This is an important book that can rightly claim to have examined “the Anglo-German antagonism” during the pre-1914 period “from a new perspective” (p. 1). Rüger is concerned with “the theatre of power and identity that unfolded between Britain and Germany in the imperial age” and with the “‘cult of the navy’” in those years (p. 1). The author asks how far this focus might “change our understanding of the relationship between politics and culture.” He postulates that the two are inseparable so that he aims to “discover the cultural in politics and the political in culture” and how “ritual and theatre merged with power and politics” (p. 2).

Accordingly, Rüger takes his cue from the explanations of “the growing pomp and circumstance” that Eric Hobsbawm and David Cannadine have related to the rise of democratic movements and mass politics. He also feels indebted to Linda Colley on the question of “Britishness and Otherness” and to Michel Foucault's interest in the “symbolic quality of ships” (p. 10). Given these introductory deliberations, it might be argued that the “culturalist turn” that affected most other genres of historical writing over the past twenty or so years has finally reached the writing of naval history, hitherto primarily devoted to the projection of “hard power” across the globe, even if the propagandistic and rallying aspects and a navy's integrating role in the epoch of overseas expansion and domestic class conflict has been highlighted by a good number of earlier studies.

Yet, Rüger is not one to engage in expansive theorizing that is oblivious of empirical backup. He has been to no less than some twenty-eight archives and, this being a comparative analysis, the primary research is neatly balanced between his British and German sources, reinforced by some thirty well-chosen photos, posters, paintings, cartoons, and other visual material.

The author begins with an examination of “maritime theatre” and the rituals surrounding the launches of battleships and ocean liners. He deals with the significance of fleet reviews and the efforts to mobilize new audiences. He discusses the role of the mass media and the use of modern technology in the shape of imposing searchlight displays and big-ship illuminations. This is followed by an even more illuminating chapter on the “bread and circuses” aspects of naval expansion which also includes a study of “gender and militarism.”

In chapter four we are treated to a discussion of the concepts of national identity formation and its dynamic within the Continental European context of Germany and that of the British “island nation.” The book ends with a chapter on “the stage between nations” and thus the increasingly antagonistic Anglo-German relationship. Finally, there is an epilogue that raises the question of why the pre-1914 pomp and circumstance declined after 1918, with bread and circuses moving to other theatrical locations.

There are two facets to this book that deserve special mention. To begin with, Rüger revisits the “the role of the ‘radical right’ which historians have seen as so instrumental in the creation of naval enthusiasm” (p. 9) and relatedly the issue of manipulation from above vs. self-mobilization from below. Finding the debate on it “frustratingly imprecise,” the author suggests “a revision of our understanding of the ‘mobilization of the masses’ in the decades before 1914” (p. 10). He sees naval theater “not merely as a function of propaganda or manipulation, but as an arena in which power was in flux. At its heart was not one source of agency, be it government initiative or the ‘radical right,’ but the tension between a number of actors, local and national, official and private, commercial and governmental” (p. 139). He is also interested in the question of how people made “sense of naval theatre” and how far it was “an arena of militarism, as contemporaries and historians of the ‘manipulation’ school have claimed” (p. 96). All this is constantly put into the author's comparative British-German framework.

This picture of the naval theater's significance leads him directly to the second major aspect of his book, as he is very much aware not only of the interaction between government, masses, and economic interests, but also of that between culture and hard power. The drama and theatricality of the rising Anglo-German antagonism is inextricably interwoven with strategy and diplomacy. He finds that on both sides, but especially on the German one, there was a strong will to make certain that the sword was carefully displayed and was visibly made of steel rather than wood.

Thus the North Sea is seen by Rüger as a “cultural space,” but one into which naval power could be projected not merely symbolically, but also tangibly in the shape of those frightful dreadnoughts. Here power was not merely shown at festive Flottenparaden. There were also the annual fleet exercises that were designed to deter the enemy or, should deterrence fail, prepared the two navies for den Tag, for the do-or-die battle in the home waters.

The trouble was that both kinds of displays had an intoxicating effect and raised false expectations both among the “masses” and the professional officer corps while at the same time reinforcing the notion of a growing confrontation between the two alliance blocs that had emerged by 1914 and that made some feel war was inevitable—an aspect of the relationship between culture and politics that is indeed worth further exploration.

Here then lies the power of Rüger's approach. Arguing that naval history can no longer be studied as strategy and politics and must include the cultural sphere, his study is persuasively integrationist. After the cultural perspective has belatedly come to naval history this book takes a further turn through which it reconnects the cultural with the political. It is this effort to bring about such a turn that, together with its sophisticated comparison of British and German naval policy, makes Rüger's The Great Naval Game such a stimulating and highly recommended read.