Occupying a Foreign Country

Abstract

The embodied meetings of war — when soldiers from the military physically encounter civilians from the local population — are radically dependent upon language exchange between the two groups. Rather than focusing on the role of potential intermediaries in these relationships, this chapter explores the ways in which the attitudes of military authorities towards language and the ‘linguistic presence’ of their forces in the foreign country serve to condition the framework of such encounters. Most military deployment involves, at least to some extent, the display of a form of power which is likely to be greater than that on offer in the indigenous community. A component in this power nexus is the attitude which the relevant occupier takes towards language, not in this case the foreign language of the local population but rather that of the army itself, the native language of the military who have arrived in the foreign country. The policies, implicit or explicit, around the use of the mother tongue of the army in these situations play a major role in how the two groups, military and civilian, meet and interact. This chapter examines these issues in relation to the early years of Allied occupation of Germany, looking particularly at how the first-language policies of two military forces, the British and the French, shaped the context in which relationships could be established between military occupiers and local civilians. The British approach to the use of English, and the attitude taken by the French to their own language, produced rather different settings for the military/civilian encounter in their respective zones of occupation.

Because of their inability to speak German … officers have tended to put undue trust in Germans who could speak English. (NA, FO 371/46971, Balfour Report, 10 August 1945)