Aleksanteri Suvioja"The Influence of Sea-power upon Historiography". The German Case of Interaction between Naval Policy and Naval History 1890-1945The paper is an attempt to outline the importance of historical argumentation for naval policy and strategy in a more comprehensive and historiographical way than previously done. Germany will be used as as object and case study to outline starting points for further study. The methodology of this paper joints history of ideas with the methods of historiographical study. The basic assumption is that military history – even official military history – cannot be simply viewed as pure propaganda. A detailed analysis of the work of officer-historians is required with further sources (i.e. correspondence) and hindsight of the intellectual climate (Zeitgeist). The paper is based on the author’s ongoing dissertation work on European interpretations of the naval war 1900-1918. The time span of this paper includes what has often been called as the era of navalism, i.e. the era during which the size of the navy of a country was considered to be of uttermost importance. History gained a unique position in the argumentation for the navies. E.g. captain Alfred T. Mahan’s seminal study "The Influence of Sea-power upon History", was a historical study of the 17th and 18th centuries. My paper will show that two phenomena created an interaction between historiography and naval strategy in German naval history. Firstly, Germany entered this era of navalism relatively late. Lacking a glorious maritime past like Great Britain, Germany was forced to mobilise every possibility of historical argumentation for a greater German navy. Secondly, the status and fate of the German High Seas Fleet in the First World War created a burden of history for the future fleet, influencing its construction, planning and operations. The role of history for the German navy has been acknowledged in previous studies. What is lacking, however, is a closer examination of the interaction between the navy and its historiography. Aleksanteri Suvioja
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