Germany

Germany occupies two connected roles in the novel: it is the power whose victory and occupation scarred France in 1870, and the supposed foreign partner in the espionage case against Alfred Dreyfus. The narrative’s central tension is that the French military repeatedly invokes the German threat to defend its handling of the case, while intelligence reports recounted to Georges Picquart undermine the claim that Germany employed Dreyfus at all.

The wound of 1870

The story gives Germany its deepest personal and political significance through the bombardment and surrender of Strasbourg. Georges Picquart recalls being sixteen when German forces shelled the city. He saw its art gallery and library burn, neighbourhoods destroyed, friends die, and strangers pulled from rubble. After nine weeks the garrison surrendered, leaving residents to choose between remaining under German rule or abandoning their homes for France. Picquart’s family arrived in Paris destitute, with their confidence in the security of civilized life shattered.

That childhood memory helps explain why the German threat remains potent decades later. In Picquart’s account, the defeat was not merely a past military event: it shaped his career and the institution to which he devoted himself. He says that after the humiliation of 1870, a career outside the army seemed frivolous; the Ministry of War funded his education, and he came to regard the army as a demanding father whose approval he strove to earn. Germany therefore stands behind both his patriotism and the military culture whose conduct he later questions.

An adversary imagined as overwhelming

When General Gonse explains the diplomatic alarm following the public controversy over Captain Lebrun-Renault, Picquart recognizes a generation formed by the rout of 1870. Gonse, Auguste Mercier, and Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre, he observes, remain frightened of Germany’s shadow. Their habitual calculation is that Germany has three men for every two Frenchmen and spends three francs on armaments for France’s two. Picquart regards this as defeatism, but the calculation makes the imbalance tangible: the old defeat becomes a present estimate of national vulnerability.

That fear shapes the response to a newspaper story suggesting that a document was stolen by the French government from the German Embassy and that the Dreyfus affair might be an espionage trap. The President fears that the German ambassador will present a formal protest from Berlin and that the German emperor may withdraw his ambassador unless France accepts the German government’s denial of dealings with Dreyfus. General Gonse is sent out before dawn to find Lebrun-Renault and silence him. In this episode, Germany is not shown acting directly in the French investigation; the anticipated diplomatic and military consequences of offending it are enough to set senior officials in motion.

The embassy and the intelligence trail

Germany also figures as the destination of French intelligence collection. Picquart learns that an agent inside the German Embassy supplies discarded papers that were meant to be burned. Many arrive torn, and members of the Statistical Section must reconstruct them; Captain Lauth is described as skilled at the work. The same method, Gonse says, was how the French first came upon Dreyfus. The embassy’s refuse thus becomes a material channel through which a foreign power enters the French case: fragments gathered in secret acquire the authority of intelligence, even as their interpretation remains open to doubt.

A separate report describes an unnamed German spy in the French army. According to the information Colonel Foucault reads to Picquart, the source is a battalion commander aged between forty and fifty, has passed information to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen for about two years, and has supplied mostly unimpressive material, including details of an artillery course at Châlons. The report says that the information reached von Schlieffen, who suspected a hoax or an agent provocateur and ordered Schwartzkoppen to have no further dealings with the source. The report offers Picquart a striking resemblance to the Dreyfus accusation, but it does not identify the alleged spy by name.

German denials and the case against Dreyfus

Picquart also hears an account of inquiries conducted on the German side after Dreyfus’s arrest. Richard Cuers reports that the Kaiser personally demanded to know whether the Imperial army had employed Dreyfus. Von Schlieffen asked Dame, who said he knew nothing of a Jewish spy, and Schwartzkoppen was recalled to Berlin for consultation. Cuers says he saw Schwartzkoppen in the Tiergarten; Schwartzkoppen maintained that he first heard Dreyfus’s name in a newspaper after the arrest. Dame then discreetly asked other friendly European intelligence services whether any had employed Dreyfus, and, in Cuers’s account, none had.

These reports do not erase the novel’s French surveillance of Germany or settle every question about espionage. They do, however, sharply challenge the premise that German intelligence had used Dreyfus. Cuers says German officials were angry because they believed France had staged a sophisticated trick to make them appear culpable before the world. Picquart finds that response absurd, but the disagreement exposes the affair’s international dimension: French officials treat German involvement as a danger to be managed, while the German account presented to him is one of denial and suspicion of a French provocation.

Germany invoked in public and in court

As the secret dossier becomes a public controversy, Germany continues to serve as a justification for actions taken in the name of national security. Auguste Mercier tells Picquart that he believes Dreyfus’s crimes are proved by the file shown to the court-martial; when Picquart advises that it should be shown to the court, he is responding to evidence whose secrecy Mercier elsewhere defends through the urgency of the German threat. Later, at the Rennes proceedings, Mercier argues that the country had come within two finger-breadths of war with Germany and says he had waited with President Casimir-Perier for the German emperor to back down. Casimir-Perier rises to challenge Mercier’s account, but the presiding judge does not let him intervene.

The novel also shows Germany’s history being folded into antisemitic claims about Dreyfus. In testimony at Rennes, Mercier repeats an alleged remark about Jews and the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, although Dreyfus had always denied saying it. The German occupation, invoked as evidence of national danger, thus becomes part of an accusation about the supposed loyalties of a Jewish officer. Across battlefield recollection, embassy surveillance, diplomatic alarm, and courtroom rhetoric, Germany remains a real historical presence and a powerful political image. The distinction between those roles matters: fear of Germany helps explain the military’s urgency, but the intelligence accounts and disputed testimony reveal how that fear can be made to support a case whose central accusation those same reports call into question.