weeks ago, had been deemed ‘subhumans’. Worse still, millions of freed slave labourers and prisoners of
war could now move freely through the country. All in all, the German
delusion of superiority had suffered a severe blow, and Hannah Arendt
on her visit to Germany in 1950 was not the only one who was repelledby the general self-pity with which the people bemoaned their own fate
and rejected any responsibility for other victims.1
At the same time, it was precisely at this historical moment, oneof a crushing catastrophe, that antisemitism and racism acquired anew, additional function in the post-war period, which explains theircontinued virulence. Never before has Germany—to quote Hannah
Arendt again—been as antisemitic as it was after National Socialism,
after the war, in defeat.2 The same can probably be said for racism:
Germany after 1945 was no less antisemitic and racist than before,
and one could venture the thesis that both antisemitism and racism
functioned at that moment as a kind of glue between one phase andthe next. To put it simply: both resentments served to maintain a senseof superiority in at least one area—that of national identity. Being
German was not bad in itself, neither individually nor collectively;
quite the opposite, as the racist disdain towards ‘marauding’ liberated Eastern Europeans or ‘haggling’ Jewish displaced persons on the
Munich black market seemed to prove—not to mention the plundering and raping Red Army soldiers from the ‘depths of the Russian
Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’, Commentary (Oct. 1950), 342–53.
2
Hannah Arendt and Dolf Sternberger, ‘Ich bin Dir halt ein bisschen zu revolutionär’: Briefwechsel 1946 bis 1975, ed. Udo Bermbach (Berlin, 2019), 100–1.
1

5

Articles
steppes’. In the end, these resentful gazes provided confirm­ation that
not everything had been wrong. The alleged threat of Bolshevism had
now become a reality, at least in the East. And one should not underestimate the additional dynamic that the Cold War would create,
which kept this older ideological conglomerate of political, racist, andantisemitic resentments alive and well.
These resentments can be quantified in the nowadays all-too-­familiar language of surveys. The US military government’s 1947
report on the continuity of antisemitism used refined categories,
though unfortunately without defining them. According to thereport, 18 per cent of the Germans surveyed were considered ‘radicalanti-Semites’, 21 per cent ‘anti-Semites’, another 22 per cent ‘racists’,
19 per cent ‘nationalists’ (without specifying what was meant by thisterm), and only 20 per cent largely free of these resentments, which
together are probably best described by the term völkisch. The authorsof the report identified several ‘interrelated causes’ for this, but
pointed out first and foremost:an overall decline in German morals, accompanied by anincrease in nationalism and anti-‘foreigner’ sentiment ingeneral. The deterioration of material conditions of life and, perhaps even worse, the continued bleak prospects have served toincrease resentment of all types as well as the aggressive expression of it. Anti-Semitism is merely one aspect of this complex.3

So this was the ideological, mental, and very real landscape of theAllied occupation zones in which the recently liberated victims ofGerman persecution were trying to find their way through devastatedlands, looking for surviving relatives and a way home or abroad. In
the early summer of 1945 around 8 million former prisoners in concentration camps, POW camps, and slave labour camps of all sorts,
together with millions of expellees from the former German territor­
ies in the East, demobilized soldiers, and fleeing Nazis, were livingin the more or less lawless space of a largely destroyed country. We
should take two additional facts into account that are hardly ever
Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS) Research Branch,‘Anti-Semitism in Germany, Berlin 1947’, reprinted in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, 6 (1997), 353–9.

3

6

The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
mentioned in contemporary reports and their later interpret­ations.
First of all, most of the survivors were young or very young, andsecond, the great majority of them had been abducted (or recruited)from rural areas, from small towns and villages; they mostly belonged
to the lesser-­educated groups or had not received any education at all.
This was especially the case for Jewish or Sinti and Roma youngsters
whose persecution had begun before the outbreak of the war. Manyof them were the only survivors of their families. Probably all of themhad witnessed at least one of the many end-of-war massacres in which
German troops and civilians had killed those still in their power at
the last minute. To name but one of the best known of these infamous
events: the so-called ‘Hare Hunt of Celle’ of April 1945 saw SS men
and part of the population of the town of Celle in Lower Saxony chasedown a group of concentration camp survivors who had managed toescape from a train during a bombing raid, killing at least 170 of them.4
All over Germany there had been an extreme outpouring of visible
violence during the last months and weeks of the war. For sure, thispotential for violence did not simply disappear in a few months—andnor did the fear of it.
What did change was the fact that by May 1945, Germany wascompletely occupied. Given the circumstances, the Allied forces did
their best to somehow control the chaos on the streets. Since there
was no lack of camp facilities in the country, they decided to concentrate the non-German population, which was now summarizedunder the new term ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). For the small Jewish
minority among them, a quarter of a million, the DP camps meant firstand foremost security under the direct protection of the Allies, especially in the American Zone. Due to persistent antisemitism among
members of some of the other DP groups, such as Ukrain­ians or Lithu­
anians, it quickly proved necessary to establish Jewish DP camps, andthis made it easier for them to cope with the liminal situation theyfound themselves in—geographically, physically, and psychologic­
ally. In addition, this collective coping mechanism was probably an
important factor which ultimately softened the long-­nurtured wish
See the section on ‘The Massacre at Celle’ in Daniel Blatman, The Death
Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge, MA,2011), 265–71.

4

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Articles
for revenge. As early as June 1945, the president of the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews stated that if Jews avenged themselves,
they would ‘descend into the lowest depth of ethics and morality towhich the German nation has fallen during the past ten years. We
are not able to slaughter women and children . . . we are not able toburn millions of people’.5 Their vengeance, some survivors very out­
spokenly conceded, was to have Germans working for them in thecamps, cleaning, cooking, repairing—and it is to the historian Atina
Grossmann that we owe an impressively multi­­layered account ofwhat she calls ‘close encounters’ between Jews, Germans, and theAllies in occupied Germany.6
Since the history of the Jewish DP camps is probably the best
researched area in the field of German–Jewish post-war history, I
will confine myself to these few remarks, insisting once again on thespecific transitional situation that only existed thanks to American
protection. For example, only weeks after the founding of the Federal
Republic, the German police started their brutal raids on the black
market in Munich’s Möhlstraße, a practice that continued well into
the 1950s.7 The market had long been a favourite object of antisemitic
projection, which was then extended to the few Jews and other ‘Easterners’ who had stayed behind after most DPs had left the country
by 1948, and who needed to find a new place to live. To quote one ofmany similar-sounding documents of the time, in this case from theBavarian city of Bamberg, where local officials wanted to get rid of the
few Jewish DPs who intended to make a home there: their rejection,
they wrote, had nothing to do with antisemitism, but merely with thefact that the population had to be protected against people ‘who feel
comfortable in dirt and vermin and therefore constitute a dangerous
site of infection’.8 In view of this reality, it is hardly surprising that the
Quoted in Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022(London, 2023), 90.
6
Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007).
7
Lilly Maier, ‘Der Schwarzmarkt in der Möhlstraße und die Münchner Polizei: Eine Untersuchung im Spiegel der Akten der Polizeidirektion München’,Münchner Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, 12/1 (2018), 35–51.
8
Quoted in Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 258.
5

8

The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
few hundred remaining Jewish families in the last DP camp, Föhrenwald in Bavaria, refused to move out until 1957.9 At that time, around
15,000 Jews were still living in Germany—a very small and often poorgroup who had not been able to emigrate and were either depend­ent on state welfare or—especially the younger former DPs among
them—tried to earn a living as unskilled labourers in bars, laundries,
and other small businesses.10
For the minority among the minority—that is, those Jews who had
been living as Germans among Germans until or during the deport­
ations—the situation had been fundamentally different from the outset.
Most German Jews had survived in so-called mixed marriages, andtherefore had at least partial connections to their neighbours which they
could sometimes build on, or professions they could take up again.11
Especially in large cities such as Hamburg, Berlin, or Frankfurt, it wasalso possible to turn to the Jewish communities that were being rebuilt
or to the city administrators, who during the immediate post-war years
were anti-Nazis, at least at the top.12 Never­theless, they were all too
aware of the virulent antisemitism of their own neighbours, having
experienced it since 1933. They understood its subtle language and had
no illusions about the state of the country. Time and again, for example,
there are cases of Jews refusing to accept the special assistance they wereentitled to, be it food or housing, for fear of provoking antisemitism.
And in fact, it took what today is often called resilience and courage toassert one’s rights as a Jew in West Germany. In his impressive moral
history of the Federal Republic, Frank Trentmann highlights this in
an example from Offenburg in southern Germany: when a secondary
school teacher showered a returned concentration camp survivor witha bucket of classic antisemitism in a bar and loudly regretted that thisperson had not gone up in smoke, various state institutions refused toAlois Berger, Föhrenwald, das vergessene Schtetl: Ein verdrängtes Kapitel
deutsch-jüdischer Nachkriegsgeschichte (Munich, 2023).
10
For a general overview see Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding
Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, trans. Barbara Harsha (Princeton, 1997).
11
Maximilian Strnad, Privileg Mischehe? Handlungsräume ‘jüdisch versippter’
Familien 1933–1949 (Göttingen, 2021).
12
See Anthony D. Kauders, Democratization and the Jews: Munich, 1945–1965(Lincoln, NE, 2004); Tobias Freimüller, Frankfurt und die Juden: Neuanfänge undFremdheitserfahrungen 1945–1990 (Göttingen, 2020).
99Articles
hold him accountable. It took a story in the weekly news magazine Der
Spiegel to bring about legal proceedings. Antisemitism, one can only
state time and again, lived on in post-war pubs and living rooms—and
only became a problem when the media took a critical look at it.13
But what about those survivors who returned to their homes insmall towns or villages where everyone knew everyone else? In theyears immediately after the war, if you wanted to recover your apartment or furniture from your neighbours in the larger cities, you could
rely on the Allies and the city administration. In the villages, however,this could trigger a tangible conflict, as you had to literally snatch thegoods from your former neighbours. Even if local authorities did provide supplies, this was usually based on a compromise: you did not
get back all of your furniture (let alone the piano!), and not your wholehouse, but only the upper floor—while the Nazis who had occupied
it after your family’s deportation continued to live downstairs.14 And
since many returnees were often the only Jews in the village, most ofthem agreed to a compromise or completely gave up what was due tothem. Anna Junge is currently working on a study of German Jews in the
post-war period in northern Hesse, for which she has compiled impressive material from the archives. She emphasizes differences between
generations and genders: while younger survivors often managed, byforce and stubbornness, to retrieve what was due to them and then left
Germany, very few of the older ones (most of whom had survived in
mixed marriages) dared to testify against their former tormentors. In
order to remain in the village, they needed to adapt: Jewish men, forexample, rejoined the traditional associations, while women generally
had no choice but to remain silent and avoid attracting attention.15
Much of what has been said so far connects the surviving Jews’ fateto that of the surviving Sinti and Roma and the former forced labourers.
Trentmann, Out of the Darkness, 192–3.
See the remarkable graphic novel Stefanie Fischer, Kim Wünschmann, and
Liz Clarke, Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past. A Graphic
History (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). For a general overview
see Stefanie Fischer, Nathaniel Riemer, and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum(eds.), Juden und Nicht-Juden nach der Shoah: Begegnungen in Deutschland(Berlin, 2019).
15
Anna Junge, ‘Unerwartete Nachbarschaft: Jüdisch-nichtjüdisches Wiedersehen im ländlichen Nachkrieg’, (PhD thesis, Technische Universität Berlin, 2024).
13

14

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
Due to their age and persecution, it was extremely difficult for themto build a life for themselves without formal education in a country
where official qualifications were—and still are—more important thanelsewhere. In the case of the Sinti and Roma, the fundamental hostility
they faced was furthermore based on centuries of stigmatization andpersecution, which had intensified in Germany since the late German
Empire in the context of ‘modern’ crime prevention.16 During the
Weimar Republic, German Sinti and Roma were registered throughout the country; from 1926 onwards, the records of 14,000 individuals,
including children over the age of 6, were brought together in a central
card index along with photos, fingerprints, and ancestry charts.17 After
1933, this mixture of police practice and crim­inal biology was combined with the racist thinking of Nazi biopolitics, which meant that
the Sinti suffered from several measures at once: forced sterilizationand psychiatrization; persecution as so-called ‘asocials’, ‘work-shy’, oras ‘hereditary criminals’, which could in some cases lead to them being
killed in the euthanasia programme; and finally, exclusion under the
Nuremberg Laws and ultimately murder in Auschwitz.18
The card index, which grew to 30,000 names during the Nazi period,
was preserved and continued to be used in the Federal Republic.19 Thishas to be kept in mind in order to understand why the few surviving
Sinti’s reaction to the liberation was completely different to that of their
See Marion Bonillo, ‘Sinti und Roma im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871 bis
1918: Eine Minderheit im Fokus der verschärften “Zigeunerpolitik” ’, in Olivervon Mengersen (ed.), Sinti und Roma: Eine deutsche Minderheit zwischen Diskriminierung und Emanzipation (Bonn, 2015), 49–70.
17
Eveline Diener, Das Bayerische Landeskriminalamt und seine ‘Zigeunerpolizei’(1946 bis 1965): Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten der bayerischen ‘Zigeunerermittlung’ im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2021), 41–65.
18
Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg, 1996); Stefanie Schüler-Springorum,‘Apotheose des Rassismus? Über das Verhältnis von Rassendenken, Rassenpolitik und Nationalsozialismus’, in Manuela Bojadžijev et al. (eds.),
Rassismusforschung: Handbuch für Wissenschaft, Studium und Praxis (forthcoming;
Baden-Baden, 2024).
19
For the blatant continuities in state policies see Gilad Margalit, Germany
and its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison, WI, 2002), 65–82; Sebastian
Lotto-Kusche, Der Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma und die Bundesrepublik: Der
lange Weg zur Anerkennung (Berlin, 2022), 47–59.
16

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Jewish peers. Given their long experience with state representatives ofall kinds, they were afraid of medical personnel, uniforms in general,and trucks and trains, so that they often fled on foot from hospitals andreception camps in order to avoid registration. As a result, they had
absolutely nowhere to go, no communities—which is why there are
hardly any facts, figures, or reports from that period. The Allies did notunderstand at all why they behaved the way they did.
In the few interviews about this period, which have been analysedby Anja Reuss, survivors unanimously describe themselves as completely disoriented, driven by and filled with fear: ‘And then we wereoutside, we didn’t even dare go out on the street, we were still afraidthat they would catch us . . . we were no longer able to think properly’.20 In search of family members, they too eventually returned to theplaces from which they had been deported. Many German Sinti had
already been settled in impoverished ghettos on the outskirts of thecities in the 1920s, and they now tried to reclaim their homes—in vain.
Such was the lot of a young girl who returned to her family’s pitch in
the town of Neubrandenburg only to discover that local farmers had
converted her family’s wagons into pens for chicken and pigs. The
local mayor, who was of course aware that she and her family had
been deported to Auschwitz, did not assist her in any way.21 The utter
desolation of the Sinti survivors led them to form even closer-knit
and more segregated groups. They went where they could meet other
Sinti and only gradually, by word of mouth, became aware of the full
extent of their catastrophe.
Only a little support was provided to them by other Nazi victims’
associations or by the first municipal contact points—partly due to lackof papers (in Berlin, for example, support was linked to proof of resi­
dence), and partly due to old prejudice. In the end, it depended on
the officials in charge. In particular, those among them who had beenpersecuted themselves, as Jews or political opponents, often called forbetter treatment and granted small sums of money or benefits out ofcompassion or care—while the rest reacted in more or less the same
way as before 1945.22 And since there were no superordinate facilities
20
Anja Reuss, Kontinuitäten der Stigmatisierung: Sinti und Roma in der deutschen
Nachkriegszeit (Berlin, 2015), 63–80; quotation on p. 76.
21
22
Ibid. 77.
Margalit, Germany and its Gypsies, 83–122.

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
similar to the DP camps for Jewish survivors, surviving Sinti wereforced to somehow reintegrate directly into everyday life in Germany.
Their attempts often failed. Even those who had already led sedentary
lower middle-class lives for generations had to start from scratch. The
restlessness expressed in the files and interviews in Anja Reuss’ book,the frequent changes of work and residence, the alcoholism and—again and again and above all—the utter poverty, are striking.23
Utter poverty seems to have linked the Sinti to the group about
whom we know least: the approximately 250,000 to 300,000 former
forced labourers who, for whatever reason, remained ‘stuck’ in Germany and mostly lived in the poorer districts as ‘homeless foreigners’.
But they were by no means invisible. Their story has met with so little
historiographical interest because the continuities between the Nazi
era and the Federal Republic have so far been considered more fromthe perspective of the perpetrator society.24 Moreover, in this case thecontinuities—or what Rita Chin, Maria Alexopoulou, and others havecalled ‘racist knowledge’—are still part of our present.25 In the springof 1945, around 6 million forced labourers were living on German
soil; by autumn, almost 5 million had already left the country for their
homelands. The problem was that not all of them wanted to returnhome—perhaps they had become emotionally attached to Germany,or perhaps the persons they had been emotionally attached to in theirplaces of origin were no longer alive; perhaps they had collaborated
with the Germans and could no longer return, or perhaps they did notwant to live under Communist rule. Or perhaps they were too ravaged
in body and soul to want anything at all. According to a letter fromthe Polish former forced labourers’ organization, many had ‘lost theirhealth due to the hard work and malnutrition’, and some had also losttheir courage to face life.26 Natascha Wodin, to give only one example,
Reuss, Kontinuitäten der Stigmatisierung, 139–51.
For a discussion of continuities and differences in the policing of foreign
workers see Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980:
Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers (Ann Arbor, 1990), 186–92.
25
Rita Chin et al. (eds.), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy
in Germany and Europe (Bloomington, 2009); Maria Alexopoulou, Rassistisches
Wissen in der Transformation der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in eine Einwanderungsgesellschaft (1940–1990) (forthcoming with Wallstein Verlag).
26
Alexopoulou, Rassistisches Wissen, 147.
23
24

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tells in her book She Came from Mariupol the story of her mother, whocommitted suicide in the 1950s at the age of 36 after years of forced
labour, illegality, isolation, and endless hostility.27
In 1951, up to a quarter of a million former forced labourers werestill living in West Germany, although an unknown number might
have arrived after the end of the war. This vagueness is based on thefact that local authorities no longer wanted to recognize DPs as victimsof the Nazis and simply claimed that they were foreigners ‘who camehere later’—which in many cases was an outright lie, as Maria Alex­
opoulou has proved in her analysis of the foreigners’ files for the city ofMannheim.28 Thus the memory of forced labour was also consciously
erased, even though (or perhaps because?) it had been present everywhere—in towns and in the countryside, in factories and families.
After the war, the continued presence of former labourers on
German soil was resisted at all levels of government and with common
racist arguments. An allegedly high crime rate, a negative attitude
towards ‘honest work’, and a tendency towards ‘asociality’ wererepeatedly cited.29 But in reality, many were simply too old or too ill,
both mentally and physically, and had thus not been able to move onto the United States or Canada. Only after a massive inter­national campaign was this group of non-returnees given the status of ‘homelessforeigners’ in April 1951.30 This status did not grant them any politicalrights, but it put them on an equal footing with German citizens inmany areas. They now had free choice of place of residence and almost
equal access to the labour market—only itinerant trade was expressly
excluded. At the same time, however, they were still subject to the Ausländerpolizeiverordnung (APVO) of 1938, so that despite their privileged
status, they were de facto at the mercy of the ‘alien police’, who madelife difficult for them with every trick in the book. For example, eventhough officially they could freely choose where to live, the local police
refused to issue them residence permits. If they were allowed to stay,27
Natascha Wodin, Sie kam aus Mariupol (Reinbek, 2017); published in English
as She Came from Mariupol, trans. Alfred Kueppers (East Lansing, MI, 2022).
28
29
Alexopoulou, Rassistisches Wissen, 130–4.
Ibid. 110–15.
30
Anna Holian, ‘A Missing Narrative: Displaced Persons in the History of
Postwar West Germany’, in Cornelia Wilhelm (ed.), Migration, Memory, andDiversity: Germany from 1945 to the Present (New York, 2017), 32–55, at 36.

14

The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
they did so in the most appalling circumstances. In Mannheim, forinstance, former DPs were often housed until the 1960s in old forced
labour barracks, while single men lived in a former bunker. Many
seem to have lived out their lives in welfare institutions such as homeless shelters or men’s homes, and the term ‘asocial’ abounds in the files.
In other words, National Socialist biopolitics continued not only in thelanguage of state institutions, but in everyday life.31 The integrationof the ‘homeless foreigners’ into the West German labour market has
hardly been researched to date. Sometimes it is described as almost
non-existent, sometimes as somewhat positive, mainly thanks to thejob opportunities offered by the Allied armed forces.32 In the 1960s,
their stories in German archives increasingly start to merge withthose of the new foreigners arriving in the country. This again points
to another important topic: the privileged status of the ‘homeless foreigner’ theoretically also entitled them to preferential treatment when
applying for German citizenship. By now, it will presumably come asno surprise that this request by the Allies was deliberately forgotten
by German institutions. Nor did the authorities consider it necessary
to notify former forced workers of the possibility of acquiring a new,better status, which meant that most did not apply for it in the firstplace or later had to fight for it in vain.33
However, this had serious consequences with regard to the questionof compensation. Although German citizenship was not a prerequisite
for this, it was extremely helpful when applying as a racially or politically persecuted person under the 1953 Federal Compensation Act.
Compensation for foreign forced labourers was postponed until after
peace treaties had been concluded with their countries of origin, andfinally came at a time when most of them had already died. Individual
claims, even if only for lost wages, were almost always unsuccessful;a female former slave worker in Mannheim, for example, was toldthat she would first have to provide proof of her exact working hours
during the war years.34 In general, German courts denied that forced
labour had been ‘racist’ persecution, but rather maintained that workers had been recruited for their professional aptitude. Incidentally,
31
32

Alexopoulou, Rassistisches Wissen, 137–67, 170–5.
33
Ibid. 107–9, 168–9.
Ibid. 139–40.

15

34

Ibid. 180.

Articles
similar arguments are found up until the 1960s in court rulings oncompensation for Sinti and Roma: their persecution had not been
racially motivated either, but had merely served to ‘prevent crime’ or
had been carried out for ‘military reasons’ (in order to prevent espi­
onage), as the Federal Court of Justice ruled in 1956 with regard to thefirst mass deportation of German Sinti in 1940 to the area of the later
Belzec death camp in south-east Poland.35
Expatriated as a group in 1935, Sinti and Roma benefited from the
support of the Allies until 1949, who, on request, issued them with‘concentration camp ID cards’ and thereby documented both theirpersecution and their German citizenship. However, after 1949 (andsometimes even before), these cards were withdrawn by the German
authorities unless ‘real proof’ could be provided. For example, Otto
Rosenberg, who had survived Auschwitz and other camps as a teenager, was now expected to prove that the rest of his family had been
gassed there, or that his mother, who had died of exhaustion after
liberation, was really buried there.36 A similarly brutal approach wastaken to pension applications. Anja Reuss tells us of a Sinti woman
whose baby had been murdered in Auschwitz and who herself had
been severely harmed by her imprisonment in a concentration camp.
She had to submit to a medical examination every two years in order tomaintain her claims, and when her menstruation resumed, her pension
was reduced.37 Frank Trentmann’s apt remarks about compensation
proceedings before German courts in general also apply to all thesecases: ‘Individual experiences of persecution were reduced to percentage points of disability and resulting benefits’38—if acknowledged atall. These were humiliating and often retraumatizing experiences for
all victims. In the case of Sinti and Roma, the dividing lines between
persecution, compensation, and prejudice were to a certain extent
fluid: for example, the central police files developed during the Nazi
35
The full text of the verdict is reproduced in Tilman Zülch (ed.), In Auschwitz
vergast, bis heute verfolgt: Zur Situation der Roma (Zigeuner) in Deutschland undEuropa (Reinbek, 1979), 168–71. See also Hans-Joachim Döring, ‘Die Motive
der Zigeuner-Deportation vom Mai 1940’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7(1959), 418-28.
36
37
Reuss, Kontinuitäten der Stigmatisierung, 93.
Ibid. 107.
38
Trentmann, Out of the Darkness, 183.

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
era and other persecutory Nazi records served as credible evidence
in compensation proceedings. There was also a tendency to pay out
compensation not in money, but in mater­ial goods.39
Such examples once again show how fundamentally importantAllied protection had been for Jewish survivors. For example, under
US pressure, Jews were allowed to (re)acquire German citizenship, andby 1952, 70 per cent of the Jewish DPs still living on German soil had
made use of this option.40 From the summer of 1945 onwards, they were
provided for fairly well, especially as private Jewish organ­izations also
supported the survivors to the best of their abilities. And, as is wellknown, the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 determined that payments
amounting to billions were to be made to the State of Israel and theJewish Claims Conference for the benefit of victims. In addition, the Federal Republic of Germany committed itself to the individual restitutionof assets—a process that was notoriously slow to begin and has not yet
been completed. Individual compensation claims, however, followed asimilar pattern and were a bureaucratic and psychological nightmare
for the victims.41 These procedures may appear somewhat less brutal or
cynical in comparison to the groups of victims I have already discussed,
but it is hard to imagine how they would have turned out without thewatchful eye of the USA or the dreaded ‘world opinion’ monitoring theGerman treatment of Jews after 1949.
Domestically, on the other hand, it was clear and unmistakablethat the care for Jewish DPs, the Luxembourg Agreement, and thecompensation payments and restitutions were lending new impetus
to anti-Jewish resentment—a new theme that was nonetheless easily
linked to old antisemitic notions.42 It is therefore hardly surprising that after the founding of the Federal Republic, this completely
Margalit, Germany and its Gypsies, 83–122.
Atina Grossmann, ‘From Victims to “Homeless Foreigners”: Jewish Survivors
in Postwar Germany’, in Chin et al. (eds.), After the Nazi Racial State, 55–79, at 76.
41
Svenja Goltermann, ‘Kausalitätsfragen: Psychisches Leid und psychiatrisches
Wissen in der Entschädigung’, in Norbert Frei, José Brunner, and Constantin
Goschler (eds.), Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung: Geschichte, Erfahrung und Wirkung in Deutschland und Israel (Göttingen, 2009), 427–51.
42
Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Anti-Semitism in Germany: The Post-Nazi
Epoch Since 1945, trans. Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown (New Brunswick,
NJ, 1997), 225–71.
39
40

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unconcealed aggression was unleashed against a Jewish representative of the compensation proceedings. Philipp Auerbach had survived
Ausch­
witz and served as the Bavarian State Commissioner for
Racially, Religiously, and Politically Persecuted Persons between 1946
and 1951. He sometimes used his position to grant payments according to need rather than according to administrative procedure. Afterbeing driven out of office by an antisemitically motivated court case,he committed suicide in prison in 1952.43 Hans Habe, a journalist who
had returned to Germany from exile, commented bitterly: ‘Thus a . . .
controversial but innocent man became the first victim of Nazi justiceseven years after our victory over Hitler’s Germany.’44
Here, as in other cases, anti-Jewish media agitation shaped the
public treatment of Nazi victims. A particularly popular topic in thefirst post-war decade were the Jewish Greifer (‘catchers’)—men andwomen, forced by the Gestapo to cooperate, who tracked down Jews
in hiding in Berlin and handed them over to their murderers. The best
known of them, Stella Goldschlag, was sentenced in a Soviet trial in1946 to ten years in a camp and, after her release, to another ten years
in prison in West Berlin. Of the hundreds of Berlin Gestapo members,
only sixteen were held responsible for the deaths of more than 55,000
Jewish Berliners. Even though some were tried in court, all of themwere released before 1950.45
This was not an exception, but a pattern. As the work of Philipp
Dinkelaker has shown, more Jews accused of betraying other Jews
under Gestapo pressure were tried in the former capital of the German
Reich than were German perpetrators. Shortly after the war, the lasthead of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany; formerly Reichsvertretung der deutschen
Juden, or Reich Representation of German Jews) was imprisoned andthen executed by the Soviets, and at least fourteen former Jewish auxiliaries were held in Gulag camps or received lengthy prison sentencesof twenty-five years. In the trials of subaltern Jewish auxiliaries of theHans-Hermann Klare, Auerbach: Eine jüdisch-deutsche Tragödie oder wie derAntisemitismus den Krieg überlebte (Berlin, 2022).
44
Quoted in Grossmann, ‘Victims’, 72.
45
Doris Tausendfreund, Erzwungener Verrat: Jüdische ‘Greifer’ im Dienst derGestapo 1943–1945 (Berlin, 2006).
43

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
Berlin Judenrat (Jewish Council) in the 1950s, the city’s courts based
their sentences on antisemitic preconceptions, as Philipp Dinkelaker
sharply observes: ‘Cementing the Völkisch image of Jews as a collect­ive with shared interests, individual survival to the detriment ofothers was understood as a base motive, a particularly reprehen­sible
betrayal that aggravated punishment.’46 As we know, this directly
contradicts German judicial arguments when the fate of the perpetrators was at stake.
I am fully aware that it is probably neither historically nor ethicallyconvincing to place the cases of Auerbach or the Reichsvertretung
auxiliaries under the rubric of ‘persecution’. Of course, there is a fundamental difference between a constitution that deems the ‘dignityof man’ to be ‘inviolable’ and a state that enacts racist laws, pursues
deadly antisemitic policies, and denies disabled and mentally ill people
the right to live. These trials took place in a democracy and in a stateof law. However, as we have already seen, below the officially applic­able norms there was a wide margin of interpretation—the famous
German administrative Ermessensspielraum—in which members ofvictim groups were treated quite differently from other Germans.
As already shown, there was a fundamental continuity between
the persecution of Sinti and Roma in the Nazi state and their treatment in the first years of the Federal Republic—the only major, butde­­cisive, distinction being of course that they were no longer subjected
to genocide. Immediately after 1945, the same German authorities
who had dealt with them during the war endeavoured to circumvent
the Allies’ protective measures. Without identity papers, they could
be—and often were—deported across the border to the East. After thefounding of the Federal Republic, this policy became more radical andthey were monitored and regulated in accordance with the APVO,
which meant that they could be banned from staying in one place, butalso from ‘wandering around’. In short, the Sinti and Roma had once
again become objects of so-called crime prevention, and the police
only needed to get used to the new terminology: Landfahrer (vagrants)
Philipp Dinkelaker, ‘ “Worse than the Gestapo”? Jews Accused of Collab­
oration during and after the Shoah’ (PhD thesis, Technische Universität
Berlin, 2022), 236. Dinkelaker’s thesis will soon be published by Cornell University Press.
46

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instead of Zigeuner (Gypsies), who continued to be recorded separ­
ately in police statistics.47 Only during the 1970s can we witness the
beginning of a slow change, thanks to incipient activism.48 Internal
police guidelines from 1970 still record a biological understanding ofcrime, despite relabelling: ‘Travellers are persons who move aroundthe country with vehicles due to an ingrained tendency to wander. The
temporary or permanent establishment or maintenance of a dwelling
does not necessarily invalidate the person’s status as a traveller.’49 In
1979, the genocide of the Sinti and Roma was publicly acknowledged
for the first time by a representative of the German government at
a commemorative event, and only in 1982 was their special registration finally abolished. But the history of trauma and the denial of life
chances that affected Sinti and Roma even after the period of persecution has not yet been written.
This can also be said about the last group of victims I wish to discuss: homosexual men. They were persecuted not on racial grounds,
but in the context of Nazi biopolitics, which aimed to eradicate
everything that stood in the way of creating a ‘healthy Volkskörper’.
In addition to this, a homosexual panic among masculinist organizations such as the SS caused its leader, Heinrich Himmler, to intensify
persecution. In contrast to the groups discussed so far, homosexuals
could theoretically avoid persecution by trying to disappear into the‘national community’ and live as inconspicuously as possible. However, the desire to denounce them in those years set narrow limits.
During the Nazi era, tens of thousands were convicted under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which was tightened in 1935.
Approximately 15,000 homosexual men were sent to concentration
camps, where they were often on the lowest rung of the prisoner hierarchy, tortured cruelly by the guards, and despised by most of theirfellow inmates. Thousands died in the concentration camps, and somewere only released from prison long after May 1945.50 But, in contrast
Margalit, Germany and its Gypsies, 56–82.
Silvio Peritore, ‘Politische Emanzipation, Erinnerungsarbeit und Gedenkstätten‘, in von Mengersen (ed.), Sinti und Roma, 185–200.
49
Lotto-Kusche, Der Völkermord an den Sinti und Roma, 54.
50
Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz: Die Verfolgung
der Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Paderborn, 1990); Burkhard Jellonnek,
47
48

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
to the other victim groups discussed here, they at least had homes
to go back to, sometimes also families and friends. After short-lived
attempts to gain recognition as Nazi victims, which mostly failed dueto their exclusion by victims’ organizations, it became clear after thefounding of the state that the law would not be changed.51 On thecontrary, the Federal Republic explicitly retained Paragraph 175 in its
1935 Nazi wording until 1969, and, as is well known, it was not completely abolished until 1994.
This led to a phenomenon that I would like to call a persecution
frenzy, without which the picture of the post-war period would not
be complete. In only twenty years, between 1949 and 1969, around50,000 sentences for homosexual behaviour were handed down in
the Federal Republic—more than during the German Empire andthe Weimar Republic combined. In addition, no compensation was
granted to these victims of Nazi persecution, neither for the timespent in prison nor for such dramatic procedures as castration, whichsome homosexual men had undergone during the war years to avoid
being sent to a concentration camp.52 Like so many other persecuted people, most of the surviving homosexual and queer victimsof National Socialism never lived to receive state recognition of theirsuffering and often died impoverished, isolated, and in poor health—
not only because of the physical harm they had suffered during the
Nazi era, but also because of repression in the post-war period, which
was only marginally milder. Even castration continued to be seen as
an acceptable alternative to preventive detention once convicts had
served their sentences. It seems easy to prove that social homophobia
was also radicalized after the Nazi era, presumably not least due to‘Nationalsozialistische Homosexuellenverfolgung in Stadt und Land: Die
ländlich strukturierte Pfalz, das städtische Würzburg und das Ballungszentrum Düsseldorf im Vergleich’, in Alexander Zinn (ed.), Homosexuelle
in Deutschland 1933–1969: Beiträge zu Alltag, Stigmatisierung und Verfolgung(Göttingen, 2020), 49–59.
51
See e.g. Susanne zur Nieden, ‘Die Aberkannten: Der Berliner Hauptausschuß “Opfer des Faschismus” und die verfolgten Homosexuellen’, in Frei,
Brunner, and Goschler (eds.), Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung, 264–89.
52
Alexander Zinn, ‘ “Gegen das Sittengesetz”: Staatliche Homosexuellenverfolgung in Deutschland 1933–1969’, in Zinn (ed.), Homosexuelle in
Deutschland, 15–48.

