Englanders and Huns: How Five Decades of Enmity LED to the First World War: The Culture-Clash which Led to the First World War - Hardcover

James Hawes

3.86

59 ratings by Goodreads

9780857205285: Englanders and Huns: How Five Decades of Enmity LED to the First World War: The Culture-Clash which Led to the First World War

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857205285 ISBN 13: 9780857205285

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK, 2014

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A completely fresh look at the enmity between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe.

Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts.

But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohltwhile playing Das Lawn Tennisas the dupe of a global conspiracy?

Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victoria's cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germany's ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors' disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.

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Product Description:

Britain and Germany were once natural allies, with closely related royal families. Where did it all go wrong? Received wisdom says with the accession of Wilhelm II in 1888. In fact, as this provocative history demonstrates, the hostility went back a full half century before 1914, to the 1864 German-Danish war. And when economic collapse hit the victorious Reich in 1873, the catastrophe seemed so inexplicable that it could only be blamed on the perfidious English policy of free trade.

Review:

'...his demolition job is performed with wit and finesses, and his book is full of enlightening surprises' --Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Times

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