Doctoral student Kai Steinhage, M.Ed.

• Alltagsgeschichte of the First World War and the interwar period
• British-German relations and mutual perceptions (1871-1933)
• Political processes and systems within Europe (20th century)
• Politics of history and memory in Europe
• History cultures and public history

Bloodthirsty barbarians or neighboring brother nation? Images of Germany among British soldiers during the military occupation of the Rhineland, 1918-1920

Supervisor: Prof Dr Stefan Berger (Ruhr University Bochum)

Research conducted on the French occupation and the Ruhr crisis (1923-1925) continues to influence prevailing general accounts of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War. Accordingly, criteria-oriented studies on the British zone, which was formed around the city of Cologne after the armistice in November 1918, still represent a desideratum.  The dissertation project is intended to partially address this research gap and, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefan Berger, explores everyday life, relations with civilians, and the diverse images of Germany held by British occupiers.

The overarching question of which narratives, topoi and stereotypes constituted the images of Germany of the Tommies stationed in the Rhineland will be investigated. In this respect, the aim of this study is to reconstruct the extent to which public narrative patterns of the pre-war period and war propaganda shaped corresponding descriptions within the British Army of the Rhine. The study particularly focuses on the influence of individual and collective aggressor narratives: Did descriptions of the German population contain stereotypical character traits that were disseminated to the British public during the First World War through defamatory depictions of Wilhelm II or generalizing images of “barbaric Huns”? Furthermore, it will be investigated whether the perceptions of the occupying soldiers differed depending on military rank, social background, ethnicity or participation in the war, and whether they changed during the course of the occupation.

The main part of the source corpus consists of contemporary testimonies (diaries, postcards and letters), which are examined categorically by means of a qualitative content analysis. In addition, published columns and articles concerning the occupied territory and its population, which appeared in the occupation newspaper The Cologne Post or the tabloid magazine The Bystander, are examined. As the personnel of the British Army of the Rhine was significantly reduced after the Treaty of Versailles became effective, the scope of the study covers the period between the beginning and the end of the military occupation (November 1918 to January 1920).

• „Verbrüderungen mit dem Aggressor? Interaktion und gegenseitige Wahrnehmung von britischen Soldaten und deutschen ZivilistInnen während der Rheinlandbesetzung 1918-1926“; Lecture in the colloquium Sozialgeschichte und soziale Bewegungen of the Institut für soziale Bewegungen at the Ruhr-University Bochum, 14 July 2025
• “The Impact of Aggressor Narratives on the Images of Germany among British Occupying Forces, 1918–1920”; Lecture at a conference of the Ladenburg Research Network „The Aggressor: Self-Perception and External Perception of an Actor Between Nations” in Ljubljana, 01 October 2025
• “Aggressor images in the first exhibitions of the Imperial War Museum, 1917-1923”; Lecture on the occasion of the workshop “The Aggressor in the Museum” in Thessaloniki, 09 October 2025