Languages as Hubs of National Imagining within the Arsenal of ‘Total War’: Critically Comparing the Teaching of ‘Enemy’ Language and Culture in Britain and Germany, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945

Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, the concept of the nation has been at the heart of language teaching, with terms such as ‘native’ and ‘target language countries’ presupposing semi-essential boundaries between cultures and naturalizing fixed, bounded notions of national identity.¹ This intrinsic link between language and the nation raises the question of whether language teaching and learning are vulnerable to exploitation by nationalist causes in times of international conflict.

Speaking to this complex intertwining of language teaching and the nation, my Masters by Research investigates the influence of the First and Second World Wars on the teaching of German and English in British and German universities, where two nations taught the language and culture of ‘the enemy’. Past studies have documented the history of German language education in Britain, or the teaching of English language and culture in Germany between 1914 and 1945, with a primary focus on schools; university case studies are limited to academics during war and tend to neglect the curriculum.² However, no studies have so far compared the two countries. My project critically compares teaching materials on ‘enemy culture’ in the First and Second World Wars in British and German contexts, focusing on the University of Leeds and the University of Hamburg. Using extensive teaching materials available in state archives and the two universities’ special collections, I ask to what extent the World Wars had an impact on the teaching of English language and culture at German universities and the teaching of German language and culture at British universities.

The wars transformed German studies at Leeds and English studies at Hamburg, as both disciplines were instrumentalized as weapons on the intellectual front of ‘total war’. Here, I use John Horne’s definition of ‘total war’ as the integration of all aspects of society, including education, into the war effort as a means of securing national victory.³ However, the specific impacts of each conflict were fundamentally different.

The Impact of the First World War

The sudden outbreak of the First World War led to drastic changes in each national context, inducing an existential crisis on both an institutional and intellectual level as British and German scholars alike strove to reimagine the target culture—now belonging to the ‘enemy’—in the wake of a wealth of nineteenth-century scholarship dedicated to stressing British–German affinities as Germanic nations.

Scholars in both countries faced the same problem: how could they justify the existence of their discipline without (1) glorifying the enemy culture and language or (2) contradicting state ideology regarding the enemy? As a result of this intellectual crisis, scholars on both sides of the conflict had to perform what I call ‘imaginative gymnastics’ in order to advocate for the continued existence of their disciplines whilst avoiding accusations of being unpatriotic or, at worst, anti-state. The result was two strategies that became integrated into curricula and pedagogic methods for teaching ‘enemy’ language and culture at each higher education institution: the ‘Two Germanies/Two Englands’⁴ thesis, and ‘othering’.

The ‘Two Germanies’ and ‘Two Englands’ theses were apparent both in exam paper series curated by University of Leeds staff and in the war lectures at Hamburg led by the head of English, Wilhelm Dibelius.⁵ They facilitated the imaginative division of the target culture into two distinct parts—one considered civilized, and the other barbarous. This imaginative process of attributing positive characteristics perceived as ‘enlightened’ and worthy of study to one half of the target culture, and negative characteristics that reinforced the demonization of the ‘enemy’ to the other, resolved the contradiction that 1) the continued teaching of both disciplines was justified and necessary and 2) the continued conflict against the target culture was equally justified and necessary. A key example of this is in the war lectures by the head of English at Hamburg, Wilhelm Dibelius, who divided England into enlightened scholars and power-hungry imperialists: ‘We are not battling the people of Shakespeare, Milton, and Carlyle’; rather, ‘we are battling the small-minded commercialism that, with cold cynicism, records the bodies of thousands of the continent’s finest sons as English national profit’. Exam papers in Leeds likewise imaginatively divided the ‘civilized’ German tradition from the corrupting influence of the warmongering Holy Roman Empire: ‘the imperial pretensions [of the Holy Roman Empire] involved successive German kings in disastrous quarrels with the Papacy’.⁶ The second strategy, othering, was used by scholars on both sides of the conflict to concretize the boundaries of their nations at a time when these borders were blurred by international exchange, and simultaneously to ‘naturalize’ the superiority of the home nation. Examples include the reduction of Englishness by Dibelius to an animalistic Masseninstinkt (mass instinct) compared to the complex and diverse Differenzierung (differentiation) of the German nation.⁷