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propaganda and socialization during the Nazi period: expert opinions,
psych­iatrists, criminologists, and, finally, the media provide ample
illustrative ma­ter­ial.53 On the other hand, it is much more difficult toreconstruct the consequences for those affected. These included thedestruction of social and family ties that often followed from a conviction, or the loss of a job or of educational opportunities (convicted
students were expelled from universities, for example). In short,homosexual men faced the fear of social disgrace as well as the psychological pressure of permanent disguise—the fury of denunciation
had by no means subsided in the 1950s and 1960s and remained a very
effective tool of threat and blackmail until 1969.
To conclude: during a discussion of contemporary history from themargins on a panel at the 2023 German Historians’ Convention, Julia
Noah Munier emphasized that the persecution of homosexuals took
place not so much on the margins, but right at the heart of the ‘successstory’ of the Federal Republic—and not only in social terms, but also
ideologically. It was precisely the heterosexual ‘model of marriage andfamily’, she argued, which, as the nucleus of the now democratic society, promised salvation through purification.54 At the same time, ofcourse, it required a negative counter-pole—namely, the ‘homosexual
youth seducer’, the different variants of which Frank Biess has recently
presented to us in his fascinating book German Angst.55 But fear was
by no means the only German emotion of the post-war period, and at
least from the perspective presented here, it was not even the dom­in­
ant one. If we consider the persecution furore against homosexuals,
and add to it—which I have not done here—the written outpourings ofhatred against communists, and later against the so-called ‘68ers andthe German terrorists of the 1970s, in which people fantasized about
every conceivable way of killing their enemies; if we consider these
Julia Noah Munier, Lebenswelten und Verfolgungsschicksale homosexueller
Männer in Baden und Württemberg im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2021).
54
See the conference report by Lukas Sebastian Sievert and Andreas Charis,‘HT 2023: An den Rändern des Erfolgs—Segregierte Geschichten der (frühen)Bundesrepublik’, H-Soz-Kult (25 Nov. 2023), at [https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-140099], accessed 3 Feb. 2024.
55
Frank Biess, German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford, 2020).
53

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
two quite violent resentments—homophobia and anti-communism—
together, then we find an eerie contrast to the radiant satisfaction of
the economic miracle up until the 1970s: a subcutaneous but passionate need for punishment that at times came to the surface, coupledwith a contempt for Sinti and Roma as well as Eastern Europeans thatwas fed by an astonishingly unbroken sense of superiority. By contrast, it is more difficult to get to the heart of feelings towards Jews in
the post-war period, not least because such feelings were made tabooby the Allies. They were as varied as antisemitism is, and in the postwar period they were nourished by resentment of the living proof ofGerman guilt, as well as envy—which could easily turn into philo­
semit­ic admir­ation. However, all these groups were united by the
majority society’s feeling that they should not be there. Even though thiswas the most taboo topic in post-war Germany, 37 per cent of respond­ents to a 1952 survey agreed with the statement that it would be better
not to have Jews in the country, while 44 per cent were ‘undecided’.
At least up to the 1960s, there was a (silent) majority of Germans who
preferred not to share their country with their Jewish fellow citizens.56
In this respect, Munier’s thesis should prompt a discussion of what
functions antisemitism and racism had for the centre of society in theearly Federal Republic, and not just how they played out on its fringes,
where a few hundred thousand people were treated badly for a while.
This question is important for various reasons. The narrative of
the unsightly continuity of the elite is incomplete if it is written only
as a history of ideology and mentalities, or as an institutional history,
without taking into account the perspective of those who paid a very
real price for it. As Frank Biess and Astrid Eckert have recently postulated, the narrative of continuity as a whole changes when the various
forms of exclusion are systematically considered.57
In contrast, this perspective brings into view factors that haveso far played no role at all in the different narratives of the Federal
56
Werner Bergmann, ‘Sind die Deutschen antisemitisch? Meinungsumfragenvon 1946–1987 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, in Werner Bergmann andRainer Erb (ed.), Antisemitismus in der politischen Kultur nach 1945 (Opladen,1990), 108–30, at 115.
57
Frank Biess and Astrid M. Eckert, ‘Why Do We Need New Narratives for theHistory of the Federal Republic?’, Central European History, 52/1 (2019), 1–18.

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Republic, be it as a success story or recently in more self-critical variants.58 In a remarkable essay, Lauren Stokes points out that there
were not only a quarter of a million former forced labourers in the
post-war years of the Federal Republic, but that new immigrants
came into the country before this situation was regulated by the ‘guest
worker’ treaties.59 Given the great need for labourers, foreigners were
tolerated even without papers, while the official rhetoric was very
different, as we have seen. At the local level, the authorities turneda blind eye when entrepreneurs employed foreign workers illegally,
without residence or work permits. The famous discretionary powerof the administration could thus work both ways. Economic requirements and the ability to work were decisive here—making it possible
to undermine the racist practices that were so vehemently upheld
against others, mostly weaker persons, at the same time. But ‘racist
knowledge’ also served to keep the costs of labour low: accommodation in barracks, twelve men to a room, hardly any washing facilities,
and so on. Even if one knows this in theory, accounts of the living
conditions of foreign workers until well into the 1970s should becompulsory reading in every German history lesson. After all, it was
not only their labour that made the economic boom possible, but also
the living conditions that were thought to be acceptable for them on
racist grounds.
Foreign workers were at the same time well aware of these historical roots, as there existed another kind of knowledge in Germany:
that of those ‘stranded’ after the war, of course, but also that of manyof the new arrivals. After all, Italians, Greeks, and Yugoslavs camefrom formerly occupied countries where the SS and Wehrmacht had
committed many outrages against civilians. They quickly learned
to relate their own experiences to the (war) knowledge about ‘theGermans’ that was available in most European countries. They thentransferred that knowledge to their colleagues from further afield, asa first-­generation Turkish labour migrant recalled: ‘Only then did I
understand why the police and the Germans were so unfriendly to
Annette Weinke et al. (eds.), Demokratisierung der Deutschen: Errungenschaften und Anfechtungen eines Projekts (Göttingen, 2020).
59
Lauren Stokes, ‘The Permanent Refugee Crisis in the Federal Republic of
Germany, 1949–’, Central European History, 52/1 (2019), 19–44, at 30–2.
58

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The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims
us! With such a past! . . . When we came here, it had only been twenty
years since the war.’60
Migrants used the murderous German past to account for the­otherwise inexplicable hostility that surrounded them, and which
they perceived as deeply inhumane. Lore’s children, however,coming of age in the 1960s and working through the Nazi past of
their family and their nation in the late 1970s and 1980s, had no idea
how present this past still was in their country. It is about time wetook note of this.

Dilek Güven, ‘Das jüdisch-muslimische Morgenland: Antisemitismus undBilder von Juden unter Deutschtürken verschiedener Generationen’, Jahrbuch
für Antisemitismusforschung, 33 (forthcoming, 2024).
60

STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM is a historian of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. From 2001 to 2011 she served as Director of
the Institute for German–Jewish history in Hamburg; since 2011 shehas been Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism, since2012 Co-Director of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies (bothin Berlin), and since 2020 Director of the Berlin branch of the Center
for Research on Social Cohesion. Her fields of research are Jewish,
German, and Spanish History. Her most recent publication in English
is Gender History of German Jews: A Short Introduction (2024).
25

A COMMON VISION OF GEOGRAPHY?
PËTR KROPOTKIN AND THE ROYALGEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, 1876–1921
Pascale Siegrist
Upon entering Lowther Lodge, home of the Royal GeographicalSociety (RGS) in South Kensington, the visitor passes through a portrait gallery. In the midst of eminent academics and explorers, one
finds a bearded face that few would expect among the fellows of agentle­man­ly society: that of Pëtr Alekseevich Kropotkin. Kropotkin’s
fame nowadays is as a Russian revolutionist and leading theorist ofan­arch­ism rather than a British geographer, but he in fact collaborated
intensively—though informally—with the RGS and was on excellent
terms with many of its leading members throughout the thirty years
he spent in British exile and even after his return to Russia.
This remarkable connection has, on the one hand, been interpreted
as emblematic of a contradiction between Kropotkin’s professed revolutionary ideals and his everyday lifestyle. Martin Miller claims that,in England, Kropotkin
began a pattern of writing accounts in scientific journals andattending teas with members of the establishment while simultaneously living the life of a revolutionary militant. In a sense,
he belonged to both worlds, the one he was working to destroy
and the one which was to replace it in the future.1

On the other hand, George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, Kropotkin’s more sympathetic biographers, make an argument for ‘Kropotkin’s
consistency’ by relating an episode in which the ideological differences
inevitably came to the fore. At a banquet held by the RGS, the anarchist
sternly refused to toast the king and was embarrassed when the wholeassembly rose to add a cheer for ‘Prince Peter Kropotkin’—‘a tribute to
the courtesy and tolerance of English geographers’, the authors argue.2
Or potentially a provocation, since Kropotkin had been born into an
Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976), 134.
George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (London, 1950), 227. It is interesting to note that1226

Kropotkin and the Royal Geographical Society
aristocratic family but had rejected his noble title. The cordial receptionof the Russian radical has similarly led historians of geography such as
Federico Ferretti and Gerry Kearns to see evidence of a ‘wider liberal
tradition’3 in the RGS, being aware of how important it was ‘for intellectual societies to cultivate dissent.’4
In this article, I further assess the extent to which these contacts created problems of ‘consistency’ for both parties, and I argue that notionsof ‘liberalism’ and ‘tolerance’ fail to offer a satisfactory explan­ation forboth sides’ willingness to bridge their obvious political divides. The
unlikely cooperation between the revolutionary and the establishment
society has implications reaching beyond the anecdotal interest of incidents such as the banquet. Informal associations were significant in anage when the professionalization of science was only just taking off—
and, as we will see, geography as a discipline was a latecomer in termsof its institutionalization. Scholars remind us of the role of learned
societies as networks of sociability: Felix Driver insists on the informality of gentlemanly science and its notions of expertise,5 and Vincent
Berdoulay urges us to ‘put more emphasis on ideologies than on institutions proper’ and to focus on the ‘circle of affinity’ beyond a scientificcommunity.6 Politics were never absent from such circles.
For this reason, this article also aims to resist arguments—sometimes
put forth by either Kropotkin or members of the RGS themselves—that
science and politics were neatly separable. Both sides understood theirscholarly efforts as imminently political, and increasingly so over thenearly fifty-year period in question. Placing their geographical projects
within their respective political and intellectual contexts, I show how
Kropotkin’s attempts to establish a scientific basis for his anarchism
Kearns and others who subsequently took up the anecdote replace ‘king’ with‘queen’, suggesting an earlier date—or perhaps scepticism.
Federico Ferretti, ‘The Correspondence Between Élisée Reclus and PëtrKropotkin as a Source for the History of Geography’, Journal of Historical Geography, 37/2 (2011), 216–22, at 216.
4
Gerry Kearns, ‘The Political Pivot of Geography’, Geographical Journal, 170/4(2004), 337–46, at 341.
5
Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford,2001), 46–7.
6
Vincent Berdoulay, ‘The Contextual Approach’, in David R. Stoddart (ed.),Geography, Ideology, and Social Concern (Oxford, 1981), 8–16, at 14.
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and the Geographical Society’s endeavours to professionalize and re­define its subject overlapped in a number of respects. This allowed
for a fruitful debate; yet although both parties were aligned on thelevel of epistemology, their agreement nonetheless also encounteredobstacles and hit clearly defined limits when it came to content. The
informal connections between Kropotkin and the Royal GeographicalSociety thus provide a way to access the underlying political scripts ofnineteenth-­century geography and address the question of the place of
Kropotkin—and anarchism—in British political culture more broadly.
Scientific Networks as an Entry Point
Kropotkin had not come to England as a scientist. He was an escapeefrom prison in Russia, where he had been arrested in 1874 (ironicallyon his way back from a lecture to the Imperial Geographical Society) for his involvement in a radical circle. England was an obvious
destination for the relative freedom it granted to political refugees.7
But despite the presence of a considerable exile community of Communards and other revolutionaries, Kropotkin found the situation in1876 dire and he soon left again, thinking, ‘better a French prison than
this grave.’ According to his memoirs, ‘for one who held advancedsocialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in.’8 It was as ascientist that he first gained a foothold in Britain.
Kropotkin was a geographer and explorer of some renown. As amember of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, he had published on the orography of Asia, studied the effects of glaciation in
Finland, corrected the Humboldtian hypothesis on the orientationof mountain rims in Siberia, and predicted the existence of a landmass in the northern Arctic.9 With the special permission of the tsar,
Cf. James W. Hulse, Revolutionists in London: A Study of Five Unorthodox
Socialists (Oxford, 1970), 1–3. Hulse traces this tradition back to Voltaire andquotes Kropotkin’s positive mentions of Britain as a place of exile for radicals
across Europe.
8
Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 2 vols. (London, 1899), ii. 251.
9Pëtr Kropotkin, Obshchii ocherk orografii Vostochnoi Sibiri (Saint Petersburg,1875); Pëtr Kropotkin, Issledovaniia o lednikovom periode: S kartami, razrezami irisunkami v osoboi broshiure (Saint Petersburg, 1876).
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he had even been allowed to continue his research in prison before
he escaped. Soon after his arrival in London, Kropotkin, looking fora source of income, approached the subeditor of Nature, John Scott
Keltie, to offer his services as a translator. Under a pseudonym heproduced notes for the journal on recent scientific publications in Russian, German, French, and the Scandinavian languages, but was soon
forced to reveal his identity when asked to give his views on his own
work. Not only was Keltie strangely unconcerned to have employeda notorious fugitive, according to Kropotkin’s account, he was indeed‘very much pleased to discover the refugee safe in England.’10 Thissuggests that Keltie shared the widespread sympathy among British
liberals and even some conservatives for the victims of Russian despotism.11 The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was able to draw
on an important current of public hostility to the tsar’s regime, whichreached back to the days of Alexander Herzen’s exile in London in the
1850s and 1860s.12 Kropotkin’s Russianness may well have made hispolitics more palatable in Victorian polite society, which prided itself
on its liberal cosmopolitanism and celebrated eccentricity.
When Kropotkin found himself imprisoned again—his apparent
preference for a French jail over London having been granted when
he was arrested in Lyon in 1883—Keltie and other British scientists
also petitioned for him to be released and allowed to work.13 Keltie
and Kropotkin continued to discuss problems of geography for the
rest of Kropotkin’s life, most of which he spent in England. Ferrettisees Keltie as ‘a sort of literary agent for Kropotkin in Great Britain’,
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ii. 187.
Keltie took a lively interest in Russian affairs; e.g. in RGS Collections, CB7,
Keltie to Kropotkin, 25 Dec. 1880, he states that he is in contact with Russian
emigrants; and in another letter written on 12 Feb. 1893 he asks: ‘Do you see
my Russian friends from time to time?’
12
John Slatter, ‘Our Friends from the East: Russian Revolutionaries andBritish Radicals, 1852–1917’, History Today, 53/10 (2003), 43–9; also John Slatter, ‘The Correspondence of P. A. Kropotkin as Historical Source Material’,Slavonic and East European Review, 72/2 (1994), 277–88, at 286: ‘[the Society]successfully changed British attitudes towards Russia by turning previously
largely Russophobic British public opinion into a more nuanced attitude—
support for the Russian people but opposition to its oppressive government’.
13
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ii. 273.
10
11

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having introduced him to editors such William Robertson Smith andJames Knowles.14 In so doing, Keltie was a crucial connection not only
for Kropotkin’s contributions to the society’s Geographical Journal, butalso to the country’s most important scientific and general interest publications, among them The Nineteenth Century, Encylopaedia Britannica,
and The Times.
Keltie was also Kropotkin’s point of access to the Royal GeographicalSociety. The Scottish geographer joined the society in 1883 and became
its assistant secretary in 1892. His correspondence with Kropotkin, heldat the RGS archives, contains mentions of visits, enquiries about eachother’s health, and regards to wives and children. Kropotkin’s associ­ation with the society is in fact best thought of as a personal connection;
the relationship was never formally recognized and it is difficult to tellwhich party would have been more interested in officializing ties. After
his return to England in 1886, Kropotkin became a regular visitor to thesociety, frequently gave lectures, and published over forty articles in
the Geographical Journal on topics ranging from the teaching of physi­og­raphy to the desiccation of Eurasia. His expertise was undoubtedly
most in demand when it came to the Russian Empire, where he had
been on expeditions to some of the remotest parts. He met many of the
RGS’s most influential fellows—assistant secretaries like Henry Walter
Bates, librarians like Hugh Robert Mill, and presidents like Douglas W. Freshfield and Halford Mackinder, who nowadays is mainly
known as one of the founding fathers of geopolitics.15 It appears that
there was even talk of offering him a fellowship in 1892. Woodcock
and Avakumović claim—without providing sources—that Kropotkinrefused the fellowship, his reason being that ‘he could not join a society
under royal patronage.’16 This seems unlikely for a man who had beena member of a society under imperial patronage. Besides, while he is
explicit on his reasons for turning down the invitation to become secretary of the Russian Geographical Society, his memoirs (which are not
14
Federico Ferretti, ‘Publishing Anarchism: Pyotr Kropotkin and British Print
Cultures, 1876–1917’, Journal of Historical Geography, 57 (2017), 17–27, at 22.
15
Gerry Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder(Oxford, 2009), 263–95 offers a detailed comparison of Kropotkin’s views andMackinder’s ‘geopolitics’.
16
Woodcock and Avakumović, The Anarchist Prince, 227.

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devoid of tales of sacrifice and suffering for the cause) fail to mention an
English offer of a fellowship.17 The only document directly referring tothis episode tells a rather different story; in a letter to Keltie and Freshfield, all Kropotkin writes is:I feel extremely obliged to you for the steps you took in asking
my admission to the fellowship of the Geographical Society. I
need not say that I always take the greatest interest in the Society’s work and if I can be useful in any way in aiding it, I shallalways be delighted to do so.18

This makes it sound improbable that Kropotkin would have refusedformal admission to the society, and more likely that the ‘steps taken’
failed to pave the way for this outcome.
Although there is no evidence that Kropotkin had enemies within
the society, his name is strangely absent from its internal publications. There is no mention of him in the council minutes of the period
in which his nomination would have been debated; neither does heappear on any of the lists of referees published during the forty yearsof his acquaintance with Keltie—even in those fields (or­og­raphy,Si­ber­ia) where his expertise was undoubtedly recognized. The factthat Kropotkin’s anarchist friend Élisée Reclus was featured in boththe council minutes and the referee lists—and was even awarded thesociety’s gold medal ‘for eminent services rendered to Geography
as the author of Nouvelle Géographie Universelle’ in 189419—implies
that there was no categorical exclusion of radicals from the highest
honours bestowed by the RGS (although it might have been more
complicated for an anarchist living and agitating in Britain).
However, even liberals like Keltie seem never to have taken Kropotkin’s political engagement very seriously, or at least they pretended not
to. When Kropotkin was refused entry into Switzerland in 1913, Keltie
sardonically commented: ‘it is very stupid of the Swiss to make such
State patronage as a possible source of conflict goes entirely unmentioned in
the chapter of his memoirs devoted to his rejection of the position of secretary of
the Russian Geograph­ic­al Society in 1871; Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist,
18
ii. 7–17.
RGS Collections, CB7, Kropotkin to Keltie, 30 Jan. 1892.
19
A list of RGS medals and awards since 1832 can be found at [https://doi.
org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QSDT4].
17

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a fuss about an old man like you who are past your plotting days.’20
No RGS member ever made an effort to engage with an­arch­ist political
positions, and they tried to keep it to a bare minimum when they had to.
Keltie famously opened his obituary for Kropotkin by stating that ‘thisis not the place to deal in detail with Kropotkin’s political views, except
to express regret that his absorption in these seriously diminished theservices which otherwise he might have rendered to Geography.’21
Towards Anarchist Science
If Keltie politely held that the RGS’s Journal was ‘not the place’ forpolitics, the question remains whether Kropotkin regarded the Royal
Geographical Society as ‘the place to deal with his political views’. Even
if Ferretti makes a well founded argument that Kropotkin used academic, and specifically geographical, outlets to promote the an­arch­istcause, his prime motivation for connecting with learned societies wasscientific. We should not underestimate the sincerity of Kropotkin’s
passion for science. In a letter to Keltie he enthused:
The idea of opening the discussion on the Desiccation of Asia
pleases me so much that this morning, as soon as I got yourletter, I sat to write down the main points, and to sketch twomaps showing the extension of the Caspian Sea at the end of
the Glacial Period.22

His correspondence with Keltie—as well as with anarchist scientists
such as Reclus23 and Marie Goldsmith24—leaves no doubt that his
interest in science was genuine and that his geographical scholarship
RGS Collections, CB7, Keltie to Kropotkin, 15 Dec. 1913.
John Scott Keltie, ‘Obituary: Prince Kropotkin’, Geographical Journal, 57/4
(1921), 316–19, at 317.
22
RGS Collections, CB7, Kropotkin to Keltie, 2 July 1903.
23
Ferretti, ‘Correspondence’.
24
Michel Confino (ed.), Anarchistes en exil: Correspondance inédite de Pierre Kropotkine à Marie Goldsmith, 1897–1917 (Paris, 1995); Michel Confino and Daniel
Rubinstein, ‘Kropotkine savant: Vingt-cinq lettres inédites de Pierre Kropotkine à Marie Goldsmith. 27 juillet 1901–9 juillet 1915’, Cahiers du monde russe etsoviétique, 33/2 (1992), 243–301.
20
21

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was not just a means of securing a livelihood, as sometimes suggested.
The case of scholars with more formal affiliations, such as the biologist
Goldsmith or Lev Mechnikov, professor of geography in Neuchâtel, illustrates that scientists with professed anarchist leanings did
not position themselves in opposition to institutionalized academia.
Moreover, as I have mentioned, notions of professionalism took holdin geography only gradually, and Kropotkin’s position beyond theacademies and universities was hardly exceptional.
In most of his letters to Keltie, Kropotkin asks him for books ormaps held at the society; he also made extensive use of its facilities,
where he could freely pursue his scientific work. His loose ties to the
RGS were easily compatible with his ideal of an anarchist researchcommunity. In The Conquest of Bread (1892) he criticizes the promotionof science by the state—‘Should [the scientist] ask help of the state,
which can only be given to one candidate in a hundred, and which
only he may obtain, who promises ostensibly to keep to the beaten
track?’25—and praises the model of the voluntary learned society.
However, in its current form, even this model is subjected to harsh
criticism:
What is defective in the Zoological Society of London, and inother kindred societies, is that the member’s fee cannot be paidin work; that the keepers and numerous employees of this large
institution are not recognised as members of the Society, while
many have no other incentive than to put the cabalistic letters
FZS (Fellow of the Zoological Society) on their cards. In a word,
what is needed is a more perfect co-operation.26

It seems more than likely that this was a veiled address to a ‘kindredsociety’ that Kropotkin knew far better than the Zoological Society.
Yet Kropotkin, too, was able to distinguish between his ideals and thereality of the scientific community of his time. When asked to give his
opinion on the award of the RGS gold medal to the geographer PëtrSemenov, he replied: ‘Semenoff [sic] is a Russian functionary andready to serve under liberal and reactionary ruler alike and of course
has no personal sympathy of mine, but scientifically, I think . . . your25
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings, ed. Marshall S.
26
Shatz (Cambridge, 1995), 101.
Ibid. 10233

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choice was not bad.’27 Miller goes so far as to claim that ‘Kropotkin only made the most rudimentary attempts to relate anarchismto modern physical science’ and gives the example of an analogy
between the equilibrium of the planetary system and the harmony of
spontaneously moving individuals.28 This is probably more tellingof the author’s understanding of science than of Kropotkin’s.
A comparison of Kropotkin’s writings published in scientific journals with those in the anarchist press does reveal significant differences,
however, and not just of tone. In his Geographical Journal article ‘The
Great Siberian Railway’ (1895) he discusses purely tech­nical and geological aspects of railway construction with an underlying enthusiasm
for the project, omitting the authoritarian nature of its conception29—aposition which seems to run against the idealized vision of a railway network continuously growing together from free agreementthat he envisioned three years earlier in The Conquest of Bread.30 Simi­
larly, Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898) argues for an increase infood production but, unlike the comparable figures and calculationsin The Conquest of Bread, leaves out the revolutionary justification ofsuch claims.31 In a letter to Hugh Robert Mill, he harshly criticizes the
censorship of science in Russia, but does not refer to any restrictions,
official or conventional, imposed on scientists in Britain.32 The boundaries between adapting to different audiences and self-censorship can
be porous. However, the above examples also illustrate that the subjects he addressed in both his anarchist writings and his geographicaltexts tended to overlap. Moreover, Kropotkin’s own understandingof the relationship between politics and science—and geography inparticular—evolved considerably over the period in question. This ismirrored to some extent in his relationship with the RGS.
RGS Collections, CB7, Kropotkin to Keltie, 1 May 1897.
Martin A. Miller, ‘Kropotkin’, in John A. Hall (ed.), Rediscoveries: Some
Neglected Modern European Political Thinkers (Oxford, 1985), 85–104, at 95.
29
Peter Kropotkin, ‘The Great Siberian Railway’, Geographical Journal, 5/2(1895), 146–54.
30
Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 117; Kropotkin gives the tsar’s decision tobuild the Saint Petersburg–Moscow connection in a straight line as a negative
example.
31
For a comparison of the two, see Hulse, Revolutionists in London, 61.
32
RGS Collections, HRM 3, Kropotkin to Mill, 6. Mar. 1895.
27
28

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Kropotkin saw himself as a scientific geographer and a militantanarchist at the same time. His interest in geography had been kindled during his journeys in Siberia as a young tsarist official in the1860s and—if we are to believe his retrospective account—it was thevery same experiences that lay at the source of his political orientation. His encounters with peasants and political prisoners made him‘appreciate how little the state administration could give to them’33
and that the central government only worsened their plight. Whileboth his scientific and political engagement date back to the 1860s, aclose reading of his scientific output suggests that it was only during
his English exile that he began to develop a theory explicitly combining the two.
Throughout his career as a scientist, Kropotkin, a prince who had
abandoned his noble title, regarded the production of science by elites
as problematic.34 In the early 1860s he felt that the pursuit of scientific inquiry raised a moral dilemma between the joy he derived fromgeographical exploration and the fact that the funds enabling him topursue his research had to be taken from the hungry.35 Only in the
future anarchist society, with the division of labour abolished, Kropotkin foretold, would science cease to be a luxury, leaving everyone
able to indulge in its pleasures. Nonetheless, there was a significant
evolution in how he conceived of his own role as a scientist towards
the end of the century: he came to recognize that science itself and heas a scientist could be useful even in the present.
Having—critically—read Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte,and Herbert Spencer and imbibed the positivist spirit of his age,
Kropotkin became increasingly optimistic about the possible social
benefits of scientific progress. Geography was especially importantin Kropotkin’s scientific worldview for its broad disciplinary sweep,
propaedeutic qualities, and progressive teleology. As I will discuss
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, i. 196.
Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, trans. David A. Modell(Philadelphia, 1903), 5: ‘Besides, it must not be forgotten that men of science,
too, are but human and that most of them either belong by descent to the possessing classes, and are steeped in the prejudices of their class, or else are in
the actual service of the government.’
35
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ii. 19–20.
33
34

