Search

List of contributors Map Chronology Wm. Roger Louis & Roger Owen: Introduction BACKGROUND: J.C. Hurewitz: The historical context Ali E. Hillal Dessouki: Nasser and the struggle for independence Wm. Roger Louis: The tragedy of the Anglo-Egyptian Settlement of 1954 Shimon Shamir: The collapse of project alpha THE CRISIS: Keith Kyle: Britain and the Crisis, 1955-1956 Maurice Vaisse: France and the Suez Crisis Mordechai Bar-On: David Ben-Gurion and the Sevres collusion Amin Hewedy: Nasser and the crisis of 1956 Sarvepalli Gopal: India, the crisis, and the non-aligned nations Robert R. Bowie: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the Suez crisis Diane B. Kunz: The importance of having money: The economic diplomacy of the Suez crisis John C. Campbell: The Soviet Union, the United States, and the twin crises of Hungary and Suez COMMONWEALTH AND UNITED NATIONS: Peter Lyon: The Commonwealth and the Suez crisis J.D.B. Miller: Australia and the crisis Michael Fry: Canada, the North Atlantic Triangle, and the United Nations CONSEQUENCES AND AFTERMATH: Lord Beloff: The crisis and its consequences for the British Conservative Party Maurice Vaisse: Post-Suez France Adam Watson: The aftermath of Suez: Consequences for French Decolonization Hermann Frederck Eilts: Reflections on the Suez crisis: Security in the Middle East Roger Owen: The economic consequences of the Suez crises for Egypt Rashid Khalidi: Consequences of the Suez crisis in the Arab World Albert Hourani: Conclusion Howard J. Dooley: Select Bibliography

The Federal Republic has made an astonishing recovery from the rubble of war to build up one of the world's strongest economies, yet in political terms it remains hopelessly weakened by the legacy of Hitler. This is a paradox that creates dangerous tensions. This is an account of economic decline and spiritual renaissance. After carrying out more than 200 interviews with Germans of all walks of life, David Marsh penetrates the veil surrounding a well-ordered but vulnerable society whose people remain curiously shorn of self-confidence and beset by anxiety. David Marsh was awarded the Anglo German Foundation's annual journalism prize.

There was nothing simple about Albert Einstein, ever. His apparent simplicity concealed an impenetrable complexity. Even the links to his native Germany were prematurely ambiguous. At a time when most Germans thought their country a hospitable home, a perfect training ground for their talents, Einstein was repelled: In 1894, as a 15‐year‐old, he left Germany and became a Swiss citizen. Twenty years later, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Great War, he returned to Germany and remained for 18 years of troubled renown, years in which he appreciated what was congenial and opposed what was antipathetic in Germany. Long before Hitler's rise, he felt unease.

Perhaps one of Europe's more remarkable achievements has been the creation of a flourishing bourgeois civilization that has never been free from the most penetrating bourgeois criticism. “Épater le bourgeois” was a great pastime of the last century and the sport still seems to be alive. Ibsen'sPillars of Society, published in 1877, was a radical analysis of the moral pretensions and the moral burden of bourgeois society. The pillars of that society were rotten; the life of the protagonist was a lie violating his own nature and that of his fellowmen. It is as if Ibsen had written a dramatic commentary on theCommunist Manifestowithout indulging in the comforting hope that a social revolution would create a new man in a newly virtuous society. In the play, salvation came through an improbable act of contrition and self-purgation; at his most revolutionary, Ibsen thought that the feminine slamming of doors sufficed for human improvement.

Selbst in unserem Jahrhundert der Umbruche ragt die Turbulenz der deutschamerikanischen Beziehungen, die sich zweimal von erbitterter Feindschaft zu spektakularer Freundschaft wandelten, als hochst ausergewohnlich heraus. 1917 brachte ein Deutschland, das leichtfertig nach der Weltmacht griff, Amerika nach Europa; amerikanische Truppen fuhrten die Wende im Weltkrieg herbei, und in demselben Jahr, als Amerika die Weltbuhne betrat, stellte die bolschewistische Revolution Amerikas Anspruch auf die moralische Fuhrungsrolle infrage. Wahrend der folgenden Jahrzehnte haben das deutsche Machtstreben, die amerikanische Macht und die sowjetische Herausforderung die Weltpolitik beherrscht. 1941 brachte die deutsche Macht, zu noch mehr Raserei und Perfektion getrieben, Amerika erneut nach Europa, dieses Mal, um den Kontinent vom Nazi-Terror zu befreien, und dieses Mal im Bundnis mit der Sowjetunion. In den zwanziger Jahren teilweise und halbherzig, seit 1947 konsequent und entschieden, verwandelten sich die Vereinigten Staaten vom Feind Deutschlands zu dessen wichtigstem Freund, Alliierten und Beschutzer —, und die Umkehrung der Rolle vom Feind zum Freund brachte einen Umschwung der Einstellung mit sich. Beide Lander sind ungewohnlich begabt in der Emotionalisierung von auswartigen Beziehungen; als die Vereinigten Staaten im Ersten Weltkrieg gegen Deutschland kampften, schwelgten sie in Karikaturen des brutalen Hunnen, des bosen Junkers; im zweiten Krieg ubertraf die Wirklichkeit des Nazi-Horrors die Phantasie im Westen. Doch bei Kriegsende wurden die Sowjets unser Hauptgegner, und unser Bild von den Deutschen wurde wohlwollender; zudem geriet ein besiegtes Deutschland unter Amerikas Bann — und mit dieser Umkehrung begann ein Zelebrieren von Freundschaft und Harmonie, das bis in die jungste Vergangenheit wahrte.

