Anglomania (36 page)

Chamberlain had come to this conclusion relatively late in life. He was born in Portsmouth and was proud of being from a “purely British family,” with nothing but English, Scottish, and Gaelic blood. Much of his early education was in France, and as a boy he spoke better French than English. Chamberlain was already thirty when he realized the full extent of British and French degeneracy and discovered the heroic beauty of Wagner’s music and the German language. His first books were about Wagner. His political or, rather, anti-political philosophy remained resolutely Wagnerian.

For the kaiser, the idea of an Englishman coming to Germany to worship the German spirit was like a dream come true. Although undeniably
British, Chamberlain believed in the greatness of the German
Volk
. He was a British “Aryan” who hated the liberal “lies” that drove Wilhelm apart from his mother. The kaiser asked Chamberlain, in 1902, to please “save our German Volk, our
Germanentum
, for God has sent you as our helper!” An extraordinary correspondence followed, which continued, on and off, until the kaiser died. The kaiser sent short, admiring notes. Chamberlain sent long, effusive tracts, in which he developed his Anglophobic, anti-Semitic, Germanophile ideas to the point of murderous lunacy.

Chamberlain’s Anglophobia came both from the Left and the Right, a mixture of extremes that might be described, anachronistically, as National Socialism. He wouldn’t have been an Englishman if class consciousness hadn’t come into it. In a strange and certainly treacherous pamphlet entitled
England and Germany
, published at the height of World War I, Chamberlain works himself up into a foaming rage against the English class system. “The prattle,” he writes, “about political freedom in England has been enough to irritate me, as long as I can remember.” After all, “the entire legislation of Britain—the Constitution, the government and its policy—are the work of a single, social class, without any true participation of the remaining population.”

This criticism of British politics goes back to Marat and his fellow French revolutionaries. It is exaggerated, but not entirely spurious. It is hard to disagree with Chamberlain’s view that the lack of a national education system is to blame for British class divisions. There is indeed much to be admired about the German school system. But Chamberlain’s characteristically racial explanation for British upper-class rule is harder to follow, although less than wholly original. He blames it on what he calls “the event”: the Norman victory at Hastings in 1066, when haughty conquerors of alien blood destroyed “Anglo-Saxon civilization.” The aloofness of the Norman nobles from the “unmixed Saxon population” led to an “upper caste.”

This, however, was not the only catastrophe to wreck merry England. Pristine, rural, “unmixed,” agricultural England was transformed in the sixteenth century into a nation of bellicose traders and pirates. The sons of earls and dukes, Chamberlain writes in a familiar lament, “disappear from society to make money,” and consequently their “moral compass” is warped and corrupted. Chamberlain had a Wagnerian nostalgia for a tribal Utopia, a community unsullied by the lust for
gold. “We were merry, we are merry no longer. The complete decline of country life and the equally complete victory of God Mammon, the deity of Industry and Trade, have caused the true, harmless, refreshing merriness to betake itself out of England.” This culminated in the modern age, when England had become hopelessly deracinated, as well as very unmerry.

As in the decadent days of Rome, Chamberlain observes to the kaiser in 1903, “the civis britannicus is now become a purely political concept.” Even in France, with its detestable republican notions of citizenship, it was getting harder for a foreigner to become French. But in Britain, why, “every Basuto nigger” could get a passport by paying two shillings and sixpence. In fifty years, Chamberlain predicts, “the English aristocracy will be nothing but a money oligarchy, without a shred of racial solidarity or relation to the throne …”

Fourteen years later, in the middle of the Great War, Chamberlain writes to the kaiser once more, from his house in Bayreuth. This time, the situation is even worse: “England has fallen utterly into the hands of Jews and Americans.” The war must be seen as a Jewish grab for world domination. Germany stands for priceless art, Christianity, spiritual education, and moral force; the Jewish world is a soulless one of finance, factories, trade, and an unlimited plutocracy. This, then, is “Juda-England,” which the Kaiser railed against during his exile in Doorn. This image, which was not new, but put across with great conviction, was presented to the kaiser by an Englishman. And that same Englishman had given him the cure: “Nothing in the world can save us all, but a strong, a victorious and a wise Germany.”

