Last Wednesday, I learnt a new word that filled me with a mixture of glee and shame at Hans Vaget’s lecture Vansittartism Revisited. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and the Threat of World War III at The American Academy Berlin.
“Vansittartism” is a Germanophobic doctrine, set out by former British foreign minister Lord Vansittart in his BBC radio addresses and book Black Record: Germans Past and Present (1941). It states that there is no difference between German leaders (at that time the Nazis) and the German people.
According to Vansittart, the Germans are characterised by “envy, self-pity and cruelty” and Nazism had “finally given expression to the blackness of the German soul”. He based his view on the fact that the Germans had been involved in five wars in the past 100 years (the three wars of German unification and the first and second world wars.) His analysis completely ignored the role of Austria, where Hitler was born and his views formed, (like the Austrians themselves, who in an act of collective amnesia forgot their Nazi past and blamed the Germans.)
As you can imagine, I was nudging the Bavarian with glee during this definition of his people. When I was young, I read Roald Dahl’s The Twits, and I think it is the book that has most defined my approach to marriage – a series of pranks and oneupmanships. The glee came tinged with shame, because Vansittart’s rhetoric is both ridiculous and racist. As Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil makes clear, peoples of every occupied country (except maybe the Danes) were complicit in the terrible crimes committed during WWII.
The lecture, however, provided food for thought. Vaget focussed on the reception of Vansittart’s ideas in the German exile community. Famously, it was a matter of contention between Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht in the USA. While Brecht dismissed Vansittartism completely (as a communist, he made a strong distinction between the German people and those in power), Mann was more ambivalent. His thoughts on Vansittart’s ideas varied at different times in his life, but the lecture proposed that overall, he took Vansittartism seriously and his view was closer to that Willy Brandt – at that time in exile in Sweden.
What is clear, however, is, notwithstanding the fact that Vansittartism is a racist product of the British Empire at war with Germany, the questions it raises – Why the Germans? How could a country that produced some of Europe’s greatest intellectuals be responsible for such barbarity? Who is to blame? – are still relevent.
An Englishman in Berlin 
What an interesting article! Thank you. Your last comment sums up very succinctly the main questions that arise from the atrocities committed in the name of national socialism.
Thanks C!
Thanks for this great article and well these are questions I ask now and then ~ and here a another Award for you 🙂 http://phoenixrisesagain.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/an-award-ein-award/
Please greet Berlin from me ~ I can’t believe I moved away 20 years ago 🙂
How nice! Thank you!
I had that 52 books a year goal too – first year I tried it, I failed, but the next year I made it, so keep at it, it gets easier!
Good word! The fact that Nazism was able to get a foothold in what was arguably one the most culturally refined countries in the world should be a warning to every country, in my opinion. This business of those in power imposing their views on others is a universal human problem, not merely a German one. I vote for freedom and pluralism.
A fascinating article. Although I studied history at graduate level I was not aware of this book. The British Union of Fascists was active in the UK under Sir Oswald Mosley in the 1930s and I’m sure that had the UK been invaded then some people (I think a small minority) would have colaborated with the invaders.