Wilton Park and Anglo-German Relations

Chair, first of all, many thanks to the organisers for the invitation to contribute to this event! Let me begin in the rubble 80 years ago. In 1945 Germany was not merely defeated; it was physically shattered – its cities in ruins, its institutions discredited, its people hungry and adrift. A journalist reporting from Berlin for the New York Herald Tribune described what he saw at the time as “more like the face of the moon than any city I had ever imagined”.

What to do with the beaten enemy? Britain had had to answer that question already a generation earlier. After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles imposed crushing reparations on Germany, fixed on it the sole guilt for the war, and left it internationally isolated. These conditions certainly did not help the young Weimar democracy – and we all know how that ended.

After 1945, Britain chose, quite deliberately, the opposite course. Churchill had a phrase for it – the very words that give the standard history of Wilton Park its title: “in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill”. Instead of isolating a defeated Germany, the aim was to bring Germans back into the European conversation as partners. We know this was not the only solution being discussed. But it was the one that was picked. The aim was thus to rebuild – and, above all, to help Germany become the kind of democracy that would not fail a second time. That reversal is the backdrop to my remarks. Wilton Park was one concrete, and strikingly successful expression of it. And I want to praise the decisions that led to that outcome – for two reasons: because this first phase of Wilton Park is too little known both in Germany and the UK (where it is overshadowed by later and better known successes), and because it was so far-sighted to invest substantial resources into it at a time when Britain was still struggling economically. Would a democratic vote whether to devote these resources to discussions with Germans rather than improving the lot of the Brits themselves have found a majority? One may doubt it. And there is a third reason: As a German, I can utter that praise more easily than many Brits whose in-built modesty may prevent them from doing so themselves!

The Founding purpose

Wilton Park began before the war had ended. But it began, as Robert Birley has put it, “as an attempt to really win the war.” In 1943, Winston Churchill had asked his ministries in a circular a simple question: how, after victory, might Britain cooperate with a democratic Germany? Heinz Koeppler, a German-born Oxford historian then working in the War Office as Assistant Director of the German Section, answered with a memo and a proposition that still sounds bold today – that a democratic Germany could only be built by Germans. It could neither be imposed nor lectured into existence, but had to be built from within, by Germans choosing to do so.

Koeppler’s memo was initially lost, but when Clement Attlee became Prime Minister, he was asked to implement his idea with a select group of German prisoners of war. That had not been his original target group, but the idea of a kind of university for PoWs had been sketched, in part, by a German Social Democrat in exile, Waldemar von Knoeringen who had close links with the Labour Party and later became vice chair of the SPD, playing an important role in drawing up the reformist “Godesberg Programme” in the late 1950s. What Koeppler added was the conviction that Britain and Germany shared an interest in solving their problems together, as equals – that a democratic Germany was as much a British interest as a German one.

So Wilton Park opened in January 1946, in a house near Beaconsfield. What is striking is what Koeppler, as the Warden, did not do. He banned the phrase “re-education” – which he called “arrogance caused by ignorance.” For a time he discouraged even the word “democracy,” because he wanted it demonstrated, not preached. The values he set out to secure in the new German state were therefore habits rather than slogans: personal responsibility for the actions of one’s community; tolerance for the convictions of an opponent; intellectual honesty in place of a false patriotism; and an honest reckoning with the German past, from Bismarck to Hitler – not to humiliate, but because, as he put it, reconstruction must rest on solid foundations. Where Germans lagged, he argued, was not in technical skill but in a sense of the citizen’s obligation to the community – the Staatsbürger who feels responsible beyond his own front door. Ralf Dahrendorf, who first came here as an eighteen-year-old, later distilled the whole idea into one line: democracy requires, beyond all institutions, democrats.

