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Article Excerpt
In the period leading up to World War I, roughly the British Edwardian period, international relations shifted with great rapidity, making this one of the most significant transitional periods in world history. Two polities, the United States and imperial Germany, pulled level with Great Britain on the world stage and began to challenge British primacy for two main reasons. Both began this drive in the 1860s. Once in charge of Congress, in 1862 the American Republican Party declared a form of economic "war" on Great Britain by passing a stiff protectionist tariff against largely British manufacturers. Paul Kennedy dated the start of the Anglo-German rivalry in the early 1860s as coming from "different perceptions of how domestic policies and external strategies should be arranged" (1980, 8). Imperial Germany imposed its own protectionist tariff in 1879. Both challenger polities, their economies driven increasingly by the second industrial revolution and protected behind increasingly steep tariff walls, began to challenge the global manufacturing dominance Great Britain had achieved in the first industrial revolution. Both began to reach economic parity with Great Britain in the 1880s. The second challenge came through global power projection. In the 1880s neither the United States nor imperial Germany could project power globally, because neither had a blue-water battle fleet. Alfred Thayer Mahan's work on the link between seapower and history made a very clear case that the only way to global power was to have a blue-water battle fleet (1890, 1892), and both Germany and the United States took notice. In the United States Theodore Roosevelt wrote approvingly to Mahan within forty-eight hours of his first book's publication and, in Atlantic Monthly, he published one of the first reviews of Mahan's work (Karsten 1971, 589). As president (1901-1909), Roosevelt oversaw the creation of the United States's first global battle fleet. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm noted in 1894, "I am ... not reading but devouring Captain Mahan's book.... It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by all my captains and officers" (quoted in Herman 2004, 474). German actions followed in 1898, with the passing of the First Navy Law to build a High Seas Fleet that also became known as the "Risk Fleet," a fleet powerful enough to ensure that Great Britain would not risk war with Germany. The Second Navy Law of 1900 doubled the size of the German fleet (Hobson 2002, 7). "No issue was as likely to turn Great Britain into an implacable adversary as a threat to its command of the seas," yet the navalist pressure groups in Germany "developed a vested interest in tensions with Great Britain to justify naval appropriations" and used the series of crises in odd parts of the globe from Samoa on to do precisely that (Kissinger 1994, 185).
Both economic and military challenges to primacy are conventional parts of international relations theory and well understood. Aaron Friedberg elaborated these in The Weary Titan as challenges based on shifts in relative economic power, financial power, sea power, and land power, all forms of calculative or "hard" power (1988). But this transitional period also saw a third challenge, one that arose out of perceptual or "soft" power: the extent to which a given polity could be said to have a "will to power." Great Britain had long had a clear will to power, and a key, but generally seriously understated, element of international relations theory is the extent to which this was lost by Great Britain in the late 1800s at the same time as it was being gained by the United States and imperial Germany. After summarizing the various realist theories, Friedberg noted that they "leave important unanswered questions. What are the internal characteristics that determine how a state will respond to external pressures?" (p. 6). In the perceptual model of power, "statesmen are seen to deal in less precise but more lingering images, both of other countries and of their own ... 'national images' [that] have received a good deal less direct scrutiny" (p. 15). The reasons for this are obvious--historical data on gross national product, number of capital ships, and the like are easily available and not much in doubt. When Friedberg returned to the perceptual model he concentrated entirely on the perceptions of political and military elites, again because they leave a clearer historical data trail.
In the case of Wilhelmine Germany the will to power is not in doubt: Kaiser Wilhelm made few bones about Germany's need for a "place in the sun," a feeling clearly supported by most of the country's elites at the time. A more critical question, however, is the extent to which this will to power extended beyond the elites into other parts of German life and culture. That question is not, of course, limited to Wilhelmine Germany. The United States is experiencing controversy about exactly this issue, in particular the loss of popular support for the Vietnam War, the propounding of the Powell Doctrine to avoid a similar loss of support in the First Gulf War, and the recent loss of support for the war in Iraq. No one questions American military primacy and economic strength, but American will to power, at least at the deep cultural level, is clearly a serious issue.
Scholars have long used nonconventional sources to more closely approach cultural history, illustrations and "popular" literature in particular. Geographers have, for example, studied maps as texts (Harley 1989), boys' adventure novels as indicative of a culture's rising or declining will to power (Hugill 1999b), and iconographic illustrations to better analyze shifting relationships between the human body and the natural world (Della Dora 2005). Recent work on political cartoons examines the British magazine Punch and the German magazine Simplicissimus for their use of cartoons as weapons in World War I (Hunig 2002). A brief article in History Today notes the anti-Nazi stance of Simplicissimus before 1933 (Bryant 2005). A deeper analysis is possible: Simplicissimus was a highly influential German publication that appealed very much to the German educated classes. It was an avant-garde, illustrated, satirical, weekly published in Munich from 1896 through late 1944 that, especially in the Wilhelmine period, commented frequently on the emergence of the German military-industrial state and the development of German geopolitical relations. Much of this comment was encapsulated in its front-page illustrations, many drawn by the brilliant satirical liberal artist and cartoonist Thomas Theodor Heine. Some measure of the importance German scholars attach to Simplicissimus may be seen in the fact that Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft posted PDFs of the entire run of the magazine, in full color, at [www.Simplicissimus.info] in July 2007.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
In Hans von Grimmelshausen's famous seventeenth-century novel the main character, Simplicius Simplicissimus, exposed the horrors of the Thirty Years' War ([1669] 1993). Albert Langen, the editor of Simplicissimus, chose his title to reflect his concern over the increasing militarization of Wilhelmine Germany. In its origins and...
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