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below, the very same properties were singled out by RGS members
seeking to champion their discipline. Kropotkin proposed ‘objective’
analysis of the resources of a given terrain to improve their distribution; he looked at ways of rationalizing food production; and hestudied the role of migration patterns in speciation. The deductionof general laws using scientific methods thus became the focus of his
political work too. The fact that his scientific work could be made rele­vant to his anarchist project reinvigorated it and gave it a renewedjustification. In 1894 he boldly stated that:
The philosophy which is being elaborated by the study ofsciences on the one hand and anarchy on the other, are two
branches of the same great movement of minds: two sisters
walking hand in hand. And that is why we can affirm that an­­archy is no longer an utopia, a theory; it is a philosophy which
impresses itself on our age.36

Given this unbridled faith in science as a force for progress, Matthew
S. Adams has noted that ‘[i]n terms of his overarching methodology,
Kropotkin appears to the modern reader as a quintessentially Victor­
ian thinker.’37
But Kropotkin also pursued more specific aims in associatingan­arch­ism with science—first, as a response to the scientific pretensionsof Marxism. Anarchism was not bourgeois, utopian, or backwards;
instead, it was more scientific than Marxism because it had rid itself
of all metaphysical elements, relying exclusively on the deductive–
inductive method.38 Second, buttressing his anarchist ambitions witha scientific grounding also allowed him to target public opinion outside the socialist camp. Adopting the vocabulary of science endowed
an­arch­ism with a sense of calm rationality. This seemed particularly
urgent in an age when anarchism had extremely bad press—in 1895,
the Gentleman’s Magazine described anarchism as ‘a malignant fungoid
Pierre Kropotkine, Les temps nouveaux: Conférence faite à Londres (Paris,
1894); translation from Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary
Anarchism 1872–1886 (Cambridge, 1989), 2.
37
Matthew S. Adams, Kropotkin, Read and the Intellectual History of British
Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism (Basingstoke, 2015), 50.
38
Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, 38.
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Kropotkin and the Royal Geographical Society
growth on the body politic.’39 More generally, in the last two decadesof the nineteenth century, politicians and the emerging mass media
stirred up an image of anarchists as fanatics, terrorists, and assassins,
thus giving the movement its first—decidedly negative—publicity.
Although the most notorious acts of propaganda by the deed occurred
outside Britain,40 there was a widespread moral panic, reinforcing the
British uneasiness with revolutionary immigrants.41 When the German
anarchist Johann Most was tried for endorsing the assassination of
Alexander II in a newspaper article, the Grand Jury deemed the piece‘brutal and un-English.’42 Recognition by eminent British academics—
and especially by the largest scientific society in London—was intended
to have a positive effect on Kropotkin’s prestige and that of anarchists
more generally. Haia Shpayer-Makov has shown how Kropotkin’s af­fili­
ation with science, alongside his aristocratic origins and manners, was a
crucial ingredient in his overwhelmingly positive image in Britain as an‘anarchist saint’ by the early decades of the twentieth century.43
I have alluded to the very prominent role played by geog­raphy with­in this scientific project.44 Kropotkin promoted a holistic understanding
Cited in Haia Shpayer-Makov, ‘The Reception of Peter Kropotkin in Britain, 1886–1917’, Albion Quarterly, 19/3 (1987), 373–90, at 373.
40
One exception being the Greenwich bomb incident; for a (geographical!)reading of it, see Ronald R. Thomas, ‘The Home of Time: The Prime Meridian, the Dome of the Millennium, and Postnational Space’, in Helena Michie
and Ronald R. Thomas (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transform­
ation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick,
NJ, 2003), 23–39.
41
Hermia Oliver insists that although London became ‘the headquarters of international anarchism’, this remained very much an immigrant
phenom­enon: ‘anarchist beliefs had nothing in common . . . with the English
radicalism of the 1860s or later’, nor with the federalists or the Manhood Suffrage League. Even later anarchist tenets in England did not grow out of
the English General Council of the First International in 1864, but were only
very slowly established by the exile community and their converts. Hermia
Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London,
421983), 5 and 148.
Cited ibid. 18.
43
Shpayer-Makov, ‘The Reception of Peter Kropotkin’, 379.
44
This being another difference between the Marxist and anarchist conceptions of science; cf. Yves Lacoste, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre(Paris, 1976), 96.
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raphy as well as into anarchism:
Anarchism is a world-concept based upon a mechanical explan­
ation of all phenomena, embracing the whole of nature—that
is, including in it the life of human societies and their economic,
political, and moral problems . . . Its aim is to construct a synthetic philosophy comprehending in one generalisation all thephenomena of nature—and therefore also the life of societies.45

In this ‘world-concept’, geography was the all-encompassing modelthat described the relationship between man and his environment in
all its aspects, ranging from the more efficient organization of production through to decentralization, a justification of federalism, andeven ethical lessons. While Kropotkin was arguably more interested
in making anarchism more relevant through the medium of geog­
raphy, his redefinition of geography’s potential paralleled the RGS’s
quest for relevance in a number of significant ways. It is here that
we have to look for reasons why the society’s engagement with Kropotkin was not called into question as the latter increasingly turned
his back on a purely physical understanding of geography and, fromthe late 1880s onwards, his political and scientific agendas became
ever more entangled. On the contrary, the evolution in Kropotkin’s
thought seems only to have reinforced his connection with the RGS.
Shared Epistemologies, Different Programmes
Kropotkin frequented the Royal Geographical Society in a time ofimportant transformations that touched upon the identity and function of the discipline. In 1885 Keltie published an influential reporton the state of geography in British schools and universities, which
he described thirty years later as the beginning of a ‘crusade’ for ‘theimprovement and elevation of geography and a better recognition of
the subject in education.’46 The two aspects of this crusade were seen
Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, 53.
Cited in J. M. Wise, ‘The Scott Keltie Report 1885 and the Teaching of Geography in Great Britain’, Geographical Journal, 152/3 (1986), 367–82, at 367. John
45
46

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as interdependent—higher standards of research would result in ahigher standing in schools and universities, and vice versa. Both wereequally dependent on a more precise definition of the proper object ofgeography.
In the late nineteenth century, the outlines of ‘geography’ remained
inchoate. To a large extent, this was due to the nature and structure of
the Royal Geographical Society itself as the main body representing
the subject—a body composed of adventurist explorers and armchair scientists. Driver tellingly describes the tensions between its
members’ conflicting aspirations: ‘the RGS was a hybrid institution,seeking simultaneously to acquire the status of a scientific society
and to provide a public forum for the celebration of a new age of
exploration.’47 While the latter ensured much of geography’s popularity, it also threatened its scientific soundness. Within the RGS, afaction of geographers—incidentally those most likely to be in touchwith Kropotkin, and often more middle-class in background—weremaking the case for professionalization and institutionalization; yetthis redefinition was not to be made at the expense of the discipline’s
characteristic breadth.
Maintaining the synthesis of physical and human geography
meant searching for a new and intellectually plausible narrative thatwould provide the field with the same coherence it had once enjoyed,
but which the discredited teleological accounts of the beginning of
the century could no longer offer. The historian David Livingstone
has referred to this attempt to justify geography as a broad church—
combining its identity as a physical science with that of a social
science—as the ‘geographical experiment’.48 In this wider context, theScott Keltie, Geographical Education: Report to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society (London, 1885).
Driver, Geography Militant, 24. David Livingstone goes further and claims
that its high-ranking membership ‘made the RGS rather different from someof the other scientific societies and gave it a rather dilettantish, amateurish
image’; David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the Historyof a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, 1992), 158–9. On its 150-year anniversary, theRGS celebrated its history of pioneering explorations with a publication: Ian
Cameron, To the Farthest Ends of the Earth: 150 Years of World Exploration by theRoyal Geographical Society (London, 1980).
48
Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 175–8.
47

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RGS geographers came up with strikingly similar strat­egies to thosedeveloped in Kropotkin’s ‘scientification’ of anarchism. While thetrends and the larger debates were indeed comparable, however, wemust also be careful to distinguish between some of their answers.
The first line of attack in the campaign to ensure geography’s legit­
im­acy, as I have mentioned already, was to establish a better grounding
in the academic landscape. Keltie’s 1885 report on geographical education in Britain had pointed to the desolate state of teaching in schools
and made a case—through comparison with Continental Europe—for
establishing chairs of geography at British universities. The Royal
Geographical Society sponsored the lectureships in geography at
Oxford and Cambridge for the first fifty years of their existence andfought for its admission as a Tripos exam subject.49 While Mackinder,
who held the position at Oxford, was beginning to attract a growing
number of students to his lectures by 1893, the situation in Cambridge
was much less promising. John Young Buchanan withdrew from thelectureship, finding it disappointing, and freely admitted that the newlecturer would need to be more apt at enthusing undergraduates forgeography. The RGS was looking for a popular and engaging speaker,
and it seems likely that some thought of appointing Kropotkin to
the position—a man who, in part through his political activity, waswidely seen as fitting the bill. This rumour has frequently been taken
up in scholarship, yet it can only be traced back to a few lines in thememoirs of John Mavor (a Canadian friend of Kropotkin’s), written
over three decades later. In his recollections, Mavor claims that Kropotkin refused the position because he ‘did not care to compromise
his freedom.’50 Once again, and for reasons that are open to speculation, Kropotkin’s own account is silent on the affair.51 Judging fromhis correspondence with Hugh Robert Mill, it seems more likely thatDavid R. Stoddart, ‘The RGS and the Foundations of Geography at Cambridge’, Geographical Journal, 141/2 (1975), 216–39.
50
John Mavor, My Windows on the Street of the World (London, 1923), 75.
51
Mavor claims that William Robertson Smith, editor of Encyclopaedia
Britannica and professor of Arabic at Cambridge, was the one to suggest Kropotkin’s appointment. There is no evidence for this in his correspondence,
held in Cambridge University Library, and the only biography, Bernhard
Maier, William Robertson Smith: His Life, his Work and his Times (Tübingen,2009), does not mention the confirmed connection between Kropotkin and49

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he sought employment in the University Extension Programme—arange of summer and evening classes aimed at the public. In a letter
written in 1893, the same year as the vacancy at Cambridge, Kropotkin gives a list of lectures for his planned application and thanks Mill
‘for the interest you took.’ Yet he is uncertain about the prospects ofsuccess: ‘we shall see what will be the results.’52 The episode is signifi­
cant because it shows how Kropotkin was interested in promoting
the cause of geography at universities; his famous 1885 essay ‘What
Geography Ought to Be’ was in fact a complement to the Keltie report.
Education was certainly a major concern in Kropotkin’s thought,
and his emphasis on geography was also linked to its supposedly
exceptional ability to shape young minds.53 Unlike ancient languages
or mathematics—the former being irrelevant and the latter too complex—geography opened the path to understanding the world,
including in an ethical sense. In ‘What Geography Ought to Be’, Kropotkin argued that ‘[geography] must teach us, from our earliest
childhood, that we are all brethren, whatever our nationality’, andthat, against war, egoism, and national jealousies, it could serve as ‘ameans of dissipating these prejudices and of creating other feelings
more worthy of humanity.’54 Only geographical knowledge couldchange the perception of people whofrom their tenderest childhood . . . are taught to despise ‘thesavages’, to consider the very virtues of pagans as disguised
crime, and to look upon the ‘lower races’ as upon a mere nuis­
ance on the globe—a nuisance which is only to be tolerated aslong as money can be made out of it.55

While agreeing with Keltie’s report on the relevance of geog­raphy
and the need for a holistic approach to teaching it, Kropotkin struck
Robertson Smith. Henry Yule Oldman was appointed lecturer instead of
Kropotkin.
RGS Collections, HRM3/12, Kropotkin to Mill, 17 Nov. 1893.
Élisée Reclus pursued a similar educational project involving the construction of a large globe; Gary S. Dunbar, ‘Elisée Reclus and the Great Globe’,
Scottish Geographical Magazine, 90/1 (1974), 57–66.
54
Peter Kropotkin, ‘What Geography Ought to Be’, The Nineteenth Century,55
18/106 (1885), 940–56, at 943.
Ibid. 942.
52
53

41

Articles
a very different note in his open critique of imperialism. Keltie had
pleaded for geography with the argument that ‘the interests of England are as wide as the world’, and so the subject was ‘a matter ofimperial importance.’56 Mackinder joined the debate with an evenmore explicitly imperialist defence of geography in schools,57 and it
has been pointed out that the very symbolism of the RGS’s seal connected ‘the quest for and acquisition of secret knowledge about exotic
lands with military conquest and power.’58 Kropotkin’s supplement
to Keltie’s report flatly rejected such propositions, but the important
point is that at no stage did Kropotkin frame his own opinion in oppos­
ition to Keltie’s; rather, he presented his argument as a contribution to
the common struggle for the recognition of geography’s relevance.59
A similar pattern—endorsing a comparable framework while filling it with largely different content—also runs through the second,
more profound aspect of ‘the geographical experiment’. Livingstone
has shown how geographers became involved in the most hotly
debated scientific theory of the day: when reconceptualizing theirfield and placing it on a new theoretical foundation, they turned to
Darwin’s theory of evolution. Its reasoning was inherently geographical—Livingstone and Withers point out that ‘[i]n the “Darwinian
Revolution,” questions of biogeographical distribution, the relationships between organisms and habitat, and explanations rooted in
the determining agency of geographical difference are central.’60 By
Keltie, Geographical Education, 83. The first issue of the RGS journal stated as
the society’s raison d’être that it was ‘paramount to the welfare of a maritime
nation like Great Britain, with its numerous and extensive foreign possessions’. Cited in Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 167.
57
For an excellent comparison of Kropotkin’s and Mackinder’s responses tothe Keltie report, see Kearns, ‘The Political Pivot’.
58
Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Michie and Thomas(eds.), Nineteenth-Century Geographies, 1–22, at 5.
59
He sardonically comments that ‘[o]ur mercantile century seems better tohave understood the necessity of a reform as soon as the so-called “practical”
interests of colonization and warfare were brought to the front. Well, then,let us discuss the reform of geographical education.’ Kropotkin, ‘What Geog­
raphy Ought to Be’, 491.
60
David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, ‘On Geography and Revo­lution, in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (eds.) Geog­raphy
and Revolution (Chicago, 2005), 1–23, at 2; cf. David R. Stoddart, ‘Darwin’s
56

42

Kropotkin and the Royal Geographical Society
linking the physical aspects of geography with its human ones, evolutionary theory provided geographers with the conceptual umbrella
they had previously lacked, as well as opening their discipline to alarger, often no less teleological vision of processes in the natural
world. It was also where their interests intersected with Kropotkin’s
project.
Kropotkin’s engagement with Darwinism is well known and cameto dominate the work of his later years. The list of possible university extension classes he submitted to Mill in 1893 includes a seriesof lectures on ‘The Origin and Evolution of Institutions for MutualProtection and Support’. This is in fact one of the first mentions of
his interest in the topic and a preliminary to the series of articles thatwould become Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). In these texts,
Kropotkin rejected Huxleian readings of Darwin, which interpretedthe ‘struggle for existence’ as leading to inevitable clashes between
individuals as well as races, thereby offering a naturalist justification
for capitalist competition, war, and racism. Kropotkin worried that‘there is no infamy in civilised society, or in the relations of the whites
towards the so-called lower races, or of the strong towards the weak,
which would not have found its excuse in this formula.’61
Kropotkin’s own anarchist formula has been summed up as ‘Darwin
without Malthus’.62 He acknowledged the principle of the struggle forexistence, but held that more weight needed to be given to environmental conditions and to other species as possible opponents in thisstruggle. Seen from this angle, the capacity for cooperation displayed
by individuals, groups, and entire species became an instrument ofsurvival. The Siberian tundra had convinced him that in an inclement
environment, the communal struggle of societies and herds of animals
trumped individual feats of strength. At all times, he insisted thathis promotion of the role of sociability in evolution came closer to
Impact on Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 56/4
(1966), 683–98.
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ii. 317.
Daniel P. Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Oxford, 1989) argues that this type of reading wasembedded in the Russian reception of Darwinism; a similar view is found in
Alexander Vuchinich, Darwinism in Russian Thought (Berkeley, 1988).
61
62

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Articles
Darwin’s own views, which had been perverted by his proselytizers.
In his memoirs, Kropotkin notes that RGS members supported him in
this, claiming that Keltie’s predecessor as secretary, H. W. Bates, wrote
to encourage him to publish his account: ‘That is true Darwinism. It isa shame to think of what they have made of Darwin’s ideas. Write it,
and when you have published it, I will write you a letter of commendation which you may publish.’63
The support for Kropotkin from RGS members can also be ac­­counted for by another similarity in their specific readings of Darwin.
Like Kropotkin, the group of geographical innovators became worried that a focus on the physical features of a habitat alone threatened
to look a lot like the crude environmental determinism of old. But
to establish a more integrative vision of geography that would leaveroom for history and culture as influences on the course of evolution,a causal connection other than determinism was needed between theenvironmental and social aspects. To explain how certain accomplishments in the social world could lead to long-lasting advantages in theprocess of natural selection, they proposed a slightly modified version
of Darwinism—one that included Lamarckian elements. The idea thatchanges occurring during an individual’s lifetime could be passed on
to offspring was important not only in restoring a pos­sible role forenvironmental factors in the process of natural selection, but also in
foregrounding agency—which in Kropotkin’s case was especially rele­vant to the evolutionary rewards for altruistic actions.64 Livingstone
again has underlined the inspiration of neo-­Lamarckian evolutionism as ‘perhaps the key ingredient’65 in the story of geog­
raphy’s
academic institutionalization, discussing the cases of Mackinder,Friedrich Ratzel, and William Morris Davis. Strangely, he leaves Kropotkin out of this particular debate, even while acknowledging that
his theory represented ‘a naturalisation of morality that was tantalisingly analogous in its conceptual structures to that of the Darwinian
imperialists.’66 Perhaps ‘conceptual structures’ alone cannot serve asa foundation for institutional co­operation after all. From the RGS’s
Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ii. 318.
Cf. Álvaro Girón, ‘Kropotkin Between Lamarck and Darwin: The Impos­
sible Synthesis’, Asclepio, 55/1 (2003), 189–213.­
65
66
Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 189.
Ibid. 255.
63
64

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Kropotkin and the Royal Geographical Society
point of view, Kropotkin, with his prominence as an exotic society
figure, would have been useful in resetting the terms of the debate;but officializing him and the political ideals he associated with geographical reform would have been a step too far.
Conclusion
The debates on education and evolution rallied scientists from a wide
range of political backgrounds; however, political frameworks on all
sides continued to set the limits of the terms of debate, and thesewere never crossed. The scientific nature of anarchism remained
contested. Geographers certainly did not recognize it; Keltie diplomatically concluded that ‘[Kropotkin] was a keen observer, witha well-trained intellect, familiar with all the sciences bearing on
his subject; and although his conclusions may not be universally
accepted, there is no doubt that his contributions to geographicalscience are of the highest value.’67 But Kropotkin’s claim to be proceeding in a strictly scientific way was not universally acceptedamong an­arch­ists either; Errico Malatesta for example berated Kropotkin: ‘you have a theory and you look for facts to group together
and support that theory.’68
It was the very specific circumstance of a broad debate on the limits
and possibilities of geographical thought that allowed Kropotkin totake a surprisingly prominent place in the forums of the Royal Geographical Society. Kropotkin and his RGS counterparts were essentiallydiscussing similar problems within the confines of the same paradigm,
and this assured their mutual interest in each other’s work. But the factthat Kropotkin was in conversation with imperialist conservatives like
Mackinder as well as liberals like Keltie underlines that what united
them was an adherence to a novel conception of geography rather thana common liberal tradition. While this certainly required a degree oftolerance, or at least a willingness to overlook many of Kropotkin’s
inferences, to treat politics as the driving force behind their association
would be to massively overstate the case. And Kropotkin seems to havebeen well aware of this. Despite his own pleas for the interdependence
67

Keltie, ‘Obituary’, 319.

68

45

Cited in Cahm, Kropotkin, 13.

Articlesof geography and anarchism, he often neglected to mention the latter:his obituary for Reclus mirrors the one that Keltie would eventually
write for Kropotkin, in that he briefly alludes to the deceased’s political activities but praises his achievements in geography at length.69
Scholars have suggested that Kropotkin’s aristocratic origins and his
position as a champion of people facing political persecution in Russia
account for his relatively easy integration into British educated circles.
But I think it is equally important to pay attention to reasons internal
to the discipline of geography, given that many of the arguments put
forward by Kropotkin in the popular press coincided with the reform
strategies of the RGS. The interest of the Royal Geographical Society
in its unorthodox associate has still not completely faded—the Geographical Journal reviewed the first two English-language biographiesof Kropotkin,70 and Nellie Heath’s portrait of him, gifted in 1904, isstill on display at Lowther Lodge. However, the recent rediscovery
of Kropotkin as a geographer has come from the more marginal andexplicitly radical side of the profession.71
For Kropotkin as a public figure, if not for anarchism, the legitimation he sought by reformulating his anarchist project through arealignment of his scientific project seems to have been relatively successful. The RGS provided contacts and networks, thereby granting
him access to a larger audience. Eventually there was a shift in his
popular perception which mapped onto the geographical area where
69
Peter Kropotkin, ‘Obituary: Elisée Reclus’, Geographical Journal, 26/3 (1905),
337–43.
70
G. R. C., review of George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist
Prince: The Biography of Prince Peter Kropotkin (London, 1950), in Geographical
Journal, 117/2 (1951), 241–2; David Wileman, review of Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976), in Geographical Journal, 144/3 (1978), 504–5.
71
This rediscovery, in the English-speaking world, has centred on the journal
Antipode and the work of Simon Springer—e.g. ‘Anarchism and Geography:
A Brief Genealogy of Anarchist Geographies’, Geography Compass, 7/1 (2013),
46–60. Geographers also took part in the various conferences commemorating the centenary of his death. For my critique: Pascale Siegrist, ‘Historicising“Anarchist Geography”: Six Issues for Debate from a Historian’s Point of
View’, in Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Federico Ferretti, Anthony Ince, andFrancisco Toro (eds.), Historical Geographies of Anarchism: Early Critical Geog­
raphers and Present-Day Scientific Challenges (London, 2017), 129–50.

46

Kropotkin and the Royal Geographical Society
he spent much of his later years; in the words of Nicholas Walter:‘[i]n continental Europe Kropotkin was thought of as an anarchist who
happened to be a scientist, in the Anglo-Saxon world he was thoughtof more as a scientist who happened to be an anarchist.’72 This is almosta paraphrase of Kropotkin’s own letter to Marie Goldsmith, to whom
he remarked that ‘in England they know me as a scholar rather than asa political writer.’73 His conscious effort to present himself as a heroic
but humble figure played no small part in creating an image of a ser­ious and dedicated scientist, and some of his letters to editors reveal
how deeply he cared about his reputation as such.74 However, the evolution of his reception should not be seen as England having ‘tamed’
Kropotkin.75 As far as he was concerned, this was less a moderation of
his revolutionary enthusiasm than a strategic reorientation—one that
corresponded to a deeply felt renewal of his interest in geography once
he had turned it into a political tool. If Kropotkin the scientist was apublic figure known for integrity and as a moral authority, there wasalways hope that one day Kropotkin the anarchist would be too.

72
In his introduction to Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. Nicholas Walter (Mineola, NY, 2010), p. x.
73
Kropotkin to Goldsmith, 15 Aug. 1909, cited in Confino (ed.), Anarchistes
en exil, 364.
74
The Kropotkin–Keltie correspondence, held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 1129, op. 2, d. 74, contains a long exchange on aletter to the editors concerning one of Kropotkin’s ‘Recent Science’ summaries
75
in The Nineteenth Century.
Hulse, Revolutionists in London, 9.

PASCALE SIEGRIST is a Research Fellow in Modern History at theGerman Historical Institute London. In 2018 she completed a PhD on
nineteenth-century anarchism and geographical thought at the University of Konstanz, and she is currently working on a new projecton language invention in the UK and the US in the twentieth century.
47

BOOK REVIEWSBERNHARD JUSSEN, Das Geschenk des Orest: Eine Geschichte des nachrömischen Europa 526–1535 (C.H. Beck: Munich, 2023), 480 pp. ISBN
978 3 406 78200 8. €44.00
The ‘Middle Ages’ is a concept deeply embedded in both the academic
and the public understanding of the past in Europe, North America,and elsewhere in the world. It organizes how people think about thepast, and thus affects their perception of it, whether they realize it ornot. It is, of course, not a concept that was used in the sources fromthis period—nobody ever thought they were living in the Middle
Ages—and in this exciting new book, the Frankfurt historian Bernhard Jussen makes the case that it is high time to abolish it. ‘This book
is a provocation’, proclaims the dustjacket, and so it proves to be.
Perhaps the most visible innovation of the book concerns thesources that it highlights. Throughout, Jussen centres not the written sources that most historical work tends to privilege, but visual
imagery, using a ‘media studies’ (Mediologie) methodology. Each chapter is based around a key image or set of images which Jussen regards
as especially telling and treats as a historical sign or Geschichtszeichen.
These images are used neither to illustrate nor to confirm a written
text, but as focal points in their own right, as keys to contemporary
perception. By breaking away from the ‘canonical’ written sources inthis way, Jussen aims to open up fresh perspectives.
The first two chapters work as a pair. They are focused on thecommemorative image of a sixth-century widow named Turtura (or‘Turtle Dove’), praised for her fidelity to her dead husband; and on thethoroughly traditional ivory diptych of Turtura’s contemporary, theRoman consul Orestes, from which the book takes its name. Jussen’sargument is that the tension between these two representations shows
the true transformation of the Roman world. This transformation hadvery little to do with migrants, invasions, or ‘barbarians’. Rather, the48

Post-Roman Europe
key was the change in the sacral system (Sakralsystem), as Christianity
gradually supplanted and overturned established Roman traditions,and this was a change that the Romans brought about themselves.
At the heart of this shift was the revolution it brought about inkinship structures. Jussen proposes that ancient Roman society had
been dominated by male ancestry, expressed legally through the roleof the paterfamilias, and materially through wax casts of dead grandparents’ faces and family lineages painted on walls (though very littleof this material culture has survived). The form of Christianity thattook over in Rome regarded this ancestor veneration with outrighthostility. Instead of claims of ancestry and descent, it put the married
couple at the heart of society, promoted spiritual kinship in the placeof bonds of flesh and blood, and entrusted commemoration to specialists housed in institutions, rather than to the family at the graveside.
Turtura’s image was painted after her death, yet pointed to the future,
whereas Orestes, with his mastery of an ancient symbolic code, wasalready living in the past.
The third chapter moves to ideas of kingship, and the imagery associated with it. Jussen points out how the misuse of this imagery has
in the past led historians astray. A handful of idiosyncratic images oftenth- and eleventh-century Ottonian kings and emperors that depict
them as Christ-like were long used by historians to underpin a readingof these rulers as ‘sacral’. In reality, the Ottonians and their successors
made far fewer claims to sacrality than their imperial peers in Constantinople, whose coins, from the sixth century, were minted withimages of Christ and Mary. That was an iconography which Western rulers deliberately avoided. Conversely, the figure of the ruler onhorseback, central to Roman imperial imagery, vanished from sculptural representation in both East and West, but Jussen points out thatin the West it remained vibrant in other media, such as seals.
Chapter four is devoted to monasticism, viewed through thefamous St Gall Plan devised by the monk Gozbert in the ninth century. Jussen highlights two features of this drawing of an idealizedmonastery: its inclusion of numerous altars, and the absence of an
enclosing wall. The multiplication of altars shows how far Western
European society was entangled in an economy of salvation thatconverted financial resources into spiritual welfare through clerical49

Book Reviews
ritual, while the lack of an enclosure demonstrates how monasteries
were supposed to be thoroughly integrated into wider society. Jussenemphasizes that the Rule of St Benedict that was so influential in theWest was what we might think of today as an inclusive and accessible
form of monasticism, which eschewed the dramatic asceticism popular in other monastic practices. That, thinks Jussen, was linked to theway monasticism in the Latin West became mainstream.
The fifth chapter is inspired by a celebrated early fourteenth-­
century fresco in Siena’s town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico. This fresco
depicts personified virtues, including a representation of Concord or
Unity holding a carpenter’s plane to smooth over disagreement anddissent. From this image, Jussen develops a discussion of urban collective organization and self-representation as a form of participatory
government and indeed civil society, which he sees as being in irrecon­cilable tension with traditional forms of top-down governance.
The book closes with another pair of chapters. Chapter six studies
the popular motif of the mourning widow at her husband’s graveside
who encounters an attractive man. The tale was told, and represented,
in various ways, including numerous woodcut prints from the fifteenth century on. But in all of them it reflected a challenge to theworld-view of the faithful widow Turtura, for this widow was notquite so unequivocally loyal to her spouse. The final chapter looks at apainting by Hans Holbein the Younger in the early sixteenth century,
An Allegory of the Old and New Testaments. Jussen reads this painting asa frontal attack on the conventions of figural representation promotedby the established Catholic Church, and thus as part of the reworkingof the sacral system first established in the sixth century.
Given that the book’s shape effectively reproduces a narrative of
the Middle Ages—a millennium between ancient Rome and the Reformation, dominated by Catholic Christianity—what, then, is Jussen’s
objection to the concept? The answer lies in its connotations and associations. For instance, Jussen argues that the term skews discussion ofartistic production at the court of the Carolingian kings. Conventional
periodization insists that ‘medieval’ art was religious. That makes it
harder to see that in fact these Carolingian debates freed artists fromsome of the burdens placed upon them by conventions of representing the sacred which remained embedded in Constantinople.
50

Post-Roman Europe
However, the central issue for Jussen is kinship and family structure. The association between the Middle Ages and family structures
such as clans and lineages has, in his view, blocked the reception ofanthropologically inspired research on kinship, to which research
Jussen has himself made many distinguished contributions. This
research presents more or less the opposite picture of the received
wisdom about the Middle Ages: that this ‘millennium of the turtle
dove’ (p. 61) was characterized by surprisingly weak kinship structures, with huge consequences both politically and culturally, since
Jussen regards kinship as foundational to the social order more
broadly.
In such a bold and wide-ranging book, there are of course points at
which specialists may cavil. Jussen’s focus on long-term kinship structures that were established in the sixth century and endured thereafter
perhaps understates the subsequent changes in these structures prior
to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The formal prohibition onpriests’ marriage in the eleventh century, for instance, was a quite
radical step that finds little discussion here. Put differently, does itreally make sense to talk of the Latin West in the twelfth century (andindeed later) as ‘post-Roman’—in other words, as still meaningfully
contained within a late Roman legacy?
Equally, one could argue that in other respects, the book is not
long-term enough. For instance, one of the key features of kinship inthe Latin West was monogamy, that is to say, the rule that both men
and women can only be married to one person at a time. Many people
today take this rule for granted, yet in reality it is far from a cultural
universal, and in many parts of the world it is not the accepted framework for the social order. Marital monogamy was not, however, aproduct of the sixth century, or even of Christianity. It had deeper
roots in pagan Roman culture, linked, perhaps, to Rome’s distinctive
private property regime. Its survival and indeed hardening in these
post-Roman centuries shows that sixth-century Christianity did not,after all, change everything about kinship in Western Europe.
This book, then, certainly provokes counter-arguments. Yet it is
not only a very stimulating read, but its central observation merits
serious reflection. The notion of the Middle Ages takes its meaningfrom a world-view that supposed that modern society had much
51

Book Reviews
more in common with antiquity than with the time of political chaos
and religious intolerance ‘in between’. Variants of this argument are
still alive and kicking. But Jussen’s insight is that today’s pluralist civilsociety—the vantage point from which he suggests historians in theWestern world now survey the past, after the end of the Cold War—actually has less in common with ancient authoritarian empires thanwith the collaborative and associational networks that replaced them,and whose origin and development this book is devoted to exploringand explaining.
As Jussen suggests, these are resonances and associations that theconcept of the Middle Ages obscures, and was indeed designed to
obscure. It might be argued that historians of the Middle Ages havesigned a Faustian pact that on the one hand gives their research a
recognized and, to some limited extent, protected place within thediscipline, but at the price of explicitly coding it as not actually relevant for their colleagues, or for that matter everyone else. We do notshare the Weltsicht (world-view) of the generations around 1800, so is
it not time that historians started seriously thinking about approaches
to the distant past that better suit our contemporary conjuncture, justas Bernhard Jussen does here?