The Method

But how do you teach a habit rather than a doctrine? Koeppler’s method was borrowed from the Oxford tutorial and turned into something quietly subversive. Lectures were followed by open discussion. Small tutorial groups, led by German-speaking tutors, argued things out. A “Brains Trust” answered unrehearsed questions from the floor. And “extra-mural” visits took participants into British newspapers, town halls and courts, to see how the British actually manage their affairs. Crucially, speakers were invited precisely because they disagreed with each other – Bertrand Russell and Arnold Toynbee, but also serving politicians of every party, from Frank Pakenham and John Profumo to Denis Healey, Lady Astor and Jennie Lee. There were no “right” answers and no imposed direction in the discussions. Open discussion had to be learned by people who had grown up in Nazi Germany. So they discussed even the most mundane things, as I found working in the archive: Should they have morning sports? What were the pros, what were the cons? It was all about practice and openness, so that people could say what they really thought, and, if convinced, change their minds. Koeppler summed up the ambition in a homely image: the task was to prime the pump, not to exhaust the well – to start people thinking, and then to get out of the way.

Britain was holding large numbers of German POWs, and from January 1946 selected men came, around three hundred at a time, for six-week courses; by the middle of 1948 some four thousand had passed through. An American observer, writing for the *Washington Post*, put the aim bluntly after a visit: Wilton Park taught prisoners “how to think”. Later, the doors opened to civilians chosen in the British zone. The reasoning was simple. In a democracy the impulse must come from below – so reach the people it comes from, and let them carry the spirit home. Koeppler had a word for this – he called them “Multiplikatoren” –  *multipliers* or sowers of the spirit. Participants were  deliberately selected who would shape opinion where they lived: Land ministers and officials, Federal and Land parliamentarians of every party, journalists, trade unionists, teachers. Women were included from 1947 after an urgent memo from the British Control Commission Headquarters in Berlin had bemoaned their absence and argued that “unless … German men and women are induced to work self-confidently together, the task of reconstructing Germany will be impossible.”

Did it work?

Reading through the participant lists in the “Golden Book” that is kept in the Wilton Park archive with group photos and signatures, I was impressed to find lots of familiar names. Among the participants were academics like the political theorist Wolfgang Abendroth, the sociologist Helmut Plessner (later rector of the University of Göttingen) and the young Ralf Dahrendorf; future mayors such as Willy Brundert in Frankfurt and Wilhelm Kaisen in Bremen; and, over the following years, future parliamentarians and ministers including Rainer Barzel (CDU chairman 1971-73 and Chancellor candidate in 1972), Liselotte Funcke and Hildegard Hamm-Brücher from the FDP, Hans-Jochen Vogel (a political protegé of von Knoeringens and Chancellor candidate of the SPD in 1983), Karl Wilhelm Berkhan and many more. The British diplomat, Sir Frank Roberts, remarked that he kept finding former Wiltonians in key posts across West Germany, especially at regional and local level – which is exactly what Heinz Koeppler had aimed for.

But the most telling verdict comes from the Germans themselves. In 1971, at the twenty-fifth anniversary, Helmut Schmidt – soon to be Chancellor – said that the rural seclusion of the South Downs had given birth to ideas that became political reality in Germany, and that almost a whole generation of German politicians had defined their attitude towards Britain on the basis of what they experienced here. Dahrendorf put it more simply still: “Wilton Park changed my life.” Don’t discount this as mere diplomatic courtesies! They demonstrate that small residential seminars held here helped to shape the political culture of the democracy of the Federal Republic – and helped to make the Anglo-German relationship, in Schmidt’s phrasing, “reliable”.

Conclusion

Which brings me back to where I began. Wilton Park rested on a wager: that you build democrats not by broadcasting values, and certainly not by humiliation, but by convening people who disagree (in a “protected space”, as we would put it today), and trusting them to reach their own conclusions. After Versailles, humiliation had helped to break a German democracy. After 1945, magnanimity – patient, unglamorous, if in the beautiful atmosphere of Wiston House since 1951 – helped to make one. With this and all that followed after its focus shifted after the mid-1950s, Wilton Park has, in the words of the title of the (as far as I know) first history of this place (the 1973 book by Dexter Keezer), made “a unique contribution to international relations”. The somewhat uncomfortable, but useful question for us, eighty years on and in a very different world, is whether we still believe in that slower method: in an age of platforms, populism, and posture, can conviction still be formed the Wilton Park way, among people willing to be persuaded? What change, if any, is needed for a mission that today is much broader? I believe that the winning formula is still valid, and that in a way slower discussion is especially needed in a world dominated by soundbites and hectic newscycles. I’m interested to hear whether you agree.

Thank you.