10. Pieter Geyl and his entanglement with German Westforschung

Alisa van Kleef

This chapter explores the extent of Pieter Geyl’s contacts with the ethno-nationalist scholarship of German Westforschung. In the interwar period, this strand of German academia became particularly inspired by Geyl’s involvement in the Flemish movement and his ‘Greater Netherlands’ history. His historical narrative lent itself well to the völkisch approach in German historiography, as both narratives understood language as the founding element of nations and both believed in the Germanic origins of the Netherlands and Flanders.

The Belgian historian Lode Wils was the first scholar to argue that Geyl was a collaborator of the irredentialist Westforschung and that Geyl’s view of history was in line with the historical propaganda of the German Flemish policy of the First World War.1 In a separate work, Wils maintained that ‘at least from 1927 to 1932 Geyl was a kindred spirit of the bourgeois German nationalists whose revanchism hoped for the disappearance of Belgium and the incorporation of Flanders into the Netherlands’.2 Drawing on newly available archival materials, this chapter reconsiders the extent to which Geyl, from his position as professor of Dutch history at the University of London, got involved with German Westforschung from 1927 to 1934. His connections included publications in German scholarly journals, presentations of his research at academic congresses in Germany and correspondence with prominent German Westforschers such as Franz Petri and Robert Paul Oszwald. The extent of Geyl’s impact on their historiographical narratives of Low Countries history will also be considered.

Westforschung, literally translated ‘research on the West’, is generally understood to have begun with the effort by German scholars to use historical arguments against the French occupation of the Rhineland in the aftermath of the First World War, to prove that the region belonged to the German nation. It gradually expanded into research of territories adjacent to the Rhineland in neighbouring countries, where it tried to substantiate German historical influences and as such would become instrumental to Germany’s later expansion to the west. In the early 2000s, historiography on the interwar Westforschung was particularly critical, claiming that already in 1918, long before the Nazis’ accession to power, German historians had hastened to the aid of the German state and offered their academic work to build the basis for an eventual legitimization of the incorporation of the Low Countries and large parts of France into a Greater Germany. The relationship between historical discourse and political interests of the German state of course became even more problematic after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, and especially after 1940, when not a few Westforschers, including Geyl’s closest contacts, would also become directly implicated in the occupation policies and practices of the Second World War, with all this entails.

For much of the period of the Weimar Republic, however, many Westforschers did not argue for annexation but recognized that the Netherlands was and should remain an independent nation, separate from Germany, whereas standpoints on Belgium were a little more ambivalent.3 In the early interwar period, the Netherlands was thought to be a particularly important ally for the German cause against the French occupation of the Rhineland, and historical narratives highlighted the ‘Germanic’ character of the Dutch people, seen as a mixture of Frisian, Frankish and Saxon ethnicities. Westforschung scholarship also emphasized the shared cultural and economic traits between the Netherlands, Flanders and Germany.

To draw on the words of historian Ton Nijhuis, the fact ‘that academics were committed to political purposes and their research was used to defend or legitimise political actions does not necessarily mean that the starting point for these specific research undertakings, such as Westforschung, was inherently linked to the specific political starting points’.4 The result may have been German historians’ legitimation for the eventual incorporation of the Netherlands and Belgium into a Greater Germany; the starting point, however, was far from that. German research on the Low Countries during the Weimar Republic largely understood itself to be in service of the emancipation of the Flemish volk in Belgium and was directed against what was perceived as French influence in the ‘Germanic’ lands in north-western Europe.

The same can be said of Pieter Geyl’s entanglement with German Westforschung. His interactions with German historians in the late Weimar period and their fascination with his ‘Greater Netherlands’ history do not automatically implicate Geyl in the future crimes of Nazi Germany, nor can one make the argument that Geyl intentionally helped to legitimate the National Socialist occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. Still, the question needs to be asked whether he did so in effect.

