Everything about Germanophobia totally explained
» Anti-German sentiment shouldn't be confused with Anti-Germans (communist current), also called Anti-German.
Anti-German sentiment (or
Germanophobia) refers to the view of the
German people or of
Germany with suspicion or hostility.
World War I
During World War I many of Germany's opponents produced propaganda attempting to dehumanize Germans; they were often depicted as
Huns capable of infinite cruelty and violence.
In the United Kingdom anti-German feeling at times led to rioting, assaults on suspected Germans and the looting of stores owned by people with German-sounding names, occasionally even taking on an anti-Semitic tone. Whether British attitudes to Germany were entirely negative can, however, be debated. The British writer and author
Nicholas Shakespeare quotes this statement from a letter written by his grandfather during the First World War:
Personally, my opinion is that our fellows get on much best [sic] with the Germans, and would very much rather be fighting the French!
.
The soldier praised the Germans for their discipline and bravery:
It was a fine sight to see the Germans coming on in solid formation, in front of our machine guns....they were generally led by one officer in front who came along to certain death as cool as a cucumber, with his sword held straight up in front of him at the salute. |
When
Australia and
Canada entered the war in 1914, followed by the
United States in 1917, some German immigrants, and sometimes even non-German immigrants who were perceived as German (Dutch, Scandinavian, Swiss), were looked upon with suspicion and attacked regarding their loyalty. Some German immigrants in America were even tried, convicted and imprisoned, on charges of sedition, merely for refusing to swear allegiance to the American war effort. Anti-German tension culminated on
April 4,
1918, in the brutal
lynching of German immigrant
Robert Prager, a coal miner living in
Collinsville, Illinois. Anti-German sentiment may have been stoked by the
1916 bombing of Black Tom island, which had been directed and financed by German intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. In the United States, between 1917-18 German-American schools and newspapers by the thousands were forced to permanently close. In cities and towns across the nation, libraries burned their German-language books in public burnings. The officials of German-named towns that had been founded by German-Americans were intimidated by county, state, and federal government officials into anglicizing their names, and into destroying all traces of their German heritage. In cities across Americam, German-sounding street names were banned. The vast majority of
German-Americans, however, were loyal to their adopted country and thousands of them served in the
United States military.
In England, anti-German sentiment was so severe that the royal family changed its name from
House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to
House of Windsor,
Battenberg became
Mountbatten and the
German Shepherd was given the euphemistic name "Alsatian." In New Orleans, Berlin St. was renamed for General Pershing (head of the Allied Expeditionary Force), and
sauerkraut came to be called (by some) Liberty Cabbage. In Canada,
the Ontario city of Berlin changed its name to become
Kitchener, after the
British military hero pictured on the famous "I want YOU!" recruiting poster. The
English Kennel Club only re-authorised the term 'German Shepherd' to be used as an official name in
1977.
Anti-German sentiment due to World War II
Much current anti-German sentiment is related to
World War II. Anti-German sentiment was particularly strong in East European countries occupied by Germany and those which were at war with Germany and its allies during WWII. As a result of the devastating consequences of the war, anti-German sentiment was widespread and strong after WWII. American General
George S. Patton complained that the U.S. policy of
denazification following Germany's surrender harmed American interests and was motivated simply by hatred of the defeated German people. Anti-German sentiment was very high among the
Red Army that German soldiers and POWs had higher chance of being killed on sight during and after surrender that some of the German army preferred to surrender to the English and Americans on the
Western Front as opposed to the Russians. Dehumanization of German soldiers was very prelevant during World War II among Allies so that the common view was they ought to be fought against without mercy. Anti-German sentiments were very high among European countries that suffered German attacks and bombings such as England, Russia and Poland among others and continues to persist at relatively lesser levels today. The prime examples are the
invasion of Poland and the
bombing of London.
Controversial attitude of US high command just after the war has also been pointed out:
Eisenhower and German POWs.
During WWII, the US Government interned, among others, at least 11,000 American citizens of German ancestry. The last person, a German American, remained imprisoned until 1948 at Ellis Island, three and a half years after cessation of hostilities with Germany.
Although views fluctuate somewhat in response to geopolitical issues (such as the invasion of Iraq), Americans regard modern Germany as an ally and few hold anti-German sentiments. Occasionally, German people are stereotyped as Nazis (goose-stepping, shouting "Sieg Heil!", and sporting a "Hitler moustache") in some parts of American media, as well as in the UK and other countries. In Poland and some other East European countries wartime memories still revive tensions.
Richard Wagner's music wasn't performed in
Israel until 1995 (radio) and 2001 (concert) and was for many years unpopular in Poland.
In Israel
Up to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Many European Jews tended to be pro-German. German Jews were deeply integrated in the country's culture, and many of them fought with distinction in the ranks of the
WWI German Army. Jews in the
Czech lands tended to adopt the German language and culture in preference to the Czech ones (
Kafka is a conspicuous example), and similar phenomena were evident in other parts of the former
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Throughout Eastern Europe, Jews spoke
Yiddish, a language closely related to German, and Jewish intellectuals often took up German as "The Language of Culture".
Theodore Herzl, the founding father of
Zionism, himself spoke and wrote German and in his utopian book
Altneuland actually depicted the future Jewish state as German-speaking.