Beware the men who would save us! The kaiser wanted to save England, his motherland, which never gave him sufficient respect. There were times when he saw himself as the only German friend of England. In a rambling discourse, published in
The Daily Telegraph
in 1908, he whined that the British were wrong to distrust him. After all, even as his German subjects had turned against British imperialism, he alone had supported the British in the Boer War; more than that, he had provided the British with a strategy that allowed Lord Roberts to defeat the Boers. His statements aroused contempt in Britain and outrage in Germany. At that moment, he really did stand alone.

The problem was that England did not want to be saved, least of all by the German kaiser. And the would-be savior’s response was like
that of a child: if the world would not bend to his will, he would wreck it. Even as he sent gratuitous advice to his grandmother, whom he sometimes referred to as “the queen of Hindustan,” as to how she should shore up her empire, his favorite motto, expressed in letters to the Russian tsar, was a version of Cato’s dictum: “Apart from anything else, I propose that Britain must be destroyed” (
“Ceterum censeo Britanniam esse delendam”
).

It was not to be. And that is why the kaiser ended up chopping trees, drinking English tea, and keeping up imperial pretenses at a country house in Holland. Yet the dream of saving England, expressed in that picture he drew for his cousin, the tsar, in 1895, of brave Prussia saving maidenly Britannia from peril, never entirely faded. This could be achieved only by first destroying Britain’s cosmopolitanism and its effete lords and ladies, its Freemasons, liberals, merchants, bankers—in short, by purging Juda from England.

On Christmas Day 1940, he could look upon the world with satisfaction. Germans were victorious all over the European continent. The blitzkrieg had been a resounding success and the kaiser rejoiced that “the Last Judgement on Juda-England” had begun. When he died at 11:30
A.M
. on June 4, 1941, Nazi Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. Less than a year before his death, he wrote to a childhood friend: “The brilliant leading Generals in this war come from
My
school, they fought under My command in the world war as lieutenants, captains or young majors.” These proud words were written in English.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

L
ESLIE
H
OWARD

I
N THE FINAL SCENE OF
T
HE
S
CARLET
P
IMPERNEL
,
MADE IN
1934, Lord Blakeney, played with English gentlemanly panache by Leslie Howard, returns from France. He has just saved dozens of French aristocrats from Robespierre’s Terror by smuggling them to England, the Island of Liberty. On the boat, gazing at the cliffs of Dover as though witness to a revelation, Leslie Howard speaks the last words of the film to his French wife, played by Merle Oberon: “Look, Marguerite …,” he says. Then a pregnant pause, and then, with deep emotion: “England!”

This last line was thought up by the producer of the movie, Alexander Korda. He reckoned it was sure to get applause. He was right. The picture was a great hit for his company, London Film Productions. Korda was being calculating, but only up to a point. Leslie Howard’s words are a statement of pure Anglophilia, not patriotism, but Anglophilia. For Korda was still a Hungarian (he naturalized later). He had always admired the dashing English hero whose courage and guile were disguised by the foppish mannerisms of an aristocratic dandy. The original story of the Scarlet Pimpernel was written by
Baroness Orczy, another Hungarian. The script was written by yet another Hungarian, Lajos Biro, together with two Americans. And Leslie Howard, that most typical of slim, blond, blue-eyed English gentleman heroes? His real name was Steiner, and his parents were from Hungary too.

