The British Empire in Europe: “A View of Heligoland from Sandy Island.” Hand-colored
aquatint, 334 ⫻ 515 mm, engraved by Robert and Daniel Havell. Published by John Dalten
on October 1, 1811, with the dedication “most respectfully inscribed to his Excellency Lt
Governor Hamilton by His Excellency’s most observant servant.” The island, occupied by the
Royal Navy in 1807 and formally surrendered to the UK in the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, remained
a “British dependency in Europe” until 1890, when it was ceded to Imperial Germany.
Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Stade, Dep. 10 Nr. 10337. Reproduced with permission.
Sovereignty and Empire in the North Sea, 1807–1918
JAN RÜGER
IN FEBRUARY 1916, THEODOR LÜHRS VOLUNTEERED to fight in the Great War. It was
time, he felt, that he did his bit. The Australian authorities were less convinced.
Certainly, they desperately needed volunteers—two new infantry divisions were to
be sent to Europe, and their ranks had to be filled. Lührs fitted the bill: he was the
right age and had no medical conditions. But he was also German, or so the Department of Defence thought. For six months it discussed his case with other government departments, a case in which the terms “nationality,” “loyalty,” and “empire” seemed frustratingly conflicted. Lührs had been born in Heligoland, a British
colony in the North Sea. In 1890, the island had been ceded to Imperial Germany.
The inhabitants had been given the right to remain British subjects, which his parents
had chosen not to do. But Lührs, “not liking the German rule,” had left the erstwhile
crown colony to serve on British ships. In December 1910, he had claimed residence
in Australia, found work, and married “a Tasmanian girl.” As far as he was concerned, he was a subject of the empire.
The Australian Army disagreed. In its view, Lührs’s parents had turned from
natural-born British subjects into German nationals: thus he was of “enemy alien
parentage.” A number of local dignitaries wrote to protest that Lührs was “a loyal
subject of the Empire” and had “no German leanings.” On the contrary, he had
“always been proud to have been born under the British flag.”1 But the Department
of External Affairs was clear: “the enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force of
men of enemy parentage is not permitted.”2 Lührs, who found this to be “an extremely awkward and unfortunate position,” continued to insist that he was not GerEarlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Cambridge, Freie Universität Berlin,
the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, and Flinders University. I would like to
thank David Armitage, Chris Bayly, Linda Colley, Sebastian Conrad, Geoff Eley, Richard Evans, David
Feldman, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Hilary Sapire, Glenda Sluga, and Brian Vick for the comments and
advice on these and other occasions. I am particularly grateful to the anonymous reviewers for the AHR ,
whose suggestions were immensely helpful. The research for this article was greatly facilitated by a
Research Fellowship awarded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and a Sackler-Caird Research Fellowship held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. I wrote the article
while a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Center and the School of History, Australian National
University, and I would like to thank Debjani Ganguly and Angela Woollacott for the opportunity to
spend time at the ANU.
1 National Archives of Australia [hereafter NAA], A1, 1916/10522: Warden, Devonport Municipal
Council, Tasmania, to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, February 17, 1916; H. B. Atkinson
to Minister of Defence, March 27, 1916.
2 NAA, A1, 1916/10522: Secretary, Department of External Affairs, to H. B. Atkinson, April 12,
1916; Secretary, Department of External Affairs, to Warden, Devonport Municipal Council, Tasmania,
March 13, 1916.
313
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man, but a British subject. In June 1916, the Intelligence Section of the General Staff
put him on its Register of Aliens, but admitted him to serve in the Australian Imperial Force. They judged him to be “of good character” and “a loyal subject” after
all.3 On August 10, Lührs joined the 12th Battalion as part of its 22nd Reinforcement.
Seven weeks later, he embarked for Europe. Until the end of the war, he fought at
the Western Front against the country to which the Australians thought he somehow
belonged.4 Several similar cases became known in Britain, Germany, Australia, and
the United States during the war, linking distant locations with a very small island
in the North Sea. They all involved individuals born in Heligoland, whose loyalty was
mistrusted on both sides of the war. In the UK, some of them eventually succeeded
in claiming their status as British subjects, either through enlisting as volunteers or
through registering as voters.5 Others continued to live in a legal limbo, a situation
that mirrored their island’s position at the fault line between national and imperial
histories.6
In the personal histories of the Heligolanders, “nation” and “empire”—terms
that are at once inadequate and indispensable—collided not only during the First
World War, but throughout the nineteenth century.7 Located fifty miles off the German coast, their island sat awkwardly between the British Empire and the various
Germanies that existed on the Continent between the Napoleonic Wars and the First
World War. For Sir Charles Lucas, the head of the Dominion Department at the
Colonial Office, Heligoland was “the point at which Great Britain and Germany
come most nearly into contact with each other.”8 “Contact,” however, was an understatement. A web of laws, practices, and traditions made it impossible to establish
a clear-cut boundary here between the British Empire and a number of German
states in the long nineteenth century. Only toward the end of the century was this
Anglo-German mesh to be disentangled—with mixed results: at the height of the
First World War, the Heligolanders remained bound up with both Imperial Germany
and the British Empire, as the example of Theodor Lührs suggests.
There is an extensive historiography on borderlands in Europe, but that scholarship has mostly focused on the identity politics involved in aspiring nation-states
clashing over contested territory.9 Yet in Heligoland, located at the edge of the ConNAA, A401, Luhrs: Record of Aliens, Intelligence Section, 6th Military District.
On his wartime record, see NAA, B2455, Luhrs, Theo.
5 “Vote for a Man Born at Heligoland,” Daily Chronicle, August 27, 1918.
6 “A Native of Heligoland: Is He a British or a German Subject?,” The Observer, September 19,
1915, contained in The National Archives, Kew, UK [hereafter TNA], FO 371/5967. For the context see
Rieko Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain (London, 2003);
Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law
(London, 1990); J. C. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians in Great Britain, 1914 –1918 (New York,
1986).
7 For “the nation” as at once inadequate and indispensable, see Antoinette Burton, “Introduction:
On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” in Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn:
Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham, N.C., 2003), 1–26.
8 Charles Prestwood Lucas, A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888),
1: 6.
9 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989),
is the classic study. See also Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany, N.Y., 2001); Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, N.J.,
2002); James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central
3
4
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tinent, such national dynamics intersected with a decidedly colonial context.10 The
open-ended nature of imperial British rule met here with the “unfinished character”
of nineteenth-century Germany.11 “Colonial rule” was a continuous process of negotiation between British and Continental European structures and practices, between local, regional, national, and imperial actors. This resulted in a degree of
codependency that seems unusual even when we take into account the well-documented pluralistic character of British imperial governance in this period.12
Considering the interplay of national and colonial dynamics in this “border island” makes it necessary to combine different scales of analysis. Heligoland was
regularly listed as the empire’s smallest colony, half a square mile smaller than Gibraltar and rarely inhabited by more than three thousand people.13 An essay in the
British weekly Household Words, edited by Charles Dickens, called it “a very tight
little island.”14 As in other commentaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Heligoland appeared here as a microcosm of the Anglo-German relationship. By
following this perspective in adopting a microhistorical approach, we can lend support to the recent emphasis on “the local” in imperial and world history.15 “Local,”
however, should not be taken to mean isolation from large-scale frameworks—quite
European Borderland (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008); Elizabeth Vlossak, Marianne or Germania? Nationalizing Women in Alsace, 1870–1946 (Oxford, 2010); Caitlin E. Murdock, Changing Places: Society, Culture,
and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2010); Gregor Thum,
Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton, N.J., 2011); Omer
Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German,
Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, Ind., 2013). For a survey of the recent
literature, see Eric Storm, “Nation-Building in the Provinces: The Interplay between Local, Regional
and National Identities in Central and Western Europe, 1870–1945,” European History Quarterly 42, no.
4 (2012): 650–663.
10 Cf. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June
1999): 814 –841.
11 Geoff Eley, “Introduction 1: Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?,” in Eley, ed., Society, Culture,
and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 1– 42, here 9.
12 Peter Burroughs, “Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire,” in Andrew Porter, ed.,
The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 170–197; John
W. Cell, “Colonial Rule,” in Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British
Empire, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 232–254; Jon E. Wilson, “Governance,” in Philippa
Levine and John Marriott, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories (Burlington, Vt., 2012), 303–321; John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British WorldSystem, 1830–1970 (London, 2009), 1–3.
13 Robert Montgomery Martin, History of the Colonies of the British Empire in the West Indies, South
America, North America, Asia, Austral-Asia, Africa, and Europe (London, 1843), 601–602; Colonial Office
List (London, 1871), 57–58.
14 “A Very Tight Little Island,” Household Words 12, no. 286 (1855): 145–149. The essay was written
by Edmund Saul Dixon and Nina Lehrmann, as Anne Lohrli has established; Lohrli, Household Words:
A Weekly Journal, 1850–1859 (Toronto, 1973), 143, 339–340.
15 On “revealing the global in the local,” see Antoinette Burton, “Not Even Remotely Global?
Method and Scale in World History,” History Workshop Journal 64, no. 1 (2007): 323–328; Geoff Eley,
“Imperial Imaginary, Colonial Effect: Writing the Colony and the Metropole Together,” in Catherine
Hall and Keith McClelland, eds., Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester, 2010), 217–236, here 233–234; Angelika Epple, “Globale Mikrogeschichte: Auf dem Weg zu
einer Geschichte der Relationen,” in Ewald Hiebl and Ernst Langthaler, eds., Im Kleinen das Große
suchen: Mikrogeschichte in Theorie und Praxis (Innsbruck, 2012), 37– 47; Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris,
and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573–584; and the AHR Conversation “How Size Matters: The Question of Scale
in History,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (December 2013): 1431–1472. Donald R. Wright, The
World and a Very Small Place in Africa (Armonk, N.Y., 1997), is a particularly influential example of this
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the contrary. If the “localizing turn” is to have some effect, it will have to adopt scales
and chronologies that engage simultaneously with the micro contexts of local and
regional hierarchies as well as the macro contexts of national and imperial structures.16 A history of this very small place in the North Sea thus has to be based on
a crisscrossing between local, regional, national, and imperial archives. And it has
to consciously bring together the historiography of the British Empire with that of
modern Germany. The two are rarely studied in one context, but they have much
to offer one another.17
This is not only because German politics and economics were closely bound up
with the empire, but also because the Anglo-German relationship can be seen as
exemplifying the broader tension between national and transnational dynamics that
defined the Age of Empire. The dynamic unfolding of European nation-states in the
decades before the First World War was made possible only because many of its
actors were able and prepared to go “beyond the nation.”18 Equally, the establishment of transnational networks and global institutions was directly reliant on the
nation-state’s structures and mobilizing power.19 The “seeds of transnationalism”
were thus strewn not so much through the British Empire itself, but through its
interaction with other cultures and political constructs, some of them, as in the case
of Germany, aspiring European nation-states.20 German nationalism, in turn, developed in a global context in which the British Empire played a key role.21
The case of Heligoland is typical of this paradox. It offers a microhistory of both
the transnational relationships that bound nineteenth-century Germany and the
British Empire together and the reverse process, in which Anglo-German “transnationalism” was challenged by the “nationalizing process.” German nationalists
embraced the British colony as a prominent marker of unity and liberalism: it was
approach in practice, but see also Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the
German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, N.J., 2010).