Such attitudes suffered an extremely painful rupture and complete reversal with the Nazi persecutions and atrocities, culminating with the systematic genocide of the
Holocaust. In the first decades of Israel's existence, anti-German feelings were strong and dominant in Israeli society. There was a widespread cultural and commercial boycott of all things German (and often, Austrian as well) and a determaination "never to set foot on German soil". German Jews in Israel, themselves refugees from the Nazi persecutions, came under strong social pressure to cease using German - their mother tongue.
At the time, the words "German" and "Nazi" were used interchangeably. (Until the late 1990s the
Sign Language of Israeli
deaf communities used the
Swastika as the sign for "German".) There was a widespread scepticism about the possibility of "Another Germany" ever emerging, and specifically a suspicion of
Konrad Adenauer's claim to be involved in the creation of a new, democratic Germany. Many Israelis took up the Soviet claims, made in the early years of the Cold War, that
West Germany was "A Fascist State" in which ex-Nazis held key positions; however, Israelis also tended to regard Communist
East Germany as being "just as bad".
The Reparations Agreement with Germany, signed by the
Ben Gurion Government in 1952, was the focus of intensive political controversy, and the protest demonstrations led by then opposition leader
Menachem Begin turned into pitched battles with the police. In the early 1960s, the
Eichmann Trial brought the horrors and traumas of the Holocaust back to the center of public consciousness. The establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and West Germany in 1966 entailed a new wave of protests and demonstrations, though less violent than those of 1952.
However, since the late 1960s, there was a clear though gradual process of rapprochement between Israelis and Germans in all spheres: diplomatic, commercial and cultural. Most Israelis came to accept that Germany had indeed broken with its Nazi past and that democracy has become rooted in German society - though many of them expressed a preference for dealing with younger Germans who were born or grew up after 1945 and a repugnance for meeting those who were adults during WWII (except if they'd a proven anti-Nazi record).
The 1967
Six Day War realigned Israeli politics, with the issue of Occupied Territories henceforth defining what is "Right Wing" and "Left Wing" - with, among other things, the result that militant Israeli nationalism tended to be anti-Arab rather than anti-German. When Begin became Israel's Prime Minister in
1977, he'd little option but to take up the maintenance of already very extensive ties with Germany, to whose creation he'd been fiercely opposed as an opposition leader.
A momentary flare-up of anti-German feeling came up during the 1991 Gulf War, when Israel was the subject of missile attack by
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Some Israeli columnists and politicians demagogically combined the revelations of German corporations helping the Iraqi arms industry and the strong anti-war movement in Germany (though these two phenomena actually issued from completely different, and indeed mutually antagonistic, parts of German society) and tied both with the German Nazi past.
The German Government of the time managed, however, to assuage Israeli feelings by providing the Israeli Navy with several advanced
submarines, which - according to repeated reports in the international press - were used to mount nuclear missiles and provide Israel with a
Second strike capacity.
At present, anti-German feelings in Israel are at low ebb. The ongoing debate about whether or not the
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra should play the works of
Richard Wagner is mostly considered as a remnant of the past. In 2008, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel was the first foreign head of government invited to deliver a speech in the Israeli parliament.
European continental relations regarding contemporary Europe
After the separation into two countries following World War II,
West Germany generally had good relationships with its western neighboring states, as did
East Germany with its eastern neighbors. Many of these relationships continued after the end of the
Cold War with the unified Germany. West Germany was a co-founder of the
European Union and the reunified Germany continues as a leading member. During the process of European unification, Germany and
France forged a strong relationship, ending the long-standing
French-German enmity which had peaked during and after the First World War.
Anti-German sentiment has endured in some countries, particularly
Poland. Anti-Germanism is heavily rooted in Polish popularized perceptions of its western neighbors, dating back to the
Teutonic Order. Tensions had only increased with the rise of nationalism and events such as the
three partitions of Poland,
germanization in the 19th and 20th centuries, and unfortunate pre-World War II situations. Germany's
invasion of Poland in 1939, controversies such as
Bloody Sunday and the Polish experience until 1945 have only contributed to sentiments, as has bitterness over
finalized borders. Germano-Polish relations have also been damaged more recently: the Poles are suspicious of the campaign by Germans expelled by Poland following the Second World War to seek reparation for their lost property and to create the
Centre Against Expulsions; in addition, the proposed Russo-German pipeline through the
Baltic Sea, which would undermine Poland's ability to negotiate with Russia over energy supplies, was described as a new
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by members of the Polish government. Against this, German analysts have accused the
Kaczyński twins of stoking up popular anti-German sentiment in order to secure the survival of their government.
(External Link
)
Germans sometimes complain of stereotypical associations of them with acts and a regime of more than sixty years ago, such as the use of anti-German sentiment in headlines by parts of the British press, recent examples arising when German
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became
Pope Benedict XVI.
"British public people, whether journalists or politicians, are more prepared to demonise the Germans than any other people I know are prepared to vilify any other nation I've heard of, with the possible exception of Arabs and Jews."
Hugo Young (
The Guardian)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Germanophobia'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://anti-german_sentiment.totallyexplained.com">Anti-German sentiment Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