Whilst both nations used these imaginative strategies as part of their contribution to the intellectual front of ‘total war’, they implemented them in fundamentally different ways. In Germany, othering took place via the racialization of both the target and home culture, using evolutionary metaphors to essentialize the inferiority of the enemy. England was characterized as a simple ‘atom’, whereas Germany was described as a living, far more complex, and developed ‘organism’: ‘not the mass, but the differentiation that transcends itself and develops something uniform from what is various, the organism from the atom’.⁸ In England, on the other hand, othering was based on denigrating the enemy’s cultural tradition. Not only were the works of scholars in the target culture insulted, but it was also claimed that the achievements of that culture would not have been possible had English scholars not paved the path, suggesting that Germany was copycatting English academic excellence. A key example here is a statement within an unseen translation paper in 1918, which reads: ‘long after Shakespeare and Milton in England and Molière in France were dead, there was still no writer of universal interest in Germany’.⁹

Despite these key differences in approach, the overall impact of the First World War on German studies at Leeds and English studies at Hamburg was the transformation of both disciplines into hubs of national imagining, facilitating the renegotiation of images of the ‘home’ and target culture, Englishness, and Germanness in the context of conflict.

The Impact of the Second World War

In contrast to the existential crisis induced in both disciplines by the sudden outbreak of the First World War, the longer period of anticipation before the Second World War allowed a more calculated approach to their mobilization as part of the war effort.

The result was a unique blurring of boundaries between the student and the soldier at both institutions as intellectual and military research collided. German studies at the University of Leeds and English studies at the University of Hamburg were both nationally and institutionally remarketed as part of an official campaign to disseminate ideology regarding the ‘enemy’ that was in line with state propaganda and policy. The University of Leeds not only became a base for military training but a place where students and soldiers could study the same courses side by side, their ability judged to the same academic standards and even the same marking schemes. Any subject considered helpful to the war effort, including modern foreign languages, was thus rebranded by the state and higher education institutions alike as ‘national service’,¹⁰ underscoring the more systematic integration of the study of the enemy’s language and culture into the initiative of ‘total war’. In a similar fashion to the formalized integration of modern foreign language teaching into the British state-organized war effort, at the University of Hamburg, the exploitation of English studies for nationalistic and propagandistic purposes became key to the state-run programme Aktion Ritterbusch. This was a national project, sponsored by the National Socialist state, which sought to instrumentalize humanities subjects within higher education for the purpose of Gegnerforschung (enemy research),¹¹ as well as to ‘prove’ the intrinsic superiority, both racial and intellectual, of German culture. Thus, in both cultural contexts, the longer period of preparation facilitated by the anticipated outbreak of the Second World War merged academic and military training into one.

However, the process of implementing changes to the curriculum differed dramatically based on the national context. At the University of Leeds, significant changes to the curriculum did not occur until 1941/2, owing largely to public scandals during the First World War relating to the continued employment of German nationals in high positions at the university, which had led not only to public uproar between 1914 and 1918, but also to the withdrawal of funding crucial to the university’s existence. The university was thus far more cautious this time round and waited for the state to develop an official narrative on ‘enemy’ language and culture before integrating this into any kind of pedagogic strategy, demonstrating a reluctance to dissent from the national narrative on the target culture for fear of punishment, economic or otherwise. The ties between language and the nation were underscored by the eventual decision to remove all Old High German texts from Scheme A of the curriculum, representing 50 per cent of its content,¹² in order to undermine British–German affinities as Germanic nations and to facilitate the othering of the enemy. Conversely, at Hamburg, changes to the curriculum were sudden and intense, as the state-ordered campaign accelerated the expansion of the English curriculum. Fifty-two PhD theses were undertaken in the English department between 1933 and 1944 compared to only seventeen from 1923 to 1932,¹³ highlighting the critical importance ascribed to studying the enemy in order to exploit its weaknesses. The content of the curricula at each institution reflected this contrast between cautious and extreme measures, with an almost complete absence of cultural themes seeking to define the nature of the ‘enemy’ at Leeds,¹⁴ whilst just under 50 per cent of the English curriculum at Hamburg was dedicated to sociocultural topics with the intention of studying enemy behaviour and characteristics as part of Gegnerforschung.¹⁵ This reflected a direct correlation between research and national military manoeuvres against the enemy.

