Backdrop: The Cultural Blockade
Usually, historians pay too little attention to how German defeat and the peace settlement isolated Germany not only politically and economically, but also culturally. But just as Allied statesmen, clerks, and advisors met to determine the contours of the peace treaty, so did Allied scholars, journalists, students, sport functionaries and humanitarians descend on Paris to remake a broader cultural postwar order without – and sometimes against – Germany: In the world of science, Article 282 of the Versailles Treaty voided nearly all scien-tific conventions, while the newly established International Research Council excluded Germany from membership and barred the German language and German scientists from international conferences and collaborations in the postwar years.1 On the student level, a newly founded Confédération Inter-nationale des Étudiants re-organized international student relations without German participation.2 In the field of communications, the cartel agreements between global news agencies were nullified and the largest German news agency (Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau) was shut out of the world market.3 In the sphere of sports, Germany would not be invited to participate in Olympic games until 1928. Even in the humanitarian realm, the Allies sought to replace the neutralist International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva with a freshly formed (Allied) League of Red Cross Societies in order to exclude Ger-many from international cooperation. In myriad ways, a host of new organi-zations and agreements perpetuated the inter-Allied accord and cemented the Great War’s recalibration of cultural affairs away from Germany.4 Their former enemies, Germans felt, were enacting a “cultural blockade” (geistige Kontinen-talsperre) against them, hoping to deprive their nation of the remnants of its international standing and influence.5
1 Manfred Abelein, Die Kulturpolitik des Deutschen Reiches und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
Ihre verfassungsgeschichtliche Entwicklung und ihre verfassungsrechtlichen Probleme (Cologne, 1968), 24.
2 Walter Zimmermann, “Deutsche Studentenschaft und Ausland,” Der Auslanddeutsche 5, no. 2 (1922): 34.
3 Heidi Evans, “’The Path to Freedom’? Transocean and German Wireless Telegraphy, 1914–
1922,” Historical Social Research 35 (2010): 209–33, 210.
4 Tomás Irish, “From International to Interallied: Transatlantic University Relations in the Era of the First World War, 1905–1920,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 13, no. 4 (2015): 311–325.
5 This term is used by a number of observers; see Prof. Dr. Gast, “Die Auslandsbeziehungen der deutschen Hochschulen,” Mitteilungen des Verbandes der deutschen Hochschulen, 2. Sonderheft 17–24, 18; Friedrich Beck, “Ausländerstudium im Ausland und in Deutschland,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 28, no. 4, (1931): 250; Georg Schreiber, “Die Kulturpolitik des Völkerbunds,” in Zehn Jahre Versailles, ed. Heinrich Schnee and Hans Draeger, 2:245–62, (Berlin, 1929), 246.
This “cultural blockade” was never as systematically organized nor as Machiavellian in design as German observers liked to imagine.6 In part, it was a matter of timing: the upsurge of international institution-building after the war simply happened when Germany was absent, thus perpetuating the status quo of inter-Allied cooperation as it existed in mid-1919. In many cases, these new organizations expressed less a desire to exclude Germany than a lack of desire to include it. At the heart of these developments lay a pronounced moral outrage over the complicity of German scholars, journalists, and even human-itarians in the alleged and real crimes of the German war effort. Acknowledg-ing the role of German science in the gas and propaganda war, U. S. President Woodrow Wilson characterized it as “science without conscience.”7 The notion that Germany had to undergo a sort of probationary period before it could be readmitted into the fold of “civilized nations” pervaded not just (some of) the founders of the League of Nations but humanitarian and academic circles.
Summing up a widespread feeling in March 1919, the American magazine Lit-erary Digest remarked that “Hans must go to the bottom of his class.”8
And still, the cultural blockade was not less powerful for being more of an informal consensus than a formal agreement. Contemporaries recognized that such efforts were part of a power play intended to break German influence in prestigious fields of international relations,9 fueled as much, German observers suspected, by lingering wartime resentments as by a desire to deprive Germany of prestige in the world. With the war largely regarded as a cultural struggle, it seemed only logical that in the field of culture, as in politics or trade, Germany
6 On German suspicions, see Karl Kerkhof, “Die internationalen naturwissenschaftlichen Or-ganisationen vor und nach dem Weltkriege,” Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft. Kunst und Technik 15, no. 3 (Jan. 1921): 225–42; “Aufzeichnung über den Stand der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Beziehungen,” June 16, 1924, PA R64980.
7 For Wilson’s address at the Sorbonne on Dec. 21, 1918, see Brigitte Schröder-Gudehus, “Chal-lenge to Transnational Loyalties: International Organizations after the First World War,” Science Studies 3, no. 2 (1973): 93–118, 100. For Americans, German arguments in favor of unrestricted submarine warfare played a special role. As George Ellery Hale, a scientist and science organizer on the National Research Council, wrote in a memorandum on the reorganization of interna-tional science on September 18, 1917: “The part German men of science have played in the initi-ation of gas attacks, and the demand upon their government last autumn for the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, must militate against the early establishment of cordial personal relations with men in other countries whose relatives and friends have been the victims of these methods or of others still more barbarous”; qtd. in Roy MacLeod, “Wissenschaftlicher Interna-tionalismus in der Krise. Die Akademien der Alliierten und ihre Reaktion auf den Ersten Welt-krieg,” in Die Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1914–1945, ed. Wolfram Fischer, 317–49 (Berlin, 2000), 338.
8 “German Academic Prestige Lost,” The Literary Digest, Mar. 15, 1919.
9 French scholars, in particular, saw Wissenschaft as a means of German domination and con-tended that, on account of the predominance of the German language in science, “German pro-fessors [had before the war] set up a kind of scientific Empire which covered all of northern, central, and eastern Europe and exerted considerable influence on the science of Russia, the United States, and Japan.” Qtd. in Schröder-Gudehus, “Challenge to Transnational,” 99.
37 Backdrop: The Cultural Blockade
would no longer occupy its prewar position. The French, in particular, seemed determined to use the postwar situation to arrest Germany’s cultural imperial-ist ambition and assert French civilization in its place.10 The French-dominated International Research Council was “quite openly part of the general postwar policy, whose spearhead was the Treaty of Versailles, of isolating the Central Powers, of demanding from them expressions of penitence, and of ensuring that Germany in particular never regained her old dominance in military af-fairs, industry, trade or science.”11 Accordingly, if Germany were going to re-gain its great power status and its standing in the world, it would have to alter not only the treaty’s territorial, economic, and political provisions; it would also have to overturn the recalibration of the cultural world.
10 As Charles Cestre, Professor of American Literature and Civilization at the University of Paris, noted, educational facilities with regard to the United States “would serve powerfully to cement bonds of sympathy and friendship between the two republics; it would enhance the intel-lectual reputation of our country and the prestige of our higher education in a country that the war has seized from the German hold”; qtd. in Whitney Walton, “Internationalism and the Jun-ior Year Abroad: American Students in France in the 1920s and 1930s,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 2 (2005): 255–78, 260.
11 A. G. Cock, “Chauvinism and Internationalism in Science: The International Research Coun-cil, 1919–1926,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 37, no. 2 (1983): 249–88, 249.