How to Be an Enemy Alien: 1914 Edition
Created | Updated Jun 4, 2017
How to Be an Enemy Alien: 1914 Edition
A Brief Introduction
'...Not that one can altogether trust any other man's word on such matters as war or prison experiences; facts are few; it is the atmosphere which is all-important and that affects different people in a different manner.
Paul Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still: My Internment in England, 1914-1918. NY: EF Dutton & Co, 1932, p.34.
The Great War (1914-1918) wasn't called 'World War I' back then. Nobody would have believed that Europe would repeat this exercise in mutually assured destruction anytime soon. In 1914, the war took most people by surprise. Two of them wrote the books I'm reviewing here. Both were artists and writers. One was an Englishwoman of mature years, and the other was an Austrian in his 30s. Looking at their different accounts is instructive: it's a good idea to ask, 'Where did civilisation go wrong?' You won't get any definitive answers, but your brain will be better for the exercise.
By the way, the Great War marked the first time in modern western history that civilians were interned as 'enemy aliens'. Keep that in mind.
Lady Jephson Takes Notes
A Wartime Journal:
Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes
Lady Jephson
Author of A Canadian Scrap-Book and
Letters to a Débutante
London, 1915.
Harriet Julia, Lady Jephson (1854-1930) was a watercolourist and travel writer. I almost put the latter designation in scare quotes. At least, a travel description that claims the Rhein landscape produces 'the effect of perpetual repetition' scares me. If you want a further taste of the travel writing in this book, check out the excerpt in this week's Post. Lady Jephson is Public Domain (which would have horrified her), and comes to us courtesy of the ever-helpful Project Gutenberg.
When the war broke out in 1914, Lady Jephson was being a no-doubt delightful hotel guest at an unnamed spa resort somewhere in Germany. She was a dignified personage of 60. The war came as a shock. The attitudes of people toward foreigners changed practically overnight. Lady Jephson was left without funds, because the beginning of the war caused alien assets to be frozen. She was dependent on the kindness of strangers – not a comfortable thing, because you're likely to find out that people really aren't disposed to be kind to you, particularly if they don't like you in the first place. Lady Jephson's maid became insolent. Small tradesmen acquired positions of authority. It was awful. And she couldn't get out of the country until these raving Germans organised transport.
Lady Jephson's attitude adjustment vis-à-vis the Germans went from amused contempt to reluctant admiration for 'the glorious spirit of sacrifice and patriotism which animates all classes of the German people' to '[p]oor, ignorant things' who are 'quite hoodwinked by their rulers', all in the course of two months. Some extracts from the book will give you a taste of what an educated and at least semi-cosmopolitan English person of the time would have thought of this experience.
August 19th. – The German Press is to me a revelation of bombast, self-righteousness, falsehood, and hypocrisy. What shocks one most is the familiar and perpetual calling upon God to witness that He alone has led the Germans to victory and blessed their cause. I read a poem yesterday, which began "Du Gott der Deutschen," as if indeed the Deity were the especial property of the German Nation! Massacre, pillage, destruction, violation of territory, everything wicked God is supposed to bless! What hideously distorted minds, and where is the sane, if prosaic Teuton of one's imaginings! I wake often in the morning and wonder if all that has happened here has not been a horrible nightmare...
August 21st. – Two men were put in prison yesterday for laughing at Germany.
August 26th. – I am so sick of "Heil Dir im Sieger Kranz" that as the children pass my villa shouting it or "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?" I go out on my balcony and retaliate by singing "Rule Britannia1."
September 16th. – To-day's "Frankfurter Zeitung" thinks that England must be at her last gasp, or she would not have "barbarians such as Indians, Japanese and Highlanders" fighting her battles for her!
September 28th. – There were few tears shed when we steamed out of Frankfort two days ago on our way to home and freedom. . . . Egotistically enough we went over in retrospect our anxieties, disappointments and miseries. Should we ever get rid of that evil shadow, we wondered, which had darkened so cruelly two weary months of our lives!