CHARLES WEST is Professor of Medieval History at the Universityof Edinburgh. He has recently published a book on the Carolingian
kingdom of Lothar II, and is currently co-leading a collaborative
Anglo-German research project on local priests in the tenth-century
Latin West.
52

ISABELLA CHWALKA, Kein Interesse? Fremd- und Selbstwahrnehmung
in der deutschen und englischen Historiographie des 12. Jahrhunderts, Orbis
mediaevalis, 19 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2022), 446 pp. ISBN 978 3
847 11349 2. €65.00
This rich study of twelfth-century historical writing in England andGermany sets out with a very particular goal in mind: to find theimage of the Other through which English and German authors conceptualized and judged one another. That no such stereotypes—more
redolent of more recent periods of Anglo-German enmity—in fact
emerge should not distract from the wealth of evidence and analysis
accumulated in this book.
The book opens with Walter Map’s twelfth-century comparison of
the material foundations of royal power in the Latin West: English
kings were rich, the French lacked everything except ‘bread, wine, andjoy!’, while the German king had given everything away to the church
except his military strength (p. 1). The remarkable anecdote is alas, for
Chwalka, a red herring, ‘at once the best and worst example’ (p. 14)of evidence one could accumulate to assess perceptions of the Other.
Eschewing such caricatured outliers, she seeks instead to ‘compile
as many testimonies as possible, especially the unspectacular ones’(p. 14). She draws upon a remarkable corpus of chronicles (sixty-fourin total). The first section of the book (pp. 39–152) lists all mentionsof England and Germany by authors writing in the opposing realm.
Strict chronological limits attempt to standardize the material: only
events from 1111–97 are included for the Holy Roman Empire andfrom 1100–99 for England (though these restrictions are occasionallyrelaxed). The second section (pp. 153–389), the richest part of the book,drills down into several case studies, selected because they proved tobe the most frequently mentioned events in the statistical analysis.
The conflict between Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa,
and the imprisonment of Richard the Lionheart, are examined in thechronicles of both realms. The marriage alliances of Emperor Henry V
and Henry the Lion, and Thomas Becket’s martyrdom, form a further
case study for the German authors; the Investiture Contest, especially
Henry V’s expedition to Rome in 1111, serves the same purpose for
their English counterparts.
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Book Reviews
The book is interspersed with rich summaries of the pertinent
scholarship regarding the events and chronicles examined (no meanfeat given the sheer volume of the latter). There are intriguing historiographical asides. The classic volumes on medieval historical writingin each realm reflect different scholarly priorities: Wilhelm Wattenbach and Franz-Josef Schmale offer a survey divided by region (p. 39),
Antonia Gransden by the reign of kings (pp. 86–90), a distant echo ofthe similarly regnal-focused approach of her English sources (though
one should add that Gransden offered further subdivisions by genre
and authorship). The summary of the German-language scholarshipconcerning twelfth-century English–German relations is particularly
useful (pp. 27–31), highlighting how previous interpretations havebeen indebted to modern notions of international politics. English historians—in contrast to their medieval forebears—have paid far lessattention to these relations than their German peers. Karl Leyser, Benjamin Arnold, and Joseph P. Huffmann are highlighted as the obvious
exceptions, but their work could have been given more weight, andTimothy Reuter is strangely absent from this section. In an intriguing
observation elsewhere, Chwalka does point out that Reuter and Björn
Weiler appear to use different terminology for the empire dependingon whether they are writing in English or German (p. 26, n. 58). The
force of this potentially significant observation is undercut by the factthat only a minority of their publications have been consulted, a lapse
with consequences to which I shall return.
The discussion of English and German identity is less convin­cing. The manifold difficulties entailed in disentangling the layers ofregional, national, and imperial identity in twelfth-century Germany
are correctly pointed out. But the discussion is surprisingly short(pp. 21–2) and the omission of work by Len Scales and Reuter is regrettable, not least because their arguments would have added nuanceto Chwalka’s claim that notions of English national identity were ‘noless complicated and controversial’ (p. 22).1 The date of inception forEnglish national identity has certainly been much debated, and thelands ruled by the English crown did fluctuate. But to suggest that, as1
Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414(Cambridge, 2012) and essays by Reuter cited below.

54

Twelfth-Century Historiography in Germany and Englanda result, a ‘unified gens did not exist for England’ (p. 24) goes too far.
The attempt to balance out the two scholarly debates—‘while for theGerman Empire it is a question of the relationship between imperial
and/or national consciousness . . . for the people of England the question of Norman or English identity is in the foreground’ (p. 23)—isnot convincing. The lack of reference to any of the essays collected in
Timothy Reuter’s magisterial Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities
is surprising and unfortunate.2 In one particularly important contribution, Reuter argued that the unification of the English kingdom
pre-1066 had produced a Wirgefühl (a feeling of unity in law, custom,and language). This was largely absent in Germany, where various
gentes were bound together more by their link to a common ruler thanby connections with one another.3 Such unity has consequences for
how one considers Chwalka’s sources.
This corpus consists of, as she well recognizes, a heady mix ofannals, monastic chronicles, royal biographies, and both national
and universal histories. The inclusion of Orderic Vitalis and Robertof Torigni, but not Gislebert of Mons (or, indeed, Godfrey of Viterbo)
requires more justification. John of Salisbury’s Historia Pontificalis is
another striking omission: an author familiar with the English royalcourt who had much to say on the empire (as Reuter’s highly pertin­ent essay on this subject—not cited—attests).4 At a more fundamental
level, there are differences in the weighting of historiographical genresin the two realms which surely influenced the results of Chwalka’s stat­
istical analysis and which would have been better addressed directly(reading relevant essays by Weiler, Reuter, and Nicholas Vincent
would have helped).5 More attention should have been paid to the link
Timothy Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet Nelson(Cambridge, 2006).
3
Timothy Reuter, ‘The Making of England and Germany, 850–1050: Points ofComparison and Difference’, in Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mental­
ities, 284–99, at 298.
4
Timothy Reuter, ‘John of Salisbury and the Germans’, in Michael Wilks (ed.),The World of John of Salisbury (Oxford, 1984), 415–25.
5
See various comparisons made in Björn Weiler, ‘The King as Judge: Henry
II and Frederick Barbarossa as Seen by their Contemporaries’, in Patricia
Skinner (ed.), Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History: The Legacy of Timothy Reuter (Turnhout, 2009), 115–40, at 135–40; Björn Weiler, ‘How Unusual
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Book Reviews
Reuter highlighted between the remarkable English unity mentioned
above and the fact that English writers, no doubt influenced by Bedeand the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were more inclined than their German
counterparts to view the past through the prism of the royal court.
References to Henry Bainton’s comparison of such texts to a ‘[n]ativity
story for the nation’ and Robert Swanson’s identification of kingship as
the historiographical focus in England (as opposed to bishops in Germany and cities in Italy) hint in this direction (pp. 88–9).
In contrast to their modern successors, the statistics show a greaterinterest among twelfth-century English historians in the empire thanvice versa. The conclusion holds true at the extremes and in the round.
All the English chronicles bar one (the Gesta Stephani) included at least
one reference, whereas a third of the German sources did not mention England. Eight German authors mentioned England just once,and only two German writers included more than ten references (thefigure is twelve for England). The range, among English historians,
is enormous: a single remark in the Annales Plymptonienses and Richard of Hexham’s De gestis regis Stephani compares to a staggering
eighty-nine in Roger of Howden’s Chronica. Chwalka is commendably
forthright about the methodological pitfalls which lie behind the raw
statistics.6 A single reference in her survey could equate to a fleeting mention of the emperor in a sentence’s subclause or a thematic,
detailed, and reflective set piece. In the example she provides, Orderic
Vitalis chronicled a sequence of events spanning twenty-seven years,
linked together in the person of Henry V. Because the account is notinterrupted by references to other topics, the five pages of discussion
was Matthew Paris? The Writing of Universal History in Angevin England’,in Michele Campopiano and Henry Bainton (eds.), Universal Chronicles inthe High Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2017), 199–222; Nicholas Vincent, ‘The
Strange Case of the Missing Biographies: The Lives of the Plantagenet Kings
of England 1154–1272’, in David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (eds.),
Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250 (Woodbridge, 2006), 237–58.
For another attempt to apply a statistical approach to twelfth-century histor­
ical writing which presents comparable methodological problems, see Grischa
Vercamer, Hochmittelalterliche Herrschaftspraxis im Spiegel der Geschichtsschreibung: Vorstellungen von ‘guter’ und ‘schlechter’ Herrschaft in England, Polen und
dem Reich im 12./13. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2020); see also my review of thistitle in GHIL Bulletin, 44/1 (2022), 80–7.

6

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Twelfth-Century Historiography in Germany and England(in the modern edition) count as a single ‘unit of meaning’ (p. 142).
A greater number of mentions thus often reflects an author’s narrative style, rather than necessarily their interest in the topic. William ofMalmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum provides only two references, forexample, but they prove to be among the most interesting.
How might one explain the greater interest displayed by English
authors if we take the statistics at face value? While Chwalka is correct
to point to more intense bonds forged between England and the Continent by the Norman Conquest and the Papacy, other hints offeredin her conclusion take us back to the more intriguing differences
between the historiographical cultures of the two realms. English
authors often prove to be better known and their background andsources easier to trace, their duties at court granting them access tooral and written material included in the composition of what were
often lengthier histories. Again, the contrast is not simple or absolute:
visits to the royal court, and journeys to Italy, are recorded for Ekkehard of Aura, Burchard of Ursberg, Otto of Freising, Rahewin, andArnold of Lübeck. A subtler suggestion offered is that we can detect
a greater ‘or at least more verifiable mobility’ (p. 152) among English
writers. Rachel Koopmans has indeed drawn attention to how manyof the authors in Chwalka’s English corpus swapped information andinspiration in what was often a remarkably tight-knit social circle, one
surely bound together more closely than in the far larger, more dis­par­ate regions of the German kingdom.7
Chwalka’s analysis bears much richer fruit once we proceed toher case studies, where the thorough exploration of the histor­ic­
albackground, the chronicles, and their sources pays dividends. The
account of English reactions to the Investiture Contest and to theSalian emperors is fascinating. Henry V’s campaign to Rome in 1111
and his scandalous imprisonment of Pope Paschal II received far
greater attention than events at Canossa. William of Malmesbury
offers a remarkable description of the latter: Henry IV is refused an
audience by a pope disgusted by the emperor’s depraved debauchery with his sister. Malmesbury himself had more time for him: here
Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting
in High Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2011).

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Book Reviews
was a powerful, intelligent, well-read, and charitable ruler, com­par­able to the ancient Caesars, who had fought in sixty-two battles andnearly always triumphed against his enemies. On the endless investiturae controversia (Investiture Contest)—compared by Malmesbury
to a hydra—the example of Orderic Vitalis in turn offers an abrupt
reminder of the gap between the priorities of modern scholarship andthose of our sources. For Orderic, like Malmesbury, incest triumphedover investiture. Investiture appears only once in a list of Henry IV’s
manifold offences, and the crime is not mentioned at all in relation to
Henry V. Rudolf Schieffer was astonished that Orderic had appeared
to mix up Henry IV and Philip I of France (the latter excommunicatedfor adultery).8 As Chwalka shows, Orderic knew his target: lewd
details of Salian licentiousness had travelled beyond the seemingly
limited circulation of polemical texts within the empire and reached as
far afield as St Evroul and Malmesbury.
The discussion of Richard the Lionheart’s captivity by English andGerman authors is equally impressive, adding nuance to previous
conclusions reached by Knut Görich and John Gillingham. Görich
suggested that the capture of the English crusader king by Leopold V,
duke of Austria, had been justified by German authors with referenceto Richard’s dishonourable conduct at Acre when tearing down theduke’s banner. In fact, only two sources mention this. Other chroniclers wrote of insulting behaviour by the king towards Leopold,
the German contingent as a whole, and God, or they condemned his
actions elsewhere. Rare references are made by the chroniclers here
to broader national categories. Otto of St Blasien suggested that theGerman and Italian knights left Acre, decrying Anglicam perfidiam(English perfidy); the Chronica regia Coloniensis claimed Richard questioned the bravery of the Germans as a people; the Marbach Annals
named him an enemy of the empire. An impatient reader might think
we have finally stumbled upon the much looked-for construction of
the Other. Ludwig Schmugge and Günther Blaicher guide us in thisdirection, arguing that the experience of crusading led to the formation of more precise and vicious national caricatures (see pp. 236–7).
Rudolf Schieffer, ‘Worms, Rom und Canossa (1076/77) in zeitgenössischer
Wahrnehmung’, Historische Zeitschrift, 292 (2011), 593–612, at 609.

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Twelfth-Century Historiography in Germany and England
Have we found, with such remarks, the beginnings of a stereotype
that would, far in the future, be wielded by the likes of Napoleon to
cut perfidious Albion down to size? Not quite. Accusations of infidelity, Chwalka cautions, were applied to numerous targets. The febrileconditions of the crusader camps before Acre had not, in fact, incubated the seeds of later English–German enmity.
Where German authors passed over Richard’s actual imprisonment
with a discreet silence, their English contemporaries felt duty-boundto defend their king’s conduct. Yes, Richard had insulted Leopold’s
honour, but quite right too! Richard may have cut down the duke’s
tent, but Leopold should not have placed it so close to the king’s pavilion or refused Richard’s request to move it a short distance. It was
sheer folly for him to demand an equal share in the spoils; he was aduke, not a king. The justice of Richard’s cause was all too apparent
when Leopold died in 1194 following a tournament accident, a gruesome death reported with relish by English authors lapping up thegossip spread by hostages returning from Austria. According to William of Newburgh, they had milk and honey on their tongues whenreporting the news. Henry VI received a variety of negative judgements: angry, envious, impressionable, and comparable to Pharaoh,and even Saladin, in his lack of Christian honour and imper­ial dignity. Negative generalizations feature again. Ralph of Diceto called
the Austrians foul-smelling barbarians who spoke a horrible language
and resembled wild beasts living in squalor. Such remarks were again
atypical. The German princes campaigning for Richard’s release re­ceived a positive press, as did Henry VI once he was thought to beplanning a new crusade.
The care with which Chwalka has dissected these accounts will bereadily apparent. An equally significant service rendered by her book
is to shine a light on the rich exchange of information which underpinned these narratives, with chroniclers drawing upon an array ofletters, chronicles, personal experience, and foreign contacts. The
importance, for English authors, of the histories written by Marianus
Scotus, Sigebert of Gembloux, Ekkehard of Aura, and David the Scot isclear (direct references by their German peers to English histories proverarer). Eyewitness testimonies were also crucial: Eadmer described theencounter of Archbishop Ralph d’Escures with Henry V; Malmesbury
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Book Reviewsclaimed to have heard stories about Gregory VII from a monk who
had heard them from Abbot Hugh of Cluny (Henry IV’s godfather anda witness to Canossa); the Cologne Chronicle described a delegation
sent to Rouen to speak with Henry II of England in 1168; and Ralph of
Coggeshall drew the details of Richard’s imprisonment from the king’s
chaplain, Anselm. The evidence for such contact and exchange, even
within the remit of Chwalka’s analysis, is considerable. They surely
represent ‘the tip of the iceberg’.9
Yet Chwalka’s assessment of these contacts is surprisingly downbeat. The theoretical discussion of ‘communication’ is an unwelcome
detour from an otherwise useful set of observations (pp. 77–8). Particu­
larly influential for Chwalka is Andreas Bihrer’s concept of mittlere
Entfernung (‘middle distance’, p. 16): an intermediate zone where the
Other could be constructed in a more dynamic and varied manner.
Conflict and contact between England and Germany are judged not
to have been as intense or immediate as between England and France,
nor as remote—in a somewhat dramatic leap—as between the Latin
West and the Mongols or China (p. 16). This model takes us to her
conclusions which—like the book’s hesitant title—often strike a surprisingly negative tone, given the wealth of evidence and insights
which precede them. On the one hand, significant omissions arerightly pointed out. No suggestion is found of the imperial overlordship so fiercely debated by twentieth-century historians, nor a ‘centreof perception’ (p. 145) or particularly obvious geographical patterns.
The overall conclusions, however, are often too starkly formulated; asper Bihrer’s model, ‘constant contact—as well as constant awareness’(p. 242) did not exist. France is the necessary foil here: unlike England’s‘immediate neighbour, the empire was not the constant focus of thescribes’ (p. 385). Personal contacts between England and the empire‘had no measurable influence on the acquisition of information about
the Other in German sources’ (p. 85). Among German authors, a ‘consistent interest’ in developments in the English polity could not be
proven (p. 241). Although ‘a large amount of information on England
and a variance of opinions could be found’ (p. 242), the triggers to
Quotation from Timothy Reuter, ‘All Quiet Except on the Western Front?
The Emergence of Pre-Modern Forms of Statehood in the Central Middle
Ages’, in Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, 432–58, at 445.

960

Twelfth-Century Historiography in Germany and Englanddiscuss English events were external (the crisis of the papal schism or
Richard’s imprisonment). More negative stereotypes stemmed from‘emotionality due to insecurity’ or were ‘persuasive stylistic devices’(p. 243) for self-reassurance. Authors oscillated between ‘indifference
and tense attention’ (p. 244). Fundamental notions of the Other, comparable to the prejudicial stereotypes formed in relation to Slavs or
Muslims, cannot be found, nor a fixed image of foreign rulers: chroniclers did not have ‘firmly established ideas about the Other . . . [nor]thought deeply about the differences between the two nations’ (p. 397).
Walter Map’s humorous anecdote, it seems, was indeed atypical.
Yet if readers flip back to the initial statistical analysis, they willfind an array of fascinating examples: stragglers, whose voices havebeen drowned out in the book’s quick march towards the selectedcase studies. Important themes emerge from this more diverse set ofmater­ial. Many English authors, for example, recognized the (growing) significance of the princes in the governance of the empire (thatRalph of Diceto explicitly discussed the office of imperial chancellor and its applicability to Thomas Becket is relegated to a footnote:
p. 319, n. 1,345). The English portrayal of princely opposition to
Henry VI, which sought to protect the honor imperii against his arbitrary tyranny, fits neatly into this pattern. References to the imperial
episcopate would also have made for an intriguing case study. Orderic
Vitalis’ observation that the archbishop of Mainz travelled with 500
knights could have led to a broader discussion of one of the mostpotent German stereotypes in the period, that of the bloodthirsty mili­tant Teutonic bishop (studies of which, by Reuter and Scales, were
not consulted).10 Comments by Walter Map and William of Malmesbury that German kings were weak because they had given too muchaway to the church will thrill any scholars still engaged in the Reichskirchensystem debates (Malmesbury claimed that they had done so
specifically to escape the control of the lay nobility). It is really worth
stressing here the sheer amount of material referred to by Chwalka,
Len Scales, ‘Germen Militiae: War and German Identity in the Later Middle
Ages’, Past and Present, 180 (2003), 41–82; Timothy Reuter, ‘Episcopi cum sua
militia: The Prelate as Warrior in the Early Staufer Era’, in Timothy Reuter(ed.), Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl
Leyser (London, 1992), 79–94.

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Book Reviews
but left untapped, ranging from discussions of Carolingian and Ottonian ancestry (for both English and German rulers) to attempts byGerman kings to introduce taxes based on English models. Ralph
Niger—in his descriptions of the Magi at Cologne, campaigns in Italy,
and the imperial episcopate—is indeed recognized as having shown a‘marked interest in German history’ (p. 137). We miss out too on Walter
Map’s incredible suggestion that Henry V, having slain his brotherand quarrelled with the princes, faked his own death and retired to amonastery. Map even cites an expletive—Tpwrut Aleman—‘reckoned
to this day by all Germans as the worst of insults . . . a reproach whichconstantly causes many quarrels between them and foreigners’.11
The material fits Reuter’s highly pertinent characterization of Walter
Map’s initial anecdote as ‘seemingly unusable: imprecise, historicallyinaccurate, cliché ridden’—but nonetheless illustrative of the capacityof these authors to compare and contrast.12
To only judge the extent of contact and awareness between Eng­
land and Germany by either the final case studies, or by reference
to models of the Other, would be to miss out on far too much of therich bounty that Chwalka has unearthed from her sources (before one
even begins to think, beyond her remit, of what could be gleaned fromother genres of sources or areas of economic, religious, intellectual,and artistic life). The absence of any reference throughout the bookto Robert Bartlett’s Making of Europe—in a study concerned with the
Other in the Latin West—is inexplicable and perhaps also significant
for the work’s framing and ultimate conclusions.13 As Bartlett argued,
twelfth-century Europe bore witness to a high degree of integrationand mobility of the kind Chwalka has observed between England andGermany. Hostile notions of the Other did exist, but were directed
more often towards those beyond the edge of this increasingly
homogenous core—by English authors looking north and west, andby their German counterparts towards the east. Chwalka’s search forsuch an Other in two polities at the centre of this zone might always
Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R.
James, C. N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 458.
12
Reuter, ‘All Quiet Except on the Western Front?’, 452.
13
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural
Change 950–1350 (London, 1993).
11

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Twelfth-Century Historiography in Germany and Englandhave proved elusive. Yet, paradoxically, one should not take her conclusion—nor the book’s title—at its word. What she has un­­covered
instead is more nuanced and arguably more interesting: a pair ofvibrant historical cultures enriching one another through fleeting,but nonetheless significant exchanges of information, documents,
and personal experiences, whose authors displayed a breadth ofvision when writing about their European neighbours that compares
favourably with that of their modern successors. Kein Interesse is notwithout its faults: the lack of reference to works by not only Bartlett
and Reuter, but also Weiler, Scales, and Thomas Förster is regrettable
and significant.14 But it remains a valiant comparative study whose
approach, interpretations, and conclusions reward close reading andprolonged reflection.

In addition to the works cited above, particularly relevant are Timothy
Reuter, ‘The Medieval German Sonderweg? The Empire and its Rulers in theHigh Middle Ages’, in Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, 388–412;
Timothy Reuter, ‘Modern Mentalities and Medieval Polities’, ibid. 3–18; Timothy Reuter, ‘Past, Present and No Future in the Twelfth-­Century Regnum
Teutonicum’, in Paul Magdalino (ed.), The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-­Century
Europe, (London, 1992), 15–36; and Thomas Förster, Vergleich und Identität:
Selbst- und Fremddeutung im Norden des hochmittelalterlichen Europa (Berlin, 2009).

14

RYAN KEMP completed a PhD in medieval history at Aberystwyth
University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universityof Bonn. His project there examines how critics of royal power wererepresented in high medieval Europe. His primary research interests
lie in the political culture of the High Middle Ages, particularly thestudy of kingship, the episcopate, and the ideals and practice of political criticism.
63

FRANZISKA KLEIN, Die Domus Conversorum und die Konvertiten desKönigs: Fürsorge, Vorsorge und jüdische Konversion im mittelalterlichen
England, Europa im Mittelalter, 37 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), xii +308 pp. ISBN 978 3 110 68714 9. £91.00
In any society in which religion is a differentiating factor, convertingfrom one religion to another has particular significance. For a relatively long time after their conversion (and sometimes permanently),
converts see themselves, or others see them, as belonging not only to
one community but as embodying much of their old world—the one
they have left behind. Their milieu, their religious and social practices, and of course suspicion towards them from the ranks of their
new religion mean that converts often occupy a distinct place withinsociety. In 1232, the English king Henry III established a dedicatedinstitution on what was then the edge of the city (today Chancery
Lane, at that time Newestrete) to accommodate, educate, and provide
for Jews from all over the country who had converted to Christianity. It was called the Domus Conversorum—the ‘first royal home forconverts in the Latin Midde Ages’ (p. 23). There is nothing left of thebuilding itself; the former headquarters of the Public Record Office(now the King’s College Maughan Library) were built on the site in
the nineteenth century. It is just about possible, however, to reconstruct its history—albeit with gaps and discontinuities, and often
only from later sources.
The history of the Domus Conversorum is the subject of this excellent book by Franziska Klein, which came out of the PhD thesis shecompleted at the University of Duisburg–Essen in 2017. Equippedwith a highly reflective methodology, the author has structured herstudy clearly and justified her approach very well throughout. First,
Klein explains her sources. Apart from a more detailed report by
Matthew Paris on its founding, there are very few thirteenth-century
records pertaining to this establishment. An almost uninterrupted
sequence of bills, admissions orders, and receipts from the houseitself, however, has survived. These date from 1331, and offer insight
into the institution’s occupancy, staffing, and financial situation. This
Translated by Marielle Sutherland (GHIL).

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The Domus Conversorum
sequence comes to an end in 1609 (p. 25), but it is interesting to notethat the Domus Conversorum survived the (by no means complete)expulsion of the Jews in 1290. A large number of its residents foundtheir way to England from different European countries (including
Spain, Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, France, and the Holy Roman
Empire), although we know very little about their reasons for doing so(p. 229–30). In 1308, forty-one men and ten women were admitted tothe institution. In terms of the gender ratio, the house was unequivo­
cally male-dominated in the late Middle Ages and the early modern
period (p. 230).
The first section examines the prevalence of, and resources involved
in, welfare for converts in England in the thirteenth century, the aimof which was to prevent a decline in their social status (p. 29). Thissection begins with a detailed inventory of the Domus Conversorum,
which is recognized not only as a central institution that cared for converts but also in its capacity as a foundation—in Michael Borgolte’s
sense of a ‘total social phenomenon [totales soziales Phänomen]’1—and asa self-contained establishment for poor relief (p. 25). According to thisinventory, the Domus by no means grew ‘out of nothing’ but followed
a tradition on which it left its own mark (p. 27). Klein’s understandingof welfare for converts is decidedly not one of ‘individual action’ butof social practice—endowed with a strong sense of social commitment.
The second section is entitled ‘Alternatives to Royal Welfare’.
Extending the perspective she has set out thus far, Klein turns to thoseconverts who did not benefit to the same degree from royal welfare
but pursued independent careers—for example, in royal service.
Other alternatives to royal welfare were, Klein observes, marriage,
the priesthood, or—strikingly, of course—crime (pp. 111–19). Section
three is entitled ‘Crossing and Drawing Boundaries: Challenges andQuestions around English Policies on Jews and Conversion’. Klein
profiles English welfare policy against the background of royal Jewish
and conversion policies, raising questions about the status of Jews andconverts in the Kingdom of England, and particularly their relationship to the Crown. Klein stresses that baptism was a ‘conflict generator’
Michael Borgolte, Weltgeschichte als Stiftungsgeschichte: Von 3000 v.u.Z. bis
1500 u.Z. (Darmstadt, 2017), 9.

