The Pity of War: England and Germany, Bitter Friends, Beloved Foes
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 1442241748
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1613, a beautiful Stuart princess married a handsome young German prince. This was a love match, but it was also an alliance that aimed to meld Europe's two great Protestant powers. Before Elizabeth and Frederick left London for the court in Heidelberg, they watched a performance of The Winter's Tale. In 1943, a group of British POWs gave a performance of that same play to a group of enthusiastic Nazi guards in Bavaria. Nothing about the story of England and Germany, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is as simple as we might expect.
Miranda Seymour tells the forgotten story of England’s centuries of profound connection and increasingly rivalrous friendship with Germany, linked by a shared faith, a shared hunger for power, a shared culture (Germany never doubted that Shakespeare belonged to them, as much as to England), and a shared leadership. German monarchs ruled over England for three hundred years—and only ceased to do so through a change of name.
This extraordinary and heart-breaking history—told through the lives of princes and painters, soldiers and sailors, bakers and bankers, charlatans and saints—traces two countries so entwined that one German living in England in 1915 refused to choose where his allegiance lay. It was, he said, as if his parents had quarreled. Germany’s connection to the island it loved, patronized, influenced, and fought was unique. Indeed, British soldiers went to war in 1914 against a country to which many of them—as one freely confessed the week before his death on the battlefront—felt more closely connected than to their own. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished papers and personal interviews, the author has uncovered stories that remind us—poignantly, wittily, and tragically—of the powerful bonds many have chosen to forget.
tender and prompt. Thackeray had been a boy of nineteen when he visited Germany in 1830; recollection had robbed the experience of none of its charm. Life for the twenty or so young Englishmen studying German culture in Weimar had been, as the author recalled in his letter to Lewes, both playful and ceremonious. Performances of Shakespeare and Schiller at the conscientiously high-minded town theatre were attended at least three nights in every week; invitations to visit Goethe were a rare and
new craze seriously, with Sheridan Knowles’s Alfred the Great, or for laughs, with an 1859 burlesque at London’s Olympic, entitled Alfred, or the Last Minstrel. Alfred was everywhere, and thanks to the new vogue for that shadowy figure, Germany and England could shamelessly unite in celebration of the common heritage that they both, back in the middle of the nineteenth century, so ardently wished to find. ‘We are Teuts ourselves,’ Blackwood’s had boasted to its readers in August 1841, in an
air. If she never mastered the language, the fault lay partly with a world that remained almost parodically British. Aside from reading English books and riding the Irish mares of which Prince Heinrich imported at least three a year to join his renowned stud, Daisy conversed daily with an English butler, an English groom, an English head gardener, an English valet and – although his services were hardly needed by a family who spoke English first and German second – an English tutor. If Daisy
faced a very different experience. At Rokeby, the London prep school where he had previously enjoyed three happy years, the young Graves had been urged to take pride in his Bavarian connections, encouraged by a headmaster who admired German culture. By 1909, the mood had altered. Signed onto the Charterhouse school list under his full name, Robert von Ranke Graves, the new boy was identified, from the start, as one of the enemy. ‘Businessmen’s sons, at this time, used to discuss hotly the threat,
countryside, he came across a band of soldiers, singing their way home from a day of field manoeuvres of the kind that were being regularly undertaken all over Germany in those last years before the war. The roar, so Sorley told his parents, ‘could be heard for miles . . . simply flung across the country, echoing from Schwerin two miles away. Then I understood what a glorious country it is . . .’ Writing to the headmaster of Marlborough (whom Sorley treated almost as a second father), he spoke