This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Reading these two excellent books, I could not help being distracted by the news from Germany. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had broken through the “firewall” of ostracism erected by the older parties, garnering almost half of all votes cast. German nationalism, eyeing a pact with Russia, is stirring again.
In front of me, two old maps are spread out across the coffee table. One, dated 1921, shows the German-speakers of Mitteleuropa. More than 15 million of them, claims the legend, have been “denied their right of self-determination” by being cut off from the German Reich.
The cartographer is a certain Dr Winkler of Vienna — by sheer coincidence, the namesake of the sinister doctor in The Third Man — but the map has been produced by a military institute. The other map, undated, shows the city of Dresden before its destruction in the firestorm unleashed by Allied bombers.
These relics evoke Anglo-German family connections. Both maps belonged to my grandfather, a distinguished gastroenterologist who was involved in medical research in pre-war Germany and Austria. He helped at least one Jewish physician to escape from Vienna after the Anschluss.
My wife’s uncle, who died this year aged 102, flew many sorties in Lancaster bombers as a wireless operator over Germany, including Dresden. After the war, having emigrated to become a professor in California, he never spoke about his wartime role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Finally, our eldest son, his wife and their Anglo-Polish family live in Wrocław, the pre-war Breslau, capital of the Polish region of Silesia. On the 1921 map, Silesia is shown as a German-speaking province of the Reich, but when a plebiscite was held, 40 per cent of the population voted to join Poland.
After three armed uprisings, the industrial regions of Lower Silesia were given to the new Polish state. This was part of the background to the unspeakable Nazi atrocities in Poland and the expulsion of the Germans after the war. Poland was moved west by Stalin’s brutal deportations and annexations, whilst Germany lost all of its territories east of the Oder-Neisse line.
Silesia is no longer disputed territory, but the rise of nationalism in Germany has aroused anxiety in Warsaw. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, described the AfD’s nationalist allies in Poland as “idiots or traitors”, whilst Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister, observed: “We remember all too well where a rearmed Germany in the hands of a far-right, pro-Russian party can lead — and that is exactly what the AfD represents.”
What used to be called “the German question” has been reopened. Meanwhile Europe’s biggest war since 1945, provoked by Putin’s attempted annihilation of Ukraine, rages a few hundred miles further east. The new German question matters for everyone and not only for those of us with grandchildren growing up in Silesia — annexed by Frederick the Great in 1742 but Polish again since 1945. What happens in Germany has had a profound impact on Britain for the past 1,500 years.
Jan Rüger (Allen Lane, £40)
Hence Jan Rüger’s ambitious history of the Anglo-German love-hate relationship is not only timely but essential reading. He might have begun with Luther’s Reformation, which made England’s rupture with Rome possible, or with the Investiture Conflict (“Europe’s first revolution”, as Karl Leyser called it), which led to the murder of Becket and thence to Magna Carta.
Instead, Rüger begins with the Hanoverians, which is as good a place to start as any. I learned a lot from his richly documented account of the fluctuating attitudes on both sides. In the foreground is a volatile brew of mutual admiration and resentment, but in the background an extraordinary degree of economic and social interdependence persists.
As an ally against France, Frederick the Great was the toast of London, until Pitt the Elder cut off his subsidies. Old Fritz’s compatriots never quite forgave “perfidious Albion”, although at Waterloo Anglo-German armies defeated Napoleon I. Indeed, the British did not side with the liberal revolutionaries in 1848, but instead allowed Bismarck to defeat Napoleon III and to unify Germany under Prussian tutelage in 1871.
Disraeli denounced “the German Revolution” for destroying the European balance of power, but he too had been in favour of non-intervention and went on to cultivate Bismarck. Rüger argues that the “Anglo-German antagonism” of the early 20th century is a myth: world wars were anything but inevitable.
Liberal Germans saw the British as role models, but conservatives and socialists recoiled against their commercialism and capitalism. In 1828 the young Heine (who had been named “Harry” by his Anglophile father) denounced England after a brief sojourn as “a whirring, whizzing, halting, stamping and growling machine-like being”. On his deathbed in 1855, he confessed to his friend, the writer Mrs Duff-Gordon: “My God, I don’t know what I had against the English, what it was that made me so malicious towards them.”
Part of the answer, for two centuries at least, is that Britain was richer than Germany. This fed a sense of grievance. Despite the success of German industry and culture, both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler felt patronised by their British counterparts. Only in the 1950s did the new Federal Republic (unfettered by statist and protectionist ideas) overtake the UK in GDP.
The Germans did well out of the European project, the British less well, but Brexit has made little difference to their relative prosperity. Indeed, thanks to wider property ownership, the average Brit is still wealthier than the average German.
Rüger’s title is ironic: he rejects the whole historiographical tradition based on the rivalries of “great powers” and the “rise and fall” of nations or civilisations. Instead, he posits an enduring symbiosis between Britain and Germany. It flourished before 1914, could still be discerned in the Weimar Republic and even resurfaced in the rubble of 1945, when occupying British troops defied Montgomery’s ban on “fraternisation with the enemy”. For a few decades, guilt eclipsed grievance in Germany, whilst anti-German feeling lingered on in Britain as a kind of inferiority complex.
Rightly, Rüger’s account dwells on the Jewish diaspora from Nazi Germany. He reminds us that refugees weren’t always accepted as permanent fixtures. After the news of Hiroshima broke, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, asked two stateless émigré friends, Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn: “Presumably you will return to your country now?”
Nor did emigration from Germany end with the Nazis: Uwe Johnson and W.G. Sebald were amongst a new wave of (non-Jewish) German writers to settle in England. After Brexit, the emigration went into reverse. Now the return of anti-Semitism in both countries is creating a new phenomenon of exile.
Like most Germans, Rüger sees Brexit as an unmitigated disaster, Britain’s “bonfire of the vanities”. Yet it is increasingly evident that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has precipitated a crisis in Germany at least as profound and polarising as that which has gripped Britain since 2016. Just as the postwar German economic model and political system are imploding, so is the Atlantic alliance on which European security depends.
It is the response to this predicament that Liana Fix addresses in her book, Germany Rearmed. The rearmament that is now under way is intended to reassure NATO allies that the Germans are ready to take over a large share of responsibility for European security, with Ukraine as the first line of defence.
Fix delves deeply into how the German elites were forced to confront their own evasions, but also the consequences for their neighbours. Now that Russian drones are menacing not only Ukrainian cities, but German airports too, the “myth of pacifism”, as she calls it, has become untenable.
Yet not everyone is thrilled by the spectacle of a remilitarised Germany. The Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens may have accepted the need to rearm, but the far right and the far left now pose as the peace parties. Liberal conservatives such as Friedrich Merz must unmask the AfD as phoney patriots, Putin appeasers and closet irredentists — no easy task.
Fix’s brilliant analysis is clear-eyed about the threats to Germany, both internal and external. By “the end of illusions” she means not just facing up to Russia, but also to the possibility that “the West” as we have understood it may no longer exist.
But the story of Britain and Germany, as narrated by Rüger, suggests there will still be common ground on which to defend Western values, long after Putin and his American or European collaborators have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
To the German question, there can be only one answer. It is the answer given by Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic’s first chancellor, in 1949: “For us, there is no doubt that we belong to the western European world through heritage and temperament.”