The Inverted Mirror: Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany, 1898-1914

It is hard to imagine nowadays that, for many years, France and Germany considered each other as "arch enemies." And yet, for well over a century, these two countries waged verbal and ultimately violent wars against each other. This study explores a particularly virulent phase during which each of these two nations projected certain assumptions about national character onto the other — distorted images, motivated by antipathy, fear, and envy, which contributed to the growing hostility betwe...