I. F. Clarke, ed.
The Great War with Germany, 1890-1914: Fictions and Fantasies of the War-to-come
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. Pp. 440. $46.95
Reviewed by Ann P. Linder

By August of 1914, the long-awaited conflict between the European powers had already been fought repeatedly, and with varying results, in the stirring pages of the illustrated press. These serialized stories of future war, filled with duplicity, “hidden armies,” invasions, sneak attacks, and dashing young heroes, became a major popular genre that both reflected and fueled animosities between the European powers in the two decades before the First World War. This anthology, the second of a projected five-volume series of future-war fiction, recovers the prophetic visions of coming war that obsessed British and German readers-and their patriotic and profit-driven editors-between 1890 and 1914, and were displaced only by the advent of actual war. As Clarke points out in his excellent introduction, these popular and influential fictions were largely the product of the growing political tensions among the great European powers. “Out of the politics,” he writes, “came the projections” (10). Early British stories project France as the future enemy, but after 1900, a militaristic and expansionist Germany replaces France as the inevitable opponent. The German stories, laced with Pan-German diction and the belligerent rhetoric of historical necessity, recall Kaiser Wilhelm’s notorious speeches and point toward Sombart’s wartime opposition of heroes and shopkeepers. This exaggerated nationalism in the popular press is but one aspect of Anderson’s “imagined community” of literate citizens. Only the content is futuristic, for these fictions are conventional tales of adventure, derring-do, and individual heroism, in which one’s own people behave well and the others (especially if they are Germans) behave despicably. They are, in short, a catalog of the national stereotypes of the era.

Chapter one establishes the outlines of the early future-war stories. The Great War of 189-, published in 1891, effectively inaugurated the new genre in the illustrated magazines, but unlike most of its successors, it was intended to be an objective forecast, including the astonishingly prescient prediction that the war would be triggered by a royal assassination in the Balkans. The chapter also includes a German story from 1900, Karl Eisenhart’s Die Abrechnung mit England (The reckoning with Britain), an early expression of the German conviction that Britain was determined to thwart German colonial expansion and deny Germany its rightful “place in the sun.”

Chapter two focuses on tales of invasion and “the enemy within,” among them Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and William Le Queux’s detailed The Invasion of 1910 (1906). Characteristic of these stories is the portrayal of German spies hidden in England to plan invasion as perfidious and of the soldiers who carry out the plans as ruthless-images that would reappear in 1914 Belgian atrocity stories. Clarke has also unearthed a small anonymous gem, The Child’s Guide to Knowledge (1909), a syntactically Germanic child’s catechism on the consequences of “the great war of 1915-17” in which Britain is defeated and made a province of the Pan-Teutonic Empire.

In chapter three, Clarke turns to German tales of the conquest of England, which invariably focus on the defeat of the British fleet and the humiliation of Britain. August Niemann’s Der Weltkrieg (The coming conquest of England, 1904) serves as an excellent example of the type. More compelling is F. H. Grautoff’s 1906 Armageddon 190-, a tale of military confrontation in German Samoa and its domino effect on the great powers. The growing importance of air power dominates Rudolf Martin’s bizarre tale of Berlin-Bagdad (1907). Not only do airships allow the Germans to win a war against Britain and dominate the post-war world, they lead to such peacetime delights as picnicking at the North Pole. However, the German obsession with righting perceived wrongs and redrawing colonial empires is as apparent here as in the later Weimar fantasies so ably analyzed by Peter Fisher.

Clarke devotes chapter four to deflating future-war fantasies. Heath Robertson’s satirical cartoon series of 1910 on the invasion of England illustrates the broad appeal of these fictions. Equally fascinating is Carl Siwinna’s Vademecum für Phantasiestrategen (Guide for fantasy strategists, 1909) with its tongue-in-cheek advice for authors who wish to succeed at writing future-war stories. This chapter also includes an early P. G. Woodhouse story illustrating the victory of the English shopkeepers over the heroic German invaders. Chapter five centers on stories of defeat and occupation, concluding with a brief invasion-of-America story.

This volume contains a well-selected array of little-known texts, complemented by pertinent, well-researched commentary. The consistent use of italics for commentary keeps primary and secondary texts neatly separated. Original sources are clearly identified and the notes are most informative, especially on the life and work of minor authors. The illustrations, notably the original covers of the German texts, are historically and aesthetically illuminating. The Great War with Germany is an excellent resource for students of war literature and of political and military fantasy literature from the early part of the century.