Thanks to the pioneering work of an earlier generation of historians, such as Francis Carsten (Britain and the Weimar Republic, 1984), we are already familiar with how contemporary British diplomats, officials, and military officers based in Germany looked on events in the Weimar Republic. Less familiar is the cultural interaction between contemporary British intellectuals and the republic. As Colin Storer points out, where this cultural relationship has attracted academic interest, the focus has been narrowly restricted to the Christopher Isherwood circle, “so much so that Isherwood's Berlin has come to be seen as the archetypal image of the Weimar Republic in the English-speaking world” (p. 5). The image that we have been left with is that of the hedonistic and decadent Berlin captured by Isherwood in his “Berlin” novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical, Cabaret. Yet, as Colin Storer's compact and well-written book reveals, the Isherwood circle is neither comprehensive nor representative of the British intellectual interaction with Weimar Germany.

Storer's objective in writing this book is laudable. He sets out to offer the first broad comparative study of British intellectual attitudes toward the Weimar Republic. He is not interested in the thoughts of intellectuals at a distance. His interest is exclusively with those intellectuals who visited Weimar Germany, remarking upon their “sheer number” and their “diversity” in terms of background, age group, and interests (p. 5). Adopting a thematic approach to his subject, Storer's book devotes chapters to British travel and tourism; British attitudes toward Germany during World War I and after; British intellectuals and their responses to the occupation of the Rhineland; the British intellectual encounter with Berlin; the attitudes of British female intellectuals; British fictional representations of Germany and the Germans; and finally, British intellectual responses to National Socialism before the Nazi seizure of power. These seven chapters stretch across a broad canvas with Storer careful to call our attention to both the diversity in attitudes as well as major points of commonality. The result is an absorbing, richly nuanced and wide-ranging discussion that offers a far more accurate, comprehensive, and balanced picture of British intellectual engagement with the Weimar Republic than the imaginary representations gleaned from the writings of Isherwood and his “Berlin Bloomsbury” set.

The pattern of intellectual engagement, as Storer reveals, was variegated. There was no standard response. The preoccupation with Berlin decadence was not everywhere (it held little interest for British women writers such as Vera Britain, Winifred Holtby, and Cicely Hamilton, for example). Often overshadowed by lurid tales of Weimar decadence, Storer acknowledges, is the occupation of the Rhineland which gave rise to sympathetic perceptions of German victimhood. Such views of German victimhood were further encouraged by reports of widespread resentment in the French zone (especially under the “horror” of occupation by French colonial troops). Nonetheless, as Storer reveals, some writers (again neglected female ones) who had visited the British area of occupation were prepared to challenge the view that in contrast to what was happening in the French zone, relations between the British occupiers and local Germans were not necessarily benign. When it came to representations of Germany and Germans in fiction, this portrayal of German victimhood also loomed large and yet Britain's intellectuals “could never quite seem to free themselves completely from their ingrained pre-war images of Germany and its people” (p. 147), that is to say, the traditional stereotype of the cold and efficient “Hun.” In his final chapter, Storer once again draws our attention to the variety of response. When intellectuals did take notice of the early National Socialists—for the most part the NSDAP was (understandably) dismissed as a minor regional party or else conflated with other radical right-wing groups—views were often contradictory. Observers struggled to disentangle the nationalism from the socialism (hence the remark by the British diplomat Harold Nicholson that the Nazis were “red fascists”). Then, as the fortunes of the NSDAP improved, not all intellectuals were so obviously opposed. As Storer informs us, the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (who had visited Berlin in November 1930) and a leading historian of Germany William Harbutt Dawson (who had traveled through Germany in the summer of 1931) certainly admired aspects of Hitler's growing movement, its Versailles revisionism in particular.

For all the variation, as Storer's discussion deftly demonstrates, there were also common themes that run throughout this patchwork of intellectual responses. The themes that clearly separated Weimar Germany from the Kaiserreich, as Storer appreciates, were modernity, freedom, liberation, youth, rebelliousness, victimhood, crisis, and instability. In the end, Storer concludes, the predominant theme was modernity. It was this notion that deserves to be singled out—Germany as “pre-eminently modern, representative of and in tune with the Zeitgeist of the 1920s” that was “at the centre of so much British writing on Germany in this period and is the key factor that made the Weimar Republic so appealing to British intellectuals” (p. 182).

The author undoubtedly succeeds in refining our understanding of how British intellectuals interacted with the Weimar Republic. It is regrettable, however, that he does not devote more attention to the impact that these intellectuals might have had on wider British opinion. Such a discussion surely had a place in this otherwise engaging study—an opportunity missed for Storer to defend the historical significance of this fascinating subject.