Elizabeth Wiskemann
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
Early life and education
Wiskemann was born in Sidcup, a suburb of London, England, on 13 August 1899. Her mother, Emily Burton, belonged to a prosperous family of local merchants, and her father, Heinrich Odomar Hugo Wiskemann, a businessman from Hesse-Cassel in Germany, had emigrated to England in order to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army. She was educated at Notting Hill High School, where she won multiple academic prizes, as well as participating in debating, sports, and drama. She received a scholarship to read History at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she obtained a first in History in 1921. During this time, her family suffered several misfortunes, with her mother dying during an influenza pandemic in 1918, and her father filing for bankruptcy in 1922. Her contemporaries and friends at Cambridge included many linked to the Bloomsbury set, including Ferenc Bekassy, Rupert Brooke, Julian Bell, Michael Redgrave, and Kathleen Raine.In 1923, her father returned to Germany, where he spent the rest of his life. Supporting herself, Elizabeth Wiskemann briefly worked as a teacher in a girls' boarding school, before beginning her doctoral dissertation, winning a research scholarship from the Gilchrist Educational Trust. She initially made good progress, but missed a research fellowship from Newnham College, receiving instead a small research grant. Her dissertation in later stages was supervised by H.W.V. Temperley, and received only a D.Litt. instead of a Ph.D. Wiskemann attributed this to Temperley's documented hostility towards female students, noting that other members of the examining committee were inclined to award the Ph.D. but could not oppose him.
Her dissertation examined diplomatic relations between the Vatican, Britain, and France in 1860s, drawing extensively on archives in all three locations. Consequently, she traveled extensively in Europe during these years, taking up tutoring work to fund her travels.
Career
Journalism
In autumn of 1930, Wiskemann visited Berlin, staying for a period of nine months, to continue her historical research and improve her command over the German language. In the 1920s, Germany was a favorite destination of British intellectuals disenchanted with British life, and it was common for those intellectuals seeking an "alternative lifestyle" to settle in Germany, usually in Berlin. In the "Golden Twenties" as Germans called the years between 1924-1929, Germany was perceived in Britain as the home of "liberalism, modernism, and hedonism...avant-garde art and architecture...social deviance and sexual decadence". The image of Germany in the Golden Twenties across the North Sea was of a more open and free society, and as such tended to attract homosexuals such as Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden who wanted to live in a society where it was less likely they would suffer criminal convictions for their sexuality or women such as Jean Ross or Wiskemann who wanted to "learn about life" and have careers. Wiskemann recalled that moving to Berlin was a liberation from her "miserable" years at Cambridge, where had been grudgingly tolerated by the male-dominated faculty doing her postgraduate research. She recalled that in circles of left-wing intellectuals that she associated with in Berlin that she felt more valued than she had ever been at Cambridge. The American historian Colin Storer wrote it was no accident that Wiskemann chose to settle in Berlin, a city that was identified with modernity and was viewed as the home of the "New Woman", able to make a career for herself instead of waiting for the right man to marry. Wiskemann seems to be greatly influenced by photographs of German women working as pilots, driving sports cars and working as scientists. The German historian Katherina von Ankum wrote that Wiskemann had an already outdated image of German women as a "resurrection of traditional notions of womanhood" was already on the rise when she arrived in Berlin as a part of a backlash against the gains that German women had made with the November Revolution of 1918.Over the next six years, she divided her time between Cambridge, where she worked as a tutor in history at Newnham College, and Germany, using the time to travel through Europe as well. She socialised there with Phyllis Dobb, Arthur Koestler, Erich Mendelsohn, and George Grosz, recounting her experiences in her memoir, The Europe I Saw, as well as in letters to friends, including Julian Bell. In Berlin, she worked as a translator and English teacher, preparing documents for the British Embassy and tutoring German diplomats in English. During this time, she closely observed political developments, witnessing in particular the rise of Nazism, and her interest was enabled by a friendship with the journalist Frederick A. Voigt, who was reporting for the Guardian. in 1932, she began writing for the New Statesman, reporting on German politics and warning about the dangers of Nazism, to which she was firmly opposed, and her writings were widely read. She also opposed British politicians who advocated a moderate approach to the Third Reich, particularly criticizing the signing of naval treaties between England and Germany during this time.
She rapidly became the New Statesman
In March 1936, she visited Switzerland, which she charged was the most provincial country in Europe. She wrote about the Swiss: "The percentage of genuinely cosmopolitan or even Continentally minded people was probably smaller than in any of the major European countries. The sentiments which prevailed in Switzerland are small-scale provincialism...and the fierce nationalism of a small country with virtually no language of its own. As this nationalism involves the Swiss in being oddly aggressive about the defense of their neutrality, which they have elevated into providing their national mystique: it seems a little absurd to an outsider at first".
In July 1936, she published an article in The New Statesman, sharply criticizing the Third Reich, and particularly, the manner in which Jewish people were treated by the Nazis. As a result, she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, and finally released on the condition that she would leave Germany. Her expulsion from Germany attracted a great deal of international attention, and was discussed in the British Parliament as a diplomatic issue. On her return to England, she was advised by the head of the Foreign Office to continue writing about Germany, but to avoid returning there in person. Following her expulsion from Germany, Wiskemann continued to report from Central Europe, traveling to Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.
Academic career
Wiskemann spent a substantial period of time in Czechoslovakia, following her expulsion from Germany in the 1930s. She published essays and reports on Czech politics, facilitated in part by her acquaintance with Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk, to whom she had been introduced by a mutual friend. From 1935, she also frequently lectured at Chatham House on central European politics. In 1937, Wiskemann was commissioned by the historian Arnold Toynbee, to write an account of German minorities outside the Reich, particularly those living in Czechoslovakia, for a series of monographs published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Consequently, resigning from Cambridge, she traveled back to Czechoslovakia for research, and in 1938 she published Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggles in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. During the writing of her book, Toynbee-who supported appeasement-was opposed to Wiskemann's "pro-Czech" book and made a number of efforts to "correct" her book. Toynbee came under pressure from the Foreign Office not to publish her book in the spring and summer of 1938. The diplomat Robert Hadow wrote to Toynbee on 16 May 1938 that publishing Wiskemann's book would be "a set-back to the very real effort...which is being made to bring M. Benes to a sense of the "realities" of the situation and so to direct him into negotiations with Henlein". Despite his own opposition to the book, Toynbee published Czechs and Germans. The book, a historical account, received praise, as "indispensable introduction to the closer study of the problem of Czechoslovakia," in International Affairs, and "...an excellent account of the relations between Czechs and the Germans in Habsburg times," in the American Historical Review. The chief limitation of this work was Wiskemann's limited grasp of Czech, and the book also faced some opposition from the British Foreign Office, who saw it as espousing Czech causes. It also received substantial attention in the press, as Lord Runciman, delegated to mediate in Czechoslovakia, was photographed by media sources reading the book as he left for Prague.Following the publication of this book, Wiskemann engaged in a lecture tour, visiting the United States of America, while continuing to publish on issues of central European politics. In New York, she accepted an invitation from Oxford University Press' office to write an account of German politics after the Munich conference, publishing Undeclared War in 1939. The book focused on the impact of the Third Reich on Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and was written in three months. Noting the haste, the historian R.W. Seton-Watson nonetheless called it a "valuable and welcome contribution to the contemporary history of south-eastern Europe". Richard Coventry, writing for The New Statesman, called it "the best book of the year so far as European politics are concerned." In 1939, she published a book, Undeclared War, which was written in the spring of 1939, but published shortly after Poland was invaded in September. She was to regret the title of her book, which made it seemed dated even before it was published.