Geyl’s association with Westforschung

The first time Pieter Geyl associated himself with German Westforschung was in December 1927, when he published an article in Volk und Reich: Politische Monatshefte entitled ‘Die mißlungene Vereinigung Belgiens und Hollands von 1814–1830’ (‘The failed union of Belgium and Holland from 1814 to 1830’).5 In the interwar years, Volk und Reich was a highly popular neoconservative periodical, in print from 1925 to 1944, with a special focus on German minorities outside the Weimar borders. Adopting a völkisch-nationalist outlook, the political journal employed racial and spatial concepts such as Volksboden and Kulturboden (‘ethnic’ and ‘cultural soil’) alongside then novel cartographic methods of research to demonstrate that the territories separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) should once again become part of Germany. What is more, it promoted the vision of a European order centred around a Greater Germany (‘Mitteleuropa’). In December 1927, Volk und Reich published a special issue on Flanders. Its contributors, among whom Geyl, were united in supporting national independence and freedom for the Flemish volk.6 In his article, Geyl wrote about the alleged suppression of the Flemish people by francophone Belgium and the awakening of its nationality during the previous century, when the Flemish movement started to no longer passively permit the demise of their language and culture. According to Geyl, it was not primarily a political movement; rather, the Flemish people had gradually become aware of its Netherlands character. Geyl was emphatic that there was no Belgian nationality and that in recent years, feelings of kinship had grown between Holland and Flanders.7

In April 1928, the Leipzig-based Stiftung für Volks- und Kulturboden-forschung (‘Foundation for Research on German Ethnic and Cultural Soil’) organized a conference in the West German bordertown of Cleves (Kleve/Kleef), bringing together scholars from Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The secretary of the Leipzig Foundation, Friedrich Metz, had asked Geyl whether he would speak about the Flemish question and had reminded him that the lectures in Cleves were not public and that neither his name nor the title of his lecture would be printed in the agenda. In fact, some official German authorities had misgivings about inviting Geyl, but Metz believed he had been able to alleviate their concerns. The Cleves congress was supposedly not political in nature but purely scholarly. Metz hoped that Geyl would describe the contemporary Flemish problem (the specific topic was his choice), but insisted that the talk should avoid politics, at least in the sense of party politics. Germany knew far too little about the social structure of the Flemish volk.8 Geyl accepted the invitation.

The president of the Leipzig Foundation, Dr Albrecht Penck, opened the conference in Cleves by saying:

The present Kingdom of the Netherlands does not coincide with the greater Netherlands. On this soil, three German tribes meet: the Frisians, the Franks and the Saxons. It is necessary to distinguish between the tribe and the volk, the dialect and the language. There is no doubt that we are in a subsidence area at the coast, but the land is one with a particular Kulturboden (‘cultural soil’). The area of the Rhine estuary had a peculiar cultural-historical development. In a friendly and confidential manner, the conference hoped to allow for a scholarly discussion of these problems. Differences in scholarly conceptions of these questions should not be kept secret, but rather it should be attempted in this environment to clarify any differences and to construct a kind of public scientific opinion.9

The Leipzig Foundation believed Geyl’s talk on the historical foundations of the Greater Netherlands idea had shown that ‘the forces in the north-west’ were alive and that they revealed important aspects for Kulturboden research.10

Geyl’s lecture on the Greater Netherlands idea stirred more discussions than all the other contributions. He spoke about the flawed historical premise of the prevailing narratives of state formation in the Low Countries, both in the traditional state-driven history of the Netherlands and in the dominant national history in Belgium as set out by Henri Pirenne in his 11-volume Histoire de Belgique (1900–32). These historians, in Geyl’s view, regarded the present as the final and logical endpoint of historical development (‘endgültige Ewigkeit’) and in their historical accounts incorrectly projected concepts and sentiments of their own time back into the past. The partition of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century was presented as a natural consequence of a deeply rooted difference in character between the north and the south, whereas Geyl hoped to show that the separation of the north and the south was primarily a consequence of the dynamics of military campaigns in the Eighty Years’ War and the geographic configuration of the region, with the great rivers featuring as a major obstacle.11

In the end, Geyl’s main point was political after all. At the end of his talk, he explained how the First World War had brought an end to a period of quiet and feelings of contentment in the Netherlands. The annexationist demands on Dutch territories in Belgian politics after the ceasefire had shown that the Dutch needed to keep an eye on Belgium. For Geyl, it was imperative not to overlook the Netherlands’ perilous position in present-day Europe. Later that same year, his talk was published in the Historische Zeitschrift, the flagship journal of the historical profession in Germany, under the title ‘Einheit und Entzweiung in den Niederlanden’ (‘Union and division in the Low Countries’), and in it Geyl expanded on what he perceived to be the problem of Belgian nationality.12 According to him,

it was a normal development that a movement that aimed to bring together two parts of a tribe [Stammesteile] derived its inspiration from sources of tribal awareness [Stammesbewußtsein] as well as through the traditions of foreign policy. Now, since the idea of a Greater Netherlands had been linked with the political interests of the state, the movement in Holland had become noticeably more powerful.

