Features > Course of German History

An introduction by Professor Chris Wrigley

The Course of German History is one of A.J.P. Taylor's best known books. It has rarely been out of print since it was first published in July 1945. It was very much a product of the Second World War, history with a moral for the victors in a second modern war against Germany. Its message was that there were continuities in German history and Hitler and the Nazis were not an aberration but only an extreme version of Germany's drive for mastery in at least central and eastern Europe.

Alan Taylor began his Preface to the first edition by observing,
The book is a pièce d'occasion. it is meant to be serious history. All the same I should never have written it except for the events of the last five years and, still more, the need of some historical background to the political problems of the present.

It had begun as a chapter on the Weimar Republic era (1919-22) of German history for a government handbook for British troops. Alan Taylor had written it in for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), which was attached to the Special Operations Executive, an important part of the British wartime intelligence service. It was the second historical piece he had written for the PWE, and was the second rejected by them as too controversial. The first had been a handbook on Hungary, which he wrote between May and October 1943, but was rejected as too polemical on the advice of another Oxford academic, Professor C.A. Macartney. The Weimar chapter was rejected on similar grounds on the advice of the refugee German scholar, F.L. Carsten. Instead, the PWE turned to E.J. Passant for a text, which later was turned into his book, Germany 1815-1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959).

Alan Taylor's message that the Germans as a whole were guilty of expansionist policies was not 'on message'. Just as the Allies during the First World War had striven to emphasise that those guilty for causing the war were the Kaiser and the Prussian militarised elite, and all would be well with a democratic German people, so towards the end of the Second World War blame was apportioned to Hitler and the Nazis not the ordinary German people. Alan Taylor took pains to emphasise that nearly all Germans had been committed to a Greater Germany. He was deliberately provocative in writing in The Course of German History.
…the rest of the world had to pay the penalty for the political incompetence and timidity of the German middle class. The failure of the 'good Germans', not the ranting of the 'bad ones', was the real crime of Germany against European civilisation. (1961 edn, p.166)

He asked in a published letter in October 1944, '…how many German refugees, living securely in this country, are prepared to recognise the full national independence of the east European peoples, and to renounce for ever all prospects of a European system under German leadership?'.

Alan Taylor came to German history from a robust radical background and an expertise in Austrian history. Born on 25 March 1906 at Birkdale, Southport, Lancashire, Alan John Percivale Taylor grew up the only child in a wealthy middle class family, his father making his money in the family cotton cloth exporting business. His was a nonconformist and radical background, his parents swinging from Radical to advanced socialist views from the First World War. Alan Taylor himself joined the Independent Labour Party and was briefly (as an undergraduate at Oxford University, 1924-7) a member of the Communist Party. However, his politics, although socialist, by the 1940s onwards, were more individualistic radical and even populist. His visits to Germany, especially once the Nazis were in power, added to his distrust of Germany as a Power which derived from his study of the published multi-volume documents on German foreign policy.

His own archival research was primarily based on research in 1928-30 in Vienna (supplemented by work in the French and British archives). Later, he went on to write a substantial study, The Habsburg Monarchy 1815-1918 (London, Macmillan, 1941), very much revised as The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918 (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1948). As a result he saw German history and politics from an Austrian perspective. His concern for national self-determination for the Slav nationalities in the old Austria-Hungary was carried through to The Course of German History, written between the two versions of his book on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, for example, Alan Taylor was explicit that Weimar politicians, before the advent to power of Hitler, were reverting to expansionist policies:
Only if Germany made reparation; only if Germany remained disarmed; only if the German frontiers were final; only, above all, if the Germans accepted the Slav people as their equals, was there any chance of a stable, peaceful, civilized Germany. (1961 edn, p.242)

During the war Alan Taylor advocated the reconstruction of Czechoslovakia, with the removal of the German minority populations. In the case of Yugoslavia, he championed Trieste going to it, not Italy.

