“Two souls dwell in the German nation”: British historians, the two Germanies, and the two World Wars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how British historians conceptualized Germany before, during, and after the Great War. Before 1914, British historians tended to view Germany favourably and often used their professional writing to encourage amiable relations between the two countries. Their ideas centred on a two Germanies thesis—an abstract framework that enabled British admiration for German cultural and intellectual achievements to exist in tension with fears about Prussianism. This literature informed semi-official views on Germany, which were anti-Prussian in orientation rather than anti-German. Even in wartime, some historians retained an unbroken admiration for German culture, education, and history. This conviction allowed them to maintain an overidealized view of Germany and, afterwards, to embrace and disseminate a more radical and revisionist interpretation of the war and its causes. The belief that all the Great Powers shared responsibility for the Great War appealed those seeking to revise the settlement, since this cast doubt on the claim that Germany alone was at fault in 1914—the moral foundation of the Treaty of Versailles. This dissertation shows how the two Germanies thesis informed both academic and elite discourse in Britain in the era of the two world wars. It reveals that earlier literature on Germany directly inspired revisionist scholarship in the interwar era—and that this scholarship influenced debates and decisions in both Parliament and the Foreign Office. The historians discussed herein had an audience with the decision-makers and affected their mentalities and debates either directly or indirectly, as educators and advocates. These historians were not only viewed as academics and intellectuals, but also as advisers and emissaries. British historians certainly assumed diverse roles and used their social networks and connections to advance their revisionist views. Gradually, their discoveries provided the decision-makers with the intellectual and moral rationale for pursuing a moderate and conciliatory foreign policy towards the Weimar Republic and, later, Nazi Germany.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".