16 “Localizing turn” is taken from Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of
the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1348–1391,
here 1365.
17 Thus the influential scholarship that has investigated the imperial relationship between Britain
and Germany has focused on colonial policies and diplomacy abroad, while the historiography on the
Anglo-German relationship in Europe, in contrast, has rarely integrated the colonial sphere with the
European. For the former, see Wm. Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914 –1919
(Oxford, 1967); Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial
Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, Conn., 1967); and Ulrike Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen:
Deutschland und Großbritannien als Imperialmächte in Afrika, 1880–1914 (Frankfurt, 2011). For the
latter, see the survey in Jan Rüger, “Revisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism,” Journal of Modern
History 83, no. 3 (2011): 579–617.
18 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference
(Princeton, N.J., 2010), chap. 11; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), chap. 6.
19 Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich,
2009), 1010–1055, is particularly good on this aspect. See also Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson,
Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010), chap. 2.
20 For the “seeds of transnationalism,” see Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann,
“Introduction,” in Grant, Levine, and Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke, 2007), 1–15, here 2.
21 Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 2006); Andrew
Zimmerman, “Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism, 1878–1914,” in Helmut
Walser Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), 359–377.
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in experiencing British colonialism that they articulated their visions of German
nationhood. After 1890, with the Kaiserreich having acquired the British colony, nation and empire were to be symbolically disentangled—in the very period when Britain and Germany were economically becoming more interdependent than ever before. How this paradoxical coexistence of transnational and national (or globalizing
and nationalizing) dynamics was worked out politically and culturally at the edge of
the Continent has much to tell us about the Anglo-German relationship more generally.
WHEN JOHN HINDMARSH ARRIVED in Heligoland in October 1840, he was clearly disappointed. The colony of which the queen had recently made him governor provided
a stark contrast to South Australia, which he had governed previously. This cliffbound island seemed permanently enveloped by bad weather.22 And it was small,
very small—an “isolated rock,” as Hindmarsh wrote to Lord Stanley, the secretary
of state for the colonies.23 Yet what seemed intriguing about this outpost in the North
Sea was the way in which the British Empire and “the people of Europe” were bound
up with one another there.24 The weights and measures used in the colony were not
the imperial ones, as standardized by Parliament in 1824, but those common in most
German states. The most widely used currency was the Hamburg mark courant.
Practically all accounts on the island, including the public debt, were held in that
currency. English was the official language, but German was used in church, in court,
and predominantly at school. Important public notices were issued in both languages. Key administrative functions concerning law, health, communication, and
policing were decidedly Anglo-German in character.
This interweaving of colonial and Continental structures had begun during the
Napoleonic Wars. In September 1807, the Royal Navy had taken Heligoland from
the Danish to deny them and their French allies a stronghold in the North Sea. Soon
after, British and German merchants started to use the island as an entrepôt for the
contravention of Napoleon’s Continental System. Their rapidly increasing smuggling
activity relied largely on Continental networks.25 As the playwright Heinrich von
Kleist observed in December 1810, Heligoland seemed to implicate a number of
German states in clandestine cooperation with the British Empire.26 The Chamber
of Commerce set up in the colony to regulate this trade was made up of traders from
22 State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, PRG 536/9: Sir John Hindmarsh, journal extract covering a journey to Heligoland, June–August 1843. For Hindmarsh’s arrival, see TNA, CO 118/23: Hindmarsh to Russell, October 13, 1840.
23 TNA, CO 118/27: Hindmarsh to Stanley, February 9, 1844.
24 TNA, CO 118/24: The Constitution of Heligoland, Observations, October 7, 1842.
25 For examples, see National Maritime Museum, Greenwich [hereafter NMM], HNL/56/10 and
HNL/56/11 Michael Henley & Son; Landesarchiv [hereafter LA] Schleswig-Holstein, Schleswig, Abt.
174, 166 Rechnungsbuch der Firma Geller & Co., Helgoland, 1809–1811; ibid., Abt. 174, 207 Listen
englischer und ausländischer Kaufleute auf Helgoland, 1810. Cf. Wernher Mohrhenn, Helgoland zur Zeit
der Kontinentalsperre (Berlin, 1928); Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, Deutsche Kaufleute in London:
Welthandel und Einbürgerung, 1660–1818 (Munich, 2007), 216–217, 380.
26 Heinrich von Kleist, “Geographische Nachricht von der Insel Helgoland,” Berliner Abendblätter,
December 4, 1810. Cf. John Hibberd, “Heinrich Von Kleist’s Report on Heligoland,” German Life and
Letters 51, no. 4 (1998): 431– 442.
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London, Hull, Bremen, and Hamburg.27 Between them they organized, as one of the
merchants operating on the island put it, a “most flourishing” trade that made possible the “exportation” to the Continent of “the produce of [Britain’s] colonys and
establishments in East India.”28 At the same time, the island functioned as a place
of muster and transfer for soldiers who escaped the French occupation of German
states. The King’s German Legion, formed to bring together these troops in the
British Isles, had a recruitment base in Heligoland, run by the Hanoverian officer
Johann Friedrich von der Decken.29 This and other operations against the French
that used the island were built on the multilayered interactions between Hanover and
the empire, but continued after Hanover had ceased to be ruled by the British
crown.30
Heligoland functioned as a hinge between empire and Continent here, just as
other British “dependencies in Europe” did, including Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian
Islands, and Cyprus. Contemporaries such as G. F. Leckie thought of these outposts
as part of an “insular empire” that would allow Britain to refrain from too much
engagement with “Europe,” while ensuring British maritime supremacy.31 But the
consequence of these acquisitions was that the British Empire became more rather
than less enmeshed with European affairs.32 The Colonial Office learned this particularly with regard to the various forms of nationalism that it had to contend with
in its “European possessions.” In the Ionian Islands and later in Cyprus, it promoted
Greek nationalism and its irredentist claims.33 In Malta and Gibraltar, by contrast,
27 LA Schleswig-Holstein, Abt. 174, Nr. 207: Listen englischer und ausländischer Kaufleute auf
Helgoland, 1810; Abt. 174, Nr. 176: Vollversammlung der Helgoländer Merchants and Agents, 1809–
1810; Abt. 174, Nr. 208: Niederlassung von Kaufleuten auf Helgoland; Abt. 174, Nr. 209: Niederlassung
von Maklern auf Helgoland; Abt. 174, Nr. 202: Hauptbuch (Ledger) der Handelskammer, 1809–1813.
28 LA Schleswig-Holstein, Abt. 174, Nr. 191: Charles Graumann, November 22, 1809.
29 Staatsarchiv [hereafter StA] Hamburg, 331–332, 1821, Nr. 287: Untersuchungsakten betr. englische Werbungen auf Helgoland; LA Oldenburg, Best. 82, Nr. 362: Aufruf und Bekanntmachung zur
Gemeinschaft mit den Feinden (Handel mit Engländern über Helgoland). On the King’s German Legion, see Bernhard Schwertfeger, Geschichte der königlich deutschen Legion, 1803–1816, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1907); Adolf Pfannkuche, Die königlich deutsche Legion, 1803–1816 (Hanover, 1926); Andreas
Einsel, Dieter Kutschenreiter, and Wolfgang Seth, “The King’s German Legion: Hannoversche Soldaten
unter britischer Flagge,” in Heide N. Rohloff, ed., Grossbritannien und Hannover: Die Zeit der Personalunion, 1714 bis 1837 (Frankfurt, 1989), 299–323. The legion was deployed in Ireland and England
before joining Wellington’s army on the Continent.
30 LA Niedersachsen, Hanover, Dep. 110 A, Nr. 50: Beabsichtigte Insurrektion der Hannoveraner
gegen die Franzosen; Dep. 110 A, Nr. 109: Geplante Expedition nach Norddeutschland; Dep. 110 A,
Nr. 114: Pläne zur Befreiung Deutschlands. For the island’s function during the Crimean War, see LA
Oldenburg, Best. 31–13, Nr. 66–146: Englische Werbungen für die Fremdenlegion in Helgoland; and
TNA, CO 118/32: Hindmarsh to Grey, January 11, 1855, and April 2, 1855; Hindmarsh to Lord John
Russell, June 25, 1855. See also Ernst Julius von dem Knesebeck, Geschichte der churhannoverschen
Truppen in Gibraltar, Minorca und Ostindien (Hanover, 1845); and Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, “German
Voices from India: Officers of the Hanoverian Regiments in East India Company Service,” South Asia
32, no. 2 (2009): 189–211. For the background, see Nick Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–
1837 (Woodbridge, 2007).
31 Gould Francis Leckie, An Historical Survey of the Foreign Affairs of Great Britain: With a View to
Explain the Causes of the Disasters of the Late and Present Wars (London, 1808).
32 Manuel Borutta and Sakis Gekas, eds., “A Colonial Sea: The Mediterranean, 1798–1956,” European Review of History 19, no. 1 (2012): 1–13; Robert Holland, Blue-Water Empire: The British in the
Mediterranean since 1800 (London, 2012).
33 Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession
(Manchester, 2009); Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean (Notre Dame, Ind., 2002); Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the
Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850–1960 (Oxford, 2006).
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London actively encouraged local forms of identity, which it hoped would resist the
irredentism promoted by Italian and Spanish nationalists.34 Yet both strategies, enlisting and resisting European nationalisms, involved Britain with, rather than kept
it aloof from, Continental politics.