Geyl believed that the history of the Low Countries would be enriched when the historian considered the common past of Holland and Flanders together: ‘The hollowness of invalid conventional representations would come to light and long-forgotten truths emerge with surprising sharpness.’13

Reflecting on his time at the conference, Geyl wrote: ‘In Cleves, I had a couple of exceptional, interesting and pleasant days. Not entirely unproductive, I hope. It was my first contact with German scholars and I was very impressed with it.’14 Geyl mentioned that the Germans did ‘these sorts of things well’. There was an agreeable tone to the event, he admitted, but he had very little contact with German scholars, because he felt inhibited by his poor command of the German language. Still, he had presented his lecture in German and felt confident that it had gone well. He was aware of the fact that his historical standpoint with its strong nationalist tendencies had earned him some notoriety in Germany,15 where, Geyl thought, there was a far better understanding of the historical problems of the Low Countries than there had been in England at any time during his stay there. Some in his German audience, he felt, had been strongly encouraged by his historical research. However, this interest by German historians had not been without ulterior motives, as Geyl wrote in his memoirs of 1942, when he knew better than he did in 1928.16 In the following year, Geyl even considered leaving his post in London to accept a professorship in Cologne, where he believed the public would be less indifferent about such historical topics.17

The Cleves congress was far more concerned with contemporary than with historical issues, and particularly with the Flemish question, the Greater Netherlands idea, and the perceived French threat to western Germany. It was in Cleves that Geyl met Oszwald (1883–1945), archivist at the German Reichsarchiv in Potsdam. Oszwald had been a leading proponent of German Flemish policy during the First World War and after the war became the central figure coordinating contacts between German and Flemish nationalists.18 In the closing remarks of the Cleves congress, Oszwald appealed to the Leipzig Foundation to encourage more interest in the study of the history of what he called the ‘north-western corner of central Europe’ (‘Nordwestecke Mitteleuropas’), so that Germany would be equipped with the scholarly tools for present and future conflicts.19 Moreover, he asserted that the poor support in Holland for the Greater Netherlands idea was due to the fear of its confessional strain, but that in fact the war had been favourable to the Greater Netherlands position for two reasons. First, it had made the Flemish movement politically aware and weakened what he called the myth of the âme belge, and second, it had made many in Holland attentive to Belgian annexationist desires.20

In the months following the Cleves conference, Oszwald became very upset with Geyl for revealing in the Flemish nationalist journal Vlaanderen on 19 May 1928 that he and the Flemish nationalist politician Herman Vos had attended. Oszwald insisted that he had made it explicitly clear that details of the event should not be made known to the press, because it would be impossible to rectify false conclusions that might be drawn. Geyl had mentioned Cleves in response to an accusation by Robert van Genechten that Geyl and Vos had been touring conferences in Flanders, the Netherlands and Germany to campaign against a student boycott in connection with the transformation of the University of Ghent into a Dutch-speaking institution. Oszwald considered the remarks to be inappropriate and unpolitical. By responding to Van Genechten’s accusations in the way he did, Geyl had caused embarrassment; he should instead have denied any contact with Germany about the boycott by the Ghent students. Oszwald was convinced that Geyl’s remarks would be exploited by opponents of the Flemish movement and that there was no way to rectify the situation.21 Geyl revealing his participation at the Cleves conference in Vlaanderen had been detrimental not to Germany but to the Flemish movement, as its opponents could now argue that the Germans had interfered in the matter.22 The following month Oszwald conceded to Geyl that he had unnecessarily and too harshly rebuked him for making his participation public. Geyl and Oszwald continued to correspond until August 1929 on topics regarding political manoeuvrings within the Flemish movement.

