Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea

by Jan Rüger

On 18 April 1947, British forces set off the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. The target was a small island in the North Sea, thirty miles off the German coast, which for generations had stood as a symbol of Anglo-German conflict: Heligoland.

A long tradition of rivalry was to come to an end here, in the ruins of Hitler's island fortress. Pressed as to why it was not prepared to give Heligoland back, the British government declared that the island represented everything that was wrong with the Germans: 'If any tradition was worth breaking, and if any sentiment was worth changing, then the German sentiment about Heligoland was such a one'.

Drawing on a wide range of archival material, Jan Rüger explores how Britain and Germany have collided and collaborated in this North Sea enclave. For much of the nineteenth century, this was Britain's smallest colony, an inconvenient and notoriously discontented outpost at the edge of Europe. Situated at the fault line between imperial and national histories, the island became a metaphor for Anglo-German rivalry once Germany acquired it in 1890. Turned into a naval stronghold under the
Kaiser and again under Hitler, it was fought over in both world wars. Heavy bombardment by the Allies reduced it to ruins, until the Royal Navy re-took it in May 1945. Returned to West Germany in 1952, it became a showpiece of reconciliation, but one that continues to bear the scars of the twentieth
century.

Tracing this rich history of contact and conflict from the Napoleonic Wars to the Cold War, Heligoland brings to life a fascinating microcosm of the Anglo-German relationship. For generations this cliff-bound island expressed a German will to bully and battle Britain; and it mirrored a British determination to prevent Germany from establishing hegemony on the Continent. Caught in between were the Heligolanders and those involved with them: spies and smugglers, poets and painters,
sailors and soldiers.

Heligoland is the compelling story of a relationship which has defined modern Europe.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany, European History, 20th Century, 19th Century

382 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 26, 2017

About the author

Jan Rüger teaches history at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2002-3, he was a visiting fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

I think this book is ok, but that it doesn't have enough Heligoland. I don't mean that in the sense of Spam, Spam and egg doesn't have as much Spam in it as Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam, but in the sense of having to look at Wikipeadia to see what the population of Heligoland is fourteen hundred at the end of 2015 and to see what language they speak their own dialect of North Friesian, not West Friesian as spoken in parts of the Netherlands nor Plattdeutsch as some do on the adjacent mainland, though I wonder how far that is the case, no doubt Hochdeutsch is widely enough spoken that one need not search high and low for your North Friesian phrase book if you are going there. If the big word on yellow on the front cover isn't a reliable guide to what the book is all about then you might look eagerly at the subtitle, but the book is not really about the struggle for the North Sea either since the thesis here is that any potential struggle was over before it began as Britain managed to successfully implement income tax on a broad basis and so could afford to outpace Germany in constructing warships while Germany didn't and so couldn't.

So no struggle, and not much Heligoland, one might wonder what it is all about. The author declares that this is a micro-history and he references (in end notes) Montaillou, The Cheese and the Worms, The Return of Martin Guerre and others that I haven't read (p.242). This is not a book like those ones at least, not like the ones I have read. In those, one incident, maybe even one person, is studied and this casts a light on broader questions. Rüger's focus is not so tight, he looks at Heligoland between Britain and Germany from the Napoleonic wars to the post war period and Germany's relationship with Heligoland. Perhaps appropriately Heligoland and even more Heligolanders are mostly lost in sea fogs what counts is what Heligoland and Heligolanders meant to the authorities of other places. Rather than a micro-history it is an emblematic history.

Heligoland is a roughly triangular lump of red sandstone closeish to the north German coast, high cliffs on one side which slop down to sand dunes. Despite not having a German speaking population as such though I guess most Heligolanders circa 1800 could probably have managed to make themselves understood to any visiting Germans , or any special historical or cultural significance it was made into an emblem of German identity and aspiration. The little island had for a long time been part of the Crown of Denmark, until it was seized by the British who held it until 1890 when it was traded in a colony swap shop for some bits of Africa that Germany had some claim to. Obviously since it was the British empire and not the Britannic consultative syndicate this caused some upset and controversy down the line as nobody was much fussed to ask or take into account what Heligolanders thought, mostly it seems they wanted to left to get on with a bit of fishing, some judicious smuggling and managing their rainwater supplies, in practice the islanders wheedled around their traditional rights to avoid taxation, as Britain and Germany above all wished the inhabitants to be loyal to their flags and felt that tax exemptions would fill the hearts of Heligolanders with new born love for the Fatherland. Said islanders were in no hurry to disabuse the current authorities of that opinion and this led to the island becoming a duty-free haven for tourists during the nineteenth century, along with its fellow colony of Hong Kong it was one of the last colonies were gambling in the face of the full fury of Victorians Values was legal. In addition to gamblers the island was also popular among hay-fever sufferers and those who wanted to get married with no questions asked about potentially disapproving parents.