In Heligoland this became increasingly obvious from the 1830s onward, when the
island became frequented by political refugees who appreciated the colony as a safe
haven from which to propagate a democratic, unified Germany. The island was close
enough to the Continent for figures such as Heinrich Heine and Ludolf Wienbarg
to influence developments in the German states, yet it was at a safe distance from
the hands of the Prussian and other police forces.35 For Wienbarg, who coined the
title Junges Deutschland (“Young Germany”) for the early national-liberal and literary movement, the British colony was his “Switzerland.”36 “Only where England’s
proud flag is hoisted” could those persecuted on the Continent for their political
views live “in peace.”37 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, too, used the island as an exile,
evading police surveillance, meeting other “oppositional men,” and conferring with
his publisher Julius Campe.38 It was here, in a British colony, that he composed the
“Lied der Deutschen,” later to become Germany’s national anthem.39
By 1844 the island had become so notorious as a safe haven for national liberals
and political radicals that the Austrian chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich,
appealed to the British government not to allow this enclave in the North Sea to
become a place from which “trouble” would be “exported to the states of the German
Federation.”40 The Foreign Office and Colonial Office were hesitant to restrict the
movement of continentals to Heligoland, but they agreed that it would be a bad idea
to allow a German newspaper to be printed in the colony. As Hindmarsh put it to
Stanley, for the “small community of fishermen a newspaper would be useless,” but
a free German press would make the island “the focus of attraction for all the discontented spirits in Germany.”41 There was some protest on the island: surely a free
press was “consistent with the principles of the British constitution,” and so, as a
British subject, should a Heligolander not be allowed to establish a newspaper?42
Hindmarsh’s response was telling, since it made direct use of the island’s position
34 Henry Frendo, “Italy and Britain in Maltese Colonial Nationalism,” History of European Ideas 15,
no. 4 –6 (1992): 733–739; Stephen Constantine, Community and Identity: The Making of Modern Gibraltar
since 1704 (Manchester, 2009); E. G. Archer, Gibraltar, Identity and Empire (New York, 2006).
35 See the police reports in LA Niedersachsen, Hann. 80, Nr. 650, and StA Stade, Rep. 80, Nr. 01231.
36 Ludolf Wienbarg, Tagebuch von Helgoland (Hamburg, 1838), viii.
37 Ibid., x. On the exile literature in Heligoland, see Günter Häntzschel, “Das literarische Helgoland:
Eine Insel zwischen Utopie und Apologie,” in Jürgen Barkhoff, Gilbert Carr, and Roger Paulin, eds.,
Das schwierige 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 2000), 27– 40.
38 August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Mein Leben: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen, 6
vols. (Hanover, 1868), 3: 208–213.
39 Fallersleben gave the completed text to Campe in August 1842, who took it back to the Continent
and had it published. See Fallersleben, Mein Leben, 212; and Roland Schlink, Hoffmanns von Fallersleben
vaterländische und gesellschaftskritische Lyrik (Stuttgart, 1981), 45–69. The song, set to the melody of
Haydn’s “Emperor” quartet, praised national unity, freedom, and the rule of law as the basis of Germany’s future. Performed publicly for the first time in October 1841, it became popular among national
liberals and was used later as an unofficial anthem in Imperial Germany. Its first usage at an official
ceremony was in August 1890, during the German takeover of Heligoland.
40 LA Schleswig, Abt. 174, Nr. 142: Metternich to Neumann, February 8, 1844. See also ibid., Canning to Stephen, February 21, 1844; and TNA, CO 118/27: Stanley to Canning, April 11, 1844.
41 TNA, CO 118/27: Hindmarsh to Stanley, March 23, 1844.
42 Ibid.
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between the British Empire and the European Continent. Although Heligoland was
a British possession, he replied, it was governed by Continental laws, a circumstance
he deemed “fortunate” since it meant that no press could be established without his
consent.43 Yet Continental professors, poets, and politicians continued to frequent
the colony, appreciating its freedoms, despite the absence of a press, as much as its
qualities as a seaside resort. As a British magazine observed in May 1848, the island
had “gradually become one of the principal and most fashionable of German watering-places, being visited during the season by Hamburghers, Prussians, Hanoverians, and people from the several German States, who flee for two months of the year
from the prevailing despotism of their countries to a foreign island, where they can
think, speak, and act with freedom.”44
IN PARALLEL TO THE RISE OF the German national movement, Heligoland thus became
a site where British visions of empire and German visions of nationhood intersected.
Both aspects were clearly on display in the lengthy essay that appeared in Dickens’s
Household Words in 1855.45 “Look at the map of Europe,” it urged its readers, “there
is a spice of humour in the choice of the spot. The advantages which it offers for the
purpose are quite out of the common way. In time of peace, Heligoland is an advanced sentinel, who can constantly keep her eye open on what is passing in the north
of Germany. In war, she is a little Gibraltar, from which, as a centre, Britannia can
send her cruisers.”46 But although this “little jewel” was a “sentinel of empire,” it
had a distinctly German quality to it. Even the waves seemed to “express themselves
in German on our tight little island, although the Union Jack does spread its colours
above it.”47 While being cultivated as a charming outpost of the empire, the island
was simultaneously styled as a national icon by German liberals. What appealed to
them was not only the safety from persecution that the British colony guaranteed,
but also its iconic status: Heligoland offered a motif that brought together nature
and nation in a premodern idyll. Here was a miniature Germanic Ur-Volk, freedomloving and deeply rooted in its natural Heimat.48 Its dramatic red cliffs and exposed
position out at sea, depicted in numerous romanticist paintings, made the island a
“natural monument” (Naturdenkmal ).49 It represented the northern boundary of a
Ibid.
“Heligoland,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 37 (1848): 543–549, here 544. See also
Martin, History of the Colonies of the British Empire, 602. On the rise of spas and bath towns as international meeting places, see David Blackbourn, “ ‘Taking the Waters’: Meeting Places of the Fashionable
World,” in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism (Oxford,
2001), 435– 457.
45 “A Very Tight Little Island,” 145.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 148.
48 On the Heimat idea, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat
(Berkeley, Calif., 1990); Alon Confino, “The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory
and the German Empire, 1871–1918,” History and Memory 5, no. 1 (1993): 42–86; Jost Hermand and
James Steakley, eds., Heimat, Nation, Fatherland: The German Sense of Belonging (New York, 1997); and
Peter Blickle, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (Rochester, N.Y., 2002).
49 For a good sample, see the Heligoland Collection at the Altonaer Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Hamburg. On the relationship between nation and nature in German history, see David
Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (London,
2006); Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (Munich, 2000), 260–273;
43
44
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future, unified Germany; and it signified the nation’s violent conflict with Denmark,
seen as one of the opponents to German unification.50 The twin aims of German
national unity and political freedom were symbolized by a British colony.
The most important context, however, in which British and German structures
became closely enmeshed was not ideological, but legal in nature. As elsewhere in
the empire, the law was at the center of the imperial experience in this colonial
outpost. Historiographical debate has traditionally focused on the political function
of colonial law: Was it a technology of rule or a tool of subversion?51 Recent research
has challenged this opposition by focusing on legal practice as a contest between
different local, regional, and imperial actors that could simultaneously sustain and
destabilize the empire.52 In the case of Heligoland, this contest was complicated by
the presence of Continental laws, which were bound up with British colonial law but
were difficult for the Colonial Office to interpret, let alone enforce. This allowed the
islanders to frame their position by referring to alternative jurisdictions and, more
generally, sources of sovereign power. That this could be an attractive strategy was
demonstrated clearly after 1864, when London introduced a constitution in Heligoland that changed the structure of government considerably. In doing so, the Colonial Office was prompted by the island’s specific financial problems, but it followed
a broader strategy that underpinned the “constitutionalizing” of other parts of the
empire. A string of colonies dominated by white settlers had been granted more
rights recently, with London encouraging a development toward “self-government”
or “representative government.”53 The new governmental structure for Heligoland
had similar aims. Its main innovation was a partly elected, partly nominated chamber,
the “Combined Courts,” responsible for making the key decisions concerning the
island’s finances.54
When the Colonial Office explained all this to the governor, Sir Henry FitzThomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–
1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
50 Alexa Geisthövel, Eigentümlichkeit und Macht: Deutscher Nationalismus, 1830–1851: Der Fall
Schleswig-Holstein (Stuttgart, 2003); Peter Thaler, Of Mind and Matter: The Duality of National Identity
in the German-Danish Borderlands (West Lafayette, Ind., 2009). For the ideological construction of
Germany’s “natural boundaries” more generally, see Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the
East, 1800 to the Present (Oxford, 2009), chap. 4; Peter Schöttler and Chris Turner, “The Rhine as an
Object of Historical Controversy in the Inter-War Years: Towards a History of Frontier Mentalities,”
History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 1–21.
51 For a good survey, see Elizabeth Kolsky, “Introduction” to “Forum: Maneuvering the Personal
Law System in Colonial India,” Law and History Review 28, no. 4 (2010): 973–978. The two positions
are represented by Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under
British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge, 2009). See also Lauren Benton, “Introduction: Forum on Law and
Empire in Global Perspective,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 1092–1100.
52 Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002); Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900
(Cambridge, 2010); Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law
(Cambridge, 2010); Jonathan Saha, “A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta, c. 1890–1910,” Past and Present 217 (2012): 187–212.
53 Hugh Edward Egerton, The Origin and Growth of the English Colonies and of Their System of
Government (Oxford, 1903), chap. 9, offers a classic analysis. For the ideological context, see Theodore
Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a
Greater Britain (Cambridge, 2011), chap. 5; for the political context, see John Darwin, “A Third British
Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics,” in Brown and Louis, The Twentieth Century, 64 –87.
54 TNA, CO 118/36: Maxse to Newcastle, June 10, 1863; ibid., minute by Rogers, June 19, 1863. For
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hardinge Maxse, it included a copy of the Rules and Orders in place in the Cape
Colony.55 This made some sense: South Africa provided one of the few examples
where European and colonial British law intermeshed in a similar fashion, but the
main motivation there was radically different.56 The more fitting parallel was with
those white settler colonies where self-government went hand in hand with an increase in the colonial subjects’ financial self-reliance.57 “The gift which has been
granted to you this day,” Maxse said when he announced the constitution, “is inestimable, it is political freedom, and if properly used it is wealth and prosperity for
the colony.”58 The subject of the island’s debt followed closely behind: “Your finances have not always been conducted in a manner tending to enrich this colony”
(this was an understatement: without the parliamentary grant that London had paid
for decades, the colony would have long since been bankrupt).59 “The fault,” Maxse
continued, lay in “the system which from beginning to end was faulty in the extreme.
It is in order to revise this system to arrange your law code and to place the happiness
of the people on a substantial basis, that it has pleased Her Majesty to order the
inauguration of the constitutional changes which I have announced to you.”60 The
new constitution was a gift that was to be honored by voting for and paying taxes.