A few years later, in July 1932, Geyl was invited to give a lecture at a German–Nordic student convention organized by the Verband der Vereine Deutscher Studenten (‘Union of German Student Associations’, VVDSt) in Rostock on the Baltic coast of Germany. The meeting was meant to strengthen cultural relationships between German university students and their Scandinavian as well as Dutch peers. The VVDSt, also known as the Kyffhäuserverband, was an umbrella organization of nationalist student fraternities at various German universities, originally established in 1881 and associated with the Pan-German League. During and after the First World War, they promoted the idea of a ‘germanische Schicksalsverbundenheit’ (‘Germanic community of fate’) and aimed to counteract what they saw as French influence in Europe. After the Great War, they separated from the Pan-German League and began to build contacts with other nationalist-oriented student organizations inside Germany as well as in the Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Sweden. Its members strongly opposed the establishment of the Weimar Republic, were völkisch-oriented and ardent proponents of the creation of a Greater Germany and a Greater Netherlands. In the 1920s, Oszwald and the Cologne lawyer Franz Schönberg were deeply involved in VVDSt affairs and helped secure contacts with Flemish nationalist and Greater Netherlands student organisations, such as the Algemeen Vlaamsch Hoogstudentenverbond (‘General Flemish Students Union’, AVHV) and the Leuven branch of the Katholiek Vlaamsch Hoogstudentenverbond (Catholic Flemish Students Union, KVHV). From 1927 onward the VVDSt was strongly represented at various Greater Netherlands student conventions in Flanders and Holland, so much so that one could say it possessed a ‘lively transnational character’.23

Geyl was pleased to be invited to the gathering in Rostock to speak about the Greater Netherlands idea. Shortly before it took place, the VVDSt had, however, fallen into the hands of the National Socialists, and Geyl relates in his autobiography how the convention took place under the auspices of the Nazi party. Geyl remembered that

never in such a short period of time had I heard so much foolishness. How harsh, how wild, how impossible it all was! The antisemitism, the blind worship of the Führer, the fanatical assurance that he would abolish unemployment, it was too crazy to be taken seriously. All the prattle, the entire day, on the Germans! My Greater Netherlands nationalism never really concerned Germandom, and the equation of culture with race was completely incomprehensible [to me].24

Geyl and Petri

In the same year, Geyl corresponded with the young German historian Franz Petri (1900–93), who had written a critique, published in the Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, of Geyl’s Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam. In his autobiography, Geyl characterized Petri as follows:

There was a young German historian, Franz Petri, in Brussels, who was preparing a major work on the great Frankish migrations and also studied the Flemish and Greater Netherlands question. I got along well with him. Petri took a truly German, thorough, standpoint [‘hij nam op echt Duits grondige wijze stelling’] towards the conflict between my view and that of Pirenne. Petri had the most comprehensive and interesting reflections, though not in the least uncritical, on part I and II of my Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam.25

In the opening paragraph of his review, entitled ‘Staat und Nation in den Niederlanden’ (‘State and nation in the Netherlands’), Petri commented that Geyl’s narrative of Netherlands history represented a novel approach. Geyl had not written a history in which the contemporary Belgian and Dutch states framed the narrative; instead his account of Low Countries history focused on the entire population of the Dutch linguistic and cultural area, without any consideration for the modern states to which they belonged. Geyl depicted the development of the Netherlands volk and nation as a natural and organic maturation beginning with the Frankish great migrations and ending with the Netherlands linguistic nation (Sprachnation). Petri summed it up thus: ‘to develop from the coexistence of different peoples and tribal elements into a nation, the Niederländertum only needed to be made conscious of an actual, or in the very least potential, existing entity and distinctiveness’.26 A most considerable shortcoming in Geyl’s narrative, according to Petri, was his underestimation of historical forces outside of ethnicity (Volkstum). In a region such as the Netherlands both the natural landscape and the cultural region (Petri’s notion of Kulturraum) had a significant influence on the development of the state and the nation. Also, although Geyl noted once in his narrative that the position of the Netherlands at the boundary between the Germanic and Romance cultural spheres had fostered the formation of an independent Netherlands, Petri would have preferred Geyl to elaborate more on this idea.27

