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

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By Jan Rüger

Oxford University Press, 2017

Douglas Peifer (USAF Air War College), Reviewer

Originally Presented at H-Net, March 2020

Heligoland—or Helgoland to the Germans—is not simply a geographic reality but a “product of the imagination,” according to Jan Rüger, a scholar of Anglo-German relations and professor at Birbeck, University of London (p. 6). The small archipelago is located in the heart of the German Bight, some 43 miles from Cuxhaven at the Elbe River’s outlet and five hours by sea from Hamburg. The archipelago consists of two small islands once connected to each other, a low-level uninhabited sand dune, and a slightly larger inhabited island famous for its towering, scenic, red sandstone cliffs. The Royal Navy seized Heligoland from the Danes during the Napoleonic Wars, with Britain retaining the island for much of the 19th century until exchanging it with the German Empire in 1890 in return for German concessions in East Africa. Rüger’s micro-study is more than a study of a small island located in the strategic southeastern corner of the North Sea. It is a beautifully written examination of Anglo-German relations over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, using the real and imagined Heligoland to analyze the local and global interplay of British and German Romanticism, nationalism, imperialism, navalism, culture, and tourism. 

Rüger draws on art, poetry, film, music, maps, and popular culture alongside diplomatic and military records to examine the meaning British and German visitors, officials, and statesmen attached to the island. Inhabited since prehistoric times, the island was home to inhabitants who spoke a Frisian dialect, stubbornly defending their historic rights and identity, as ownership of the island shifted from the Kingdom of Denmark to the British Empire to Imperial Germany. Heligoland provides a prism for assessing Anglo-German relations as Germany evolved from a confederation of states following the Napoleonic Wars to an empire dominated by Prussia during the final decades of the long 19th century to a republic following the First World War, then becoming the Third Reich, then two Germanies anchored in opposing Cold War alliances, and finally a united, democratic Germany after 1990. Consciously shifting the focus of analysis away from politicians, diplomats, and admirals, Rüger uses Heligoland to paint a nuanced, differentiated picture of Anglo-German cooperation, confrontation, and interaction over two centuries. 

The book is organized chronologically, with nine chapters framed by a prologue and epilogue taking the reader from the early 19th century to the post-World War II period. The opening chapter does a superb job explaining how and why Great Britain acquired Heligoland, taking the reader back to the life and death struggle between Britain and Napoleonic France. Following Trafalgar, Austerlitz, and Jena-Auerstedt, France could no longer directly threaten the British Isles with invasion, while Britain faced the grim reality of a Europe dominated by France. Faced with economic warfare and fearful that Denmark with its powerful fleet might align with France, in 1807 the British government decided to preemptively sink the Danish fleet while seizing Heligoland as an outpost to northern Germany. The little island became a hub for anti-French activities, allowing Britain to insert spies, support sympathizers, and undermine Napoleon’s Continental system. Britain courted the cooperation of Heligolanders by assuring them that the British Crown would recognize the rights they had enjoyed under Danish rule. By 1810, hundreds of vessels moved back and forth between the island and the German coast, with the Royal Navy protecting the smugglers' haven. Rüger estimates the value of goods shipped through the island over the three-year period, 1809 to 1811, as roughly 86.3 million pounds, which, to put things in perspective, was equivalent to Britain’s annual budget at that time (p. 25). The outpost also served as a recruiting station for the king’s German Legion, epitomizing the bonds that developed between Britain and Germans eager to throw off the French yoke. 

Heligoland Archipelago Rebuilt Today–In World War II It Was Flattened by British Bomber Command

With the tides of war running against Napoleon by the fall of 1813, Denmark abandoned its alliance with France and made a separate peace with the United Kingdom and Sweden. One of the conditions of the Treaty of Kiel signed in January 1814 was that Denmark officially renounce its claim to Heligoland, ceding the island to Britain. Following Napoleon’s final defeat the next year, Heligoland lost its wartime utility as a smuggler’s haven, recruiting post, and conduit for spies and agents. It reverted to what it had been before the war—an isolated island community subsisting on fishing, local trade, and the occasional visitor. One important distinction, however, set it apart from the Frisian islands closer to Germany: as an outpost of the British Empire, it lay beyond the jurisdiction of Austrian and Prussian officials intent on suppressing opinions and publications that criticized their conservative, restorationist agendas. German liberals, radicals, and nationalists could express themselves relatively freely on Heligoland, transforming it into a haven for the poets, painters, and professors of the Vormärz (pre-1848) period. Heinrich Heine wrote of freedom and revolution in his Helgoländer Briefe (1830), and August Heinrich Hoffman (using the pseudonym Hoffmann von Fallersleben) penned the Lied der Deutschen while visiting the island in 1841. The lines of this poem conveyed the nationalist sentiment of a Germany still divided into multiple kingdoms and principalities and would later be adopted as the lyrics of the German national anthem. By 1844, the island had become “so notorious as a safe haven for national liberals and political radicals” that Klemens von Metternich himself warned British authorities that it was becoming a hotbed for troublemakers (p. 40). 