To the great dismay of the governor and the Colonial Office, the Heligolanders
were less interested in political freedom than in avoiding taxation. For four years a
stalemate ensued, during which the governor was frustrated by the islanders’ “passive
resistance.”61 While Maxse threatened them with increasingly draconian consequences, they turned to the Continent for help, sending a deputation to Bremen and
publishing a catalogue of complaints against the governor in German.62 At a time
when the map of northern Europe was being redrawn (the German Federation had
defeated Denmark, the erstwhile owner of Heligoland, in 1864), the islanders sought
to capitalize on their position as go-betweens. As at key points later, they styled
themselves consciously as an independent proto-nation situated at the intersection
of empire and Continent.63 If these islanders, whom German nationalists claimed as
part of the fatherland, were in continuous conflict with their imperial rulers, would
Prussia not come to their assistance? Only a year earlier, Maxse had alerted the
the text of the constitution, see Return of the Orders in Council of 7 June 1864, and 29 February 1868,
as to the Government of Heligoland (London, 1890).
55 TNA, CO 119/2, Colonial Office to Maxse, January 8 and 18, 1864.
56 Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 170–183; Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the
Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville, Va., 1996).
57 Fred D. Schneider, “Deadlock on the Rock: Constitutionalism and Counteraction in Heligoland,
1864 –1868,” Canadian Journal of History 8, no. 1 (1973): 23–35.
58 LA Schleswig-Holstein, Abt. 174, Nr. 114: Address by the Governor on new constitution, 1864.
59 Ibid. For an assessment of the colony’s finances, see TNA, CO 118/38.
60 LA Schleswig-Holstein, Abt. 174, Nr. 114: Address by the Governor on new constitution, 1864.
61 TNA, CO 118/38: Maxse to Elliot, December 30, 1865.
62 Beschwerdeschrift der Helgolander Bürgerschaft wider den Gouverneur Maxse wegen Verletzung der
der Insel Helgoland garantirten Rechte und Privilegien (Husum, 1866).
63 For the twentieth century, see Bundesarchiv, Berlin [hereafter BA], R 43 I/1843, vol. 1; Geheimes
Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin [hereafter GhStA PK], I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 311 a, Nr. 147:
Niederschrift der Besprechung betreffend Helgoland am 8.12.19 and Abschrift Bericht Klett, 24.1.1920;
Denkschrift der Helgoländer über Klarstellung ihrer Rechtsverhältnisse zum Deutschen Reich und Preußen
in Anbetracht ihrer Reservate (Helgoland, 1921).
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Colonial Office about plans to annex the island.64 Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian
minister-president, left little doubt that he regarded Heligoland as German and was
“flattering the feelings of the people not only in Prussia but in all of Northern Germany” with his national policy.65 If the Heligolanders sought support from Berlin in
these circumstances, a broader conflict might ensue. In June 1867, the secretary of
state for the colonies, the Duke of Buckingham, went to Heligoland with a naval
detachment, incredulous at the complete lack of gratitude displayed by the islanders.
He returned without having achieved much. Shortly after, another show of force was
needed to prevent a riot on the island.66 By February 1868, the London government
had had enough. It revoked the constitution and gave the governor far-reaching
rights.
THE IRONY OF A COLONY CONSISTING of a European miniature nation being issued a
written constitution by a country that had none, and then successfully resisting that
“imposition of a constitution of British manufacture,” was not lost on the Continental press, nor on critics in Britain.67 Much of the ensuing debate focused on the
way in which the constitution had been revoked, granting the governor comprehensive powers to rule the island as a crown colony. Years later, critics still evoked
the episode as a showcase for the abandonment of “imperial liberalism.”68 In 1876,
Lord Roseberry castigated the government in the House of Lords for having acted
“in the most Cromwellian manner.” The Heligolanders were “as much entitled to
respect for their rights and liberties as were the inhabitants of Cromarty or Rutlandshire.” It was regrettable that the episode had demonstrated to European observers that there was a “difference between our professions and our practice.” The
German press in particular had highlighted “that while we had preached the granting
of constitutions all over the face of the earth, here was the case of our abolishing
in the most summary manner the constitution of one of our own dependencies.”69
British and German commentators angrily exchanged views in the press about “tyranny,” “autocracy,” and a range of other attributes usually reserved for countries
against which the British liked to accentuate the civilizing virtues of their empire.70
As Sedley Taylor, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, pointed out, it was a curious role reversal that the Germans should be entitled to lecture the British about
despotism.71
More than anything, the failure to impose a coherent, London-drafted consti64 TNA, CO 118/38: Maxse to Cardwell, March 6, 1865. The Prussian interest in the island is documented in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin [hereafter PA-AA], R 19552.
65 TNA, CO 118/38: Maxse to Cardwell, March 6, 1865.
66 TNA, CO 119/6: Rogers to Admiralty, July 6, 1867.
67 The Collected Papers of Sir Adolphus William Ward, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1921), 5: 89.
68 On imperial liberalism, see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in
Britain and France (Princeton, N.J., 2005); Andrew Sartori, “The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 3 (2006): 623–642. On the “civilizing mission” of law, see Nasser
Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003),
chap. 2.
69 Hansard, House of Lords, March 13, 1876, 1852–1853.
70 See the press cuttings and reports in PA-AA, R 19552.
71 Sedley Taylor, “British Despotism in Heligoland,” Pall Mall Gazette, January 14, 1876.
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tution underlined the limits of imperial sovereignty. “Colonial rule” was a process
here in which British and German structures and practices were closely bound up
with one another. The “experiment,” as the Earl of Carnarvon called it in the House
of Lords, not only had failed to persuade the Heligolanders of the virtues of “selfgovernment,” it had also done little to counter the increasing influence of German
jurisdiction in the colony.72 Beneath the superstructure of the new constitution, a
diverse set of laws had continued to exist from before British rule. The result, as the
lawyer Friedrich Oetker wrote, was “a mish-mash, such as is to be found in very few
other places in the world. Apart from local regulations, we have to deal with Roman,
canonical, German, Danish, Schleswig-Holsteinish, and English laws and ordinances.”73 The relationship between these was complicated not only by the radically
different political circumstances in which they had been established, but also by
linguistic difficulties. The legal process on the island involved three languages: the
version of Frisian in which the locals conversed; German, in which all legal proceedings were recorded; and English, in which the governor and the Colonial Office
were notified of judgments and verdicts, and in which they issued ordinances and
other legal documents to the islanders.74 All this added to the complex interdependence between British and Continental laws, prompting the assistant under-secretary of state at the Colonial Office, T. F. Elliott, to conclude that no other colony
could offer “such curiosities of legislation.”75
Complicating matters further was the governor’s growing dependency on cooperation with the governments in Berlin and Hamburg, as well as the increasing presence of German residents on the island. Considering all this, Governor Maxse issued
an ordinance in November 1864 through which Heligoland adopted the Legal Code
of Schleswig-Holstein. The Colonial Office reprimanded him that “the substitution
of the law of a neighbouring state for the existing law of a British Colony” was a grave
step.76 It was all the more so since the Prussian-Austrian victory over Denmark in
October 1864 had led to important changes on the mainland (Schleswig was now
ruled by Prussia, Holstein by Austria). As in 1848, London was keen not to be pulled
into the national conflict between Danes and Germans.77 Yet the Colonial Office did
not revoke the ordinance, acknowledging that a high degree of dependency on Continental laws existed in the colony. For legal advice the governor now wrote regularly
to the ministries in Schleswig, Hamburg, and Berlin. By December 1866, this practice
had become so extensive that the British consul general in Hamburg suggested that
a German solicitor be appointed to decide legal disputes arising on the island. The
Hansard, House of Lords, March 13, 1876.
Friedrich Oetker, Helgoland: Schilderungen und Erörterungen (Berlin, 1855), 311. See also Ernst
von Moeller, Die Rechtsgeschichte der Insel Helgoland (Weimar, 1905); and Lorenz Petersen, “Zur Geschichte der Verfassung und Verwaltung auf Helgoland,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 67 (1939): 29–190.
74 Oetker, Helgoland, 311.
75 TNA, CO 118/38: Minute by Elliott, March 24, 1865.
76 TNA, CO 118/38: Cardwell to Maxse, October 14, 1865.
77 For the background, see Frank Lorenz Müller, Britain and the German Question: Perceptions of
Nationalism and Political Reform, 1830–63 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2002); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Vom Wiener Kongress zur Pariser Konferenz: England, die deutsche Frage und das Mächtesystem,
1815–1856 (Göttingen, 1991); Holger Hjelholt, Great Britain, the Danish-German Conflict and the Danish
Succession, 1850–1852 (Copenhagen, 1971); Hjelholt, British Mediation in the Danish-German Conflict,
2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1965–1966).
72
73
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Foreign Office was alarmed that key decisions affecting the running of a British
colony should be “at the mercy of a German lawyer,” but could not deny that the
expertise of lawyers on the Continent was needed.78
The law was clearly not an instrument here through which the imperial state
simply exercised sovereignty over colonial territory. Nor did it offer a straightforward
“weapon of the weak,” designed to destabilize colonial rule. Rather, it represented
a cumbersome form of compromise, which clearly signaled the limits of sovereign
power. In order to govern the island, the British had to collaborate with the neighboring German states. Instead of reasserting imperial rule and spreading British
institutions, they had to accept a messy modus operandi in which the colonial administration was dependent on Continental laws and jurisdiction, to a degree that
was seen by the Colonial Office as unusual even in the context of the diverse legal
cultures that operated in the empire. The Heligolanders themselves were actively
engaged in this interdependency. Their efforts, akin to other forms of “diplomacy
from below” at the fringes of the Continent, aimed to ensure the continued involvement of both colonial and Continental authorities.79 A compromise between the two
was best suited to preserve what the islanders’ representatives projected as their
“ancient privileges.” The fact that this strategy proved remarkably successful until
well into the twentieth century should not be misread as evidence for the existence
of an active form of colonial resistance. Nor can the islanders be persuasively portrayed as engaging in “the art of not being governed” here.80 In fact, they were quite
happy to be governed—and by a “despotic” colonial regime, at that—so long as that
regime continued to safeguard the key privileges that had propped up their local
economy and hierarchy in the past.
While the law thus continued to function as a hinge between colony and Continent, a number of initiatives taken both locally and centrally aimed at connecting
the island more strongly with the empire. Migration, encouraged through the provision of information and financial assistance, proved the most lasting of these “imperial links”: groups of islanders went to work in the UK, served on British ships,
or emigrated, with a particular preference for Australia. The governors, too, linked
the island with other parts of the empire, through their careers and networks as well
as through initiatives that consciously drew on experiences gained in other colonies.81 As in practically all other parts of the empire, they developed a range of rituals
designed to promote a sense of imperial unity.82 Yet loyal addresses and official visits
could not disguise the fact that the German influence was increasing markedly. After
TNA, CO 118/43: Stanley to Ward, December 26, 1866.
