Germanophobia
Germanophobia (also German hatred or German (en) hostility ) is an attitude that Germans , and sometimes Germany itself, rejects with their culture , language and ascribed "characteristics". During imperialist disputes and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries, this was a widespread phenomenon in other countries, especially in those waging wars with Germany. Germanophilia is the opposite of this.
history
19th century
From the second half of the 19th century, hostility towards Germans was a recurring phenomenon in the form of discrimination against ethnic Germans or people of German origin in connection with imperialist disputes in Europe. In the United States of America , with the increasing immigration of Germans and Irish around the middle of the century, the nativist movement emerged and later the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party , which saw Anglo-Saxon culture threatened by the predominantly Catholic migrants from these countries. This also applied to the temperamentalists who were related to the nativists , since many German immigrants were innkeepers (the later prohibition in the United States was also partly motivated by Germanophobia). In the 1850s, the influence of the nativists within the Republican Party made it difficult for the Forty-Eighters , who were competing with them, to win voters of German origin, until Abraham Lincoln , who was regarded as pro-German , was put up as a Republican presidential candidate in 1860. In the 1860s, the journalist Mikhail Katkow published an anti-German article in the Moscow News , which sparked a wave of anti- German publications in large parts of Russia . The occasion was a German-Russian conflict of interest with regard to Poland , which was then divided between the two states , and the position of German-born and German-Baltic elites.
The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led from 1871 to critical press articles in the United Kingdom and to the emergence of invasion literature , a forerunner of military science fiction . An example of this is the novel The Battle of Dorking by George Tomkyns Chesney , which depicts an invasion of Great Britain through a German-speaking country that is vaguely referred to as "The Enemy".
First World War
Anti-German attitudes reached a preliminary climax during the First World War in the states of the Entente and their allies. After Germany declared unlimited submarine warfare, in which numerous American civilians were killed, anti-German hysteria arose. German-Americans were attacked and were forced to assimilate. In the United Kingdom, the British royal family of German descent (until 1917 Saxe-Coburg and Gotha , English: Saxe-Coburg and Gotha ) was forced to rename it Windsor .
Period of National Socialism and World War II
The greatest spread of anti-German attitudes took place during the Second World War and the Holocaust, for which the Third Reich was responsible . This was expressed after the war. a. during the expulsion of Germans from the former eastern territories of the German Reich .
During the war and in the immediate aftermath of the Western Allies, the ideas of Vansittartism were in circulation. According to this Germanophobic explanatory model of German history, National Socialism was the result of centuries-old political and cultural mistakes in the same. According to the historian Wolfgang Wippermann, the historical importance of Vansittartism should not be underestimated, because "as problematic as this [...] interpretation of German history was from a historical point of view, it was so important from a political point of view", because numerous representatives of the Western Allies believed that they were collectively guilty of the Germans went out. American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, tended to view Adolf Hitler as the typical German ( Winston Churchill , like Josef Stalin and unlike many of his compatriots, however, did not share this view ). During the war, the Vansittartist views within sections of the resistance against National Socialism , such as the Kreisau Circle and the conspirators around the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , created anti-Western sentiments against capitalism and materialism , which, according to Axel von dem Bussche , also contributed to Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg is said to have been the case. Vansittartist views also influenced denazification and re- education . The historian Ian Kershaw speaks of "crude interpretation [s]" "by Anglo-American authors". With the beginning of the Cold War , however, Vansittartism lost its importance.
Post-war period and EU
In her essay on the cultural-political relations between Germany and Italy after 1945, Andrea Hindrichs (2002) deals with “anti-German films” that were produced by Italian directors with predominantly left-wing socialist to communist inclinations until the 1960s. Hintrichs judges that while Germans were collectively “stamped as Nazis” in the films, in return all Italians in the films appeared in consistently positive roles. The "anti-German [n] films" had put a strain on German-Italian relations, but from 1964 onwards, Italian politics had increasingly intervened against anti-German tendencies - in particular due to the decline in German tourist traffic.
In his study of German-Turkish media relations from 1999 to 2009, the German-Turkish Germanist Seref Ates (2011) judged the Turkish newspaper Hüriyyet to have represented “nationalist and anti-German tones” for a certain period of time.
In the course of the debt crisis in the euro area and the imposed austerity policy , a return of old, anti-German stereotypes in newspapers was observed , especially in Greece . For example, montages of pictures of Angela Merkel in National Socialist uniform were printed. There were similar publications in the Italian and Turkish media.