Metternich had reason to fear German nationalism, as the German Confederation experienced revolution, war, and then unification excluding Austria. Chapters 3 through 5 use Heligoland as a prism for illustrating the cooperative and conflictual elements of the Anglo-German relationship in the second half of the 19th century. The British governor of Heligoland was a Germanophile and a realist, an admirer of German culture but one distrustful of Otto von Bismarck’s Continental ambitions. British and German influence overlapped on the little outpost of the British Empire, with Heligolanders welcoming the increasing number of German tourists and investors while retaining the “ancient privileges” the British Crown had promised them (p. 67). The steamship made mass tourism to the island possible, with mainland Germans fascinated by the island’s romantic terrain and its association with nationalist poets and painters. The Royal Navy, well aware that sentiment on the island was becoming increasingly German, believed that new technologies (steam-powered battleships, torpedoes, mines) and strategies (distant vice close blockade) were making the island both more difficult to defend and less important geopolitically. In 1890, the British and German governments negotiated an exchange of territories and claims that seemed mutually beneficially. In exchange for German claims in East Africa, the British government gave Wilhelmine Germany Heligoland. When some British officials wondered whether the Heligolanders should be consulted regarding their preferences about who should rule them, the Colonial Office reminded them that putting the matter to a plebiscite might be unwise as other British territories might point to this as a precedent that should apply to them as well. 

The Anglo-German Treaty of 1890 was based on British hopes for a continued, cooperative relationship with the new German Empire. Rüger analyzes how these hopes withered over the next decade, as Wilhelm II made the fateful decision to build a battleship navy designed to coerce Great Britain. Heligoland again serves a microcosm for understanding the changing relationship between Germany and Britain. Heligolanders had been given the option of choosing British or German citizenship, and one could find islanders serving on both British and German merchant ships well after the transfer of the territory. Some Heligolanders, at sea when the treaty was signed, left Heligoland as subjects of the British Crown only to discover upon their return that they were now Germans. Yet if cooperation was ascendant in 1890, by the close of the decade suspicion had replaced it. The German government, entranced by Alfred von Tirpitz’s assurances that a German fleet could force Britain to support its global ambitions, transformed the island into a mighty fortress with heavy guns and searchlights. The story of Heligoland, in short, is more than a micro-study of a small island. Instead, Rüger elegantly uses the small to illustrate the large, embedding his account of the changing character of the island into an analysis of Anglo-German relations. The Tirpitz Plan, the Crowe Memorandum, and the Moroccan crises all find their place in Rüger’s account, as the author deftly moves from the local to the global and from the military/diplomatic spheres to the cultural and economic realms. 

The second half of the book takes the reader through the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Second World War, concluding with a chapter about how the Federal Republic was able to convince Britain to return the island to Germany as the Cold War transformed enemies into allies. Military historians looking for detailed discussion of what units were stationed on the island, of its effectiveness as a screen for minelayers/sweepers, or of the importance in the Second World War of the island’s radars and airbase for the air war over Germany will be disappointed at the level of detail. Rüger likewise touches only lightly on the experience/memories of the 6,000-strong garrison stationed on the island, though one might surmise that the massive Allied air attacks on the island must have made life a terrifying experience. Yet Rüger’s purpose is not to write a military history but rather to use Heligoland as a mirror for the broader dynamics reflecting Anglo-German relations. His discussion of how and why Britain returned the island to German control after both world wars is superb, illustrating the unequal dialogue between victor and vanquished, between occupier and occupied. Britain reluctantly returned Heligoland to Germany after the First World War on the condition it be thoroughly demilitarized. Fifteen years later, Adolf Hitler’s Germany set out to make the island a fortress of unparalleled strength, with grandiose visions of transforming it into a first-rate naval strongpoint by dredging additional land, building piers that stretched far into the North Sea, and constructing an airfield. After World War II, British military authorities planned to retain the island long into the future as a bombing range. Operation Big Bang, conducted in 1947, was the largest detonation of conventional ammunitions to date, destroying what was left of its already devastated fortifications. In fascinating detail, Rüger unpacks how pacifist and environmentalist West German student groups protesting British devastation of the island were spurred on by East German agents intent on creating fissures between Konrad Adenauer’s Germany and Great Britain. Britain returned the island to West German control in 1952, as the Anglo-German relationship entered its next phase, one of cooperation between the UK and West Germany as partners in a Western military alliance confronting the Soviet Union, its Germany (the Democratic Republic of Germany), and the satellite states of the Warsaw Pact. 

Rüger’s Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea succeeds brilliantly in exposing how Britons and Germans moved from admiration to antagonism, from cooperation to conflict, intermingling elements of both during the long 19th century, between the world wars, and after the Second World War. Focusing on the specific, it illustrates the shifting dynamics of the general relationship. The micro-study references higher level diplomacy and the military dimensions of the Anglo-German relationship but focuses on how art, poetry, music, and the everyday interactions of islanders, visitors, and representatives of the state made Heligoland into something more than two small islands buffeted by the waves of the North Sea.

Douglas Peifer

Source: Review of Jan Rüger., Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea, H-War, H-Net Reviews. March 2020.