Renaud Morieux, “Diplomacy from Below and Belonging: Fishermen and Cross-Channel Relations in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 202, no. 1 (2009): 83–125.
80 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (New Haven,
Conn., 2009).
81 For an example, see TNA, CO 121/1: Draft of an Ordinance framed in accordance with that of
Newfoundland, July 30, 1887. For the broader context, see David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
2006).
82 Judith Bassett, “ ‘A Thousand Miles of Loyalty’: The Royal Tour of 1901,” New Zealand Journal
of History 21, no. 1 (1987): 125–138; Phillip Buckner, “The Royal Tour of 1901 and the Construction
of an Imperial Identity in South Africa,” South African Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (1999): 324 –348; Jan
Rüger, “Nation, Empire and Navy: Identity Politics in the United Kingdom, 1887–1914,” Past & Present
185, no. 1 (2004): 159–187.
78
79
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the foundation of the Kaiserreich, cooperation between the colony and the German
state was formalized in a range of areas, including finances, banking, communication,
shipping, tourism, property transfers, and law enforcement. For public projects that
required private capital, the governor became the co-owner of an Anglo-German
company that had its seat in Berlin.83 By 1875, the colony’s stamps were issued in
both German and British currencies and were printed by the government press in
Berlin. The British Empire was visibly at home here with the Bismarckian nationstate.84
THIS CLOSELY ENTWINED CHARACTER was to be reversed when Germany acquired Heligoland in 1890. The treaty through which Berlin swapped protectorates in East and
West Africa for the North Sea island had the traits of a classic imperial bargain,
clarifying spheres of influence and redrawing colonial boundaries.85 But what
counted for Berlin, to the dismay of the Wilhelmine colonial lobby that coalesced
in opposition to the deal, were national more than imperial considerations.86 This
came through clearly in the official justification of the treaty, but was even more
obvious in the way the colony was “Germanized” after 1890.87 Once the Kaiser had,
amidst much “smoke and enthusiasm,” taken possession of Heligoland, the link it
had provided between the British Empire and the German nation-state was to be
severed conclusively.88 The island was swiftly incorporated into the Prussian state
and its legal system.89 A range of initiatives were launched to make the British colony
German: street names were changed, bilingual teaching and recordkeeping stopped,
and new public buildings and monuments were erected. The seemingly never-ending
83 NMM, TCM/6/28: Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company Limited. The company,
backed by Hamburg banks, was bought by the German Imperial Post in April 1889. See LA SchleswigHolstein, Abt. 174, Nr. 145: Staatssekretär Reichspostamt to Governor Heligoland, March 13, 1889.
84 For an acknowledgment, see PA-AA, R 19552: Bismarck to Münster, March 19, 1876.
85 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980), 205–
209; D. R. Gillard, “Salisbury’s African Policy and the Heligoland Offer of 1890,” English Historical
Review 75, no. 297 (1960): 631–653; G. N. Sanderson, “The Anglo-German Agreement of 1890 and the
Upper Nile,” English Historical Review 78, no. 306 (1963): 49–72; Michael Salewski, “Das historische
Lehrstück: Helgoland,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 116 (1991):
173–192. The negotiations are documented in TNA, FO 881/6146; PA-AA, R 2490–2499 and R 6114 –
6115. The original treaty, complete with maps, is in TNA, FO 93/36/24.
86 On the Pan-German League, founded in opposition to the treaty, see Roger Chickering, We Men
Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (London, 1984); Geoff
Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven,
Conn., 1980); and Arne Perras, Carl Peters and German Imperialism, 1856–1918: A Political Biography
(Oxford, 2004). After the war, the very colonial lobby groups that had opposed the island’s acquisition
discovered it as a monument to Germany’s lost colonies. In June 1931, the Kolonialverein had a statue
of the infamous colonial pioneer Carl Peters erected in Heligoland that had originally graced the German settlement in Dar es Salaam. See BA, R 32/374: Vize-Präsident Deutscher Kolonialverein to Reichskunstwart, June 30, 1930; ibid.: Reichskunstwart to Reichsminister des Innern, August 14, 1930; BA,
R 1001/6516: Franz von Epp to Auswärtiges Amt, April 23, 1929; LA Schleswig, Abt. 320.22, Nr. 84:
Kolonial-Tagung und Werbewochen des Deutschen Kolonialvereins; Helgoländer Heimat-Bund, July
1931.
87 On the official justification, see “Denkschrift über die Beweggründe zu dem deutsch-englischen
Abkommen,” Das Staatsarchiv 51 (1891): 170–188, here 186–187.
88 “Smoke and enthusiasm” is from “Lebe Wohl! Helgoland!,” Punch, August 16, 1890, 81.
89 GhStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 50, Nr. 90: Einführung von Reichsgesetzten und preussischen
Landesgesetzen auf der Insel Helgoland. See also ibid., I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 50, Nr. 89: Vereinigung der
Insel Helgoland mit dem preussischen Staat.
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visits of the Kaiser and his fleet, the parading of soldiers, and a host of other rituals
claimed the island demonstratively as part of Germany. Nowhere was the break with
the British colonial past clearer than in the ambitious fortification program, aimed
at turning the island into a “German Gibraltar.” The island was to be an “advance
position” on which the Kaiser’s fleet could “lean” in its anticipated conflict with the
Royal Navy.90 By 1914, easily half of Heligoland was taken up by military installations. A sixth of the island had been tunneled under or dug into, with bunkers and
depots carved fifteen meters deep into the red rock.91
Alarmed by this transformation, the Admiralty repeatedly sent spies to the island,
some of whom were captured and given lengthy prison sentences. The Berlin government seized on the opportunity to project an image of Heligoland as a victim of
British aggression: this was an endangered outpost where agents were at work, a
symbol of the need for Germany to be strong at sea and bold with Britain.92 Satirical
magazines, in turn, showed the island as a stepping-stone from which the British were
spying out the “German cousin.”93 Nowhere could the englische Gefahr, which justified the Kaiser’s ambitious naval program, be more easily illustrated than here.
Without the support of a strong fleet, the “German island” would be defenseless, just
as it had been in the late summer of 1807, when the British had taken it as part of
their operations against Denmark, culminating in Nelson’s expedition to Copenhagen. For Wilhem II and his admirals, Heligoland was inseparably linked to the
historic fate of the Danish fleet: the island was a constituent part of the Wilhelmine
“Copenhagen complex,” the fear that the Royal Navy would suddenly appear in
Heligoland Bight and do to the Germans what it had done to the Danish a century
earlier.94 The historical parallel was misleading, but conveniently so: it suggested
German victimhood rather than aggression.
In the British imagination, however, Heligoland changed from a forlorn colonial
outpost, that “gem of the North Sea,” into a dark rock symbolizing the German
menace.95 Erskine Childers, H. G. Wells, and numerous lesser authors used the island as a metaphor for what had gone wrong with the Germans.96 Visitors reported
that what had been “an ideal little community” under British rule now resembled
90 “Leaning on Heligoland” became a standard phrase in the Kaiser’s and his admirals’ rhetoric. For
examples see Ivo Nikolai Lambi, The Navy and German Power Politics, 1862–1914 (London, 1984), 119,
123, 144, 250, 256, 333, 345, 350, 354; and Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 224. In
German naval doctrine, the island had the role of a stepping-stone toward Britain, marking the anticipated theater of war. It was, in the famous words of the Tirpitz-Memorandum, “between Heligoland
and the Thames” that the German navy would have to “unfold its greatest military potential”; Jonathan
Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (London, 1965), appendix,
208.
91 Cf. GhStA PK, I. HA Rep. 151, IB Nr. 2571, Bl. 5: Imperial Chancellor to Prussian State Ministry,
secret, October 8, 1890.
92 For high-profile cases that were made public in Britain, see Evening Post, August 24, 1912; and
“Espionage on Heligoland,” Times, March 27, 1914.
93 “Englische Annäherung,” Ulk, no. 37 (September 15, 1911).
94 Jonathan Steinberg, “The Copenhagen Complex,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 3 (1966):
23– 46.
95 See Fanny A. Barkly, From the Tropics to the North Sea (Westminster, 1897), for Heligoland as
“the gem of the North Sea”; and Pall Mall Gazette, August 11, 1890, for Heligoland as “the pearl of the
North Sea.”
96 H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (London, 1908), 99; Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands:
A Record of Secret Service (London, 1903), 105. See also Percy Francis Westerman, The Sea-Girt Fortress:
A Story of Heligoland (London, 1914).
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“an enormous military industry,” transforming the island through “the most able and
clever engineering.”97 When Robert Blatchford wrote a series of articles on modern
Germany for the Daily Mail in 1909 (later reissued as a pamphlet, which sold more
than a million copies), he seized on this imagery. For him, Heligoland’s fortifications
were emblematic of what was going wrong with the Kaiserreich more generally. Machine-like, this “nation of soldiers” was “working night and day” to turn the erstwhile
peaceful British colony into a menacing fortress. The ceaseless building activity and
the secrecy that enshrouded the island expressed “the German motive for hostility
to Britain.”98 But not only did the island change in the British imagination, the Heligolanders themselves were also rediscovered: as a freedom-loving miniature nation
overpowered by militarist Germans who disregarded their rights, erstwhile protected
by the British Empire. Giving the island to the Kaiser had, in this reading, been a
twofold mistake: strategically, because Heligoland now stood at the center of AngloGerman conflict, and morally, because the islanders had been betrayed. Combining
the benefit of hindsight with self-righteous indignation, this interpretation suggested
that the British identify with the islanders as victims of German aggression—the
Heligolanders were a reminder of what happened when the Reich’s expansionism
was left unchecked.99
It was as part of this reinterpretation that the former colony became a symbol
of appeasement avant la lettre. The first official to evoke this link was Eyre Crowe,
the influential senior clerk at the Foreign Office whose “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany,” written in January 1907,
stands at the beginning of the British anti-appeasement tradition.100 For Crowe it
did not matter whether German foreign policy was deliberately designed to push for
hegemony in Europe or whether it merely reflected a confused state of mind: in
either case it was wrong to think that concessions would “conciliate” the Kaiserreich.
