Ireland, Germany and the Nazis: Politics and Diplomacy, 1919-1939
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXI; Issue: 492 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ehr/cel134
ISSN1477-4534
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoTHIS book (no. 3 in the new series ‘Cork Studies in Irish History’) ploughs a well-worked field. The Irish Free State's relationship with Nazi Germany has proven to be of continued interest to historians in the last few decades, as it has been to the general public in Ireland. A black dust-jacket adorned with a red Nazi emblem, the publisher has quite rightly judged, is still a sure-fire method to boost sales. O'Driscoll bases his study to a large extent on documents in Irish Archives and here in particular on the reports of the Irish Ministers in Berlin available in the National Archives. He makes use of government records which only became available from 1 January 1990, and were therefore inaccessible to earlier studies. The very thorough examination of available Irish sources and a much more limited analysis of German documents (largely restricted to the correspondence of Eduard Hempel, the German Minister in Dublin, with Berlin) lends a certain lopsidedness to the study. The imbalance is compounded by the author not making use of German research on the subject: at least two German book-length studies which have a bearing on his subject (Hubert Sturm, Hakenkreuz und Kleeblatt, 1984, and Thilo Schulz, Das Deutschlandbild der ‘Irish Times’, 1933–1945, 1999) have been published, apart from Horst Dickel's work of 1983, which the author quite rightly praises. Occasional slips in German words (e.g. ‘Seekreigsleitung’ (p. 272), 12-Uhr Mittag listed under ‘t’ in the index (p. 302), ‘DADD’ for ‘DAAD’ (p. 250)) in an otherwise impeccably edited book suggest a certain lack of language proficiency which sadly still affects Irish historiography, especially studies on Irish-German relations (work on Roger Casement's German adventure being another case in point). Certainly O'Driscoll's statement in the introduction that ‘until now Irish-German relations have escaped detailed examination except for their impact on Irish wartime neutrality’ (p. 13) has to be qualified when publications in German and in other areas beyond the diplomatic and political are taken into consideration.
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