The book also expressed his concerns arising from the Second World War. He was very much an apostle of the Anglo-Russian alliance. In the first edition the book reached its climax with a final paragraph, now the third from the end, with Churchill proclaiming the alliance of Britain and Russia. After the subsequent sentence, the book then concluded that paragraph with:
The 'many great nations', whom Bismarck had dismissed scorn, at last awoke. Germany owed her unity and success to the disunion of her neighbours. That was now at an end. There will be no German 'New Order' in Europe. Instead there will be a 'New Order' in Germany which will owe nothing to German efforts. It will be imposed by the united strength of England, Russia and the United States; and it will prove impermanent unless these three powers remain as united in peace as they have been in war. (First edn, pp.223-4)

Alan Taylor continued to press for Anglo-Soviet understanding during the early period of the Cold War. Shortly before The Course of German History was published he wrote in a letter, 'In the near future, say the next twenty years, the Soviet Union is our natural ally'. However, by 1948 he was disillusioned with the Soviet Union, observing on the radio, 'I care for liberty above all other causes….'. From at least the early 1940s his fundamental political position was: 'Without democracy Socialism would be worth nothing, but democracy is worth a great deal even when it is not socialist'.

Alan Taylor had no doubts that he was writing a polemical book with The Course of German History. Shortly before he completed it, he informed a BBC producer that the book 'is as hot as can be - a good thing that it doesn't have to pass your censorship'. He was later to criticise it as his 'unfavourite' book, being 'too clever and showy'. This was the main negative note sounded by reviewers when it was published. In the American Historical Review it was observed, 'Grandiose in style, it often overshoots its mark. The profound is mixed with the wisecrack'. But Sigmund Neumann, the reviewer did praise it as,
…a challenging essay, packed with substantial summaries and spiced with brilliant observations, reflecting his scholarly maturity, his lucid mind and his Vienna training… An answer to an important query, it is an impatient book, vivid and tempestuous, pointed and pugnacious, concise and over-zealous, severe and sarcastic, ambitious and angry.

R. Birley in International Affairs mostly praised it but felt that it was facile in its attempt to find continuities in German history and that in making the Nazis seem 'a normal development, quite to be expected, of German history, Mr Taylor nearly succeeds in making them respectable'. Alan Taylor was to be severely criticised for this tendency in his later, The Origins of the Second World War (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1961).

Lewis Namier in the Times Literary Supplement, who also found much to praise, observed that 'the book should prove of high value in the study of the German problem'. However, this presumption that there was a long-running 'German problem' was to make The Course of German History seem dated. By the early 1970s it was deemed by one historian to be almost a caricature of anti-German history. More generally, it was seen as one of several books of the war period which tried to explain the rise of the Nazis as due to some peculiarity of the German character.

Alan Taylor was appalled by the atrocities of the Nazi era. When in Florence in April 1973, he wrote to Eva Haraszti of elderly German tourists,
They looked so orderly, civilized, restrained. Yet they must have been in the prime of life under Hitler and most of them must have been Nazis. You think one man is a quite distinguished scholar; perhaps he was once a German officer, massacring prisoners-of-war in Russia. And that grey-haired lady. She was no doubt a Hitler mächen and after that a guard in a concentration camp. How could such ordinary people have been so surpassingly barbarous? It is beyond my understanding.

Taylor was not alone in having such concerns. There was a major debate aroused by Daniel Goldenhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, New York, Knopf, 1996. Earlier, there were controversies over Fritz Fishcher's Germany's Aims in the First World War (German publication, 1961, English translation 1967), which argued the Kaiser and his advisers had sought to dominate much of Europe both during and before the First World War, and over the uniqueness of the Holocaust (the Historikerstreit, 1986). Given these controversies, Alan Taylor's The Course of German History appears to be less out on a limb than once seemed to be the case. Nevertheless, it still remains a strong statement of the view that German history is exceptional. This is expressed vigorously at the very start of the book: 'The History of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation….'.

Yet Alan Taylor was trying to write more than an anti-German tract. When he came to write a new preface to the 1951 edition of The Course of German History he argued that the study of international relations since 1848 had been dominated by German scholars or by those unduly influenced by the published German documents. He continued, Sooner or later we shall have to escape from the German version of the events of the last hundred years. I myself am halfway through a history of the relations of the Great Powers between the revolutions of 1848 and the collapse of the European system in 1918. If I can ever snatch leisure from the time-consuming life of a College tutor and complete it, this present book will appear more sensible.

This he did, the resulting book - The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1954 - proving to be a classic of diplomatic history. He also went on to publish a brief biography of Bismarck - Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman, New York, Knopf, 1955. In writing the biography, he reversed his earlier distaste for Bismarck, observing later, 'Now I found Bismarck's personality fascinating…and he became one of the few I should like to recall from the dead'. Even so, Bismarck came off relatively lightly in The Course of German History, being judged 'a barbarian of genius' (First edn, p.96).

Although very much a work of its time, The Course of German History remains a lively, if polemical, short history written by one of the twentieth century's greatest historians.