The example of Heligoland showed this forcefully. It marked, as Crowe argued, one
of the moments when Britain had shown a misguided “spirit of accommodation”
vis-à-vis Germany. Instead of cementing “the reassertion of Anglo-German brotherhood,” it had become a symbol of the Reich’s menace against Britain.101 Retrospectively, the cession of Heligoland thus marked the beginning of a string of occasions on which, in Crowe’s words, “England’s spirit of accommodation” had been
deeply misguided.102 Crowe’s interpretation was echoed by Churchill and Fisher,
97 William George Black, “From Heligoland to Helgoland,” National Review 58 (1911): 317–322,
here 319.
98 Robert Blatchford, Germany and England (London, 1909), 8, 9.
99 Black, “From Heligoland to Helgoland”; Horace Waller, Heligoland for Zanzibar; or, One Island
Full of Free Men for Two Full of Slaves (London, 1893). For a recent example of this sentimental tradition,
see George Drower, Heligoland: The True Story of German Bight and the Island That Britain Betrayed
(Thrupp, 2002).
100 Paul M. Kennedy, “The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865–1939,” British
Journal of International Studies 2, no. 3 (1976): 195–215. On Crowe and his memorandum, see T. G. Otte,
“Eyre Crowe and British Foreign Policy: A Cognitive Map,” in T. G. Otte and Constantine A. Pagedas,
eds., Personalities, War and Diplomacy: Essays in International History (London, 1997), 14 –37; and Keith
M. Wilson, “Sir Eyre Crowe on the Origin of the Crowe Memorandum of 1 January 1907,” Historical
Research 56, no. 134 (1983), 238–241.
101 British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, 11 vols. (London, 1926–1938), 3: 397– 420,
here 409.
102 Ibid.
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whose mantra “No more Heligolands” meant no more concessions to the Germans,
who seemed bound to use any advantage they could against Britain.103
YET WHILE IDEOLOGICALLY THE ISLAND turned into a metaphor of difference, its colonial past continued to be bound up with its national present. This was the case on
Heligoland itself, which still functioned as a site of Anglo-German contact and exchange.104 And it was the case in those territories that had been swapped for the
island. The East African protectorate of Witu-Land provides a good example. Just
as Heligoland turned German in August 1890, Witu turned British. While the Kaiser’s administrators left the protectorate, most of the Germans living there stayed
behind, content that the British would be reliable partners to work with. This partnership was severely tested when nine Germans were killed after a dispute with the
sultan in October. The Berlin press was outraged, but applauded Salisbury’s immediate decision to send a punitive expedition. Under the command of Sir Edmund
Fremantle, nine vessels were dispatched to avenge the deaths of the Germans. Witu
and the villages where the murders had taken place were destroyed against considerable opposition. After six days of fighting and burning, Fremantle had, as he
noted in his journal, “quite a nice dinner, with a bottle of champagne to celebrate
our victory, which I should have enjoyed more but for a splitting headache, due to
sun, anxiety, and smoke of the burning town.”105 When he was back at sea he had
some doubts, but he remained convinced of the mission’s necessity:
I am not so satisfied with such wanton destruction as we had to effect but it was in the bond,
it is in accordance with African custom, and the lesson it will read to the Arabs on this coast
is patent; but we have killed slaves and devastated a country which had some germs of civilisation. We ought to have aimed at something higher.106
Fremantle could console himself that he had done what the Germans would have
done: “set an example,” as the mouthpiece of the Berlin government put it.107 It was
the honor of “white men” and “Europeans” rather than Britons or Germans that had
been restored. As Sir James Ferguson, the under-secretary of state for foreign af103 Arthur J. Marder, ed., Fear God and Dread Nought: The Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet
Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, vol. 2: Years of Power, 1904 –1914 (London, 1956), 435: Fisher to Churchill,
March 5, 1912.
104 For Anglo-German encounters on the island after 1890, see Austin Harrison, England and Germany (London, 1907), 164, 180; and Black, “From Heligoland to Helgoland.” Anglo-German scientific
cooperation was facilitated by the Royal Biological Institute, founded in 1893 on the basis of plans first
discussed between Anton Dohrn and Charles Darwin in 1869. See Christiane Groeben, ed., Charles
Darwin, 1809–1882, Anton Dohrn, 1840–1909: Correspondence (Naples, 1982), 26; Anton Dohrn, “Der
gegenwärtige Stand der Zoologie und die Gründung zoologischer Stationen,” Preussische Jahrbücher 30
(1872): 137–161. One of the scientists to make extensive use of the institute was William John Dakin,
trained as a zoologist at Liverpool. Dakin returned to the UK in 1910, before taking up the chair of
biology at the new University of Western Australia in 1913. See Dakin’s acknowledgment in “Variations
in the Osmotic Concentration of the Blood and Coelomic Fluids of Aquatic Animals, caused by Changes
in the External Medium,” Biochemical Journal 3 (1908): 473– 490, here 490; and Ursula Bygott and K. J.
Cable, “William John Dakin,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne, 1981), 190–191. For
the background, see Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic
World, 1850–1939 (Manchester, 2013).
105 Edmund Robert Fremantle, The Navy as I Have Known It, 1849–1899 (London, 1904), 384.
106 Ibid., 385.
107 Neueste Mittheilungen, October 31, 1890.
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fairs, put it in the Commons, it had “unquestionably” been Britain’s duty “to inflict
punishment for murders of white men.”108 It is impossible to think of Heligoland
without this dimension. In German and British discourse, the island remained linked
to those territories in Africa that had been “lost” or “gained” in exchange for the
North Sea island. Germans and Britons continued to cooperate here—while Heligoland turned into a symbol of antagonism.
Continued Anglo-German interdependence was also manifest in the islanders’
status after 1890. Much of the publicized rationale for the acquisition of the island
depended on the purported ethnic link between them and the Kaiserreich. The official memorandum stressed that “Germans of all tribes have felt for many generations the pain of a foreign power ruling over German soil so close to the mainland.
They felt the pain of a truly German tribe which, ripped apart from its homeland,
was left to languish.”109 Yet this rhetoric could not hide the fact that it was far from
clear where the Heligolanders “belonged” ethnically or nationally. The case for their
“Germanness” rested on their Frisian origins. In nineteenth-century racial thinking,
the Frisians represented a supposedly “pure” or “untouched” ethnic group, constituting a link back to the early Germanic “tribes.” Yet even Rudolf Virchow, who
argued this case with some force, had to admit that the Frisians were “mixed.”110
Already in 1856, Karl Reinhardt had observed that “the current Heligolanders, like
the current Germans, appear to have no pure origins.”111 Writing fifty years later,
the linguist Theodor Siebs went a step further: the Heligolanders were in language
and customs closer to the British than the Germans.112 If it was therefore unconvincing to claim them ethnically as Germans, government memoranda made clear
that neither were they to be regarded as German in sentiment. In the months before
the takeover, the Berlin Foreign Office sent Rudolf Lindau, the head of its Press
Department, to the island to report on local opinion. He concluded that “if a vote
was to take place whether Heligoland should stay with Britain or be given to Germany, the vast majority of Heligolanders would decide for the status quo.”113 The
islanders still had to be “made German.”114
Wedged in between the British Empire and the rising German nation-state, the
Heligolanders did not see it as in their interest to align themselves too closely with
either of the two powers. The islanders’ main political aim was not so much to be
united with the Kaiserreich, but to preserve against this state the privileges and special regulations that they had enjoyed under British rule. To this end it was important
for them to insist that their identity was independent from both the British and the
Germans. There were voices in the UK that, acknowledging the islanders’ ambiguous
108 Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 349, col. 128. Anglo-German cooperation over Witu is documented in BA, R 1001/959 and R 1001/8875–8881.
109 “Denkschrift über die Beweggründe,” 186–187.
110 Die V. allgemeine Versammlung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte zu Dresden vom 14. bis 16. September 1874 (Brunswick, 1875), 19. See also Rudolf Virchow,
Beiträge zur physischen Anthropologie der Deutschen, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Friesen (Berlin,
1876), 26, 361–362. For the context, see Chris Manias, Race, Science, and the Nation: Reconstructing the
Ancient Past in Britain, France and Germany (New York, 2013), chap. 6.
111 Karl Reinhardt, Von Hamburg nach Helgoland: Skizzenbuch (Leipzig, 1856), 8.
112 Theodor Siebs, Helgoland und seine Sprache: Beiträge zur Volks- und Sprachkunde (Cuxhaven,
1909), 41, 170.
113 PA-AA, R 2496: Lindau to Marshall von Bieberstein, June 23, 1890.
114 Ibid.
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position, called for a referendum. The Pall Mall Gazette even conducted its own
plebiscite, sending a reporter to the island, who confirmed that the Heligolanders
wanted to remain British.115 But giving colonial subjects the power to decide about
their future was out of the question for Whitehall, just as the notion of a German
border population determining their nationality was anathema for the Kaiser’s government. Still, Salisbury was keen to be able to claim that he was acting in the interest
of the islanders, if only to pacify the queen, who had given her consent on the condition “that the people’s feelings are consulted and their rights are respected.”116 In
the negotiations with the German government, he successfully insisted on a clause
that would allow the Heligolanders to opt for British citizenship after the island’s
cession.117 In contrast to Alsace-Lorraine, where those wishing to remain French had
to emigrate, these British islanders would be allowed to stay.118
Theoretically this meant that the Kaiser’s bulwark against the Royal Navy could
be inhabited by British subjects, but the German government went out of its way
to dissuade the islanders from making use of the option to remain British. As Karl
Heinrich von Boetticher, the German secretary of the interior, quipped in the Reichstag, the Heligolanders had not yet “acquired a taste” for German military service and
taxation.119 So the government exempted all those born before 1890 from conscription and ensured that the island would continue to benefit from its tax privileges.
Combined with the Kaiser’s considerable charity, this would surely result in a heightened loyalty to the German nation-state.120 But lest too many of the islanders still
felt inclined to opt for their former rulers, Berlin created some significant disincentives. British Heligolanders were to be treated as foreign residents: they had to
pay a special poll tax and were not eligible for local privileges. And as the secretary
of the interior declared in the Reichstag, in regarding them as aliens, the government
retained its right to deport them should they “become inconvenient.”121
A number of locals protested to the British government that they felt intimidated
by the German authorities, making them “very nervous about expressing their wish
to remain British subjects.”122 To the officials in London, this treatment of erstwhile
British subjects seemed “thoroughly German and not indicative of nobility.”123 The
115 Pall Mall Gazette, June 25, 1890. Cf. PA-AA, R 2496: London Embassy to Caprivi, June 25, 1890,
and Lindau to Marshall, June 29, 1890.