At the close of his critique, Petri stated that Geyl’s research did not have any adverse impact on the present-day Dutch–German relationship. The volk and nation were an outcome of history and as such ‘common history unites, its loss estranges’. ‘The 350 years of modern Netherlandic history with the separation of North and South was too great to skip over, so too the thousand years since the origins of an autonomous Netherlands alongside Germandom.’28 The Dutch volk had established itself around the mouth of the Rhine and Meuse rivers and had differentiated itself from ‘continental Germandom’ (‘Festlandgermanentum’) in the course of a long and turbulent history that had led to a unique political and cultural development (Sonderentwicklung). The existence of an independent Dutch nationality could not be questioned in the modern era.29 The discipline of German Volksforschung sought to resolve the compelling question of the present-day independence of the Dutch nationality. The historical reasons explaining why the Netherlands was separate and independent from Germany formed an integral component, according to Petri, not only of Low Countries but also of German history. Geyl had not done enough to explain the gradual moving apart of the German and Dutch nations, and the division remained purely a backdrop for Geyl.30

In the following year, Geyl’s response to Petri was published in the Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter. On the whole, Geyl was pleased with Petri’s critique of his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam, writing that ‘all things considered, I can only delight’.31 However, he wished to reply to one particular comment made by Petri, namely that his preliminary studies had not always adhered to the boundaries of truly scholarly evidence and moderation in judgement, and that his views were becoming more and more polemical and even personally aggressive; the Belgian historical community must feel hurt. From reading Petri’s critique, Geyl assumed that the reader would be under the impression that he was driven by nationalist passion and scholarly intolerance that would sharply attack different nationalities and different perspectives. In these essays about Belgian historiography, Geyl claimed, he had discovered a number of astonishing mistakes, incorrect quotations, misunderstandings of sources, and so on. These historical errors had bolstered the thesis on the solidarity of the Flemish and the Walloon and strengthened the notion of heterogeneity between the Dutch and the Flemish. For Geyl, Belgian historians’ reaction to his way of thinking was not scholarly but purely politically motivated. It was rooted in their conviction that there was no Belgian nationality problem. In closing, he wrote that, on the contrary, he was pleased to note that such a thorough critique as Petri’s, which primarily concerned only interpretation or emphasis, did not find any factual inaccuracies, distortion of quotations or any methodological error to remark on.

Geyl’s disassociation from Westforschung

Deeply anguished by the National Socialist rise to power in early 1933, Geyl’s stance towards German Westforschung changed abruptly and he was no longer interested in entangling himself in the affairs of German historians. On 6 December 1933 Geyl wrote to Petri that he was upset and wanted to speak honestly about what was happening in Germany:

First I want you to know that I am doing my best to view the things happening in Germany as quietly and reasonably as possible. There are some things happening in Germany that I loathe from the depths of my heart, the suppression of the freedom of expression by a central power to proscribe certain values and insights, the power as a result thereof, the decline of intellectual individualism, often by fear that leads to being dishonest. All this is offensive to me. You speak about great expectations and of a ‘neue Volksverbundenheit’ and you appeal to my own nationalism. But if the Greater Netherlands nationalism should lead to a flattening and an erasing of all in the historically rooted diversity then I would be one of the first to end up in a concentration camp. I do not understand nationalism that way. (…) I ask you urgently to believe me, that my aversion does not include the German people or the German civilization. I believe this is an unfortunate coming together of circumstances that the German people at this moment are subjected to such rough violence and the German civilization is threatened by such immense dangers. I hope that the old, great and beautiful traditions that have currently disappeared under the surface will rise again and have not lost their power. It is the great task of the intellectuals who these days are able to maintain their independence.32

Petri responded to Geyl on 3 February 1934:

Your letter has interested me greatly. I thank you for your words. I wish we could have spoken in person about it all. I understand your concerns and feel with you. I want to write you openly, that I myself am in a constant conflict between anxiety and hope. I have met some people who are close to me and share this opinion.33

Six months later, on 5 June 1934, Geyl wrote to Petri once more:

I am sorry that I did not interact with you much at the conference, I would have liked to sit down and quietly have talked about everything. The development of circumstances in Germany are worrying me and saddening me. Almost all over in England and the Netherlands one feels that the German culture has cut itself off from the European community and is in danger of drying out and choking. Most probably, I will be in Flanders in the second half of July and first half of August. Would I find you there still?34

After 1934, there is no evidence of any correspondence between Geyl and Petri until several years after the end of the Second World War.