Poor Lady Jephson. We imagine her going home and holding TED Talks on the war. Or handing out white feathers. This book made me really curious to find out what the experience of internment was like for 'enemy aliens' in the UK. The search involved a lot of work: after all, I'd stumbled across Lady Jephson's tome on Internet Archive. To get the other side's view, I had to borrow an out-of-print but still copyrighted book from Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, via Inter-Library Loan2. I was really glad I took the trouble.3
Paul Cohen-Portheim Takes Stock
Time Stood Still: My Internment in England, 1914-1918
Paul Cohen-Portheim
NY: EF Dutton & Co, 1932.
Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880-1932) was also a painter. He was Austrian (and Jewish), he had relatives there and in Berlin, but he himself lived in Paris, where all the painters went in those days. Every summer, he'd go over to Devonshire, stay with friends, and paint landscapes. In 1914, he asked an Austrian friend with connections in high places if he should stay put: after all, the Archduke had just been shot by a Serb. The friend replied, basically, nah, Serbs are always doing something revolting, nobody in Austria Hungary ever does anything, etc, etc. Boy, was that a mistake.
Like Lady Jephson, Cohen-Portheim found himself in August in a foreign country that was suddenly hostile, with no way to leave the country, and no money in his pockets. (He had a whole £10, and the banks wouldn't open for him, either.) Unlike Lady Jephson, Cohen-Portheim was well liked. He stayed with friends in the country. He felt bad, though: his younger friends went to war and were killed. He left the parents to their grief, moved to London, navigated the complicated enemy alien registration business, and found work as a set and costume designer for operas. He earned his way.
Cohen-Portheim couldn't be repatriated, because the UK government considered him more of a military risk than the Germans (rightly) considered Lady Jephson. Both sides sent the women, children, and elderly home. The men between 18 and 50 were interned in what were openly called concentration camps. One of the most famous was Knockaloe, on the Isle of Man, which is where Paul Cohen-Portheim ended up in 1915.
'[In Knockaloe, Isle of Man]. . . we were now marched twice a week to a hill close by which had been surrounded by wire and was to serve as a playground. . . . All sorts of games were played. . . and that hill is the birthplace of German boxing. Boxing was unknown in Germany before the war, the first boxing lessons to some of the future professionals were given there by men who had learned it in England. ..'
Time Stood Still, p.57.
Cohen-Portheim kind of liked it at Knockaloe. It was summer, the view was nice, and he was a painter. He hated the crowding, but enjoyed the variety of men he met. He was secretly rather disappointed when he was transferred to the more 'upper-class' camp at Wakefield. For one thing, the landscape was dreary. For another, the treatment got worse and worse.
'When prisoners at Wakefield complained to the neutral representative who sometimes visited the camp of insufficient nourishment they were told that the 'number of calories' had been reduced to correspond to that given to British prisoners in Germany, and the British there were no doubt told the same tale.'
Time Stood Still, p.71.
As the years dragged on, Paul Cohen-Portheim became very introspective. He read extensively. He decided to change professions and see if he could do any good with a book or two. The painter turned writer was a sharp observer. He was also remarkably objective.
''In no previous European war had enemy civilians been interned; in 1914 every country interned them and every country gave out that the measure adopted was one of reprisal for similar treatment of their own subjects. . .
....it was always better to convince one's own people that the enemies had been the first to employ any particularly nauseous weapon and that your side was merely taking reprisals. During the war no one could ascertain the truth of such a statement and after the war no one would care.'
Time Stood Still, p.71.
Cohen-Portheim took a long view of what was going on. He worried about the effects of this war on humanity in general. After reading his remarkable story, I felt curiously glad that Paul Cohen-Portheim died in 1932. At least he didn't have to live through the horrors of Hitler, the Anschluss, and World War II. He didn't deserve that. The last part of Time Stood Still is both amazing and disheartening, as the internees' dark comedy of a journey through the Netherlands ends in the post-apocalyptic chaos of revolutionary Berlin.
The verdict: If you only want to read one book about civilians in the Great War, read Time Stood Still. I guarantee you'll learn something you didn't know about that time, even after all the centenary films and exhibitions. You might also be surprised by some of the things Cohen-Portheim had to say about human nature. It's an engrossing read.
As for Lady Jephson, as we said in the Literary Corner, we think she'd make a good comedy special for television.
