scholarly journals The Revista Médica project: medical journals as instruments of German foreign cultural policy towards Latin America, 1920-1938

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wulf
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
First World ◽  
Latin American Countries

After the First World War, foreign cultural policy became one of the few fields in which Germany could act with relative freedom from the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. In this context the Hamburg doctors Ludolph Brauer, Bernhard Nocht and Peter Mühlens created the Revista Médica de Hamburgo (as of 1928 Revista Médica Germano-Ibero-Americana), a monthly medical journal in Spanish (and occasionally in Portuguese), to increase German influence especially in Latin American countries. The focus of this article is on the protagonists of this project, the Hamburg doctors, the Foreign Office in Berlin, the German pharmaceutical industry, and the publishing houses involved.

The Foreign Office and British Propaganda during the First World War

1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
The Creation ◽  
First World ◽  
New Phase

In July 1918 it was the considered opinion of Lord Northcliffe that propaganda and diplomacy were incompatible. When, only five months earlier, Northcliffe had accepted Lloyd George's invitation to take charge of the newly created department of enemy propaganda, his appointment, coupled with that of Lord Beaverbrook as Britain's first minister of information, had held out the promise of a new phase in the efficiency and co-ordination of Britain's conduct of official propaganda in foreign countries. It was then, in February 1918, that the Foreign Office had finally been forced to relinquish its control over such work. However, the creation of the two new departments had produced an intolerable situation. After three years of inter-departmental rivalry and squabbling over the conduct of propaganda overseas, Whitehall closed ranks on Beaverbrook and Northcliffe and united behind the Foreign Office in opposition to any further transference of related duties into their hands. Now, after five months of continued obstruction, Northcliffe expressed the view that:As a people we do not understand propaganda ways…Propaganda is advertising and diplomacy is no more likely to understand advertising than advertising is likely to understand diplomacy.

The Career of Sir Eyre Crowe: A Reassessment

1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Cosgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
First World War ◽  
Evil Spirit ◽  
Prime Mover ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
British Policy ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
British Foreign Office ◽  
First World

Among the myths of the origins of World War I is that of the ability of obscure bureaucrats to influence the foreign policy of their country through intrigue and deceit. The foremost example in the volumious literature involved the unlimited capacity for evil attributed to Friedrich von Holstein of the German Foreign Office. One of his contemporaries left the. following portrait: “His life was devoted to poisoning human and international relationships. Holstein's diplomacy by intrigue, his vicious disloyalties, and the way he placed his own revengeful purposes before his country's good contributed largely towards the outbreak of the First World War.” Labeled the Grey Eminence of the Wilhelmstrasse in the aftermath of defeat, Holstein became the scapegoat for the disasters of German diplomacy in 1914.Other bureaucrats of the pre-war era whose careers followed a similar pattern have received like treatment. On the British side, it was asserted, there operated a civil servant whose anti-German animus steered Britain into conflict with Germany. Allegedly possessing a fatal fascination for Sir Edward Grey, Sir Eyre Crowe was credited by historians with enormous surreptitious influence. The hostility toward Germany manifested by Great Britain in the decade prior to 1914, the argument runs, reflected Crowe's personal hatred and suspicion of German power. “The vast influence exercised by Sir Eyre Crowe upon British policy between 1908 and 1914,” wrote the distinguished Austrian historian A. F. Pribram in 1951, “only became generally known outside the Foreign Office, and especially abroad, in recent years.” Apologists for Germany cited Crowe as the prime mover of British policy, and one German historian termed him the ‘böse Geist’ [evil spirit] of the British Foreign Office.

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