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Book Reviews(pp. 162, 166), a concept she illustrates in very different ways. As an
example of a property dispute deriving from a conversion, she citesa case from the mid thirteenth century: an argument between Josce,
who was a Jew from Canterbury, and his daughter. Josce was unenthusiastic about his daughter’s conversion plans. When she and herhusband announced they were going to convert, he promptly withdrew the dowry of 30 marks he had given her upon their marriage. He
then received orders from the Crown to return the money, although it
is unclear whether the converts were allowed to keep it or whether it
was ultimately seized by the king. As well as such property disputes,
Klein describes other obstructions to conversions, kidnappings, andcases of converts threatening Jews.
The fourth section explores planning, control, and the handling ofcontingencies, investigating the functions and effects of welfare forconverts in England. Central to this was education in the Christianfaith, which converts received at the Domus Conversorum (p. 211).
The many measures Klein lists include general facilitation of workand careers, but above all support from the Crown for careers in the
Church and for marriages (p. 212). Section five turns to the broader
history of the Domus Conversorum after the expulsion of the Jews
from England. Here, Klein establishes that despite its unquestionablesignificance, the year 1290 did not represent an immediate turning
point in the existence of the Domus Conversorum. However, during
this year—as documented by fewer payments from the Crown andnumerous reports on catastrophic living conditions in the house—
the institution found itself at a crisis point, and this lasted until themid fourteenth century (p. 225). Crucial in the survival and gradualtransformation of the institution was not least the fact that it became
an important site of the royal chancery. Exactly when the Crown
began storing chancery records (especially rolls) in the chapel of the
Domus Conversorum can, according to Klein, no longer be established, but it had already been reported that Philip Gerardyn ‘venit
coram Cancellario . . . in capella domus conversorum London [cameto the Chancellery . . . in the chapel of the Domus Conversorum in
London]’ (p. 234). For the years following, Klein continues, recordsof legal transactions are legion, and consequently, the chapel of thehouse acquired the title capella rotulorum, or Rolls Chapel. At the end
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The Domus Conversorumof the fifteenth century, it even replaced the Tower in its role as ‘document repository’ (p. 234). Whereas the converts thus featured less andless from the fourteenth century, becoming more an accessory to thehouse than the centre of its work, the Masters of the Rolls, and withthem the royal chancery, increasingly shaped the character of the site(p. 236). Further architectural changes were made in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries before, in the nineteenth century, the famous
Public Record Office building was erected, the home of the British
National Archives until 1974.
At the end of her book, Klein rightly points out that despite all her
emphasis on welfare, we must not forget that there were also converts who were neither recipients of aid nor employees of the Crown.
Such people, whose existence is confirmed by isolated sources, still
represent a blind spot in the study of English conversion policy, forthey are mentioned in the sources only in exceptional cases. Further
studies on converts in England, Klein argues, are needed to examine this group more closely, coming at it from a local angle insteadof from her rather centralized, royal perspective. Our knowledge of
converts at the parochial level is still rather hazy in terms of both theireveryday integration into the majority society and their contact withJews; a cursory glance at the Husting Rolls of Common Pleas reveals
there is great potential for research in this area. More generally, there
is in fact a considerable gap in research on the inclusion of converts in
the Christian community beyond the Iberian Peninsula and the Kingdom of Naples, and the few short studies completed thus far havenot been able to fill it. Research on converts primarily needs to use
regional sources to focus on localizing this phenomenon of poor relief
and Jewish policy.
Klein’s book contains a wealth of valuable insights, not least the
fascinating idea put forward in its conclusion: that it was no accident
that the increased separation between Jews and Christians and the
stepping up of welfare for converts came at around the same time,
but rather that both phenomena had the same root cause. Both werea reaction to a proximity between Christians and Jews that the Christian society increasingly considered problematic. The most powerfulstories of personal fates in the book—in my opinion—are those thatare ambigu­
ous: descriptions of the majority society’s ineradicable67

Book Reviews
resentment towards newly converted Christians, such as in the caseof Henry of Winchester, perhaps the most famous of all thirteenth-­
century English converts. King Henry III himself was involved in
Winchester’s conversion; he lifted him from the baptismal font andknighted him. Henry of Winchester played a crucial role in the buying
and selling of Jewish bonds. In 1261, he was ordered by the king tostore the bonds in six chests. Nonetheless, as Klein con­
vin­
cing­
ly
shows, his Jewish origins always went before him, like a stain on his
character (p. 182). Following an objection by Thomas de Cantilupes(c.1220–82), the Bishop of Hereford, he was denied a decisive rolein investigations into counterfeit coins. Thomas even threatened toresign from the counsel if this ‘convert and Jew’ were to be given such
power over the lives of Christians (p. 182).
It is also worth drawing attention to the book’s appendix; in it, there
are transcriptions from the National Archives that document the distribution of converts in 1255; reprints of a letter from the convert Alicia
of Worcester to Robert Burnell, the chancellor and bishop of Bath andWells (c.1275–92); a report on the state of the Domus Conversorum
and the number of residents in 1308; and a petition by the convert
Andrew to Edward II (c.1315). An index of names, places, and institutions rounds off the study, which, in its interplay between specificindividual cases and general inferences, is key to our understandingof how the English monarchy dealt with England’s Jews, even beyond
the history of the Domus Conversorum. The book is one of the mostimportant new publications on Christian converts in the Middle Ages
since Jean-Claude Schmitt’s The Conversion of Herman the Jew.2

Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century, trans. Alex J. Novikoff (Philadelphia,
2010; French original 2003).

2

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The Domus Conversorum
JÖRG SCHWARZ is Professor of Medieval History at the University of
Innsbruck. His research interests cover the high and late Middle Ages.
In particular, he has worked on the history of the Holy Roman Empire
and of England during this period, urban history, the history of early
humanism, and the history of historiography. His many publications
include Herrscher- und Reichstitel bei Kaisertum und Papsttum im 12. und
13. Jahrhundert (2003), Das europäische Mittelalter, 2 vols. (2006), and(with Jan Keupp) Konstanz 1414–1418: Eine Stadt und ihr Konzil (3rdedn, 2017). He also coordinates, with Dominic Waßenhoven, fembi.de[https://fembi.uni-koeln.de], a network of German-speaking scholars
researching the history of the British Isles during the Middle Ages.

69

DAVID BLACKBOURN, Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500–
2000 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), xxv + 774 pp.
ISBN 978 1 631 49183 2. £40.00
Making sense of German history has remained a challenge far into thetwenty-first century, and is certainly not confined to parochial undertakings at German universities, but has become somewhat of a global
enterprise in itself. Several decades ago, master historians of the postwar West German generation such as Thomas Nipperdey, Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, and Heinrich August Winkler launched their multi-volume
works on modern Germany, roughly since the late eighteenth century,and in many respects, those books have remained the gold standard
in the field.1 They share a combination of energetic writing, erudite
knowledge of specialized research, and a guiding interpretation that,
despite some differences between the three, may be broadly characterized as a modified reckoning with the German Sonderweg. Back then,when Nipperdey and Wehler were still conceiving and writing theirfirst volumes, two young British histor­ians self-confidently stepped
up and challenged prevalent notions that Germany had diverged froma liberal–democratic trajectory of modernity in the nineteenth century with the ‘failure’ of the 1848 revo­lution, Bismarck’s authoritarian
empire, and the ensuing Wilhelmine deformations that fed into theThird Reich. These are but ‘Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung’,David Blackbourn und Geoff Eley lamented—historiographical myths
about alleged ‘peculiarities of German history’, as their enormously
influential treatise was titled in the expanded English edition of 1984.2
Fast-forward four decades, and both Blackbourn and Eley havelong since moved to the United States and risen to the ranks of highest
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1918, 3 vols. (Munich, 1983–92), vol. i published in English as Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, trans.
Daniel Nolan (Princeton, 1996); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1700–1990, 5 vols. (Munich, 1987–2008); Heinrich August Winkler,
Germany: The Long Road West, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2006–7). See also: James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989).
2David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung:
Die gescheiterte Revolution von 1848 (Berlin, 1980); David Blackbourn andGeoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in
Nineteenth-­Century Germany (Oxford, 1984).
1

70Germany in the Worldeminence in the field of German and European history, although theiracademic ways have parted. While Eley has emerged as a rare flagbearer of Marxist historiography, David Blackbourn has moved to thecentre (or always stood there) and continued his challenging of established perspectives through much more sophisticated intellectual
approaches, often taking up views from the margins: Württemberg
rather than Prussia in his PhD on the Centre Party; ordinary Roman
Catholic folk in a small town rather than the state bureaucracy other­wise hailed as modern and liberal in his study of apparitions of
the Virgin Mary in Marpingen; and the transformation of German
waterways in what still stands as a pioneering book on the history oflandscapes in his Conquest of Nature.3 With his most recent publication,
Germany in the World, Blackbourn continues his quest to make senseof German history somewhat against the grain, albeit in a different
way: not just with the synthetic scope of a book that presents an histoire totale of Central Europe across five centuries (a bold claim madequite explicitly in the introduction),4 but by taking up a conceptual
challenge that has now arrived in the mainstream of historiography
and has been widely discussed for more than two decades—namely,
global history and its impact on Germany, a nation long considered amere continental player aside from the few decades of formal colonial
rule between 1884 and 1918.
With this intellectual effort, Blackbourn addresses two admon­itions
to the profession, particularly in Germany, that he has consistently
been making for a long time: the ‘lack of sense of space’ in muchconventional writing (certainly in Nipperdey and Wehler), and theshrinking of the time span of German history—in particular, theneglect of the nineteenth century (unimaginable in the good old timesof the Sonderweg!) in favour of the twentieth, or what German histor­ians often call Zeitgeschichte. While the publisher’s claim on the dust
3
Cf. David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg before 1914 (New Haven, 1980); DavidBlackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany(Oxford, 1993); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape,and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006).
4‘I have cast my net wide. Politics, war and peace, economics, culture, gender,
education, science, the environment, race, religion—all have a place’ (p. xxv).

71

Book Reviews
cover that the history of Germany ‘has often been told as if it began in
1871’ is grossly overblown, taking the Reformation as a starting pointis a remarkable endeavour, also vis-à-vis the aforementioned grandviziers’ storytelling, which started only with the decomposition of theHoly Roman Empire or even, in Nipperdey’s famous first sentence,with Napoleon. Perhaps it represents a trend born in Nashville, Tennessee, as Blackbourn’s colleague at Vanderbilt, Helmut Walser Smith,
opted for a similarly wide chronology in his own account, which centred on the nation rather than the global.5 Still, only about one third of
the roughly 650 pages of text is devoted to the three ‘early modern’ centuries, including some material in part II that covers the trans­forma­tive
period 1780–1820. The story becomes more expansive towards thepresent, with the nineteenth century unfolding over 160 pages and,
finally, the twentieth century (from 1914) over 280.
The meaning of global in this book is wide rather than narrow,reaching far beyond specific schools or approaches, and its author iscertainly not in the post-colonial camp. He includes Germany’s European interconnectedness, with a lot of attention paid to the classic
theme of German–French exchanges and entanglements. Indeed, thenotions of transnational and entangled history seem to describe thisapproach best, its truly global reach notwithstanding. Driven by genuine intellectual curiosity and an astounding ability to digest tons ofspecialized literature, Blackbourn tells fascinating stories about Germans out there in the world, beyond the borders of the German landsin Central Europe. He explores the influences not just of German
military power and violence abroad, but the enormous soft power ofGerman culture, be it in ideas and institutions of education (the university, yes, but also the kindergarten!) or in realms of ‘high culture’such as classical music or ‘world literature’, the claim to which may be
traced back to Goethe. Indeed, Germans themselves would blush in
the light of so much praise being heaped on their country, especiallyin the chapters on the long nineteenth century, from Weimar classicism to the cultural and scientific advancements of the Kaiserreich. The
book is also about the other direction—about ‘the world in Germany’,
5
Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time. Before, During, and After
Nationalism, 1500–2000 (New York, 2020).

72

Germany in the Worldto invert its title—with regard to Germany taking in French or American influences, or other nationals, as in the waves of migration thathave increasingly shaped the country since the late 1950s.
Yet what does David Blackbourn tell us, and how does he do it?
The book starts out as an impressive panorama of vignette biographiesof Germans who ventured abroad in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Readers will encounter sailors, merchants, and soldiers,
often commissioned by non-German enterprises or armed forces, as
individuals or in larger constellations, forming German-speaking
colonies in Portugal, Latin America, and just about anywhere in the
populated world and on its margins. Indeed, the first third of thebook, roughly, is a testament to a major trend in German history (andbeyond) over the last two or three decades: the attention to the lives
of individuals and their experiences of the world. This focus on subjectivities has transformed early modern history (for example, with
its attention to egodocuments), as well as our understanding of thetwentieth century with the massive impact of Zeitzeugen (witnesses ofthe past), especially in the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Beyond its interest in the global, Blackbourn’s account may be seen
as a major attempt to bring this microhistorical approach to fruition
in a larger synthesis. The result is compelling and captivating, andyet offers clear proof of what this kind of narrative cannot achieve.
There is little effort to account for institutions such as the Holy Roman
Empire, or the estates of late feudal society, and a near absence ofstructural explanations. Sometimes Blackbourn appears to turn in thisdirection, only to come up with yet another biographical story in thenext sentence.
The fabric of the book changes significantly, however, as the story
progresses into the nineteenth century. Individual actors retreat, a different kind of storytelling is woven into the larger narrative, and theauthor increasingly includes a more systematic kind of consideration.
By the time we reach the twentieth century, this mode of writing has
become all but dominant. In the chapters on the Third Reich and theHolocaust, readers will encounter the type of research-based factor
analysis they may be familiar with from Nipperdey or Wehler. The
Holocaust chapter starts with a brief reference to Victor Klemperer’s
diaries, but quickly shifts to four main characteristics, or ‘four things73Book Reviewson which most historians agree’ (p. 498) in systematically assessing the
Shoah. Readers now are provided with the orientation in the researchlandscape that was absent from the early modern chapters, while individual voices, or exemplary stories of lives of ordinary people, rarely
come up, including Jewish lives in the years of persecution and massmurder. Overall, the narrative of the book in its second half turns more
towards the well-established, both in the way the story is crafted aswell as in its content and subject matter. Compared to Michael Wildt’s
recent history of Weimar and Nazi Germany, with its ‘postmodern’view from the margins of the empire and through the eyes of marginalized ­people,6 Blackbourn’s twentieth-century account is much more‘centred’, mainstream, and sometimes even conventional.
In a still different sense, what kind of German history is it thatDavid Blackbourn maps out in this impressive tour de force? Trueto his beginnings as an anti-Sonderweg historian, he does not see
Germany as having taken a different course from other European
nations over the many centuries. The myriad global Germans in theearly modern era and into the nineteenth century are testimony toan entangled nation, much as the British and Portuguese are wellknown to have been. Then again, it is more complicated, as we areoften reminded that Germans abroad mostly stood in service ofother countries, and therefore the notion of Germany as a latecomer
to global aspirations, and colonial ones in particular, is not off thetable. When did it all start to go wrong, if not with German isolation, or the failed revolution in 1848? Blackbourn goes along withcurrent mainstream research in pointing to some radicalization in
the late Wilhelmine period (albeit with less emphasis on radicalized,
and racialized, science), and otherwise looks to the First World War
and the ensuing peace settlement. With regard to colonialism, thelitmus test is the connection between colonial violence, especially in
the genocidal campaigns against the Herero and Nama in Southwest
Africa (1904–7), and the Holocaust. Blackbourn remains cautious,and sometimes vague, when he at­trib­utes ‘colonial levels of violence’to the conduct of the Wehrmacht (p. 490), and turns a question of
causation into an issue of memory when he finds that violence in
6Michael Wildt, Zerborstene Zeit: Deutsche Geschichte 1918–1945 (Munich, 2022).

74Germany in the World
Eastern Europe during the Second World War ‘recalls what had been
done to Nama and Herero’ (p. 482).
The final chapter on post-1949 Germany, divided and reunited,even comes with a classic redemptive storyline, reminiscent of Heinrich August Winkler’s Long Road West, as its title reads ‘The German
Question Answered’. The issue of reconciling liberal democracy witha nation-state may well have been answered for good. But so manyother German questions remain open, and not least questions about
Germany in the world, and the world coming to Germany. Will theGerman empire of global industrial and trade domination soon collapse? Will ethnic Germans and immigrants alike finally manage tostrike a balance between acknowledging diversity and constructing
collective identities and communal spirits that go beyond ethnic
origin? In the meantime, David Blackbourn’s global history of Germany is indispensable reading for anyone seriously interested in
the history of that country—a history that in post-Sonderweg times
still holds a firm place in general discourses on the trajectories andpredica­ments of modernity.

PAUL NOLTE is Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität
Berlin. After completing his doctorate and habilitation in Bielefeld with
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, he became a Professor of History at International
University Bremen (now known as Constructor University Bremen).
He has been a fellow at Harvard University, the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin, and the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, as well as a Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at
St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His work on German andtransatlantic history ranges from eighteenth-century revolutions andrepublicanism to current issues of social change and democracy in theFederal Republic.
75

JONATHAN PARRY, Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle
East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), xvii + 480 pp. ISBN
978 0 691 18189 9. £40.00
The entanglement of empires and the mentalities of those involved insuch exchanges have been the focus of many studies in recent years.1
Seen through this lens, regions of multicultural engagement, such as
the Ottoman Empire, have become major research areas. These studies test and refine concepts like geopolitics, international law, andOriental­ism and demonstrate their impact on the local and trans­
national context.2
Jonathan Parry’s book Promised Lands is another exciting contribution that connects the mentality of British actors in the Middle Eastwith British geopolitical engagement in the Ottoman Empire during
the first half of the long nineteenth century. The impact of British
mentalities on broader European politics has been described and analysed recently;3 Parry now offers a history of Britain’s oriental politics
from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to 1854, the first year of the
Crimean War.
The author offers a multifaceted description of individual actionsin the Ottoman territories and explores the global impact of different perceptions of these areas. The title of the book, Promised Lands, isa biblical reference. The plural form emphasizes the diversity of theregion, which is often oversimplified as the Middle East (p. 3). But
the title carries a second connotation. Most of the actors, despite direconditions, were motivated by their hope of improving the regions
through their personal efforts and by exporting the boons of (Western) civilization (pp. 380–1). They believed they were destined torecreate the Promised Land.
Adopting a history of mentalities approach, Parry outlines the
lives, career paths, and cultural endeavours of many actors linked
1E.g. Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956 (Oxford, 2017).
2
E.g. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and theOrigins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2016).
3
E.g. Andreas Rose, Zwischen Empire und Kontinent: Britische Außenpolitik vor
dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2011).

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The British and the Ottoman Middle East
to the Ottoman Empire. Most of the twelve chapters of the book are
divided into subsections, each of which is narratively structured
around one person who was active in a particular region and at aparticular time. The author describes their biographical background,political activities, and thinking, embedding their actions in the
broader picture of local and transnational politics. The use of publications and personal, business, and diplomatic papers written byactors in very different positions provides an interesting insight into
the interconnections between political actions and distinguishes thestudy from many works that draw only upon diplomatic and military documents.
Parry weaves a mostly coherent story from the records of manydifferent individuals, institutions, and companies within a complex
context. He highlights not only political negotiations but also the
crucial role of economic relations (for example, pp. 309–17), religious
perceptions (for example, pp. 239–48), and the impact of archaeo­
logical findings on narratives in London as well as on individualcareers (for example, pp. 290–7). Rarely has the entanglement of
microhistory and political history been illustrated in such detail. Yet
the author’s modest claim to present only the history of how Britain
saw the Middle East (pp. 12–13) turns out to be an understatement, for
he integrates many facets of the local context into his narrative, even if
only the British are represented in the primary sources.
Throughout the book, the author presents a mostly chrono­logicalstory, shifting the geographical focus in each chapter. The first chapter is centred on Egypt during and after Napoleon’s invasion. It
highlights the internal disputes among British actors, as well as theirprimary objective of defending India against a possible French assault(pp. 22–45).
The second chapter frequently shifts perspective between various
British military and diplomatic personnel and representatives of theLevant and East India trading companies. The chapter continues thestory of Egypt in the years following the first British intervention,
describing the changing coalitions and explaining the British stancein the Egyptian civil war of 1801–12 (pp. 46–57). Later, the focus shifts
towards the Red Sea and the pursuit of alternative routes to India,
intertwined with the assertion of trading interests (pp. 57–66).
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Book Reviews
The third chapter delves into the Eyalet of Baghdad. It meticulously describes the power struggles in this Ottoman province andBritish and Indian efforts to counterbalance French and Russian influence in the region. The stories of two consuls also show how various
local groups like the Arabs or Wahhabis were viewed differently by
British men on the ground, who valued them not only as pawns in the
British power play, but also in a moral context (pp. 80–110).
Chapter four remains in the same region but advances to the 1830s.
Britain’s main antagonist in the region changes from France to Russia,
and Mehmet Ali’s impact on British thinking about the Ottoman
Empire is explored. Consul Taylor’s story exemplifies how British
officials tried to keep different powers at bay and improve regional
economic development (pp. 111–43).
In chapter five, Parry returns to Egypt and the British relationshipwith Mehmet Ali. This chapter explores the relationship between
Britain and Egypt through economic connections, the protection of
Christians, modernization attempts, and the export of ancient cultural assets from Egypt. The chapter also illustrates Jeremy Bentham’s
philo­sophical view on Egypt and Ottoman rule, and his impact on
British thinking about the region (pp. 144–61). In the later subchapters, the focus shifts to Syria and how the brutal suppression of therebellion against Mehmet Ali shattered the British image of him as a
benevolent despot (pp. 161–73).
Chapter six discusses British involvement in the Oriental Crisis(1839–40) and the reactions to the Tanzimat reforms, which placedhigh expectations of modernization on the Sultan. It also explains thereasons for the joint intervention against Mehmet Ali (pp. 174–205).
Chapter seven narrates the story of the Anglican mission in Syria
and Kurdistan, showing how its efforts were restricted by contest­ations from Catholics and Ottoman officials, given that Protestantism
lacked the status of a millet. Parry describes many attempts to establish lasting contacts with the different sects in the region, as well as thefailure to maintain such connections (pp. 206–48).
The theme of protection is picked up again in chapter eight, which
is set in Lebanon and particularly addresses the British reaction to thepersecution of Nestorians by Kurds. It also investigates the power
struggle between Consul Rose (later the assistant ambassador) and78

The British and the Ottoman Middle East
Ambassador Canning, intertwining these stories with the establishment of Henry Layard as an important new actor who worked withdifferent local groups for his archaeological excavations (pp. 249–77).
Chapter nine continues this narrative in Constantinople with Canning as the main protagonist. It explores his efforts to counterbalance
Russian influence and establish judicial fairness in Ottoman courts
while British consular jurisdiction was expanding (pp. 278–90). In thelast subsection, Layard becomes the central figure. Despite becoming a
British national hero through his achievements in archaeology, he lostthe favour of Canning, who felt his sponsorship was underappreci­
ated by Layard and the wider public (pp. 290–7).
The British influence on trade routes taken by Indian steamships,
and British and Russian mediations in the conflict between the Ottoman and Persian Empires, are the subject of chapter ten. Here, Parryillustrates the penetration through trade, but also highlights how British trade relied on local networks and how both the Ottoman Empire
and Egypt were able to restrain British efforts (pp. 298–333).
Chapter eleven returns to Egypt and demonstrates that co­oper­
ation with France became possible once joint economic interests in theregion became strong enough. Despite differing political goals, France
and Britain supported the new Khedive Abbas I in similar ways inConstantinople, initiating large infrastructural projects such as theconstruction of a railway from Cairo to Suez (pp. 334–55).
In chapter twelve, the intellectual pilgrimage of the book concludes
in Jerusalem on the eve of the Crimean War. The ongoing disputes
over the holy places in Jerusalem, Russian protection of Orthodox
Christians, and the refugees of the revolutions of 1848 who escapedto the Ottoman Empire are examined as major factors behind the war.
The author further explores the outcome of the war, the 1856 Treaty ofParis. According to Parry’s analysis, the formal inclusion of the Ottoman Empire in the Concert of Europe did not significantly changeinternational law, but was intended to undermine Russia’s symbolic
demands. Rather than enhancing respect for Ottoman sovereignty,
Westerners interfered more frequently in the empire, which led toincreased antagonism with the Muslim population (pp. 356–72).
In the conclusion (pp. 373–404), Parry ties together the many
threads he has presented and provides an overview of the impact of79

Book Reviewsthe events described on further developments in the region through tothe period of decolonization. In this broader context, nearly all British
actors were primarily reacting to ‘great European wars’ and the actualor perceived ‘imperial ambition’ of other major powers (p. 403). There
was no master plan, but every action triggered long causal chainswith a life of their own. Within the time frame of the study, thesechains were mostly beneficial for the British. Looking beyond the FirstWorld War, however, suggests the opposite. Thus Parry argues thatfor as long as the British were merely power brokers in the regions,they were able to establish good connections with local groups andoutmanoeuvre imperial rivals. Problems arose when they began governing the regions themselves (pp. 399–402).
Overall, Parry’s work demonstrates an excellent combination ofmodern history of mentalities and classical political history, offeringsignificant insights into Ottoman history. The book is primarily basedon British sources and acknowledges nearly all significant English-­language secondary literature concerning the Ottoman Empire, theBritish Levant trade, and Franco-British diplomacy and foreign politics. The depth and breadth of Parry’s knowledge are impressive.
He almost always succeeds in connecting the changing local contexts
with the intellectual, political, and economic aspirations of his protagonists within the broader currents of international power politics.
He examines the impact of cultural endeavours in archaeology andthe powerful imaginings and reimaginings of the biblical and ancientworld, which fostered dreams of improvement for the Near East.
He also shows how these aspirations often clashed with those in theimperial centres.
Nonetheless, the analytical reasons for the selection of someregions and the exclusion of others remain unclear. Parry’s narrative
framing of a pilgrimage may partly justify the areas of research. However, some stories, like the excursions to Abyssinia, do not fit within
this framework. As Parry acknowledges, given the vast amount ofhistorical sources, a historian, while selecting interesting stories, mustalso ‘try to produce something coherent’ (p. 405).
More importantly, however, the study is based exclusively on
English-language literature and sources. To use the example ofGerman alone, this limitation means Parry did not consider similar
80

The British and the Ottoman Middle Eastor complementary studies such as the one by Johannes Berchtold on
the British consular justice system.4 My own study of protection in
the Ottoman Empire could also have enriched Parry’s conclusion withregard to Layard’s additional diplomatic efforts.5 In terms of sources,
Parry thus excludes diplomatic actors from other major powers, like
Austria, who were significant brokers in the Ottoman Empire. As
Parry himself admits, no Ottoman or Egyptian sources are included;
we can assume this has skewed his perspective considerably.
Parry’s book is an extensive and detailed study of a vast area andtime period, providing in-depth insights into the lives and actions of
numerous British, Indian, and Ottoman individuals. Their remarkablestories might have been forgotten if Parry had not chronicled them.
However, while reading the book, I often wondered about the motiv­
ations behind the actions of these individuals and questioned theoverarching thesis of the book. Parry seldom analyses his protagon­
ists’ actions, and his conclusion primarily serves as a summary andalso a survey of the next hundred years. If Parry’s main point is toshow that Orientalism is more complex than Edward Said suggested
and to reaffirm the principal-agent problem, these insights are notparticularly new in this field of study.
In this sense, Jonathan Parry has written a brilliant book thatengagingly tells and arranges the stories of nearly forgotten areasand individuals, often employing intriguing metaphors. However, aslightly larger focus on analysis and more daring theses could haveelevated this already great contribution to a truly magnificent level.

4

Johannes Berchtold, Recht und Gerechtigkeit in der Konsulargerichtsbarkeit: Britische Exterritorialität im Osmanischen Reich 1825–1914 (Munich, 2009).
5
Wolfgang Egner, Protektion und Souveränität: Die Entwicklung imperialer Herrschaftsformen und Legitimationsfiguren im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2018).

81

Book Reviews
WOLFGANG EGNER is a history and philosophy teacher at a schoolfor highly gifted children in Schwäbisch Gmünd. He was previously
a research assistant at the ‘Cultural Foundations of Social Integration’ Centre of Excellence at the University of Konstanz. His recent
publications include his PhD thesis Protektion und Souveränität: Die
Entwicklung imperialer Herrschaftsformen und Legitimationsfiguren im
19. Jahrhundert (2018) and ‘Governing “two races”: The External Construction of a Turkish Identity by an Early British Administration(1878–1844) of Cyprus’, Archivum Ottomanicum, 36 (2019), 47–68.

82

ANDREA GRÄFIN VON HOHENTHAL, Griff nach der Psyche? Psychologie im Ersten Weltkrieg in Großbritannien und Deutschland, Krieg
in der Geschichte, 120 (Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2023), x + 609 pp.
ISBN 978 3 506 79086 6. €129.00
In her comparative study, Andrea Gräfin von Hohenthal examines the genesis and development of psychology as a science andmedical-­therapeutic practice during the First World War. Throughher examination of the British and German psychological associations
and specialist societies of the period, the author traces the individualand group actors who played a central role in shaping the disciplineof psychology. In addition, she takes into account the perspective of
those who called upon psychological expertise, such as the army andthe military administration.
First, von Hohenthal examines psychology’s ‘formative phase’ inthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time, it was neither a discrete discipline or field of study, nor was it possible to takeany course of study—which is why the author defines psychologists
as members of the British Psychological Society and the Gesellschaft
für experimentelle Psychologie (Society for Experimental Psych­ology)
in Germany, specialist societies that were founded early on (1901 and1906 respectively). By the mid nineteenth century, psycho­
logic­
alknowledge was already being produced and methods were being
tested within certain fields. For example, the Medico-Psychological
Association (founded in 1865), the successor to the Association of Medical Officers, was open not only to doctors in psychiatric institutions
but also to researchers in psychology, such as Charles Myers, whoplayed an important role in the care of injured soldiers during the FirstWorld War. Von Hohenthal maintains that, although psychology inthe late nineteenth century was an international project, there were as
yet no shared conceptual tools nor any common understanding of theprinciples of psychology. Any international cooperation seemed to be
driven purely by the appetite for a new science. Experi­mental psych­
ology, which had been established in Germany and was increasingly
gaining international recognition around 1900, played a particularly
Translated by Marielle Sutherland (GHIL).

83

Book Reviews
important role in the exchange of ideas. The German psychologist
Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig had become the linchpin of this variant of
psychology. He attracted students from the Anglo-American world
and made sure the programme of scientific experimental psychology
was also promoted in Great Britain and the USA.
This development coincided at the end of the nineteenth century
with a push for new expertise within various disciplines—for ex­­ample, medicine, pedagogy, and law. Based on this ‘scientificationof the social’ (Lutz Raphael, cited on p. 37)—undertaken not least by
state actors—von Hohenthal interprets the formation of an experimentally oriented psychology as the result of academic discourse andthe expectations of policymakers and the public, that is, as a specificepistemological approach. She focuses on the following questions:what role did psychological experts play? What kind of expertise didthey bring to the military administration? And which spheres of work
were open to psychologists?
Von Hohenthal puts the First World War period, which was a cata­lyst for scientific psychology, at the centre of her analysis. As well as
essays in specialist journals and the records of psychological societies
such as the archive of the British Psychological Society, her sources
include British and German medical reports and British reports byparliamentary and other committees, such as the ‘Report of the War
Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock” ’. Furthermore, she
examines patients’ files and psychologists’ personal archives, as wellas the letters, diaries, and memoirs of patients, drawing on these
egodocuments to incorporate their perspective too. Before the war,
psych­olo­gists did not have any kind of practical function. Only withthe outbreak of war did specific fields of activity emerge in either
country: in psychiatry and the treatment of soldiers, in the war industry, and in assessments within recruitment processes, particularly forpilots. Charles Myers, for example, became a psychological adviser
to the British Armed Forces, and this put him in a position to showthat psych­olo­gists were indispensable. It was the British Army’s openness, or its low level of organization, that offered these windows ofopportun­ity, particularly as the Army Medical Corps played a very
limited role before the war. In the German Empire, by contrast,
there was a high level of organization in the medical service, giving
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Psychology in the First World War
psychologists, even in the field of military psychiatry, very limited
scope for influence and much less room for manoeuvre. However,their involvement in the treatment of injured soldiers behind the frontline enabled German psychologists, too, to play an active role.
In both countries, these new experts were integrated into modern
warfare. Psychologists were able to apply their specific knowledge,
which was based on the testing and measuring of cognitive and emotional capability. They evidently did not question whether or not theyshould be contributing to the war effort. In both Great Britain and
the German Empire, they assimilated unhesitatingly into the militaryhierarchy, adopted its concepts of authority, and subordinated thewelfare of individual patients to national goals.
The Battles of Verdun and the Somme, which from 1916 caused
huge losses of soldiers and materiel, led to the conscription of more
and more workers from industry, who were replaced by untrained
and female staff. This reorganization of the war economy, and the efficiency problems people feared it would cause, convinced polit­icians
and mili­tary administrators to test and implement new methods ofassessing workers. Psychologists provided the knowledge and thecorresponding methods for selecting suitable candidates, and thesetechniques remained in demand in both the military and the private
sector in the Weimar Republic after the war, whereas the British
Army returned to more traditional recruitment processes. Nonetheless, in Great Britain there was still a high level of interest from theprivate sector.
During the war, psychologists’ concepts and views of the causesof ‘shell shock’ and the appropriate therapies for it also changed. At
first, mental disorders were seen as having been caused by the war
itself. It was felt that many soldiers and officers were overwhelmedby the enormous levels of death and destruction, the constant physical and psychological stress, and the fact they were not given longenough to recover. In the course of the war, however, and partly
because of the increase in pension applications, this belief changed
and the illness was attributed more and more to the individual soldier’s constitution and disposition. This meant it was no longer the
war that was seen as causing mental exhaustion and breakdown,
but the weaknesses of the individual. In Germany, this shift in focus
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Book Reviews
to the individual led to the use of more aggressive treatments suchas electro­shock therapy in order to make patients fit for work andwar again. German psych­olo­gists were primarily concerned here,von Hohenthal claims, with getting men back into the war economy.
Returning them to military duty was less important, whereas British
psychologists were tasked with getting their patients ‘fit for the front’(p. 496). The therapeut­­ic approaches employed to this end by psych­
ologists in Great Britain remained rather ‘benevolent’ (p. 491); they
seemed to distance themselves from aggressive therapies. Whether
British officers and rank-and-file soldiers were treated equally in thisregard remains unclear.
For Great Britain, the picture of war psychology that emerges is toa large extent based on the reports and accounts of officers who werealso writers, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who werebriefly treated by the psychologist William Rivers at Craiglockhart
War Hospital near Edinburgh. Rivers’ methods, however, and eventhe diagnosis of ‘shell shock’, were highly controversial at the War
Office in London, where the view was taken that such patients weremerely deserters or malingerers who should not be rewarded—in thecase of Craiglockhart—with ‘luxuries, golf and tennis’ (p. 313).1 Nonetheless, in Great Britain psychologists like Rivers were able to try out
new methods such as talking therapy within military psychiatry.
As well as having practical implications for psychology, the FirstWorld War spawned groundbreaking conceptual research in thefield. Once the USA joined the war, British thinking was increasingly
shaped by American knowledge and ideas. The previously dominant
influence of German experimental psychology waned, British psych­
olo­gists turned their sights west, and Anglo-American psychology
began to prevail.
For many psychological experts in Great Britain, the end of the war
also meant the end of their work. Posts within universities or the1
On Craiglockhart see e.g. Thomas Webb, ‘ “Dottyville”: Craiglockhart War
Hospital and Shell-Shock Treatment in the First World War’, Journal of theRoyal Society of Medicine, 99/7 (2006), 342–46; or Peter J. Leese, ‘A Social andCultural History of Shellshock, with Particular Reference to the Experience ofBritish Soldiers during and after the Great War’ (PhD thesis, Open University,1989).

