Europe’s future depends heavily on Germany and France, but their relationship has long been strained

Europe’s future depends heavily on Germany and France, yet the two countries have often stood in each other’s way. Klaus Kellmann’s book examines the gap between the idealized image of their partnership and the antagonism that has shaped their history.

The relationship is marked by famous gestures of reconciliation, including the 1963 Élysée Treaty signed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle. But Kellmann’s central argument, as presented here, is darker: Germany and France long defined themselves in opposition to one another. The book traces that tension through episodes ranging from de Gaulle’s claims to great-power status to François Mitterrand’s efforts to prevent German reunification.

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More than ever, Germany and France understood themselves as two nationalities defined by the fact that each largely saw itself as the negation of the other.

Kellmann begins not with Napoleon’s export of revolution in the early 19th century, but with the Dreyfus affair. He uses the affair to show the self-assurance of the French state and the long refusal by representatives of the Third Republic to acknowledge a judicial miscarriage of justice.

He treats the period from 1894 to 1906, when Dreyfus was only half-heartedly rehabilitated, as a decisive stage in a destructive development. Those who sought revenge for France’s defeat in 1870 and 1871 joined forces with anti-Republicans and antisemites, including figures far into the political left. Kellmann argues that the rhetoric of a hereditary German-French enemy helped shape the atmosphere that preceded the First World War. He also examines the motives of the belligerents and the arguments that continue to drive disputes over responsibility for the war’s outbreak.

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A state is an individual totality.