The Law and Justice party (in power in Poland since 2015 ) and its chairman Jarosław Kaczyński are perceived as anti- German.
There is also hostility towards Germans in the - at least mostly - German-speaking countries of Austria and Switzerland . For Switzerland this is shown in German in Switzerland . The relationship between Austrians and Germans is thematized in the film The Piefke Saga - on the one hand you want income from tourism, on the other hand the German guests are not always welcome.
The BKA used the subcategory "German Hostile" as part of the topic "hate crime" to capture since the beginning of 2019 politically motivated crime .
See also
literature
- Arno Münster: Fear of Germany: causes and backgrounds of the new Germanophobia. What future for Europe? Königshausen u. Neumann, Würzburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-8260-6297-1 .
- Don Heinrich Tolzmann, Arthur D Jacobs: Germanophobia in the US: The Anti-German Hysteria and Sentiment of the World Wars (= German-Americans in the World Wars, Volume V ). De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-11-181960-0 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ See in particular on “Prejudices on the inter-ethnic level” Susanne Janssen, Vom Zarenreich in den American Westen: Germans in Russia and Russian Germans in the USA (1871–1928) (= studies on the history, politics and society of North America; vol . 3). Lit Verlag, Münster 1997, ISBN 3-8258-3292-9 , p. 243 .
- ↑ Michael C. LeMay (Ed.): Transforming America: Perspectives on US Immigration (= The Making of a Nation of Nations: The Founding to 1865 , Vol. 1). Praeger, Santa Barbara 2013, ISBN 978-0-313-39643-4 , pp. 226-228 .
- ^ Sabine Friday : Friedrich Hecker . Biography of a Republican, Transatlantic Historical Studies Vol. 10, Stuttgart 1998, pp. 191–192.
- ^ Daniel Nagel, From Republican Germans to German-American Republicans. A contribution to the identity change of the German forty-eight in the United States 1850–1861, Mannheimer Historische Forschungen Vol. 33, St. Ingbert 2012, p. 517.
- ^ Sabine Friday: Friedrich Hecker. Biography of a Republican, Transatlantic Historical Studies Vol. 10, Stuttgart 1998, p. 196.
- ↑ Jürgen Müller: Review of: German-Americans in the First World War . In: sehepunkte , Edition 8 (2008), No. 3, March 15, 2008, accessed on October 27, 2019.
- ↑ British Royalty: Why the Windsors are actually German. March 7, 2011, accessed October 27, 2019 .
- ^ Eva Rommerskirchen: Germans and Poles 1945–1995. Approaches - Zbliżenia. Book accompanying the exhibition in the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany , Bonn, March 7 to May 5, 1996 , Droste, Düsseldorf 1996, ISBN 3-7700-1057-4 , p. 70.
- ↑ Wolfgang Wippermann: Controversial past. Facts and controversies about National Socialism, Berlin 1998, pp. 14–15.
- ↑ Richard Overy : The Roots of Victory. Why the Allies won World War II, Munich 2000, pp. 368–369.
- ↑ Dieter Ehlers: Technology and morals of a conspiracy. July 20, 1944, Frankfurt am Main 1964, pp. 149-150.
- ^ Ian Kershaw: The Nazi State. An overview of historical interpretations and controversies, Reinbek 1994, p. 23.
- ↑ In: Bernd Roeck et al. (Ed.): German cultural policy in Italy. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-484-67014-2 , pp. 51–86, here pp. 66 ff.
- ^ Seref Ates: German-Turkish media relations (1999–2009). Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4522-6 , p. 62 and 115.
- ^ Bernard-Henri Lévy: Germanophobia in Europe: Why I defend Angela Merkel . In: Spiegel Online . April 2, 2015 ( spiegel.de [accessed October 27, 2019]).
- ^ Europe's Bogeyman 'There Is No Doubt Germanophobia Exists' , Spiegel Online, April 11, 2013
- ↑ Italian newspaper shows Merkel with a Hitler beard. In: Welt Online . August 8, 2011, accessed October 30, 2019 .
- ↑ Turkish insult: Angela Merkel with Hitler mustache. In: Luxemburger Wort . March 17, 2017, accessed October 30, 2019 .
- ↑ Trzecia wojna z Niemcami. Antyniemieckie kalendarium PiS , Gazeta Wyborcza.
- ^ Official denigration , Süddeutsche Zeitung.
- ↑ Federal Criminal Police Office: Politically motivated crime in 2019. Nationwide case numbers , May 12, 2020, p. 6.