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Psychology in the First World War
military were neither continued nor developed. Only three hospitals
carried on using and testing psychological and therapeutic knowledge
and methods. In industry, psychologists were reliant on the initiativesof individuals who recognized the value of the new aptitude tests andselection processes and wanted to use them in companies.
In Germany, unlike Britain, psychology continued at the institutional level too. Psychological expertise played an important role in
the now considerably reduced armed forces. The universities, too,established further professorships and departments in psychology.
This post-war period also saw the founding of a psychotherapy society, which distanced itself from the aggressive therapies that had beenused experimentally during the war.
Von Hohenthal also traces less obvious continuities that go beyond
the period under study through to the Second World War. Ability
assessments and aptitude tests applicable on a mass scale formed asubset of psychological knowledge that was continuously employedin Germany in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism. In
Great Britain, by contrast, psychological expertise only made a comeback when the Second World War broke out and it was once again
needed in industrial psychology and military aptitude tests. Likewise,
psychologists were called upon to share what they had learned about
the symptoms of exhaustion and breakdown in military psychiatry
during the First World War so that they could help prepare young
doctors for the tasks that lay ahead in the coming conflict.
Andrea von Hohenthal successfully demonstrates how the FirstWorld War acted as a catalyst in the field of psychology. Psychologists
from both countries came together proactively to play an importantrole in the war effort. Through their broad range of methods—including statistics and questionnaires—they proved their worth in modern
warfare as particularly valuable ‘modern experts’ (p. 495), for example
in selection processes for pilots. There was therefore a demand forthem in military psychiatry, the war industry, and the armed forces.
In both countries, the military needed them to explore, assess, andmanipulate the human psyche.
The author also identifies the subtle differences between psychologists and their therapeutic approaches in Great Britain and Germany
during and after the war, without losing sight of international
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Book Reviews
connections. Furthermore, she illustrates the catalysing role of theFirst World War in terms of the importance attached to psychologists
in both countries, which waned, but did not disappear altogether. The
psychologists’ expertise could be reactivated at any time.

JENS GRÜNDLER is a research assistant at the Westfälisches Institut
für Regionalgeschichte. His main publications include ‘Antipsychiatrie und administrativer Pragmatismus: Anstaltsschließungen in
Großbritannien Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Praxis—das Beispiel Glasgow’, in Wilfried Rudloff et al. (eds.), Ende der Anstalten?
Großeinrichtungen, Debatten und Deinstitutionalisierung seit den 1970er
Jahren (2022), 174–92; ‘Care and Control: How Families Used Asylums
and Shaped an Institution. A Glasgow Case Study, 1875–1920’, inAn­dreas Gestrich, Elisabeth Grüner, and Susanne Hahn (eds.), Poverty
in Modern Europe: Spaces, Localities, Institutions (2022), 311–31; with
Hans-Walter Schmuhl and Malte Thießen (eds.), Psychiatriegeschichte
als Beitrag zur regionalen Zeitgeschichte (2020); with Beate Althammer
and Andreas Gestrich (eds.), The Welfare State and the ‘Deviant Poor’ inEurope, 1870–1933 (2014).
88

MIRA L. SIEGELBERG, Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 328 pp. ISBN 978 0 674 97631
3. £30.95
Mira L. Siegelberg’s study of statelessness as a newly emerging polit­
ical and legal category of international politics in the twentieth century
comes at a moment when refugees are again in the focus of publicdebates. As the author herself writes in the introduction, unpredict­able levels of forced mass migration and the foreseeable, yet still denied
consequences of climate change—namely, the vanishing of island states
due to rising sea levels—have brought statelessness back to the inter­national agenda. The study aims to analyse why statelessness remained
a rather ‘hidden’ category of international law, politics, and also history,
though it was, as Siegelberg seeks to show, a major category aroundwhich the architecture of the present international order evolved. To
do so, she takes up fresh insights from the historiography of empire,decolonization, and international organizations, which argues thatthe global triumph of the nation state as the dominant and seeminglynon-­negotiable form of political organization was not foreseeable until
the 1960s. In this way, Siegelberg turns against established readingsof contemporary international history that present statelessness as thedownside of nationalism and sovereignty. Instead of asking why theinternational agreements of the post-war years to protect refugees,
stateless persons, and human rights in general did not achieve theirintended aim, she investigates how these conventions contributed tothe creation of the international order after the Second World War.
Siegelberg’s approach opens up a set of interesting and productive
questions that put the gradual emergence of the relationship between
individuals, states, and international law centre stage. She does so by
focusing on international organizations and legal scholars. Accordingly, the book is an intellectual history of statelessness dealing withlegal theory and scholarly debates, with particular emphasis on
Hannah Arendt and Hans Kelsen. The overall argument is that statelessness entered national and international politics only after the FirstWorld War, and soon became a contested battleground in efforts torebalance the relationship between national sovereignty, global governance, and international law. Siegelberg presents the post-1945 era
89Book Reviewsas the most important period in which these conflicts took legal andpolitical shape. It is therefore surprising that five out of six chaptersdeal with the decades until 1945, while only the last chapter delves
into what she presents as the core development.
Chapters one to three trace how statelessness entered internationallaw and politics. The first chapter analyses a major court decision in1921 in the UK that established statelessness as a novel legal category. The High Court of Justice ruled in favour of a formerly interned
German ‘enemy alien’ who had sued the UK for failing to acknow­
ledge that he had been stateless before war broke out. As Siegelberg
argues, although this case is not representative for several reasons,it was nevertheless decisive, as it introduced a third legal category
next to alien and citizen. Moreover, it rejected the previous imper­
ial practice of deciding independently about people’s citizenship infavour of the principle that only the country in question can rulewhether someone is a national or not. This meant that foreign law
was acknowledged as a relevant foundational principle which had tobe respected by other states.
As the following chapters show, however, this landmark decision remained vague in important respects. Though it established thesovereign state as the basic unit of international politics, it neglected
the variegated practices of imperial governance and remained silent
about the relationship between domestic rule and international law.
This became the main concern of the League of Nations. Taking the
Nansen International Office for Refugees and the break-up of the
Habsburg empire as case studies, Siegelberg shows how the needto solve political problems led to differentiation between categories:
statelessness, humanitarian intervention on behalf of refugees, and theemergence of new collectives as subjects of international law, such as
minorities, mandatories, refugees, and stateless persons. It is interesting to read here how League officials thought of international law as
a proper jurisdiction that could take care of stateless persons beyond
national law, but at the same time they remained hesitant to infringe
upon national sovereignty and thus endanger attempts to establish
new principles of international governance.
Chapters four and five deal with the deteriorating internationalsituation from the 1930s onwards, with denationalized Jewish people
90Statelessness
as the largest group in need of some kind of national or international
protection. In these chapters it is instructive to read how contemporaries struggled to differentiate between refugees and stateless persons.
Whereas today this distinction seems to be natural, Siegelberg argues
that nationality as a legal and political concept was far from being
unequivocally established at the time. Consequently, determining
statelessness and the role of international law in regulating nationality became key issues in dealing with forced migration. Siegelberg
focuses on The Hague Codification Conference, held in 1930 under
the patronage of the League of Nations, which strengthened nationalsovereignty as the sole instance able to determine nationality and citi­
zenship. Moreover, she demonstrates how legal experts from the US
and Great Britain attempted to legally justify Nazi denationalizationacts by referring to precedents in late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. They thus not only confirmed the priority of state practices
over international law, but also set out to establish the distinctions
between refugees and stateless persons and between national andinternational competences: refugees had a nationality and thus fell
under national jurisdiction, while stateless persons were assigned tointernational regulation.
Chapter five ties this discussion to human rights. Here, Siegelberg argues that the shift in legal theory to the primacy of nationalsovereignty was reflected in the limited political effectiveness of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ironically, European émigré
scholars and exile politicians were the main proponents of centring thestate in legal theory. They thus supported a legal approach to which
they had themselves fallen victim. In practice, the contested meaningof statelessness became relevant when the United Nations Relief andRehabilitation Administration and the International Refugee Organization began to support displaced persons, posing the question ofwhat kind of authority would be tasked with adjudicating conflicts
over nationality. Here again, the international protection of statelesspersons depended on the question of whether state sovereignty was
subject to limits.
The last chapter delves into what Siegelberg presents as the main
focus of the book: the nationalization of legal subjecthood, that is, thegranting of national and international rights to individuals on the basis
91

Book Reviewsof their having a nationality recognized by a sovereign state. Moreover, she points to the transformation of nationality from a formal,
legal political membership to a robust social bond. The author argues
that a case before the International Court of Justice in 1955 was crucial
in establishing the social quality of nationality as decisive for granting
or denying citizenship. She explains the significance of the judgementby turning to decolonization and the fierce debates about the right toself-determination that took place in the same year within the United
Nations. For Siegelberg, the ruling was of major importance, as it
accepted the creation of stateless persons as collateral damage alongside the higher aim of substantiating national sovereignty as a core
principle of international law.
All in all, my opinions of the book are mixed. On the one hand,
Siegelberg presents intriguing arguments, and her overall approach of
linking statelessness to the development of the relationship between
national and international law and the settling of the legal status ofindividuals, states, and international authorities makes a lot of sense
and is illuminating in many respects. On the other hand, the book is
a taxing read. This begins with the accessibility of the material used:
there is no bibliography or list of archival sources, and the latter arecited in the footnotes in a way that does not facilitate further research.
Moreover, the introductory description of the subchapters does notcorrespond with the actual structure of the book, as for example inchapter five. This opaqueness also extends to the content: contested
terms such as ‘international society’ or ‘non-state political order’ areused without defining what they mean. More importantly, the main
thesis is repeated continuously, while important supporting arguments are not provided. For example, the link to decolonization,
presented as a main explanatory feature, remains vague and not
sufficiently elaborated. The rise of social bonds as the main criteria
for nationality in the post-war period is repeated time and again,
but Siegelberg does not attempt to explain why the social became sotremendously import­ant and what stood behind this shift. The same
holds true for the turn to national sovereignty in chapter five; this is
described, but no arguments are provided beyond the writings of legal
scholars, which are unsatisfactorily left to the reader to puzzle out.
The book makes a major contribution to the history of international
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Statelessness
law and politics in the twentieth century. Yet the argument is exaggerated and it would have been desirable to better contextualize thewritings of the legal scholars at the centre of the book and criticallyassess their impact.

ISABELLA LÖHR is Professor for International History of the Twen­tieth Century at the Freie Universität Berlin and heads the Department‘Globalizations in a Divided World’ at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam.
93

ANDREW CHANDLER, British Christians and the Third Reich: Church,State, and the Judgement of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2022), 422 pp. ISBN 978 1 107 12904 7. £90.00
In this book, Andrew Chandler brings together more than three decades of his own research into the study of how British Christians
viewed and interacted with Nazi Germany, returning, indeed, to thesubject of his 1991 PhD thesis. This is hardly an unresearched topic;
however, most studies have considered individual aspects of what
British Christians thought about the ‘Church Struggle’ (Kirchenkampf)
in German Protestantism, the British government’s appeasement
pol­icies, the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Allied war effort andthe moral issues raised by Allied victory, or the churches’ post-war
social policy. Chandler attempts to bring these topics together intoa more organic whole. The ‘and’ in the main title covers a multitude
of contexts, whether at the official level—the churches’ leadership
receives signifi­cant attention—or on the part of individual lay thinkers and activists. He focuses on the Church of England and on thesubstantial, increasingly institutionalized ecumenical movement of
the 1930s and 1940s. Mainstream Christian opinion in Britain was
clearly, consistently, and adamantly opposed to Nazism; nonetheless, there were sympathies towards aspects of National Socialism to
be found in some prom­inent corners of British Christianity. Overall,
Chandler emphasizes the Christian interest in and active support forresistance to Nazism, while exploring the many ambiguities, frustrations, and failures that prevented Christians from acting upon thesecommitments.
Chandler has organized his thoroughly empirical study chronologically. After a couple of introductory chapters that set the overall
scene, provide some background to the interwar period, and introduce key figures in the story to follow, the remainder of the book is
broken into sections that consider two- to five-year time spans starting in 1933 and ending in 1949. Without advancing any sweeping or
especially bold theses, he uses this approach to methodically reveal
the incremental back-and-forth of British–German relations in atumultuous era. The motive force in this story lies within Germany:
British churches are depicted as reactive, being constantly forced to94

British Christians and the Third Reichseek coherent responses to political, social, and military events occurring beyond Britain’s shores. Much more space is given to the pre-war
period 1933–9 than to the war years that followed. The denomin­
ational diversity of British Christianity’s intellectual world is madeclear: each church had not only its own theological traditions andpolitical affiliations but also varied networks and arenas for intellectual debate (such as journals, meetings, councils, conferences, and soon), and each denomination had different degrees and kinds of relationships with Germany in the decades before the 1930s.
The Church of England is at the heart of this story, particularly at
the level of its archbishops (Cosmo Lang and William Temple are thekey figures) and bishops. Anglicanism had a particular prominence as
the ‘national’ church, and, not least because of its seats in the Houseof Lords, it had a distinctive political visibility. As Chandler observes,‘for the most part Free Church opinion did look to the Anglicans to takea lead’ (p. 5), the culmination of an increasing friendliness in Protest­
ant relations by the interwar years. Roman Catholics played a muchsmaller role on the national stage at the start of this period, but in thecrises that followed, the church—under the leadership of the Cardinalof Westminster, Arthur Hinsley—increased in both stature and relevance. Some individuals stand out. The bishop of Chichester, George
Bell, was one of the most active and knowledgeable Anglican figureswith regard to German affairs, and he made several notable interventions in public debates. The bishops of Gloucester (Arthur Headlam)and Durham (Herbert Hensley Henson)—who often clashed publicly
over German issues—also receive recurrent attention.
Those Christians who took up the fight against National Socialism
had a distinct set of perspectives (p. 33):
They shared a belief that the Christian church mattered in theworld, that it had a responsibility to it and the prospect of influence within it. They found themselves at home in an essentiallypolitical milieu because they were sure that they were a defining dimension of it.

These views were common in Christian ecumenism—‘one of the great
progressive movements of post-war liberal internationalism’ (p. 22).
Its nascent bodies and networks connected German and British
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Book Reviews
Christians and coordinated many Christian responses to Nazism. Suchcontexts are key to Chandler’s stress on the transnational dimensionsof national historiography. He seeks to present British figures—frombishops and archbishops to ecumenical activists—as participants in
the internal conflicts of the German churches: ‘National Socialism’, heemphasizes, ‘was not simply a German catastrophe but more truly
a part of a wider European crisis’ (p. 392). In this emphasis on theparticipatory role of British Christians in German affairs, Chandler
at least implicitly draws a contrast with Tom Lawson’s depiction of
British Christians as ‘bystanders’ to the Holocaust.1
British churches shared overlapping concerns across the 1930s: thethreats posed to the international order, to those resisting the Nazis
within Germany, and to Jews. But what could they actually do? Above
all, they sought to mobilize public opinion through meetings andstatements, resolutions by church governing bodies, and commentary in books and periodicals. Church networks were politically wellconnected, and when opportunities arose—such as during travel toGermany for church gatherings—face-to-face meetings between British churchmen and high-ranking Nazi officials were arranged (thoughrarely made public). British Christians also organized aid for refugees
and, in a more limited sense, for prisoners in Germany through visits
to concentration camps.
The Church Struggle involved a set of complicated conflicts—
some theological, some political—between those German Protestants
willing to submit the faith to Nazi control and those who refused to
do so. At first, its contours were ambiguous, and British responses
correspondingly mixed. In 1934, the efforts of the ‘Confessing Church’
to take a more strongly articulated independent position provided
a focus for British church action, and the mobilization of inter­nation­al opinion initially bolstered a counter-offensive against thepro-­regime Deutsche Christen (pp. 134–5). Chandler foregrounds ashifting framework of possibility for British action: the stabilizationof Nazi rule made the regime less concerned about foreign opinion,
reducing opportunities to exploit internal divisions. Nazi success also
1
Tom Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory
and Nazism (Woodbridge, 2006), 167.

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British Christians and the Third Reich
emboldened their sympathizers (or those at least critical of the Nazis’
opponents) in other countries (pp. 139–40).
Apart from the intra-Protestant Church Struggle, the increasingly
desperate plight of German Jews was the most prominent recurringissue in British Christian discussions in this period. Chandler identifies
residual antisemitism within British Christianity—disproportionately,
but by no means exclusively, among Roman Catholics—but insists
the Christian ‘consensus lay elsewhere’ (p. 67). Even so, he recounts
statements by leading churchmen, such as the bishop of Gloucester,
expressing understanding for the regime’s reasoning even if they
condemned the persecution that followed from it. Chandler stresses
the depths of British Christians’ concerns about Nazi antisemitism:
public demonstrations against the mistreatment of Jews began in
April 1933, and the issue preoccupied the Christian press and churchorganizations. The official statements by the churches, however, were
often curiously mild, a point that some previous historiography has
strongly emphasized.2
This institutional timidity derived, Chandler shows, not from disinterest but rather from uncertainty about which kinds of intervention
would help the Jews rather than further endanger them. The resulting strategy of ‘sympathetic criticism’ meant that official critiques of
the Nazis were mixed with praise of the ‘new Germany’ or even of
the regime itself. The concurrent reliance upon their contacts in the
Confessing Church was, in turn, stymied by the latter’s own am­biva­
lent stance: while adamant about church independence, many in the
Confessing Church sympathized with various tenets of National
Socialism. Christians were thus hindered in developing an effective
strategy and had few levers to influence Germany’s emerging totalitarian system.
The years of the Second World War are given relatively compact treatment, with a focus on Christian views on the morality of
the British war effort, debates concerning ‘war aims’, and visions ofan improved post-war society. Christian pacifist opinion receded,though it remained a small, insistent current. It was more mainstream
E.g. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity: 1920–1990 (London,1991), 327, 342–5.

297Book Reviews
to support the war effort while avoiding the jingoistic nationalism
common in the Great War. This consensus suffered under the reportsof German atrocities in Poland, the rout of British and French forces,
and, of course, as a result of the Blitz; nonetheless, Bishop Bell andothers sought to combat ‘Vansittartism’—the harshly anti-German
views of government adviser Sir Robert Vansittart (later Baron Vansittart)—throughout the war. From 1942 onwards, in the press andin church statements, British Christians condemned reports of themass killing of Jews. Against some claims that British Christians had
failed to sufficiently recognize the unique dangers and suffering ofJews—by folding their struggles into a threat to faith generally or
to Christianity specifically3—Chandler argues convincingly not onlythat such an ‘alliance of faiths’ had been the goal of both British Christians and Jews, but also that in this way much was accomplished inlong-term interfaith relations that might not have been anticipated at
the time (p. 310).
Discussions about the shape of the post-war society to come led
to a flood of new publishing formats. For example, Bell’s Christianity
and World Order (1940) was in fact the first of the popular ‘Penguin
Specials’, Archbishop Temple’s Christianity and Social Order (1942)
was one of the bestsellers of the war, and, starting in late 1939, theChristian News-Letter rapidly attracted some 10,000 subscribers.
‘Christian ideas’, Chandler shows, ‘occupied a firm place in the foreground of this broad discourse’ (p. 296). Discussions of post-war
social reconstruction can be seen as the most successful of the causes
around which Christians organized in this period. Social policy andthe moral issues involved in the rebuilding of post-war Britain werehome territory for the churches, and the broader shift towards ‘planning’ gave Christians new means to influence society. The churches
also threw themselves into meeting the vast needs of post-war
humanitarian assistance.
Chandler summarizes the German Church Struggle as ‘a vast,diffuse controversy which sprawled untidily, configured and reconfigured, often by the month’ (p. 80). This is an apt description of theevents related in this book as a whole, and it speaks to Chandler’s
3

Ibid. 345; Lawson, The Church of England and the Holocaust, 6, 167.

98

British Christians and the Third Reichskills that they are so clearly depicted. British Christians, broadly
speaking, flowed with wider cultural currents in Britain: disturbed
and concerned about Nazi oppression and violence, rapturous about
Munich, inspired (and then deeply disillusioned) by appeasement,
patriotically supportive of the war effort (with occasional misgivings
about area bombing), and, finally, consumed by visions of a British
society after the war that would be better than the one that had enteredit. Nonetheless, within such broader commonalities they set their own
emphases. Unsurprisingly viewing the age as in the throes of a ‘spir­it­ual’ crisis, their focus on religious freedom and the role of the sacredin modern societies gave them a distinct standpoint from which tojudge politics. As Chandler notes, Christians were already familiar
with the language of ‘totalitarianism’, seeing threats to the rights ofChristians as a faith community as part of a wider set of endangered
freedoms. (As Markus Huttner has shown, Christians were, indeed,pioneers in such narratives.)4
However, the strategy of ‘sympathetic criticism’ proved a losing
and, in retrospect, morally questionable game. Even in November
1935, after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and in the processof passing a resolution in the Church Assembly condemning thetreatment of German Jews, Bell felt the need to reference the ‘cre­
ative’ aspects of Nazism and stress that some of his German friends
were committed National Socialists (p. 157). Chandler convincingly
refutes the suggestion that British Christians ignored National
Socialism or the plight of the Jews. At the same time he shows themany missteps made by church leaders. Ultimately, the churches(like much of the democratic world in the 1930s) seem out of theirdepth in confronting a force that was immune to—indeed, contemptuous of—appeals to Christian morality. The tools available were
simply inadequate to the job.
Nonetheless, this period was a historically important one for
Christian social thought, which achieved a creativity, visibility,
and relevance that it had at no other point in the twentieth century.
The intensity of the British involvement in the Church Struggle, theMarkus Huttner, Totalitarismus und säkulare Religionen: Zur Frühgeschichte
totalitarismuskritischer Begriffs- und Theoriebildung in Großbritannien (Bonn,
1999).

499

Book Reviews
leadership of British Christians in the early years of the ecumen­ic­al movement, and, not least, Britain’s place as one of the victors
in the Second World War ensured that British Christians were especially prominent in international Christian dialogues and debates.
(The strong relationship between British Christians and the rest of
the Anglophone world—including the United States—also contributed to their status, though this is an issue that Chandler addresses
only glancingly.) ‘National Socialism’, Chandler writes, ‘drew British
Christians into the forefront of a vigorous national discussion about
political justice, persecution and war and saw them shaping its terms
and trajectories’ (p. 390). Christian thought expanded its purview,finding much to say about justice, the social order, and freedom; perhaps more surprising, it discovered that there were many, whether
committed Christians or not, who were willing to listen.
This is a masterful and important study that will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding mid twentieth-century
British Christianity.

JOHN CARTER WOOD is an adjunct professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and works at the Leibniz Institute of European
History, also in Mainz. He is currently Managing Director of the
NFDI4Memory research data management consortium and has published extensively on the topics of violence, crime, policing, media,
gender, and Christian intellectual history. His most recent publications are This is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the
Crisis of Europe, 1937–49 (2019) and, as editor, Christian Modernities inTwentieth-­Century Britain and Ireland (2023).
100

ROTEM GEVA, Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s
Capital, South Asia in Motion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2022), 368 pp. ISBN 978 1 503 63119 9 (hardback), $90.00; ISBN
978 1 503 63211 0 (paperback), $30.00
Delhi Reborn is an exceptional work of urban and local history thatexamines the city within larger frameworks whilst never losing sightof its purpose: to understand how the particular cultural and political histories of Delhi were transformed by the end of empire, thebirth of the new nations of India and Pakistan, and the cataclysm ofPartition. For the period before these events, Geva’s work offers valu­
able insights into how imaginaries of a new city, and a new nation,
were articulated in the interwar period. In particular, the first chapter
captures the excitement of these possibilities for understanding andimagining Muslim selfhood. The ideas of Pakistan circulating in the
1930s, communicated in texts and maps, included the city as a place,and more significantly, as an expression of Muslim community thatwas simultaneously distinct and connected to the broader mores ofnational politics. The fixing, and restriction, of such ideas in territory came only later. This argument is, of course, a familiar one ingeneral terms: Pakistan meant many things to many people before
1947. Geva, however, succeeds in grounding those ideas in a particular urban, intellectual, and cultural realm, connecting them to lives
that belonged entirely within the domain of the city and, indeed, wereconstitutive of the city in a number of profound ways.
The second chapter maps the violence in Delhi in 1946—the‘abrupt and violent rending of the city’s social fabric’ (p. 95)—against
broader waves of unrest and uncertainty across northern India, andsituates the more immediate, local escalation and anticipation of violence in Delhi within a larger history. Geva argues that the violence
took on new forms, paving the way for the extraordinary maelstromof inter- and intra-community violence that accompanied the Partition in 1947. Local organizations armed and trained volunteers,
creating new combatants and enabling violence in particular localities. The expansive, inclusive ideas of Pakistan that Geva describesin the first chapter were shrunk back and asserted as defensive calls
to arms in the face of immediate threats to personal and collective
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Book Reviews
safety. Delhi Reborn describes the mechanics of the state and the political will that led to anxiety and the restrictions placed on the safety,
property, and legitimacy of Muslims in the city. In particular, it traces
the role of Sardar Patel, Congress home minister in the interim government which held the power abdicated by the British after mid
1946. Changes in po­­licing and in the coordination of responses tolocalized violence were critical in creating the conditions for a very
new format for communal violence. New Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru’s voice is heard as a righteous, if ineffectual, witness to thealienation of the city’s Muslims.
The third chapter explores particular social and organizational
histories that contributed, deliberately and otherwise, to making
Muslim inhabitation of the city increasingly insecure and uncertain. Geva demonstrates the constellation of interests of those who
constituted the state—politicians, bureaucrats, activists, volunteers, social workers, and the police. She offers a compelling, andunsettling, account of the tensions between Delhi as a symbolic andpolitical centre of the new nation and as a set of inhabited local­ities
from within which responses to the violence, fear, and opportunity
were formulated. A terrifying flux was created by attempts to realize Partition, in all its absurdity, by mass migration and ill-formed
legislation.
Geva’s discussion of literary and journalistic print and text­
ual cultures in the fourth chapter provides a fascinating picture of
the dynamic, precarious, and fractious landscapes of identity andbelonging that emerged in the years after Partition. The expansive,
ambitious imaginaries of the interwar period are replaced by anxious and aggressive narrations of self and other in the new city. The
chapter includes a compelling satire—penned by Gopal Mittal in thenewspaper Milap—of a Dilliwallah’s (a long-standing resident of thecity) resentment towards people transported from Lahore to Delhi.
The evocative piece maps and ridicules the resentment felt by longterm Delhi residents towards the ambitious refugees arriving from
Punjab.
The book provides insight into the complexities of thought andaction that informed Muslim identities in the city during Partition,
including among people who had ‘familial and friendly’ relations with102Delhi Reborn
those who had made the decision to migrate. Formerly mixed neighbourhoods became exclusionary and treacherous for Muslims, whowere becoming the ‘other community’ within the new nation. Delhi
Reborn moves between different scales of history, from the broadest
canvases of national vision to the microhistories of the mohalla (community, neighbourhood). Geva also underlines the importance ofclass, as the situation for the poorest inhabitants was worsened byprosperous families departing the city on relatively advantageous
terms, leaving the poor vulnerable to the lawmakers and enforcers,
who were biased towards Hindu refugees.
Notwithstanding the physical violence and ghettoization of
Delhi’s Muslims, the fifth and final chapter provides perhaps thegrimmest reading. It describes the ruptures, augmentation, andcontinuities in the institutions of policing and intelligence in Delhi
between the periods of late colonialism, dominionship, and full independence. In 1951, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in
Delhi attempted to intercept around 1,700 letters moving between
India and Pakistan. Geva describes this action, along with the CID’s
targeted surveillance and harassment of those classified as potential
or actual threats to the new, democratic political order. The lens of
the state shifted to include new enemies: socialists, communists, andlabour organizers.
The book ends with an epilogue, rather than a conclusion. This
briefly summarizes the popular agitations against the CitizenshipAmendment Act and the farmers’ protests between 2019 and 2021,
presenting the continuing tension between the ‘authoritarian instinctsand democratic aspirations’ (p. 263) that are so vividly presented in
the proceeding chapters.
Geva avoids shorthand simplifications, offering instead a meticu­
lously researched history that helps us to understand the rhizomic
complicity of local politics in a city that was a theatre for national politics and, perhaps, a reluctant capital. This can lead to some dense
prose and occasional tangents from what had appeared to be the principal lines of argument. Nevertheless, this book richly rewards thereader with its insight, scope, and eye for detail. Delhi Reborn succeeds
in making plain just how much was lost to the city, and in turn toboth nations, in the division of India and Pakistan. The book is more,103

Book Reviews
however, than a chronicle of loss. It is a work that articulates a passion
for the city of Delhi; in its pages lie not only the history of violence,but also glimpses of a city that endures despite the inadequacies of thepolitical and bureaucratic machinery it has long sustained.

