Are we – the so-called “west” – no more than the baby Germany threw out with the bathwater? Any history of the industrialised world’s culture – scientific, technical, literary, military, philosophical, global-entertainment – has to accept the multiple creative impact of German emigration over the two previous centuries. But its best known and most spectacular source has been forced emigration, as David Blackbourn confirms. The whole world, not only America and Britain, was fertilised by the torrent of intellectual brilliance that fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Less well known is the earlier outflow of refugee liberals and socialists, politicians, writers or barricade fighters, after the counter-revolutions that followed the great uprisings of 1848. Most headed for the US, where many Union commanders in the civil war would be Germans who had learned their trade in Baden or the siege of Vienna. The thinkers and revolutionaries often joined London’s swarm of political émigrés.
These German currents, and especially their Jewish element, were intellectual and entrepreneurial. They taught the British, for instance, new ways to invent, design, travel, make love and stay fit. But Germany in the World recalls that “ordinary” Germans, especially peasants, had also been emigrating by the tens of thousands all through the 19th century. At first they moved into prosperous north-west Europe, including Britain (Victorian London and Liverpool were overcrowded with German waiters and clerks). But as long-distance travel grew easier, five million out of the five-and-a-half million German emigrants that century settled in the US.