On account of its low tax regime, casinos, sea air, lack of despotic rulers (like Queen Victoria's uncle in nearby Hanover) and basically indifferent marriage registrars, the island was visited by Harry Heine, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (who wrote what is now the German national anthem there), August Strindberg (who married there) and Werner Heisenburg who claimed to have made a breakthrough in his physics there among many others and eventually booze cruising day trippers. Later Leni Riefenstahl acted there - the cliffs were a substitute for the Alps (I guess some clever camera angles were needed and many retakes due to seagulls). The kaiser had impressive fortifications built into the cliffs which were demolished after the war, during the Nazi period in terms of emblematic history the Nazis went mad over the island, since Heligoland sounds vaguely like holy land in German, Himmler funded research to prove that the island was the Aryan Atlantis sending drivers there to see if in prehistoric times the place had been far bigger than it was even more impressive five storey subterranean defences were constructed including an underground hospital - after 1945 the island was used by the RAF for bombing practise (because they could) before eventually the islanders were allowed to return. In between Sir Edward Grey proposed turning the island into a bird reserve, this was not entirely disinterested, I believe he was keen on bird watching or perhaps that was just what he told Mrs Grey assuming there was a Mrs Grey . None of this amounts to a micro history though.

In Rüger's account, by Heisenberg's day, Heligoland had become so natural a symbol of Germany that it was an obvious place for him to say that he had thought great thoughts and realised new things about the nature of the universe whether he had or not. Heligoland had become an emblem of Germany's place in the world, and as a part of that its inhabitants were assumed to be, indeed had to be, intrinsically German, irrespective of their own opinions. Here the reader might think of other similar emblematic places like Hong Kong, Gibraltar or the Falkland islands (and no doubt various others).

In an obverse way Heligoland took on significance in British politics ,during the wars with Napoleon it was a great place to occupy, smugglers carried over industrial quantities of coffee and sugar from the island into mainland Europe and it was a convenient base to recruit the King's German Legion and to transport soldiers from Northern Europe to fight the French in Spain. By 1890 the Royal Navy regarded Heligoland as a liability in the event of war, so Lord Salisbury's government was happy to swap it, this didn't stop politicians and publicists arguing that this was a great mistake and exposed Britain to terrible peril, amusingly one of those who did just that - Erskine Childers - was later to emerge out from under the Imperial skirts as a determined enemy of all things British. This is a topic for another book. Heligoland emerges as sitting athwart a great number of books that Rüger didn't write. There is a simple conception of identity at the level of great empires - here is the flag, the framed photo of the monarch, this what is required of you. Down at the absolutely granular level of the man and woman they might accept that - irritatingly long after they have been given away - or not. Under British rule the Heligolanders made great play of the laws and rights they had traditionally had as subjects of the Danish Crown, under German rule they appealed to their British heritage. Mostly London and Berlin gave in - it was much simpler that way.

A consequence of the Imperial swap in 1890 was that after 1914 there were some born Heligolanders who volunteered for the Allied armies, claiming that they had been born British subjects and so just as entitled to die for the King-Emperor as anybody else, here we might say are the subjects for a micro-history to crack open their heads and examine why they attempted to volunteer and what kinds of identities they constructed for themselves and why one army board might accept such a claim and another deny it - here we move firmly into the territory of modern conceptions of national identity and how that conflicts with the optional or aspirational attitude a migrant might have.

Judging from the bibliography, instead of starting small say with a retired sailor in Newport, Wales finding himself declared an enemy alien in 1914 and working out to consider issues of identity and colonialism, Rüger starts with a broad issue - Heligoland between Britain and Germany but doesn't really settle on any one thing in particular, nothing really comes into focus, the binoculars flitter over the landscape.

[Anatolikon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An example of how to do microhistory well, which looks at the island of Heligoland as a way to examine the relationship between Britain and Germany through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rüger writes wonderfully and tells an excellent story, with the main point being that the Anglo-German relationship was not one of increasing hostility but rather much more measured, while the Heligolanders themselves are treated as a sort of middle ground people who manage to exploit both empires for their own benefit.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought I would find this book fascinating - it is the sort of book about an obscure or curious footnote/lacuna in Britain's imperial history that can provide a broader light on a bigger subject -such as Anglo-German rivalry, etc. - but it just didn't do it for me. I couldn't help thinking that the author thought that he could/would find a new way of looking at or insight into British/German history and interactions through that curious outcrop in the North Sea (the only really interesting thing I discovered was that what we in Britain now call the North Sea we used to call the German Sea and it was only with the decline of UK/German relations under Kaiser Wilhelm II that it was retitled and the older, and probably more honest title, forgotten) but that he didn't and what we have is a largely pedestrian examination of a micro history which relates to, but does not really shine any meaningful light on, larger issues.