DEBORAH SUTTON is Professor of Modern South Asian History
at Lancaster University. Her research encompasses environmental,
cultural, and political histories of India and the Indian diaspora. Her
forthcoming book, Ruling Devotion: The Hindu Temple in the Colonial
Imagination, will be published by Permanent Black and SUNY Press
in 2024.
104

RONNY GRUNDIG, Vermögen vererben: Politiken und Praktiken in der
Bundesrepublik und Großbritannien 1945–1990, Geschichte der Gegenwart, 28 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2022) 340 pp. ISBN 978 3 835
35169 1. €32.00
Social inequality has once again become a contentious societal issue
in the wake of Thomas Piketty’s work, if not before.1 Unlike in thepast, however, the contemporary debate has centred on the end of
the income and wealth spectrum that has previously attracted lessattention—in other words, on the rich. This new focus soon raises
questions around inheritance, which makes a significant contribution
to maintaining structures of social inequality across generations.
Inheritance as a process extends far beyond the individual and is aworthwhile subject for social history. However, contemporary histor­ians have paid it far less attention than scholars of other eras. Only inthe last few years has German historiography taken a greater interestin this form of wealth transfer, and Jürgen Dinkel in particular has
done much to advance the research field.2
Now Ronny Grundig has developed it further in his PhD thesis,
written at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam.
His study focuses on the period from 1945 until 1990—an end pointchosen because of the subsequent changes to discourses and structures of inequality brought about by German reunification. Grundig
compares the Federal Republic of Germany to the UK, justifying his
selection of countries by their different legal systems. His analysis
centres on three points: first, the regulation of inheritance by the state;second, changes to inheritance practices on both sides—that is, among
testators as well as heirs; and third, how the process of inheritanceshaped the social and economic fabric of the Federal Republic.
The part dealing with political history is the most straightforward.
Chapters one and two outline the legal context over the period, withmore space given to the early post-war years. This unequal weighting
Translated by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL).
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014).
Jürgen Dinkel, ‘Erben und Vererben in der Moderne: Erkundungen eines
Forschungsfeldes’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 56 (2016), 81–108.

1
2

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Book Reviews
makes sense, given that the aftermath of the Second World War opened
a window for change in both nations. In the UK, change consisted primarily of substantial tax rises in accordance with the legislative goalof redistributing wealth in the post-war settlement. In West Germany,
the Allies—and especially Great Britain—made significant interventions in tax law. Previously, inheritance tax rates had varied basedon how closely related the heir was to the testator. This system was
replaced with a single standardized rate, which placed a substantial
burden on smaller estates. The resulting legislative similarity between
both countries was short-lived, however, as the Bundestag repealed
the reform in its very first session. This shows how significant anissue inheritance tax was, given the large number of important le­gis­
lative projects competing for attention at this time—a situation that
prompted some contemporaries to call the Bundestag a ‘working
parliament’ (Arbeitsparlament). For the UK, Grundig extends his discussion into the 1970s, thereby considerably stretching the definitionof ‘post-war’. Yet this is necessary to cover key aspects of the British
inheritance debate—notably, efforts to safeguard widows.
Chapter two then traces the regulation of inheritance up to 1990.
Here, Grundig places more emphasis on the similarities between hiscase studies than the differences. The high rate of inheritance tax inthe UK did not bring about the redistribution hoped for by legislators.
There were many other wealth transfer routes to choose from, andalthough attempts were made prior to Margaret Thatcher’s election
to close loopholes, they achieved little. Labour politicians introduced
a capital transfer tax in order to skim off private wealth and divert
it to the treasury, but their efforts were thwarted by the change ingovernment. After 1979, estates benefited from the concept of theproperty-owning democracy, which produced a fall in the rate ofinheritance tax, among other effects. This development is certainly inkeeping with the standard view of the Thatcher era; however, there
is still a need to explain why the lively debate over increasing inheritance tax had so little influence on legislation. The same goes for theFederal Republic, where voices were also raised in support of a higher
rate of inheritance tax as a counter to growing wealth inequality. Yet
the German inheritance tax reform of 1973 was moderate in scope,
despite the extensive demands made by the left wing of the Social
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Inheritance in the UK and Germany
Democratic Party (SPD). While there was no radical policy of redistribution under the SPD, there was no clear neoliberal turn either.
In the third and fourth chapters the focus shifts onto inheritancepractices. Grundig’s source base switches from parliamentary debates,
politicians’ personal archives, and committee minutes to tax andprobate records and corporate archives. The UK case fades into thebackground in this section—presumably for practical reasons, which
are all too understandable given the time pressures faced by most
doctoral students. Comparative social history is generally far morechallenging than studying political decision-making, as working withcase files is very labour-intensive. Nonetheless, it would have been
desirable for the author to reflect more openly on his analytical context. That said, Grundig’s social historical inquiries have resulted insome of the most interesting findings in his book. Only a quarter toa third of testators opted to actively transfer their wealth instead ofbequeathing it according to inheritance laws. The extent of a person’s
wealth generally determined whether they would write a will, but insome cases less wealthy people also chose to do so—for example, toleave money to their carers.
The most important empirical findings relate to the dominanceof families, the formation of a labour market around inheritance,
and the complexity of transferring wealth. People generally choseto actively transmit their property to family members, in particular their spouses. In many cases, inheritance involved a number ofactors besides the testators and heirs, such as notaries, executors, andheir finders. The inheritance tax records show that intergenerational
wealth transfers took place beyond the confines of inheritance law,
especially when it came to large fortunes. Gifts and other methodsof transmitting property must also be taken into account in order tounderstand the full picture.
All in all, Grundig has produced a source-centred study thatsynthesizes information from case files, parliamentary records, sociological and legal studies, and personal archives into a readable whole.
Some clever planning was evidently required to accommodate thebroad array of topics—taking in large and small estates, testators,
heirs, and two countries—within the confines of a single book. And it
is ultimately for the best that the transnational comparison fades into107

Book Reviews
the background as Grundig immerses himself in the social history
of inheritance. However, in certain places more in-depth discussion
would have been welcome—for instance, on why inheritance tax
remained so modest in West Germany, especially when comparedto the higher rates in the UK and the USA. Also, coming back to
the third of the three major questions raised at the beginning of his
study—that of the significance of inheritance for the social and economic fabric of the Federal Republic—Grundig could have discussed
more what his findings regarding inheritance practices mean for thehistory of the family or old age. An answer to some of these questions
should be forthcoming from the array of existing and soon-to-bepublished research on inheritance in the twentieth century.3

3
See e.g. Jürgen Dinkel, Alles bleibt in der Familie: Erbe und Eigentum in Deutschland, Russland und den USA seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2023).

NICOLE KRAMER is a Junior Professor for Contemporary History at
the University of Cologne. Her current research deals with the historyof care policies, older people, and the European welfare state after
1945. She also works on gender, the history of Nazism, and the Second
World War.
108

SARAH COLVIN, Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners(London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 280 pp. ISBN 978 1 789 14627 1. £25.00
Anyone who believes that everything essential about the history of theFederal Republic of Germany has already been written should read thisbook by British literary scholar Sarah Colvin. Colvin is the Schröder
Professor of German and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. So she
is not a historian. And it is particularly important to emphasize thisbecause her carefully researched study makes an extremely important
contribution to the history of the Federal Republic of Germany that noone has written before, and perhaps no one has wanted to read. Shadow­
land is an uncomfortable book. It examines West German society fromthe perspective of those whose very exist­ence is not mentioned, evenin passing, in the standard histories of the Federal Republic: the people
in prison. A section on the GDR shows the extent to which the penal
system in East Germany had parallels in the West. Colvin does notwrite about well known prisoners such as Red Army Faction founder
Ulrike Meinhof, whose writings she has analysed in another book on
how terrorism takes root.1 Instead, she takes up the ‘stories of the “little
people” in prison’ (p. 10) and shows the extent to which these stories
express the history of an entire country. Very different people havetheir say: women and men, Black people and people of colour, rarely
also disabled and elderly people.
Colvin states that her book ‘is the story of Germany told, as far as
possible, in the words of people in prison’ (p. 10), and this certainly
makes it a ‘different’ history of the Federal Republic. Colvin deserves
credit for writing it. However, it was inspired by Ralf Dahrendorf,
who emphasized in the mid 1960s in his book Society and Democracythat ‘adequate witnesses’ for the liberal, democratic constitution ofWest German society were not politicians or lawyers, but ‘foreign
workers, mentally ill, [and] prison inmates’. This is because outsiders
are particu­larly good at documenting ‘what is happening in a society’.2
In order to show what was happening in West German society, Sarah
Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence,and Identity (Rochester, NY, 2009).
2
Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (London, 1968), 351. First
published in German in 1965.
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Book Reviews
Colvin has organized her book into four chronologically arranged
parts, one of which deals with living conditions in the GDR penal
system. The sources used are mainly letters and memoirs written byprisoners, with the GDR section—inevitably—drawing on memoirs
published after 1989. The immediacy of the letters on which the otherparts are based is therefore found only to a limited extent here.
One common thread in Shadowland is the experience of violence. Inpart one, ‘Unity, Rights and Freedom: West Germany, 1949–68’, readers meet Germans—mostly children—who had lost both parents inthe war and were wandering around alone, stealing in order to survive. Many of them ended up in institutions, where they were beaten
and often abused. Their life stories, as becomes clear in Shadowland,
reflect the story of a society that was not really interested in the fateof the ‘rubble children’. Many of those who experienced such a ‘mid-­century childhood’ (p. 45) were never able to lead law-abiding lives.
Their ‘careers’ on the streets and in closed institutions also determined
their future development. Shadowland reports on these often very personal experiences and draws on sources such as the collection of lettersassembled by the Swedish publicist Birgitta Wolf (1913–2009), who
lived in Germany from 1933. As Carin Göring’s niece, Wolf had good
contact with prominent representatives of the Nazi state. At the sametime, she began campaigning on behalf of prisoners and concentration
camp inmates in the 1930s and continued this commitment after theend of the war. By the early 1960s she had already received 6,000 letters from prisoners. By the time of her death she had amassed 60,000
letters, some of which are now in the archives of the Hamburg Institutefor Social Research and have been published.3 All the letters that Sarah
Colvin quotes in this section point to a fundamental problem: ‘Con­
tinu­ity, rather than change, is the leitmotif in stories from the post-war
prison’ (p. 30). Apparently, the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners signed by the UN in 1955, which strictly prohibited
any form of violence behind bars, did nothing to prevent physicalabuse of all kinds from determining the everyday lives of prisoners.
In the social liberal reform years from 1968, when the Federal
Republic of Germany wanted to ‘dare more democracy’ (in Willy
Birgitta Wolf (ed.), Die vierte Kaste: Junge Menschen im Gefängnis. Literarische
Dokumente (Hamburg, 1963).

3

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Shadowland
Brandt’s famous formulation), prisons also became the subject ofreform. Sarah Colvin describes these developments in part two (‘AModel and Looking Good? West Germany, 1968–89’) without any
sugar-­
coating, because her material—letters from another gener­
ation of prisoners—gives no reason to do so. In 1976 the Prison Act
was passed, a law that was intended to grant rights to prisoners andwhich stood at the end of a long reform process that aimed to achieve
the goal of rehabilitation through educational and socio­-psychologicalmeans. In those years, the Federal Republic was certainly looking toNorthern Europe and the Scandinavian model, which allowed prisoners more freedom and led to recognizably lower recidivism rates.
However, this model was not implemented in the Federal Republic.
Prisoners certainly realized this and were often stunned by how much
was said about rehabilitation and how little of the supposed spirit ofreform reached the prison walls. In this section, we learn about issues
such as sexual distress, sexual violence, and homosexual seduction,
which women encountered more than men and of which they weregenerally ignorant and fearful. There is also an impressive descriptionof what it meant to be a transgender prisoner in a men’s prison (andnot to survive). It is as sobering as it is remarkable that self-harm andsuicide were apparently the only possible form of self-­empowerment
for many of the prisoners. The fact that a supposedly liberal law granting prisoners educational and socio-psychological treatment as well as
extended personal rights was passed at this time sheds a different lighton the often-cited success story of the Federal Republic. Progress andstagnation could apparently stand side by side, and this contra­dictionis therefore just as much a part of the history of the West Germans as
their supposedly straightforward path to a ‘better world’.
The third part, ‘Risen from the Ruins: East Germany, 1949–89’,
makes it clear from the outset that no account written by a prisonerof the GDR was published in East Germany during the forty years thestate existed. One exception is the Hohenecker Protokolle, based on interviews with former inmates of the infamous women’s political prison.4
Ulrich Schacht, who conducted the interviews, epitomizes the brutalityof the GDR penal system more than almost anyone else. He was born
4
Ulrich Schacht (ed.), Hohenecker Protokolle: Aussagen zur Geschichte der politischen Verfolgung von Frauen in der DDR (Zurich, 1984).

111

Book Reviewsin Hoheneck and was taken away from his mother, Carola Schacht,
when he was just a few weeks old—a completely normal fate for mothers and their newborns in East German jails. Readers also learn about
the experiences of Black GDR citizens in prison, as well as the arbitrariness, violence, and hopelessness that characterized life behind bars.
The situation improved somewhat with the Helsinki Accords of 1975
and the GDR’s new Penal Code of 5 May 1977, which consigned tohistory at least the worst instruments of torture, such as standing cells
and water cells. This development was hardly reflected in the prisoners’ stories, however. Even after the reforms, imprisonment meant thatmost people had to give up their personal rights completely. ‘Foucault
could not have known it’, Colvin writes, ‘but even before he famously
revisited Jeremy Bentham’s panoptical vision of the prison in Discipline
and Punish (1975), East German prisoners were experiencing prison asa reflection of the panoptical or all-seeing state’ (p. 147).
‘Wind of Change: Germany after 1989’ is the title of the fourth andfinal section, which left this reader in disbelief. Colvin jumps forward
to the present and reports that even in 2020, there are still communal
cells in German prisons that do not have a separate toilet area andtherefore do not guarantee a minimum degree of privacy. What Sarah
Colvin has emphasized in the stories of prisoners since the post-war
period still applies today: ‘over and over again, the story of people inprison is the story of not being believed’ (p. 55). Regardless of how
they are treated and what they have to suffer, they are hardly considered credible. Peter-Paul Zahl called the fate of people in prison‘nobodification’ in 1977, a term that is obviously still relevant today(p. 173). Not being heard and seen is reminiscent of what Johan Galtung dubbed ‘structural violence’ in the late 1960s. Structural violence,
according to his conceptualization, is the avoidable impairment ofbasic human needs or, to put it more generally, of life, which reduces
the actual degree of satisfaction of needs below what is possible.5 Itis ‘built into the system and manifests itself in unequal power relations’.6 As much as the prisoners’ letters express these unequal power
Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace
Research, 6/3 (1969), 167–91.
6
Johan Galtung, Strukturelle Gewalt: Beiträge zur Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), 9.
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Shadowland
relations in the past, Colvin’s book also makes it clear that it would bewrong to believe that a transformation has taken place in the institutions of the Western world since the 1970s. On the contrary, prisonsare still violent places today. Prisoners kill and are killed behind bars.
The drug trade also flourishes behind prison walls. And people whohave been in prison for a long time are not rehabili­tated, but fear thatthey will no longer be able to live in freedom. Giving these people avoice and showing the extent to which writing can be a form of self-­
assertion is one of the great merits of Sarah Colvin’s book. Another isthat it inspires Germans to reflect on their country. The experiencesof prisoners leave no doubt that the development of West Germansociety, although it has largely succeeded politically and legally in(re)building a democratic community after the ‘shock of inhuman­ity’,7 cannot adequately be described with the still frequently invoked
narrative of ‘liberalization’.8 ‘Most of us prefer to believe we live ina (more or less) rational modern democracy. But stories from prison
say: this is not the country you thought it was’ (p. 22).

7

Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, trans.
Brandon Hunziker (Oxford, 2006), 5 .
8Ulrich Herbert, ‘Liberalisierung als Lernprozess: Die Bundesrepublik inder deutschen Geschichte—eine Skizze’, in Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980(Göttingen, 2002), 7–49.

ANNELIE RAMSBROCK holds the Chair for Modern History at
the University of Greifswald. Her publications include the monographs Geschlossene Gesellschaft: Das Gefängnis als Sozialversuch—einebundes­deutsche Geschichte (2020) and The Science of Beauty: Culture andCosmetics in Modern Germany, 1750–1930 (2015; paperback 2017).
113

REET TAMME, Wissenschaft und ‘race relations’: Repräsentationen vonMultiethnizität in Großbritannien 1950–1980 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022),
vii + 411 pp. ISBN 978 3 110 79057 3. £82.00
The book begins with a focus on Sheila Patterson’s study Dark Stran­
gers, published in 1963.1 Although the title of this study is based on
Georg Simmel’s concept of the ‘stranger’,2 this choice of words is hardly
conceivable in the social sciences today as a reference to minorities andmigrants. This is precisely why it is impressive to see how far these
disciplines have come since then, and Reet Tamme’s PhD thesis, which
she wrote at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, guides readers along
this path from the 1950s to the 1980s.
In her introduction, Tamme describes British race relations research
as a ‘new system of knowledge production and a new representation
system for ethnicity’ (p. 2). This is linked to the broader question ofwhether and how the social sciences help structure social reality, following Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.3 At the same time, Tamme
states that the social sciences themselves are subject to social change.
This has an additional transnational dimension in the case of British
race relations research: according to Tamme’s thesis, US research provided the decisive theoretical foundations over several decades.
The source base of Tamme’s work largely comprises social sciencepublications, in particular from the Chicago School and from the Institute for Race Relations (IRR), which was founded in London in 1958. It
also includes reports, organizational charts, and correspondence fromthe IRR’s committees and from the Ford Foundation as a significant
third-party funder. These are taken from the institute’s and foundation’s own archives in London and New York and from the Black
Cultural Archives in London, the London Metropolitan Archives,
and the National Archives in Kew. Methodologically, Tamme uses a
Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a
Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (London, 1963).
2
Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social
Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), 143–9. Thisessay was first published in German in 1908.
3Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY, 1966).
1

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British Representations of Multi-Ethnicity
model of discourse analysis that includes texts and institutionalizedpractices. In addition, she draws on Lutz Raphael’s notion of the ‘scientification of the social’,4 since British race relations research has had
a strong social reform impulse from the very beginning.
The first chapter is dedicated to the establishment of race relations
research in the USA and Great Britain from 1920 to 1960. Tamme provides a detailed overview of the works of the Chicago School and therefutation of the ‘scientific’ concept of race by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and others. Although these outlines are largely known, they areskilfully summarized here. Gunnar Myrdal, who understood race associally constructed and race problems as socially caused, plays a central role in Tamme’s portrayal. What was notable, however, was thatfrom the 1940s onwards a greater conceptual distinction was drawn
between race (for African Americans) and ethnicity (for European
immigrants) in the US social science literature. These semantics havealso been relevant to the situation in Great Britain since the introduction of the Nationality Act of 1948, which recognized Commonwealthcitizens as British citizens. The interest in the living conditions of thisnew category of citizens was the starting point for British race relations research.​
Tamme convincingly places this emerging field in the global context of late colonialism, as well as in the historical context of science.
Academic sociology was still not very well developed in Great Britain,
and American theoretical impulses were therefore readily adopted.
Applied social reform predominated until the 1960s, while earlystudies of prejudice and discrimination were already highlightingsocial insecurities and the question of British identity. More powerful, however, for race relations research was the emergence of several
paradoxes: on the one hand, the particular needs of immigrants wereoverlooked because they were officially considered ‘ordinary citizens’(p. 112); and on the other, social reform goals often led to the negative
singling out of immigrants by discursively creating new stereotypes
and prejudices that were applied to the ‘Black’ population, and byconstructing distinctions between ‘British’ and ‘foreign’. It was also
Lutz Raphael, ‘Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische
und konzeptionelle Herausforderung für eine Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 22/2 (1996), 165–93.

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Book Reviews
increasingly recognized as a problem at the time that ‘White’ social
scientists were studying ‘Black’ communities, even if they saw themselves as their advocates.
The second chapter deals with the institutionalization of race
relations research in Great Britain at the beginning of the 1960s. The
widely publicized riots in Notting Hill in 1958 stimulated activities
that aimed to improve race relations. These included the founding ofacademic institutes and departments of urban sociology, and especially the IRR in London. The IRR’s Board of Studies included not only
scientists but also businesspeople who invested in the British colonies,
and the institute’s director, Philip Mason, was also a former colonial
official. The IRR had its headquarters in the affluent neighbourhood of
St James and published its monographs with Oxford University Press.
Tamme pointedly judges that in the IRR, an elite from the worlds ofscience, business, and politics controlled the production of knowledge
about race relations.
Transatlantic ties remained strong: the Ford Foundation was animportant third-party donor, and the IRR also entered into collabor­
ations with the University of Denver and the University of California,
Berkeley. Above all, however, its major project of undertaking a‘survey of race relations’ was explicitly intended to build on an American model and to become a ‘Myrdal for Britain’ (p. 173), with reference
to Myrdal’s influential study An American Dilemma.5 In 1969, thesurvey was published under the title Colour and Citizenship.6
However, the 1960s also brought a shift towards a more specifically
British approach to race research. Immigration from South Asia cameinto focus, and multi-ethnicity gradually established itself as a newinterpretive pattern for British society, while the idea of assimilation
lost importance. At the same time, immigrant groups were increasingly seen as stable units whose well-being should be promoted. Suchessentialization was one of the paradoxes of race relations research.
Nevertheless, it had a political impact, in major laws such as the 1962
Commonwealth Immigration Act and especially the Race Relations
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy (New York, 1944).
6
E. J. B. Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations(Oxford, 1969).
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British Representations of Multi-Ethnicity
Act of 1965, which brought a series of anti-discrimination regulations
into force earlier than elsewhere in Europe.
Children and young people also came into focus in the 1960s. It
is estimated that around 170,000 children were classified with terms
such as ‘immigrant children’ or ‘second-generation’. This made education in a multi-ethnic environment a new topic for research. While theteaching of English as a second language was established smoothlyin schools, there were other controversies: alongside criticism of textbooks that still conveyed colonial worldviews, there was a demand
for more Black teachers. Furthermore, in some schools, quota regulations allowing ‘non-White’ children to make up no more than one
third of each class were tried out, as was the bussing system known
from America. Finally, special classes were set up, primarily for
Afro-Caribbean children.
Chapter three, which addresses the pluralization of the research
field from the beginning of the 1970s, offers very pointed descriptionsof various crises. Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speechfrom 1968 stood against the growing influence of the ‘Black Power’
movement, while in science, so-called radical sociology forced the‘emergence of new theoretical approaches as a counter-­representation’(p. 265). In the IRR, these challenges became particularly acute. A newgeneration of scientists came onto the scene who saw themselves asradical academics. They stood for an epistemic commitment that was
openly political, in contrast to the previously claimed ‘neutrality’ of
the IRR. Criticism quickly arose in response to the IRR’s flagship study
Colour and Citizenship, and Black communities who featured in it as
research subjects were called on to resist: ‘When researchers from theIRR come knocking on their doors for information they will be welladvised to tell them to fuck off’ (p. 273). Radical scientists now often
spoke of a ‘race relations industry’ and ‘scientific colonialism’ (p. 273),
while Marxist approaches and a reckoning with capitalist structures
were very popular.
This new era at the IRR was also reflected in its symbolism andpractices. The institute’s headquarters were moved from St James tothe King’s Cross area—closer to Black communities—and the scholarly magazine Race was renamed Race and Class: A Journal for Blackand Third World Liberation. A comprehensive change in personnel also117

Book Reviews
took place in the committees: political and economic elites gave way
to activist representatives of Black communities and Marxist scholars.
This reorganization had consequences. The Ford Foundation ended
its funding of the IRR and instead focused on individual projects andscientists in Great Britain. In Tamme’s judgment, this marked the endof a period of intensive knowledge transfer between the US and Britain. British cultural studies, which were largely influenced by StuartHall, embarked on an independent approach in which culture wasunderstood as everyday practice and great attention was paid tomedia theory. Racism was not to be analysed as a universal phenomenon, but rather in a specific historical context.
In her last chapter, Tamme takes a systematic look at know­
ledge production and its modes, discussing several models from thesociology of knowledge. She concludes that race relations researchevades a traditional disciplinary history because it did not develop
any specifically dedicated courses or chairs during the period underinvestigation. In addition, it imported its methods predominantly
from the USA and was characterized by disciplinary heterogeneity
and the increasing participation of non-academic representatives, aswell as a high level of practical relevance.
Reet Tamme’s book shows the change in representations of multi-­
ethnicity very convincingly, but the parts dedicated to race relations
research as a new system of knowledge production have somewhat
less momentum. The fact that science should not be understood asa teleological process has already become established in the historyof knowledge. Although she shows that interdisciplinarity took root
earlier than previously assumed, Tamme does not establish a parallelwith Anne Kwaschik’s book on the emergence of area studies, whichshowed precisely this.7 In general, Tamme deals well with theories
and models of the sociology of knowledge, but engages less oftenwith the historical research literature.
One of the methods of the history of knowledge is to shed light on
the biographical characteristics of the actors involved. Tamme does
this only for a few actors, and in a brief manner. This reluctance isAnne Kwaschik, Der Griff nach dem Weltwissen: Zur Genealogie von Area Studies im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2018).

7

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particularly regrettable in the case of two social scientists, Ruth Glassand Marie Jahoda. Born in Berlin and Vienna, they had to emigrate
in the 1930s because of their Jewish origins and their political commitments. Against this background, it would have been interesting tofind out whether and to what extent both of them also brought Continental European experiences with ‘race’ and racism into British race
relations research. This question is also of interest because the translation of terms and concepts is a recurring issue in Tamme’s work. In
her German text, Tamme uses the term ‘ethnicity’ where Americansocial scientists were still speaking of ‘race’, and she uses ‘multi-ethnic’when British social scientists were evoking the vision of a ‘multi-­racial
Britain’. After all, Tamme points out that in Great Britain too, theterm ‘ethnicity’ increasingly replaced ‘race’ and became partly interchangeable with it—in contrast to developments in the USA which
are shaping current racism research.
Debates like these show the great advantage of studies of the history of knowledge, such as that by Reet Tamme. They offer the insightthat many of the challenges, tensions, and perspectives encountered
today in the scientific discussion about migration and racism havebeen around for decades and have—sometimes forgotten—forerunners and pioneers. They show which paths were taken back then, andwhich are no longer being pursued today. With her detailed presentation of institutionalized practices, Tamme also offers fascinating
insights into the British research landscape on late colonialism, decolonization, and the Commonwealth. These findings seem all the more
powerful because Tamme refrains from political commentary andpointed argument. This pronounced objectivity is also stylisticallybeneficial, since well-chosen source quotations and praxeologicalmicro-insights provide fine narrative counterpoints to the otherwise
sober tone of the book. This thoroughly crafted and very readable
study is indispensable to any future research work on migration, race,and ethnicity, as well as the history of knowledge and the contem­por­ary history of Great Britain.

119Book Reviews
STEPHANIE ZLOCH is Deputy Professor of Modern History andHistory Education at TUD Dresden University of Technology. She
is the author of Das Wissen der Einwanderungsgesellschaft: Migration
und Bildung in Deutschland 1945–2000 (2023) and Polnischer Nationalismus: Politik und Gesellschaft zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (2010). Her
research interests include the history of knowledge and migration as
well as the history of nationalism and ethnicity, with a focus on Germany and East Central Europe from the nineteenth to the twenty-first
centuries.

