Meeting the Enemy

When British soldiers and civilians entered the Allied-occupied Rhineland after the First World War, they were often surprised to discover that the individual Germans they encountered had little in common with the image of the enemy promulgated by British propaganda during the war. While face-to-face encounters with an often disconcertingly friendly civilian population inevitably forced the British to re-evaluate their wartime visions of the enemy, certain negative stereotypes of the German enemy nevertheless persisted in the context of the occupation. Several British commentators even found it necessary to fall back on these stereotypes when trying to explain the friendly attitude of the local population. To some, German friendliness only served to demonstrate the servile disposition of the Germans towards any form of authority; to others, it confirmed the existence of a supposed division in Germany between a liberal, peace-loving and civilized south and west and the “real” enemy, an autocratic, militarist and expansionist Prussia. Moreover, the British self-image in the Rhineland was frequently constructed in opposition to a real or imagined German enemy. The attitude and behaviour of the occupiers was regularly presented as characteristically “British” and measured not only against how the Germans had treated the populations of occupied regions of France and Belgium during the war, but also against how the stereotypical “Hun” would have behaved in the case of a German victory.