Although the changes to the curricula were different in each country, both universities were reacting to their nations’ respective understanding of their shortcomings in the First World War, underscoring the imagined relationship between language curricula and the success of the war effort in the eyes of the state. The cautious approach to the curriculum at Leeds was a direct response to the consequences of betraying the state narrative on enemy language and culture in the First World War, and shows how perceived dissent against state ideology within the language classroom was seen as endangering the integrity of the national narrative and posing a threat to the victory of the home nation. Similarly, in Hamburg, the significant emphasis on Gegnerforschung, reflected in the intensified study of societal structures and ‘natural’ enemy behaviour and characteristics, grew out of the belief that Germany had lost the last war due to having insufficient knowledge of the enemy to exploit militarily.¹⁶

Thus the inherent link between modern foreign language teaching and ideas of the nation led to the former becoming a hub of national imagining in both countries during the two World Wars. The discipline was particularly susceptible to national propaganda as a means of redefining the relationship to the target culture in times of conflict. The sudden and unexpected outbreak of the First World War in 1914 forced British and German scholars alike to redefine the boundaries between the home and target culture, performing ‘imaginative gymnastics’ to justify the existence of their discipline without undermining the justification for war or, more dangerously, heroizing the enemy. By contrast, the anticipation of the Second World War allowed the calculated use of the discipline for nationalistic purposes in both countries, with the teaching of ‘enemy’ language and culture becoming part of military campaigns that were rooted in intellectual research. The transformed role of languages in wartime highlights not only their vulnerability to nationalist campaigns but also their engineering by the state to push conformist ideology.

Featured image: Soldiers receiving instruction in a university lecture theatre, Oxford, First World War. Dutch National Archives, 158-0074. Published under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

1. Karen Risager, Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm, (Clevedon, 2007), 6. [↩]
2. Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Anglistik und Amerikanistik im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Frankfurt am Main, 2003); Gunta Haenicke and Thomas Finkenstaedt, Anglistenlexikon 1825–1990: Biographische und bibliographische Angaben zu 318 Anglisten (Augsburg, 1992); Thomas Finkenstaedt, Kleine Geschichte der Anglistik in Deutschland: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt, 1983); Frank Finlay, ‘Casualty of War: The Hounding of German Scholars in the UK’, Times Higher Education, 9 Mar. 2015; John Flood, ‘Ginger Beer and Sugared Cauliflower: Adolphus Bernays and Language Teaching in Nineteenth-Century London’, in Rüdiger Görner and Helen Kelly-Holmes (eds.), Vermittlungen: German Studies at the Turn of the Century (Munich, 1999), 101–15; Nicola McLelland, German through English Eyes: A History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain 1500–2000 (Wiesbaden, 2015); Nicola McLelland, ‘The History of Language Learning and Teaching in Britain’, Language Learning Journal, 46/1 (2018), 6–16; Sylvia Jaworska, The German Language in British Higher Education: Problems, Challenges, Teaching and Learning Perspectives (Wiesbaden, 2009). [↩]
3. John Horne, State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997). [↩]
4. Tomás Irish, The University at War, 1914–25: Britain, France, and the United States (London, 2015), 26; Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918 (Edinburgh 1988), p. v. [↩]
5. University of Leeds, Special Collections, LUA/DEP/016, Birmingham Exam Paper Series; Wilhelm Dibelius, England und wir (Hamburg, 1914). [↩]
6. Dibelius, England und wir, 29; University of Leeds, Special Collections, LUA/DEP/016, University of Birmingham Honour School of Modern Languages, German I Composition and Essay, June 1918, p. 1 [↩]
7. Dibelius, England und wir, 18. [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩]
9. University of Leeds, Special Collections, LUA/DEP/016, German II Composition and Unseen Translation, 1918, p. 1. [↩]
10. Willis Rudy, Total War and Twentieth-Century Higher Learning: Universities of the Western World in the First and Second World Wars (London, 1991), 70. [↩]
11. Hausmann, Anglistik und Amerikanistik im ‘Dritten Reich’, 297. [↩]
12. University of Leeds, Special Collections, LUA/DEP/016, Caldwell’s Diary, 1979. [↩]
13. Album of doctorates within the Philosophische Fakultät der Universität Hamburg, English Philology, 1923–1944; unpublished dissertation samples in the library holdings for the department of English language and culture (Seminar für Englische Sprache und Kultur), University of Hamburg; published dissertation samples and Promotionsakte, State Archive Hamburg; Hans Peter Lütjen, ‘Das Seminar für Englische Sprache und Kultur 1933 bis 1945’, in Eckart Krause, Ludwig Huber, and Holger Fischer (eds.), Hochschulalltag im ‘Dritten Reich’: Die Hamburger Universität 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1991), 737–56. [↩]
14. University of Leeds, Special Collections, LUA/PUB/003/3/64, University of Leeds Academic Calendar, 1939, p. 200. [↩]
15. Statistics calculated by the author based on contents of curricula in State Archive Hamburg, 364–5 I (Universität I); M 15.01.01 Volume 1, 1919–1938; Volume 2, 1937–1954. [↩]
16. Hausmann, Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 297. [↩]

Holly Perril

Holly Perril is an MRes student in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies at the University of Leeds with… Read more

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