At least for me it didn't - professional reviewers have praised the book - it was one of the nominated history books of the year - so maybe I am being obtuse - I certainly would not tell anyone not to read it - only warn them that if disappointed or unsatisfied that their experience is not unique. The sense of disappointment I felt was possibly because, as an Irishman, I could see echoes of the Heligolander's plight in that of the Irish before WWI (although obviously different because Ireland was, theoretically not a colony but a part of the UK) and all other Imperial territories and citizens who while obliged to be subjects of the crown could never quite be sure that the loyalty demanded of them in law would be reciprocated by any real commitment on the Imperial countries part. To often citizens of the empire of Britain's overseas territories found that while their obligations to the mother country were unlimited the opposite was never the case and they could be discarded and cease to be part of Britain with a casualness that should shock.

So I think this book a failure - but if the subject appeals then give it a chance - I could be very wrong in my criticisms.

[Richard Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought Jan Rüger‘s Heligoland on a hunch, having read two highly complimentary reviews. The hunch was that I would enjoy the book very much indeed, not least because the subject matter seemed to echo a number of themes explored by one of my favourite writers, W.G. Sebald. My hunch was correct: Heligoland is a fantastic read.

The eponymous subject of this book is a pair of small islands in the German Bight of the North Sea. Annexed from Denmark by the British during the Napoleonic Wars to prevent it becoming a French naval stronghold, the archipelago became a base for British wartime smuggling and espionage operations. It became an official British colony with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1814. Two years later, Heligoland rebranded as a seaside spa, which in later years (to the consternation of the British) became a major centre for gambling, and a refuge for German revolutionaries.

After the unification of Germany, Heligoland was much coveted by Bismarck, who saw it as a launchpad to German imperial ambitions. The colony was eventually horse-traded with Germany for unopposed British access to Zanzibar. The main island was heavily fortified by its new owners in advance of the First World War, during which, thanks to the new fortifications, it saw very little action. The fortifications were dismantled in line with a provision of the Versailles Treaty after the war. The resentment this caused in Germany became a major source of Nazi propaganda between the wars.

When the Nazis rose to power, they heavily refortified the main island. But the advent of aerial warfare had made Heligoland less strategically important. It was largely ignored by the allies during the Second World War until, in the final days of the war, it was blanket-bombed to such an extent that the Germans were forced to desert the island. To add insult to injury, in the years immediately after the war, the British used Heligoland as a bombing range. But the ultimate insult came in 1947, when they did their level best to level the island by setting off stockpiles of wartime munitions in a single ‘Big Bang’. The explosion changed the geology of the island forever. After a coordinated series of protests, Heligoland was finally returned to German control in 1947, where it remains to this day.

Rüger’s fascinating history of the archipelago is really a history of Anglo-German relations over the last two-hundred years. It shows how continent-wide political manoeuvrings had profound effects on the two tiny islands. It’s a wonderful example of describing major themes by concentrating on small, specific examples.

The Sebaldian themes that emerge throughout the book include the Napoleonic Wars, the North Sea (née German Ocean), the leisure activities of the idle rich, aerial warfare, war crimes, and walk-on parts by assorted artists and despots. Even Werner Heisenberg makes an unexpected appearance. It was during a prolonged visit to Heligoland in 1925 that he first formulated quantum theory: a circumstance that seems metaphorically apt, bearing in mind Heligoland’s uncertain position during much of its political history.

Highly recommended.

[Paulibrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A potted history of an island that signifies all that was wrong and all that is right for Anglo-German relations. In 1805, Helgoland [German spelling] was won in a battle between the British and Denmark. 85 years of unique ownership later, Britain swapped Helgoland for the German island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Africa and Helgoland became German. But what both England and Germany found out during their terms of ownership was that the Helgolanders were a type of person not to be dealt with lightly. Also, strategically, this was to prove a thorny issue for the British, giving up such land so close to the German mainland. In the next few decades, both World Wars saw the island fortified and destroyed twice. An in-depth account of what happened to this tiny place over the years 1805 to the present day.

[Tom Simpkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about a little unknown piece of land and history in Europe

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive, exhaustively researched and elegantly written. The use of th Heligoland story as a prism for analysing the British-German relationship since Napoleon works very well.

[Richard Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read giving a lengthy account for a spit of land which i never knew was that important

[Chris Wares · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story about a unique frontier between Britain and Germany and the strange role it played during the Napoleonic Wars, WW1 and WW2.

Well researched but I felt that the island and the personalities that inhabited it could have been given more colour.