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Thirteenth Medieval History Seminar. Organized by the German
Historical Institute London and the German Historical Institute Washington, DC, and held at the GHIL, 5–7 October 2023. Conveners: Stephan
Bruhn (GHIL), Fiona Griffiths (Stanford University), Michael Grünbart(University of Münster), Jamie Kreiner (University of Georgia), Simon
MacLean (University of St Andrews), Len Scales (Durham University),
and Dorothea Weltecke (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
Every two years, the German Historical Institutes in London andWashington DC jointly organize a three-day seminar for PhD candidates and recent PhD recipients working on ‘medieval history’ in the
broadest possible sense of the word. Already the thirteenth iterationof this successful format, the Medieval History Seminar in October
2023 brought together eighteen early-career medievalists from theUK, Ireland, the US, Canada, and Germany to discuss their work witheach other and a group of well established scholars.
As usual, the seminar’s papers addressed a deliberately broad
spectrum of topics and methodological approaches, ranging geographically from Fennoscandia to the Aegean and the Iberian Peninsula, andchronologically from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Recurring
topics included interreligious encounters and relationships; learned
cultures; the role of saints’ cults, visions, and exempla in political, religious, and social discourse; (re)configurations of monarchical, papal,
and imperial rule; and elite formation processes and topographies of
local power. There was much overlap between the papers: thematicallythere was a focus on the manifestations and functions of violence inmedieval societies, geographically on the Reich, and chronologicallyon the later Middle Ages. The Mediterranean world did not feature asprominently as in past seminars, and there was a conspicuous absenceof papers on the earlier Middle Ages, particularly the centuries after
the end of Roman rule in the West.
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To facilitate in-depth discussions, the seminar followed the wellestablished pattern that participants did not give their papers during
the panels, but pre-circulated them within the group for everyone toread in advance, with two (in one case three) participants asked to prepare comments. These comments then served as opening statements
for the panels in that they briefly summarized the papers, highlighting similarities as well as differences, and addressed open questions.
Following a brief response by the panellists, the chairs immediately
opened the floor for discussion. Although labour-­intensive and rather
unusual, all participants agreed that this format of ‘non-held’ papers
led to extremely stimulating discussions and beneficial feedback.
The papers in the first panel dealt with the formation of Christian value communities in the German-speaking lands in the highand later Middle Ages. Isabel Kimpel (LMU Munich) examined
the structure, content, transmission, and reception of the Cistercianmonk Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Omelie morales de infantia Salvatoris.
Although Caesarius is quite famous for his homiletic and paraenetic
oeuvre in general—especially the Dialogus miraculorum—scholarshiphas paid scant attention to the Omelie so far. However, it can provide
us with new insights into Caesarius’ methods and the audiences hewas targeting, as well as the recontextualization of his works in latemedieval monasticism and reform contexts, as Kimpel convincingly
showed. Savoy Curry (Northwestern University) also drew on one
of Caesarius’ exempla but used it as a stepping stone for a different angle on Christian value discourses: the self-reassurance of latemedieval urban communities in the context of interfaith sexual relationships. Via an in-depth analysis of municipal court records, Savoyrevealed how urban authorities adopted clerical views on illicit sex
and pollution in their treatment of Christian women who had sexual
relationships with Jewish men. The growing criminalization of andanxiety over these relationships resulted, as Curry argued, from theirinversion of gender norms, as they threatened established hierarchies
and thus the foundations of Christian communal life itself.
The following panel drew attention to the multifaceted relationship between textual artefacts and the practices from which they
evolved in the earlier Middle Ages. Daria Safronova (University of
Tübingen) examined supplications which were directed to the ruler
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during assemblies in tenth-century León. On the one hand, using
mainly charters as gateways to the petitioners’ speeches and gestures,she highlighted the constitutive role these performative acts played in
dispute settlement and the formulation of royal ideology. Although
the petitions show no trace of direct sacralization, they promoted theking’s position as leader by ascribing Christian virtues to him. On theother hand, Safronova discussed the crucial problem of how closely
the written evidence mirrors what happened at the meetings themselves, thus addressing the limits of historical knowledge. The sameproblem was tackled in the paper by Peter Fraundorfer (Trinity College Dublin), albeit from a different angle. Focusing on the practiceof writing itself, he provided an in-depth stylistic and codicologicalanalysis of the so-called ‘Reichenau Group’, a set of manuscripts fromthe ninth century written in an Irish hand, which were once part ofReichenau Abbey’s library. In doing so, Fraundorfer underlined
the immense value of a thorough and well defined palaeographicalmethod for the field of historical study, since his analysis significantly
strengthened the rather tentative older assumption that these codicesstemmed from the same scriptorium.
The changing roles of dynasties and married couples within medieval religious culture were at the heart of the third panel. Antonia
Anstatt (University of Oxford) examined the idea of chaste marriage inthe cults of holy couples. Focusing on two case studies—the imperial
couple Henry II and Cunigunde and the marriage between the Occitan
nobles Elzear and Dauphine—she showed how these cults were used
to promote new ideas of marital life in which the consensual decision
to abstain from sex led to new forms of intimacy and, in particular,
mutual assistance in the partners’ quest for a saintly life. The shift
in the significance of families and dynasties was also at the centre of
the paper by Cynthia Stöckle (LMU Munich), which explored the roleof medieval nobles as founders and benefactors of monastic communities. Focusing on the Cistercian abbey of Stams in Tyrol, Stöckle
demonstrated that the classification of the abbey in older scholarshipas a Hauskloster (family monastery) of the Meinhardinian and Wittelsbach dynasties was deeply misleading. Not only did the generalchapter of the Cistercian order have a say in the founding process,which secured a certain degree of independence for Stams from its
123Conference Reports
noble founders, but the monks also made connections with other families in the vicinity to further their position within the local polit­ical
and religious landscape.
The fourth panel developed new perspectives on elites in the Ottonian Reich. Alena Reeb (Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg)
provided a thorough re-evaluation of the relationship between Saxon
elites, both male and female, secular and ecclesiastical, and ‘their’ kingat the beginning of the eleventh century. Taking the Billung Dukes
Bernhard I and Bernhard II as well as the Abbesses Sophia of Ganders­heim and Adelheid of Quedlinburg as case studies, she illustrated how
difficult it is to draw any clear-cut conclusions based on the patchyand often biased evidence we have. While the dukes’ relationshipwith their royal overlord was much less troublesome and contentious
than commonly thought, the two Ottonian sisters had a far greater
impact on local political decision-making than scholarship has recognized so far. Ottonian elite women also featured prominently in thepaper by Graham Johnson (University of Toronto) on female learned
culture in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. In contrast to older
scholarship, which has mainly focused on the supposedly exceptional
character of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Johnson unearthed a plethora ofsources either written by female authors, directed at female audiences,or dealing with female education that collectively show how women
played a key role in early medieval writing and learned culture.
The reconfiguration and legitimization of royal and imperial
rule at turning points in the Reich’s history lay at the core of the fifth
panel. Shifting the focus from local elites to the empire’s head, Felix
Timmer (University of Münster) highlighted the hitherto neglectedrole of the Diet of Liège in 1131 as a watershed in Lothair III’s reign.
Via a meticulous analysis of Lothair’s diplomas before and after theassembly, Timmer outlined a significant shift within his self-fashioning
which was itself part of a larger and longer transformation process: atthe beginning of the twelfth century, Roman-German rulers and theirentourages experimented with new concepts of imperial rule—not allof them successful—which in the long run would lead to new configurations of political order. The paper by Richard Schlag (University of
Oxford) on the repercussions of the Cologne Diocesan Feud in 1474–5
pointed in a similar direction. While the military invention by the124Thirteenth Medieval History Seminar
Burgundian Duke Charles the Bold in what was an internal affair ofthe empire has long been regarded as a token of Frederick III’s weakness, Schlag showed how the Habsburg ruler and his advisers usedthe exceptional situation to significantly strengthen imperial rule
within and beyond the archbishopric–electorate of Cologne. Not only
did the emperor present himself as guardian of the German-speaking
lands and steward of the Church, but he also put this self-fashioning
into practice to exert more direct influence in Cologne’s territory.
Elites took centre stage in panel six again, but this time the focus
shifted to their interactions and relationships with groups they did
not consider to be their equals. Tristan Sharp (University of Chicago)
proposed a new perspective on feuding practices in the late medieval German lands by analysing the violent extraction of resources
recorded in ‘damage registers’ (Schadensverzeichnisse). Directed against
the rural population, this form of violence not only transcended theboundaries between feud and lordship, in that it was often used bynobles to extend their power over dependent groups; but it also provided a viable source of income, so that it was employed by all strata
of noble society and thus became a feature structurally inherent toseigneurial rule. Erik Wolf (University of Greifswald) examined thechanging and multifaceted relations between Christian elites and themainly non-Christian Sámi during the conversion of the latter. Deliberately questioning the adequacy of ethnological categories, Wolf
persuasively argued that the conversion of Fennoscandia was nothindered by the population’s unwillingness to accept the new faith;
nor was the relationship between converter and not-yet-converted
neces­sarily marked by alterity or antagonism. Secular and ecclesiastical elites did indeed other the Sámi when it served their needs, but
this only rarely stemmed from the missionary context. What is more,
the Sámi had agency of their own when it came to adopting the Christian faith.
The seventh panel addressed the experience, repercussions, andovercoming of violence in late medieval urban communities, withboth papers highlighting the strategic dimensions inherent in this sup­posed­ly irrational and extreme behaviour. Maria Pieschacon-Raffael(LMU Munich) examined how the hunger crisis in cities under siege
during the Hundred Years War was dealt with. Taking Calais and125Conference Reports
Rouen as case studies, which were both besieged twice, Pieschacon-­Raffael convincingly argued that urban authorities learned from theatrocities inflicted upon them, in that they successfully managed toprevent food shortages during their second military encounters. This
success reveals on the one hand the adaptive skill and pragmatism ofurban communities facing recurrent situations of extreme violence;but on the other, the apparently high priority given to these measures
betrays how deeply the previous hunger crises were inscribed on thecollective memory. The paper by Stanislaw Banach (University of Cambridge) dealt less with the systematic containment of violence and its
manifold impacts than with its strategic employment by late medieval
urban elites. As Banach’s examples from towns in Silesia, Poland, andPrussia indicated, civil unrest was not caused by the faceless masses;
nor was it necessarily a token of chaos breaking loose. More often thannot, violence was a powerful means deliberately employed by a town’s
elites to further their own (political) interests. This applies particularly to situations in which the instigators were pursuing a change ofgovernment or dealing with outward interference in internal affairs,
which was considered a threat to urban autonomy.
Multisensorial experiences formed the focus of the eighth panel.
Beatrice Blümer (University of Kassel) analysed the complex relationship between text and image—or map—in Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s
Liber insularum. Delving deep into the Liber’s multifaceted transmission history, she pointed out how successive copyists significantly
changed the textual and visual representation of archaeological sitesthat Buondelmonti had included in his work. These changes, Blümer
argued, mirrored the context in which the respective manuscript was
produced. But they also reflect broader changes in knowledge culture
and production, as well as the specific needs of those commissioning the copies. Late medieval reflections on the sense of sight and its
usefulness in telling true from false formed the core of the paper byGenevieve Caulfield (UCL). Using examples from the canonization
process of Dorothea of Montau and Johannes Nider’s Formicarius, sheconvincingly distinguished between different conceptions of seeing,both physical and metaphorical. These different ways of seeing, Caulfieldargued, were promoted in edification literature as a means of identifying saints and demons and were thus considered to be essential
126Thirteenth Medieval History Seminar
techniques in underlining Christian truth claims and strengthening
resolve in faith.
The seminar’s final panel dealt with changes in papal elections,both on a practical and a theoretical level. Anna Eßer (RWTH Aachen
University) focused on a group of texts generally known as ‘schism
treatises’ (Schismatraktate), which she distinguished from the genreof ‘controversy literature’ (Streit- or Kontroversschriften). Whereas thelatter stemmed from the Investiture Controversy and often took sides,
the former derived specifically from papal schisms and were more
pragmatic in nature. In their quest to explain the causes and minimize
the impact of ecclesiastical factionalism, they often foregrounded theidea of canonica electio (canonical election), as Eßer underlined withregard to Abbot John’s De vera pace. Schisms had to be prevented
before they even came into being. Canon law and the question of
whose claims were justified thus mattered less than the implementation of norms and behavioural codes which ensured unanimity andpeace. These ideas already featured prominently in the early Middle
Ages, as Stefan Schöch (University of Erfurt) explained in his paperon the ‘papal election procedure’ (Papstwahlordnung) of 769. Focusing
on the older principle of an election conducted equally ‘by clergy andlay people’ (durch Klerus und Volk) and its varying implementationsin practice, Schöch not only showed how clerical actors significantly
professionalized the delicate procedure long before the creation of
conclave and cardinals, but his analysis, like Eßer’s, also highlighted
the productive potential of disruptive moments. Without the succession crisis following the death of Paul I in 767, there would probably
have been no need to clarify the election procedure.
As a sort of ‘farewell’ to the seminar, the outgoing convener Dorothea Weltecke gave a public lecture on the first evening, intriguingly
titled ‘On How and Why Religions Became Exclusive Social Formations—A Historian’s View’. Based on her forthcoming book, Weltecke
explored the historicity of both religion and exclusivity, which areclosely entangled. The formation between the seventh and the fifteenth
centuries of what have been called ‘religions’ since the Enlightenment
had, she argued, less to do with absolute truth claims and more withthe proliferation of mutually exclusive group affiliations that were
fundamentally shaped by social inequality and political domination.
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While the followers of the three Abrahamic religions were well awarethat they shared common organizational and doctrinal features andhistorical links, which could lead to tolerance and exchange, they alsoestablished boundaries by polemicizing against each other. Precisely
because every teaching had its place, it needed to be limited to a specific group, be it one’s own or a constitutive other. It was only whenthese rather loose claims of religious differences aligned with powerthat truth and thus exclusivity could be established. Religion should
therefore be regarded as a category of legal and social inequality andnot a necessary corollary of belief.
The seminar concluded with a lively conversation on the overarchingquestions and topics that had been discussed. The participants debated,
for instance, whether the seminar’s strong focus on the history of violence and the later Middle Ages was indicative of wider trends in thefield or just a very fruitful coincidence. Another aspect that featured
prominently over all three days and was duly credited in the concluding discussion was the high degree of source criticism that does seemto be a peculiarity of premodern history. All the papers had shownhow profoundly medievalists scrutinize their sources, often gaining
new insights from well known evidence, without falling back on thehypercriticism which characterized the field after the rise of the linguistic turn. Furthermore, all participants agreed on how valuable
a format like the Medieval History Seminar is in enabling academic
exchange and international networking at an early stage in medievalists’ careers. It is therefore worth continuing to offer this opportunity.

Stephan Bruhn (GHIL)

128

Social Data on Inequality in Historical Perspective. Workshop held at
the Werner Reimers Foundation, Bad Homburg, 6–7 November 2023.
Funded by the Werner Reimers Foundation. Conveners: Al­­brecht
Graf von Kalnein (Werner Reimers Foundation), Lutz Raphael (Trier
University), and Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL).
This year, the working group ‘Social Data and Contemporary History’focused its workshop on inequality research and the possibilities andchallenges associated with the use of social data in this research field.
Lutz Raphael opened the workshop by presenting its thematic foci.
The first item on the agenda was to broaden the geographical perspective by comparing notes on British and German approaches to social
data. Next, he posed the question of how much knowledge needs
to be available, and to what extent we need a history of knowledge
about the origins, the production, and the collectors of contemporary
inequal­ity data to then be able to work with the data itself. He thendrew attention to how qualitative and quantitative data can be integrated into historical research and connected with one another, andfinally, invited the historians and social scientists to present their projects and explain their work using data, the aim of the workshop being
to scrutinize and develop existing practices and methods.
The first panel began with a German–British comparison. Felix
Römer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) asked how actors and theirrespective views of society influenced the production of social statistics and knowledge about economic inequality in Great Britain andthe Federal Republic of Germany from 1945. According to Römer, thestate itself has been a central actor in the production and managementof this knowledge. Social science research on inequality has relied ondata produced by the state. Not only has the state collected a lot of
data, it has also decided what to publish, and in addition, it is only
state actors who have been able to judge the quality of the data. Römer
argued that this approach to data has followed a political agenda andhas also been employed in state campaigns. Ignorance about methods of data collection has led to the circulation and reproduction of
inaccurate figures over long periods of time. It is therefore important
Translated by Marielle Sutherland (GHIL).

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for historians to conduct archival research into this statistical meta-­knowledge and take it into consideration when using figures.
In his paper, Marc Buggeln (Europa-Universität Flensburg) linked
social inequality with tax policies across a range of Western countries
in a long historiographical perspective and described the challenges
of examining these connections. During his research, he came acrossdata sets that returned different results on the relative proportions of
direct and indirect taxes. In addition, differences between data collection processes and a lack of knowledge about the surveys meant it
was difficult to compare governmental tax policies. Comparative data
has only been available since the OECD database was established in
1965. It is therefore important, he argued, to ask how people handled
data before this—how they collected and then analysed it. In particular, the study of taxes and social inequality requires knowledgeof contemporary statistics based on quantitative data. Once the data
and the associated history of knowledge have been acquired, it is thenpossible to make an international comparison.
Presenting her planned research project—a collective biographythat will primarily focus on women—Jenny Pleinen (FernUniversität in Hagen), too, argued that the state is an important actor, in that
individual knowledge about social inequality can be influenced bystate control. Her idea is to connect individual biographies in clusters
and use serial sources to work out how state decisions have affectedindividuals and in what ways people have adapted their lives to societal structures and changing conditions. She plans to include a broad
range of categories such as gender, wealth, and nationality. Divorcelaw, for example, or joint taxation of married couples are interestingfor certain age groups or from the perspective of women. Pleinen saw
challenges in terms of the acquisition and compilation of data that
could be useful for the project.
In the second panel, the British historian Jon Lawrence (University of Exeter) talked about his work with interviews conducted in
post-war England, which he is re-analysing and historicizing froma source-critical perspective for a study on the meaning of ‘community’ during this period. Using interview transcripts as examples, hedemonstrated the various challenges, such as gaps and omissions intranscripts, and acknowledged that, if available, it is very useful to have130Social Data on Inequality
early researchers’ written recollections or original audio recordings
in addition. This makes it possible to reconstruct the data collection
process more accurately, detect ways in which the researchers influenced the interview, and ask new questions of the social data. One of
the advantages of these interviews over oral history interviews, heargued, is that they have no retrospective ‘filter’ but are contemporary
snapshots of history. When using pre-compiled data, it is still, however, important to take into account the interview setting in each caseand not simply repeat the interpretations and findings of these studies. Researchers need to ask their own questions in order to generate
their own insights.
In the third panel of the workshop, the sociologist Christoph
Weischer (University of Münster) explained to the audience of historians how social inequalities can be captured by a social structure
analysis, and how microdata has been generated within the social
sciences over time. The collection of cross-sectional data that began
in the 1950s was followed by longitudinal studies and trend datafrom the 1980s onwards and process-generated data in the 1990s.
During this period there was also increased interest in qualitative
microdata as a route to understanding social inequalities. Weischer
explained that the ‘praxeological protheory’ of social differentiation
he was presenting involves amalgamating qualitative and quantitative data on the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, and combining
appropriate empirical methods. This provides the basis for a multidimensional understanding of social inequalities that incorporates
economic and legal inequalities alongside fundamental preconditions such as health. This theory, he argued, is not about taking ahistorical snapshot but about tracing observable historical change.
In the final panel, participants presented current research on social
inequality in contemporary history. Helena Schwinghammer’s (Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History) geographical focus was on the
Vogtland region, spanning the border between Bavaria and Saxony,
and its particular position in divided Germany. She explained that
she was examining the history of the lives and labour of female textile
workers in the region, and also looking beyond the end of the GDR at
the impact the historical transition and the transformation in the 1990s
had on the Vogtland’s textile workers and subsequent generations in
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Conference Reports
Saxony and Bavaria. In order to access the experiences of these workers, Schwinghammer scoured the German Socio-Economic Panel’s
repeat survey for suitable cases, then set up oral history interviews inwhich she asked about the structural impacts of deindustrial­ization
on social inequalities in the Vogtland, and its comparative effects
on women across the region. The interviews revealed many cases ofmothers in gainful employment at that time who then found themselves unemployed or forced to retrain. Women were less likely towork in industry, having been increasingly pushed into typicallyfemale professions such as social services or retail. The conditions
worsened for those women, and only improved as their daughtersentered the labour market.
Deindustrialization in Germany was also the theme of the contribution by Jonas Fey (German Institute for Adult Education—Leibniz
Centre for Lifelong Learning)—this time its impact on adult education,and particularly on the Volkshochschulen (adult education centres), thebest known providers of this service, since the 1970s. Fey pointed
out that there has been linear growth in the requirements placed on
employees, and obtaining qualifications is increasingly seen as a core
duty in the working world. Adult education, he argued, has, among
other things, increased labour market mobility and raised incomes,
thereby reducing inequality. At the same time, however, not all people
will take up adult education. In the workshop, Fey ran two mathematical models—difference-in-differences and two-way fixed—in orderto determine the impact of deindustrialization on further education
products. He used a data set published by the European Commission(from the ARDECO database) and statistics provided by adult education centres, emphasizing that the data from the various centres
showed considerable variation, but that the large number of data sets
enabled regional differentiation and quasi-experimental approaches
and could also be of interest to historians.
Jürgen Dinkel’s (LMU Munich) paper was about a classic inequality issue: inheritance and bequests. He focused on the case study ofBaltimore in Maryland, USA, at the turn of the twentieth century. Setting out the history of knowledge on the production of social data at
a local level, he scrutinized statistics, regularly published nationwide,
on inheritance inequality in the USA. Dinkel’s research revealed blind132

Social Data on Inequality
spots in regional data, and he identified the following reasons for this:most inheritances had been recorded, but women and people of colour
rarely registered their estates and are therefore underrepresented incontemporary statistics. Dinkel also observed that although the data
has been repeatedly used by researchers, many studies do not take into
account that in 1900 inheritances were only recorded in affluent areasof the city. Aware of these gaps, Dinkel assumed a considerably higher
level of inheritance inequality. He argued that in practice, courts foundit difficult to record all the information. This led to numerous errors,
the consequences of which were often much more significant in bigger
data sets. Dinkel’s paper once again illustrated the importance of thehistory of knowledge in the use of historically collected data.
The final workshop paper showed how much qualitative dataand interviews can potentially contribute to research into ideas ofinequality. Till Hilmar (University of Vienna) conducted interviews
with carers and engineers from the former GDR and Czechoslovakia,
selecting people who were in their early twenties in 1989. In his ana­
lysis of the interviews, Hilmar identified patterns in the way people
talked about inequality and their own experiences of it. He was able
to compare how they evaluated these in the context of the societal
transformation process over the decades. The interviewees picked out
the years 1989 and 1990 as the beginning of long-term inequalities.
They talked about their own economic agency in this period, and how
they dealt with the ruptures that ensued from the Wende. Through theinterviews, Hilmar showed that statements about unemployment andother experiences of inequality tended to be framed through individu­
alized rather than structural interpretative paradigms, especially by
the engineers. The individual respondents, however, thought it was
important for their experiences to be comparable with those of others,
and for the transformations to be analysed in similar ways.
Finally, Kerstin Brückweh (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space) and Pascal Siegers (GESIS—Leibniz Institute for theSocial Sciences) summarized the two days of the workshop and theirimpressions of the talks and discussions, emphasizing that there arestill many differences between historians and sociologists when it
comes to talking about methods and data. Researchers of contemporary history must consider how qualitative social research can be133Conference Reports
implemented and whether it would be useful to develop a methodological canon and a catalogue of best practices for the subject so as tobe able to explore with sociologists contexts in which both sides could
work effectively with one another. They noted that it had become
clear how important it is to know about data generation and how it isproduced, and it was also striking that, thus far, historians have generally worked either with qualitative or with quantitative data sets.
In future, it is worth asking how these two kinds of data can be combined effectively and employed in the study of contemporary history.

Pia Kleine (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space)134

NOTICEBOARD
Scholarships Awarded by the German Historical Institute London
Each year the GHIL awards a number of research grants to German
postgraduate and postdoctoral scholars to enable them to undertake
research in the UK. Scholarships are generally awarded for a period of
up to six months, depending on the requirements of the research pro­
ject. Scholarships are advertised at [https://www.hsozkult.de] and on
the GHIL website. Applications should include a curriculum vitae,
educational background, list of publications (if any), and an outlineof the project, together with a reference from a supervisor confirming
the relevance of the proposed archival research. Applications should
be sent to stipendium@ghil.ac.uk. Please note that as a result of the
UK leaving the EU, new rules apply to research visits. Please refer tothe scholarship guidelines for further information. If you have any
questions, please contact stipendium@ghil.ac.uk. German scholars
present their projects and initial research findings at the GHIL Colloquium during their stay in the UK.
In the first round of allocations for 2024 the following scholarships
were awarded:
Almuth Ebke (University of Mannheim): Das Andere der Moderne:
Historisch-kritische Bibelforschung, Geschichtsdenken und das Konzept der Moderne, ca. 1830–1920
Lucas Haasis (University of Oldenburg): Das Bremer Schiff Concordia:
Eine globale Mikrogeschichte
Charlotte Hoes (University of Göttingen): Gefesselte Wildnis: Zur Zirkulation von Tieren im 20. Jahrhundert
Martin Meiske (Deutsches Museum, Munich): Kulturen und Kosten
der Wartung: Der Aufstieg von Kreosot und sein prekäres Erbe
Talha Murat (FU Berlin): Between Empires: Ottoman Egyptian Sufi
Thought at the Turn of the Century (1882–1908)
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Deborah Schlauch (University of Marburg): Exporting Images: Französische Malerei in England zwischen Grand Siècle und Enlightenment

Prize of the German Historical Institute London
The Prize of the German Historical Institute London is awarded annually for an outstanding PhD thesis on• German history (submitted to a British or Irish university),• British history or British colonial history (submitted to a
German university), or• British–German relations or British–German comparative history (submitted to a British, Irish, or German university).
The prize is 1,000 euros and will be presented on the occasion of the
GHIL’s Annual Lecture on 25 October 2024.
To be eligible, applicants must have successfully completed doctoral exams and vivas between 1 August 2023 and 31 July 2024.
Application Details
To apply, send one copy of the thesis with:• a one-page abstract,• examiners’ reports on the thesis,• a brief CV,• a declaration that the work will not be published before thejudges have reached a final decision, and• a supervisor’s reference
to reach the Director of the German Historical Institute London, 17
Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ, by 31 July 2024. Applications and theses should be sent by email as a PDF attachment to:
prize@ghil.ac.uk.
If the prize-winning thesis is on British history, British colonial
history, British–German relations, or British–German comparative
history, it may also be considered for inclusion in one of the GHIL’s
publication series.

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Summer School 2024
The British Empire and the History of Capitalism. Twenty-first Summer
School in British History and the History of the British Empire, LMU
Munich, 3–6 September 2024.
Capitalism, broadly understood as an economic and social ordercharacterized by profit-seeking and market exchange, has become
constitutive of modern societies. The expansion of trade between
Europe and Asia since early modern times has facilitated a boom incapitalist enterprise not only in North-Western Europe, but also inlarge parts of the world that became linked to the global economy.
The coercive, exploitative practices of colonialism and the expansionist forces of imperialism undergirded this global growth of capitalism.
The history of capitalism and capitalist expansion on the back ofEuropean imperialism has long drawn the interest of historians. For
example, the colonial capitalism of the cash crop plantations in theAmericas and the parallel growth of the transatlantic slave trade havebeen much debated for their impact both on the rise of industrial
capitalism in the nineteenth century and on the current shape of theworld. The emergence of world markets under the auspices of industrialization and imperialism went hand in hand with a transformationof economic structures and global labour relations. The British Empire
stood at the centre of these fundamental shifts in the world economicorder. Global capitalism on the back of empire catapulted Britain into
becoming a global economic power, arguably at the cost of its col­onies, such as South Asia.
This summer school will engage with the history of capitalism in
the British Empire, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our tutors, Maxine Berg (University of Warwick), Karolina
Hutkova (LSE), and Tirthankar Roy (LSE), will discuss key questions
regarding the development of capitalism in the British transatlantic
economy as well as in the relations between Britain and South Asia,
stressing the circulation of resources (cap­ital, knowledge, people,
and/or materials) and the economic, social, and political conditions
behind and resulting from those developments. Finally, the course
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has shaped, and continues to shape, modern Britain and its former
colonies. The summer school is part of the on­going collaboration
between the German Historical Institute London and LMU Munich.
The course convenors are Alexander Engel (LMU Munich) and Indra
Sengupta (GHIL).
The course is aimed at advanced BA or MA students of history orother related subjects at all German universities.

Forthcoming Workshops and Conferences
Afterlives of Empire: How Imperial Legacies Shaped European Integration.
Conference organized by the German Historical Institute London in
conjunction with the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, to be held at the GHIL, 12–14
June 2024. Conveners: Alexander Nützenadel and Heike Wieters(Humboldt Universität zu Berlin).
Recent historical research has turned our attention to the importanceof imperial and colonial legacies for the process of European Integration. Most studies, however, have focused on the founding phase of
the EEC, while the long-term legacies of empires have rarely been
considered. Moreover, historians have overlooked the fact that the
EU’s expansion over the years brought new member states with different imperial traditions into the EU, including the United Kingdom(1973), Spain and Portugal (1986), and the Eastern European countries
after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Hence, the history of the EEC/EU
is closely intertwined with the dissolution of empires, not only in the
beginning, but also in later phases and more recent times.
This conference aims to explore the afterlives of empires from aninterdisciplinary and comparative perspective. It will bring together
scholars from history, the social sciences, economics, and regional
studies to start a dialogue about the historical impact of past empireson the process of European Integration.
The concept of ‘legacies’ is used in a broad sense. First, we will lookat the persistence of economic structures, social elites, migration networks, forms of knowledge, and bureaucratic practices which often
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survived the formal termination of empires and continued to exert
a strong influence on post-imperial orders. Second, we will explore
conflicts that resulted from EU membership, which was often seen as
an alternative to past imperial orders and belongings. Third, we will
analyse how the EEC/EU developed strategies to compensate newmember states for the loss of their imperial structures, for example bygranting former colonies favourable trade conditions or establishingcredit schemes benefiting underdeveloped regions at the European
periphery. Fourth, we are interested in how collective memories of
empire were reactivated and used in political debates, often decades
after their formal dissolution; not least, narratives of empire haveunderpinned rising Euroscepticism during the past decades. Fifth,
we will reconstruct debates about how the EEC/EU itself developed
structures that resemble those of older empires.

Cultures of Compromise and Liberal Democracy after World War II. Conference organized by the German Historical Institute London in
conjunction with the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, to be held at the GHIL, 4–6
July 2024. Convener: Constantin Goschler (Ruhr University Bochum).
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the idea that democracy
and Europe belonged together took hold. Yet for some time now, thisliberal utopia has been challenged—if not replaced—by a dystopian
vision of the future of liberal democracy. Increasing political polar­
ization in many Western societies, particularly in Europe, has fuelledfears that liberal democracy is dysfunctional and that authoritarianalternatives are becoming more attractive. A recurring argument inthis debate is that growing social and political polarization is undermining the capacity for compromise, thereby threatening a key
condition for the functioning of liberal democracies in Europe andelsewhere.
Proceeding from these observations, the conference will discuss
cultures of compromise and their significance for liberal democracies
after 1945. The normative premise that liberal democracy is tied tofunctioning compromises will be examined through a historicizing
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perspective. Using an international comparative framework, the conference will discuss the causes and reasons for the varying functions
and the relevance of compromise as a model of political and social
conflict resolution. The aim is to analyse compromise in the tension
between the political and the private. To this end, we will ask how
compromise has been institutionalized, how it has been reflected indiscourses, and what practices it has been associated with. At thesame time, we will demonstrate how liberal democratic institutions
are embedded in social and private norms and practices.

Ageing, Experience and Difference: The Social History of Old Age in Europe
since 1900. Conference to be held at the German Historical InstituteLondon, 12–14 September 2024. Conveners: Christina von Hodenberg(GHIL) and Helen McCarthy (University of Cambridge).
To date, the social history of ageing and old people has received comparatively little attention from historians. Recent works have begun
to explore the topic from multiple perspectives, building on oral
history, archival materials, media sources, and quantitative and quali­
tative data produced by twentieth-century social science. From thisscholarship it emerges that ageing was a dynamic process across theperiod and the aged themselves were a highly differentiated group.
Gender, class, racial background, and marital status, among otherintersectional categories, produced marked differences in the social
experience of old people. This conference aims to bring together
scholars working on ageing and old age in twentieth-­century Europe,
including Europe’s colonial and global entanglements. While en­gaging closely with the more established historiography on pension
reform, welfare, and ideas of ageing, we seek to centre the changing
experience of ageing and the life worlds of old people in different
European contexts.
Papers will cover Germany, the UK, Ireland, Soviet and post-­
Soviet countries, France, and colonial India. Five panels will address
topics such as age and work/retirement; the agency of older people inthe mass media; health and the older body; old women and feminism;and the ‘family life’ of older people.
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Public Lectures
Local Modernity: Agency, Entanglement, and the Making of the Modern
Middle East. The fifth Thyssen Lecture, to be given by Professor
Gudrun Krämer (Freie Universität Berlin) on 21 October 2024 at the
GHIL and on 22 October 2024 at the University of Nottingham.

Please consult our website [https://www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures]for the regular GHIL Lecture Series, which takes place in three seriesof five lectures per year.

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To consult the GHIL Library catalogue, visit:https://library.ghil.ac.uk
Links to recent acquisitions of print and e-books can be found on the
top left of the page, under the heading ‘The GHIL and its library’For an up-to-date list of the GHIL’s publications, see our website:
https://www.ghil.ac.uk/publications