German Historians and England

Between the late eighteenth century and the eve of World War I, England assumed a special significance for the German intellectual elite. In the beginning, the preponderant admiration for England was intense enough to earn the name Anglomania, but by the turn of the twentieth century German intellectuals had developed an intensely hostile view of everything English, a view which required little exaggeration to provide distorted war propaganda in 1914. Dr McClelland describes and explains the great change in the German view of England in the period when she meant most to German thinkers. In particular he investigates one important group of German intellectuals - the historians and social scientists. These men provide a relatively continuous thread through the development of German thought. Furthermore, the German historians played an especially important role in the elaboration of German civic culture as a result of their great prestige within the universities, their political activism and their political journalism.