The film was made one year after Hitler came to power, too soon for the horror of Nazism to have sunk in. But Korda, the Jewish showman in his Savile Row suits, his chauffeur-driven Rolls, and his suites at the Dorchester Hotel, knew what he was doing. He once said that “all Hungarians love the English. It is their snobbism, and I am a snob.” But that is not all there was to it. He had lived in Berlin. He understood the threat of Hitler’s regime, not least to himself (he was on the Gestapo hit list). And he admired the British “way of life,” by which he meant that old combination of deference to privilege and respect for civil liberties. Like Theodor Herzl, he saw the British Empire as an example of gentlemanly administration. A year after
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, Korda made
Sanders of the River
in praise of that “handful of white men” whose governance of the empire “is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency.” These are the opening titles of the movie, which no doubt were greeted with much applause, at least in Britain. But Korda sincerely believed in the idea of England as a safe haven from European tyranny—for good reasons. And this made him the ideal propagandist for the Allied war effort. It was in that role that he was happiest. As he put it: “I felt during those terrible days, that I ‘belonged.’ ”

I have a relative, now in his seventies, who could not be more British, in manner, dress, habits, and speech. His name is Ashley, as in Ashley Wilkes, Leslie Howard’s most famous role. If one were to draw a caricature of the perfect English gentleman, he would come out looking like Ashley. He came to England from his native Germany some time between
Sanders of the River
and Dunkirk. He was a teenager then, who decided to shed his German skin and become an Englishman. He succeeded. And without overacting; not the exaggerated drawl, or the splashy tweeds that often mark the immigrant. Ashley’s remarkable effort to reinvent himself as an Englishman cannot be understood simply as an act of conformism. To understand Ashley’s generation of Anglicized Europeans, one must understand where they came from.

• • •

I
HAD ALWAYS
been aware of refugees in my family. Dick came to England as a child in 1939 and lived with my mother’s family during the war. He was still called Hans then, a name that was later dropped—too German. Hans expressed his obvious distress about being forced to flee into the arms of strangers by being a secretive, difficult boy. I first met Dick before he moved to the United States, where he became a distinguished scientist. I have seen him several times since, a small, dark, animated man whose accent became increasingly American over the years. Dick is an American now, whose Anglophilia was always tempered by memories of bullying at his school in a small English town. He had escaped from almost certain death in the Third Reich, but to his British classmates he remained a bloody foreigner, or worse, a German spy.

Then there were the “rented children.” The hostel was a large Victorian house in Highgate, rented by my grandfather to shelter twelve Jewish children rescued from Germany at the last minute on the so-called children transports. The British government did not exactly welcome refugees at that time. The 1905 Aliens Act still had been generous enough: persecuted persons would not be refused entry just because they lacked the means to support themselves. But this was changed when it really mattered, in the 1930s. To find refuge in Britain you had to have either a job lined up or a British guarantor prepared to support you. Otherwise you were trapped. After the ghastly events on Kristallnacht in 1938, when Jewish shops were ransacked, Jewish men arrested and killed, and synagogues set on fire, an exception was made: ten thousand Jewish children would be allowed to come to Britain, as long as they came without their parents, a condition of dubious magnanimity that traumatized many children for life. But still, they lived. My grandparents took in twelve.

My grandmother sometimes mentioned the names of former hostel children to me: Steffie Birnbaum, Lore Feig, Ilse Salomon, Michael Maybaum … She had kept in touch with them, and their children, wherever they were, in England, the United States, or Israel. Birthdays were never forgotten, help was offered with careers and personal matters,
and—a typical Anglo-German touch—Christmas cards were always sent. But I never quite realized how much my grandparents, Bernard and Win Schlesinger, meant to the hostel children. I had never before met people whose eyes filled with tears at the mere mention of their names.

Walter placed a dark gray box on the table in front of me. It was the size of a portable typewriter and was marked, in ball-point pen,
HOSTEL
. He opened the box. Inside was a stack of large brown envelopes. One of them had an address typed on it, which I recognized with a sense of excitement: St. Mary Woodlands House, Nr. Newbury, Berks. My grandparents’ old house, the one with the huge garden, my childhood Arcadia. The handwriting on the envelopes looked familiar too. It was my grandfather’s. One envelope was marked
ADMIN
. Another said
LETTERS PRIOR TO OPENING OF HOSTEL
. Yet another:
DETAILS OF ALL 12
CHILDREN
. And:
RE: TRUNKS, LISTS OF CLOTHES
.