Civilian Internment during the First World War by Matthew Stibbe

Author:Matthew Stibbe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137571915
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Internment and Ideas About ‘National Community’

As we shall see in the next chapter, internment and associated deportations did provoke some concern among a minority of humanitarian activists and civic-minded persons for the plight of enemy aliens and their families. For the most part, however, it boosted support for new forms of bigotry, with all foreigners, and especially those born or raised in hostile countries, now potentially exposed to cultural and social exclusion from the robust ‘national community’ of 100% patriotic loyalists. Sometimes even previously tolerant and open-minded individuals could get caught up in this seemingly all-encompassing wave of intolerance and suspicion. In January 1915, for instance, the German-born British national Walter Lewenz, who had just been released on parole after several weeks in Ruhleben camp to find that his (and his fellow internees’) children had been expelled from their German schools, was shocked when his attempt to gain the support of one of his neighbours in Grünewald, the famous liberal Berlin law professor and constitutional expert Gerhard Anschütz, ended in an angry rebuttal. Anschütz replied to him:That the children of British internees have been excluded from all German schools is a natural consequence of the war between the two nations. I simply cannot understand why anybody would be of a different opinion. British children no longer belong among German children. Our children will be educated to hate England and so they SHOULD be, since hatred of this kind is now one of our national maxims [Lebensprinzipien]. It would be a gross violation of this maxim were we to allow our children to be educated alongside the children of the enemy. It would also be a very poor way of serving the interests of the British children, since our children – by the very nature of things and as children are want to do – would vent their hatred on them. Thus, apart from anything else, the granting of your wish to have your son readmitted to the local school is impermissible on pedagogical grounds. If I were to have any say in the matter, I would do all I could to prevent your wish from being fulfilled.

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