116 TNA, CAB 41/21/42; George E Buckle, ed., The Letters of Queen Victoria, 1862–1901, 3rd series,
3 vols. (London 1930), 1: 614.
117 TNA, FO 881/6146, 97: Art. xii, 2. The right existed for two years and was exercised through
notification of the local authorities. As Arthur Stadthagen, a lawyer and Social Democratic member of
the Reichstag, pointed out, the clause meant that all Heligolanders became “compulsory Germans” in
August 1890. In a second step they could then acquire British nationality if they asked for it individually.
See Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, VIII. Legislaturperiode,
I. Session 1890/91 (Berlin, 1891), 2: 813 (37. Sitzung, December 9, 1890).
118 Alfred Wahl, L’option et l’émigration des Alsaciens-Lorrains, 1871–1872 (Paris, 1974); Matthew P.
Fitzpatrick, “A State of Exception? Mass Expulsions and the German Constitutional State, 1871–1914,”
Journal of Modern History 85, no. 4 (2013): 772–800.
119 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, VIII. Legislaturperiode, I. Session 1890/91 (Berlin, 1891), 2: 751 (33. Sitzung, December 2, 1890).
120 The Kaiser’s gifts to the island are documented in GhStA PK, I. HA Rep. 151, IB Nr. 2573.
121 Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages, VIII. Legislaturperiode, I. Session 1890/91 (Berlin, 1891), 2: 814.
122 TNA, FO 64/1321: Natives of Heligoland electing to remain British subjects (1891–1893). See also
FO 537/17: Marschall to Malet, August 9, 1890.
123 TNA, FO 537/17: Minute by C A Harris, February 21, 1893.
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islanders had become victims of a more general strategy toward forced Germanization that was on display in other border regions of the Kaiserreich, too.124 But since
Berlin kept carefully within the agreement, there were “no grounds on which a remonstrance could be based.”125 It was unsurprising, then, that only a small minority
opted for British nationality. Most of them emigrated before 1914, though some
stayed as British citizens on the island. Others continued in a curious existence in
between the countries, causing much bureaucratic confusion.126 They served as a
living reminder that the nationalizing process was far from “complete” in this borderland between the British Empire and the German nation-state.
FOR THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES, the Heligolanders never lost their status as go-betweens whose loyalty seemed at best divided. It was out of mistrust of the islanders
as much as the desire to draw a clear line against British influence that the government declared Heligoland a focal point for counterespionage and continuously
expanded the police presence on the island.127 The commander of the naval station
hired a number of informants, who supplied him with details about islanders who
had British contacts or seemed otherwise “unreliable.” On the basis of this information, he kept a secret list of locals who would be arrested in the event of war.128
In November 1907, he noted that “the vast majority” of Heligolanders “cannot be
trusted.”129 The Kaiser even sent his self-acclaimed master spy, Gustav Steinhauer,
to keep an eye on the islanders. As Steinhauer put it, they were not trustworthy
because they “all spoke English” and “had relatives in England and America.”130
It was mostly out of fear of espionage and sabotage that German mobilization
plans foresaw the deportation of all Heligolanders in the case of a war with Britain.131
In the early hours of August 2, 1914, the “evacuation” of this conflicted Anglo-German borderland was initiated, two days before a state of war was to exist between
Britain and Germany.132 The majority of the islanders were transferred to temporary
accommodations in Hamburg, where they continued to be observed. The British
citizens among them were deported to the Ruhleben camp outside Berlin, like most
124 TNA, FO 537/17: Minute by H C M Lambert, February 20, 1893. For the Germanization of other
border regions, see Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, chap. 5; Jeffrey K. Wilson, “Environmental
Chauvinism in the Prussian East: Forestry as a Civilizing Mission on the Ethnic Frontier, 1871–1914,”
Central European History 41, no. 1 (2008): 27–70; Vlossak, Marianne or Germania?, chaps. 1–2; Fitzpatrick, “A State of Exception?”; William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict
in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago, 1980).
125 TNA, FO 537/17: Foreign Secretary to Secretary of State, Colonial Office, February 17, 1893;
TNA, FO 64/1321: Edward Wingfield to Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, February 25, 1893.
126 For examples, see TNA, HO 144/609/B32890 and HO 45/10732/255947.
127 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77, Tit. 872, Nr. 12, Beiheft 10: Spionageabwehr auf Helgoland; LA
Schleswig, Abt. 320.22, Nr. 44; Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg [hereafter BA-MA], RM 43/845
and 865: Kaiserliche Kommandantur Helgoland, Spionage.
128 BA-MA, RM 43/844: Gg. Akte nur für Kommandanten.
129 BA-MA, RM 43/845: Verdächtige Helgoländer, Ganz Geheim, November 16, 1907.
130 Gustav Steinhauer, Der Meisterspion des Kaisers: Was der Detektiv Wilhelms II. in seiner Praxis
erlebte (Berlin, 1930), 137.
131 BA-MA, RM 5/1880: Tirpitz to Büchsel, December 10, 1905; ibid., RM 43/843: MobilmachungsAngelegenheiten, Ganz Geheim, November 28, 1912; StA Hamburg, 621–1/95 1105: Mobilmachungsverträge.
132 BA-MA, RM 43/830: Kaiserliche Kommandantur Helgoland, Kriegstagebuch, August 2, 1914.
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of the UK nationals who happened to be in Germany in August 1914.133 Those German nationals whom the authorities suspected to have connections to individuals or
institutions in Britain were also arrested.134 No islanders born before 1890 were
meant to serve in the Kaiser’s army, but some of them did end up at the Western
Front. When British forces stormed a position near Saint Julien in Flanders in July
1915, they took prisoner a soldier in German uniform who claimed to be British.
They thought he was joking, but he was serious, insisting that he had been born in
a North Sea colony under the British flag.135
In Britain, too, the Heligolanders’ ambiguous status made them suspect. Those
islanders who lived in the UK but had German citizenship or were “known to have
German sympathies” came under police surveillance.136 John Elias Dirks was one
of them. He had left the British colony as a young man to serve on British ships and
had then become resident in Newport, Wales. But since his parents had not opted
for British nationality after 1890, the UK authorities regarded him as German. He
was arrested as an enemy alien in October 1914.137 A month earlier, a similar case
had ended with the opposite result when another islander, Bernhardt Baron, was
prosecuted under the Aliens Restriction Act. The act had been passed by Parliament
in August 1914 in order to “remove or restrain the movement of undesirable
aliens.”138 The prosecution argued that Baron, a former inhabitant of Heligoland,
was German: he had not declared his wish to remain a British citizen after the island’s
cession, nor had he been naturalized since, while a UK resident. Yet in direct contradiction of the line taken by the Home Office in a number of similar cases, the
government declared that Baron had “not become a German.”139 He was discharged
and left the courtroom as a naturally born British subject.
British colonial and German national contexts continued to be bound up in such
personal histories. This was the case not only in Britain and Germany, but also in
the more distant locations where some of the islanders had settled, especially in
Australia and the U.S. Those who volunteered during the war had to realize that even
here their nationality remained contested. Some of them succeeded in persuading
the authorities to let them enlist, including Theodor Lührs. Charles Bertholdt Nissen
provided another case. Rather than state his nationality directly as British or German, he described himself as “born in Heligoland when under Great Britain.” The
authorities at Blackboy Hill, the Western Australian training camp, accepted him on
that basis as a subject of the empire. At the age of 37, he enlisted and embarked for
the Dardanelles on June 6, 1915. He joined his unit there on August 4. Two days
later, he was shot in the opening phase of the Allies’ August Offensive. Badly injured
with a stomach wound, he was transferred to a hospital ship, where he died the same
day. He was buried at sea on August 7. For years after his death, the Australian
133 Matthew Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914 –1918 (Manchester, 2008).
134 BA-MA, RM 43/866, 377–378.
135 Letter to the editor, Times, October 9, 1939.
136 TNA, HO 45/10732/255947: Chief Constable of Newport to Under Secretary of State, Home
Office, October 22, 1914.
137 Ibid.
138 As announced by Reginald McKenna, the home secretary; Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 65,
col. 1986 (August 5, 1914). On the act, see Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians in Great Britain, 14 – 44.
139 The Observer, September 19, 1915; Durham County Record Office, PS/CE 9, 101, 111.
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Department of Defence tried to find a relative to whom his personal belongings and
posthumous decorations could be given, but none could be located in Australia—
they were likely to be in Germany.140
Neither in Imperial Germany nor in the United Kingdom and its empire was there
a consistent line by which the Heligolanders’ status was treated during the war: too
much was their island bound up with both the German and the British pasts. In the
United States, too, the islanders remained “orphans” of both empire and nationstate.141 When Fred Kuchlenz, a resident of San Francisco, was drafted in 1917, the
local military board rejected him on the grounds that he was German. Yet his
brother, born like him in Heligoland, was accepted and sent to the army camp at
American Lake, Washington. All the while, the Kuchlenzes had relatives in Germany
who had been arrested and deported from the island on suspicion of having foreign
sympathies.142
The conflicted position of the Heligolanders at the intersection of the British
Empire and the German nation-state continued after 1914 not only in their biographies, but also in their political activities. After the war, with the island demilitarized under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, leading representatives again
took on the roles of Anglo-German go-betweens and lobbied the British government
to re-annex the former colony. As a petition of March 1919 put it, “the inhabitants
of Heligoland continually remember the glorious times which they were able to enjoy
under the British flag.” The islanders “were all entirely of the opinion that we should
now return again to our old flag.” It had been an injustice when “the British government exchanged us without our approval” in 1890. Since it had not “obtained the
view of its faithful subjects” then, it should do so now.143 A series of similar appeals
followed, some of which were published and caused heated debates.144 But the British and the German governments were no more inclined to grant the islanders a
referendum in the 1920s than they had been in the 1890s. While the German press
lambasted the Heligolanders as traitors, the Berlin government made a range of
concessions to the islanders, which eventually ensured that the separatist activities
stopped.145
SITUATED AT THE FAULT LINE between imperial and national histories, this very small
place in the North Sea provided a surprisingly long-lasting link between the British
and German pasts. For much of the nineteenth century, colonial British and German
national structures were closely entwined here. The governor, appointed by the
queen and responsible to the Colonial Office, was embedded in the global context
of empire, but key instruments of his rule, including taxation and legislation, were
NAA, B2455: Charles Bertholdt Nissen.
For “orphans of empire” see John Darwin, “Orphans of Empire,” in Robert Bickers, ed., Settlers
and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford, 2010), 329–345.