The author, at one point a prominent Nazi official shares his memories of Hit and recounts Hitler's conversations and opinions concerning politics, marria art, economics, and the Jews.

[Karl Marx (1813–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) are not usually remembered as historians—the standard works on historiography barely mention them—and yet they were not only practicing historians but their dialectical materialistic conception of history was the core of their system and had a profound impact on subsequent historical thought and writing. For Marx himself the formulation of historical materialism in the mid-1840’s represented the link between his earlier philosophical interest and his later concern with the economic structure and the political development of capitalistic society. The German Ideology (written by Marx and Engels in 1846, published in its entirety only in 1932), from which the following selection is taken, contained the first exposition of historical materialism: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” The modes of production and the social relations to which they give rise determine the consciousness of men, the ideological superstructure of society Both in short historical studies of the 1848 Revolution—Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (1850) and Engels’ Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1852)—and in several studies on remoter periods—Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany (1850)—Marx and Engels sought to analyze particular historical events in light of their historical system.

[The only son of an impoverished printer whom Napoleon had persecuted, Jules Michelet (1798–1874) became the foremost historian of the French people. His historical works were highly personal creations, combining an immediate sympathy with the past—aroused first by his childhood visits to the Lenoir National Museum—a broad philosophical interest, a scrupulous attention to neglected primary sources, a rich, poetic style, and an ardent patriotism which led him to personify the object of his love, France, and to glorify equally, in his first works at least, each period of its history. In 1824 Michelet discovered by chance and immediately translated Vico’s Scienza Nuova which gave philosophic sanction to his spontaneous belief that the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions, shaped history. An enthusiastic teacher, he published in 1827 a Precis d’histoire moderne, a brief, but highly original, essay on the unity of modern history, which until 1850 guided historical instruction in French schools. After a History of Rome, Michelet wrote the first six volumes of his History of France (1833–1843; eleven other, less judicious volumes, 1855–1867); eleven other, less judicious volumes, 1855–1867); these early volumes depicted in a series of tableaux the unfolding life of the French people, its physical environment, its spirit and its heroes, and ended with the poignant portrait of Saint Joan.

[As a historian, critic, teacher, Jacques Barzun (b. 1907) has had a marked influence on contemporary academic life, and especially on the teaching of the humanistic disciplines. In his works on European and American culture, past and present, he has come to define a genre of cultural history which comprehends the history of thought and society and yet is distinct from the more exclusive field of intellectual history and the all-embracing efforts of the cultural anthropologists. In his studies of nineteenth century culture, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937), Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941), Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Berlioz and the Romantic Century (2 vols. 1950; Rev. Ed. Berlioz and His Century, 1956) and most lately in his Energies of Art (1956) he has defined the unity of the Romantic Age and reaffirmed its creative role in Western culture. The following essay appears here for the first time.]

[Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), jurist, epigrapher, and historian, made incomparable contributions to the study of Roman history. Universally acclaimed for his History of Rome (3 vols., 1854–1856 plus a fifth volume on the Roman Provinces from Augustus to Diocletian 1885)1 his more specialized work included a history of Roman coinage (1860) and a monumental treatise on Roman Public Law (Romisches Staatsrecht, 3 vols., 1871–1876). He originated, supervised, and contributed to the Corpus inscriptionum Latinorum, a collection of all the known Roman inscriptions. The bibliography of his own works listed 1,500 items. Mommsen’s History exceeded in scope and scholarship anything that had been done before: using a variety of sources, including inscriptions, laws, and coins, he reconstructed the history of the Roman Republic from its origins to the reign of Caesar. Mommsen’s History was a literary masterpiece as well, and in 1902 he received the Nobel Prize. His frequent allusions in this work to the contemporary scene—to Junkers, journalists, and proletariat, for example—and his undisguised admiration of Caesar whom he depicted as a democratic leader, attested his intense involvement in German politics, his hope for a liberal Germany.