In another example of unabashed criticism of the National Socialist influence on German scholarship of Low Countries history, Geyl wrote a jarring critique of Oszwald’s 1937 edited work Die Deutsch-Niederländische Symphonie.35 Geyl strongly disapproved of Oszwald’s view that the same ‘race’ lived on both sides of the Dutch–German border and insisted that ‘the real creative forces in history were not blood-racial ties (‘Blutsverbundenheit’) but cultural tradition, such as could be cultivated and maintained within a linguistic community. There you have something uniting the Flemish and the Dutch, never mind all temporary misunderstandings and whether they want it or not.’36 In contrast, in Die Deutsch-Niederländische Symphonie the opinion was that the Germans and the Dutch had a deep connection of blood and soil (‘Blut und Boden’), but Geyl insisted that far more important to understanding the relationship between the Netherlands and Germany was the diverging historical development that had led to the estrangement between the neighbours.37 Geyl warned forcefully against the instrumentalization of history to serve a specific German propaganda.

In the Weimar Republic, Geyl’s Greater Netherlands history did have a great impact on German Westforschung scholarship, but mainly because these German historians were already protagonists of such ideas. One need only peruse the numerous writings by Oszwald and other völkisch-nationalist historians in connection with the neoconservative movement and the Kyffhäuserverband. Another example of this impact can be seen in the 1931 article ‘Staat und Nation an der Westgrenze’ (‘State and nation on the Western border’) by historian Hermann Aubin. Aubin was an ardent supporter of the Flemish movement and his article devoted much attention to the topic of what measures could and ought to be taken to foster the development of a Flemish national identity. He was inspired by August Borms and his arduous campaign for an autonomous Flanders within Belgium and the inevitable union of Flanders with Holland. The German state had let go of the Netherlands in the early medieval period and the separation of the Netherlands from the German nation began with the linguistic rupture when the regional dialect of the Netherlands became the standard written language of the newly formed state. In closing, Aubin referred the reader to the publications by Oszwald and Geyl in the 1927 Flanders issue of Volk und Reich. As for Geyl’s influence in historical narratives of the Rhineland school of regional studies, namely Franz Petri and others, it was not so much the appeal of his Greater Netherlands history but more an interest in his völkisch approach to understanding Low Countries history, namely the primacy of the linguistic (cultural) boundary for the development of the nation and their shared disbelief in Pirenne’s notion of an inherent Belgian unity. While Geyl had been primarily concerned with the relationship between the north and the south of the Low Countries, Petri was more interested in learning which historical circumstances had led to the west–east separation of the Netherlands from Germany.

Conclusion

Pieter Geyl’s entanglement with German Westforschung in the Weimar Republic was largely a one-sided affair. Geyl was never too concerned with what German historians were saying about the Netherlands. Quite the contrary, German scholars of Low Countries history were immensely intrigued by Geyl’s polemical approach and his blurring of the lines between historical scholarship and political activism. Geyl did not really ‘collaborate’ with German scholars, he simply circulated in Germany his belief in a shared cultural and linguistic community between Flanders and the Netherlands and was himself a strong protagonist for the eventual creation of a Greater Netherlands state. His publications in German journals and his lectures at various conferences in Germany were a platform to disseminate his ideas abroad, an opportunity to inform and persuade German intellectuals and politicians of what he saw as the historical and contemporary political and cultural need to resolve the Flemish question and to keep the Dutch linguistic area free of francophone encroachment. During the Weimar Republic, neoconservative and Westforschung scholars were united in their support for the emancipation of the Flemish volk, the division of Belgium and the creation of a Greater Netherlands joining together Flanders and Holland. In his every interaction with German scholars, Geyl maintained his distance and, although he appreciated German völkisch research on the Netherlands, he was even more steadfastly opposed to the National Socialist movement.