142 TNA, FO 371/5967, 154: excerpt from “Drafted Man Is Very Certain He Is Not German,” San
Francisco Examiner, n.d.
143 TNA, FO 608/141: Letter by Heligolanders, January 19, 1919.
144 See the press cuttings and transcripts of parliamentary debates in PA-AA, R 77407–77408, and
TNA, ADM 116/1981.
145 PA-AA, R77408: Besprechung über die Helgolandfrage, November 17, 1920.
140
141
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dependent on his cooperation with Continental governments and could be successfully challenged by local society. By the late 1870s, he was as much a client of the
Imperial German government as a patron of his colony. Sovereignty was very much
“an uncertain and uneven phenomenon” in this Anglo-German borderland and continued to be so long after the island had been ceded.146
The interactions that bound this British colony and the Kaiserreich together were
transnational in nature, no doubt.147 Yet this label alone does little to reveal the
paradoxical relationship between globalizing and nationalizing processes that unfolded in this period, and which is exemplified by the case of Heligoland. At the very
time when transnational structures were beginning to challenge national boundaries,
the appeal and resourcefulness of “the national” were also heightened. Historians
have been slow to explore the relationship between the two, but it seems convincing
to see them as intrinsically interdependent phenomena.148 Nor did transnational
connections operate in a linear, one-directional fashion. They did reinforce the British state as a result of imperial expansion, but they also challenged that construct.
Historians have seen the empire as a global beneficiary of “transnationalism,” but
the limits to imperial rule were often enough to be found in the very networks that
were meant to underpin it—challenging colonial rule was just as transnational in
character as colonial rule itself. Thus we should be cautious about advancing too
linear or enthusiastic an interpretation of this period as global and transnational.
Rather than claiming the victory of transnational history over the “methodological
nationalism” of traditional historiography, historians ought to investigate more
closely the interactions between the two fields, between the nationalizing and globalizing dynamics at work in the Age of Empire.149
This seems particularly fruitful in scenarios where the Continental European and
imperial British pasts intersect. For some time now, historians have tended to focus
on one or the other, in research as much as in teaching. This has been informed by
calls in British historiography for the empire to be understood as distinct from the
European perspective. John Pocock has been particularly influential in theorizing
this divide, urging British historians not to fall for the supposedly hegemonic perspective of “Europe,” “that tendentious and aggressive term.”150 Britain was not the
Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 306.
On transnational history, see the AHR Conversation “On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441–1464; as well as Jürgen Osterhammel, “Transnationale
Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternative?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, no. 3 (2001):
464 – 479; Sebastian Conrad, “Doppelte Marginalisierung: Plädoyer für eine transnationale Perspektive
auf die deutsche Geschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, no. 1 (2002): 145–169; Patricia Clavin,
“Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005): 421– 439; Ian Tyrrell,
“Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global
History 4, no. 3 (2009): 453– 474; Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Transnational,” in Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves
Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke, 2009), 1047–1055; Jan
Rüger, “OXO: or, The Challenges of Transnational History,” European History Quarterly 40, no. 4
(2010): 656–668; Struck, Ferris, and Revel, “Introduction”; Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke, 2012).
148 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im deutschen Kaiserreich, 319–324.
149 “Methodological nationalism” is taken from Kramer, “Power and Connection,” 1314.
150 J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005), 78. For the
original article, see Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47,
no. 4 (1975): 601–621. See also Pocock, “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 490–500, especially 492– 495.
146
147
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“promontory” of the Continent, he argued, but part of an archipelago of “Greater
Britons.”151 As David Armitage has put it, this vision “explicitly defined Britain as
an oceanic entity that looked to the west and the south, and whose connections with
Europe were implicitly accidents of submarine geology rather than a determining set
of relations.”152 Continental historians have argued a similar case, suggesting that
the empire separated Britain from Europe to a degree that makes it possible to speak
of a “special path” that the British took in the modern era.153 This turned around
the older argument about Germany and its “peculiar path” to modernity, the Sonderweg : in this reading it was the British development that appeared as distinct, with
the empire constituting a key distinguishing factor.154 Arguably, the “new imperial
history,” too, has contributed to the gap that exists between British imperial and
Continental European history.155 Its main focus has been to rethink the relationship
between Britain and its empire, establishing colonies and metropole as “a single
analytical field.”156 The rise of world history has lent additional impetus to this project, prompting historians to “write the British empire into world history,” or to “rewrite the British themselves, so that they may be put more accurately in their place
in global history.”157 Regrettably few scholars who are part of the “new imperial
history” have been tempted to take the opposite route toward writing the British
Empire into European history, or indeed toward writing European history into the
imperial British past.158
Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, 23.
David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 427– 445, here 431. For Pocock’s response to this characterization,
see Pocock, “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective,” 491– 495; but compare Richard Bourke,
“Pocock and the Presuppositions of the New British History,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (2010): 747–
770, here 751–752.
153 Bernd Weisbrod, “Der englische ‘Sonderweg’ in der neueren Geschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16, no. 2 (1990): 233–252. See also Jürgen Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des
Nationalstaats: Studien zu Beziehungsgeschichte und Zivilisationsvergleich (Göttingen, 2001), 122, 140.
154 For recent engagements with the Sonderweg debate, see Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German
Empire, 1871–1918 (London, 2008), chap. 1; H. Glenn Penny, “The Fate of the Nineteenth Century in
German Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 1 (2008): 81–108; Helmut Walser Smith,
“When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us,” German Studies Review 31, no. 2 (2008): 225–240; James J.
Sheehan, “Paradigm Lost? The ‘Sonderweg’ Revisited,” in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver
Janz, eds., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006), 150–160;
Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005),
65–81.
155 For a good survey, see Kathleen Wilson, “Old Imperialisms and New Imperial Histories: Rethinking the History of the Present,” Radical History Review 95 (Spring 2006): 211–234. Key works include Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867
(Chicago, 2002); Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture
and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006); Hall and McClelland, Race, Nation and Empire ; Kathleen
Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840
(Cambridge, 2004); Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, N.C., 2011).
156 Ann Laura Stoler and Fredrick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research
Agenda,” in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), 1–56, here 4.
157 Antoinette Burton, “Getting outside the Global: Re-positioning British Imperialism in World
History,” in Hall and McClelland, Race, Nation and Empire, 199–216, here 213; Linda Colley, Captives:
Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002), 19.
158 This applies especially for the nineteenth century. For studies of the long eighteenth century that
integrate European and imperial perspectives, see Harding, Hanover and the British Empire ; and Renaud
Morieux, Une mer pour deux royaumes: La Manche, frontière franco-anglaise, XVII e–XVIII e siècles
(Rennes, 2008).
151
152
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There are exceptions, of course, but the general historiographical picture seems
to confirm Winston Churchill’s idea of the “three concentric circles” that he famously
saw as defining the UK’s geopolitical position: in the center the history of Britain;
around it the history of the British relationship with Europe; and outside of this the
history of the British Empire and its implications for world history.159 But just as
Churchill’s “concentric circles” described a political project rather than the less
neatly divided international reality, the historiographical tendency to interpret Britain’s imperial project in separation from its relationship with Continental Europe
is misleading. The British imperial and the European national pasts were closely
bound up with one another. This was the case ideologically: imperialism and nationalism reinforced one another, especially in the late nineteenth century.160 While
“nationhood in Europe was fast becoming imperial,” British thinkers were busy realigning imperial and national categories in the face of European competition.161
Beyond such ideological interactions, the British Empire and Continental Europe
were bound up with each other in a multitude of colonial contexts. Important processes of transfer, adaptation, and cooperation made it difficult to tell where Britain
ended and where Europe began.162 This was the case in many colonial societies
abroad, but also in those British “dependencies in Europe” on the fringes of the
Continent to which Heligoland belonged. The empire’s instruments and laws intersected here with those of aspiring Continental nation-states, allowing us to study
“in one frame,” as Chris Bayly has put it, “the interaction of the European . . . and
imperial experience.”163
It may well be that the “fate” of Britain being “drawn into Europe” was, as Antony
Hopkins has argued, “forestalled for centuries by the possession of the empire.”164
However, it is worth considering that the empire also had the opposite effect: that
it made Britons engage with Europe. This does not mean that British history in this
period has to be understood necessarily as “European,” certainly not in the hegemonic sense alleged by Pocock. But it does mean that we ought to allow for the
159 Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, ed. Robert Rhodes James, vol. 7: 1943–1949 (New
York, 1974), 7810–7811. This is not to deny that an older historiography has investigated the intersections between these circles in diplomatic and strategic contexts. See especially Ronald Robinson and
John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London,
1961); Gifford and Louis, Britain and Germany in Africa; Stig Förster, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Ronald
Robinson, eds., Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference, 1884 –1885 and the Onset of
Partition (Oxford, 1988).
160 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, chap. 6; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History,
chap. 11; Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, ed., Liberal Imperialism in Europe (New York, 2012).
161 Geoff Eley, “Writing the Colony and the Metropole Together,” in Hall and McClelland, Race,
Nation and Empire, 217–236, here 229; Dane Kennedy, Britain and Empire, 1880–1945 (London, 2005),
5; Keith McClelland and Sonya O. Rose, “Citizenship and Empire, 1867–1928,” in Hall and Rose, At
Home with the Empire, 275–297, here 275; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New
Haven, Conn., 1992); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order,
1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J., 2007).
162 Lindner, Koloniale Begegnungen; Robert Bickers, “Shanghailanders and Others: British Communities in China, 1843–1957,” in Bickers, Settlers and Expatriates, 269–301, here 276–278; Tim Harper,
“The British ‘Malayans,’ ” ibid., 233–268, here 236; Ulrike Kirchberger, Aspekte deutsch-britischer Expansion: Die Überseeinteressen der deutschen Migranten in Großbritannien in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Stuttgart, 1999). For the broader argument, see Jan Rüger, “Britain, Empire, Europe: Re-Reading Eric
Hobsbawm,” Journal of Modern European History 11, no. 4 (2013): 417– 423.
163 C. A. Bayly, “Afterword,” in Burton, Empire in Question, 293–301, here 300.
164 A. G. Hopkins, “Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History,” Past & Present
164 (August 1999): 198–243, here 239.
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British and European pasts to have been bound up with one another in a broader,
imperial context. Viewed from the fringes of the Continent, the dichotomy between
Europe and empire, which is so ingrained in the writing of modern British history,
is not a compelling one.
Jan Rüger teaches modern history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the
author of The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire
(Cambridge University Press, 2007) and is currently writing a microhistory of the
Anglo-German relationship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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