Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea

"Yes. He talks about the island being a metaphor for Anglo-German rivalry. And what a turbulent fate this little rocky island in the North Frisian islands had! They spoke a language very few people know about, called Heligolandisch. It was probably a branch of Frisian. You can’t get much more remote than that, and to use the fate of this little island as a lens to look at Anglo-German relations is very bold, I think. And it works. It’s a serious work of scholarship, using primary sources, and very accessible. It was really fascinating. I learned all sorts of facts that I hadn’t heard before. For example, that Britain handed over Heligoland to Germany in 1890, in exchange for Zanzibar. It’s an extraordinary exchange. Certainly Zanzibar would have been a lot warmer, but quite apart from that, the people of Heligoland didn’t have much to say about it. They were just pawns in the game, weren’t they? It was a battle site, a point of issue in both World Wars. Also, I was horrified to read that in 1947 British forces set off the largest non-nuclear explosion in history there. So, a long tradition of rivalry between England and Germany comes to an end in the debris of what remains of Hitler’s island fortress. It’s a very unusual book. Again, it shows us the way in which a really good piece of scholarship can be made fascinating with primary sources, accessible to the ‘ordinary’ reader, and also be something that can be broadened into significance of a wider nature. Not just that, it’s mentioned in 5 am weather forecasts on Radio 4, if you’re up that early. I gather that it’s quite a popular tourist place now."