ABSTRACT
While this chapter incorporates the methodology used in Chapters 1–3, it investigates Erskine Childers’s mode of masculine self-determination during the late-Victorian/Edwardian period. While still operating within the overall objectives of the British Empire, Davies and Carruthers, as amateur spies, initiate and execute an intelligence-gathering mission as private citizens, who not only lacked the imprimatur of the British government, but also took the initiative to become de facto agents without the crown’s knowledge of their transnational activities. In acting autonomously, they demonstrated clear traits of self-determination not only as amateur spies, but as men who chose to boldly face the challenges of sea and sailing, using the forces of Nature as a preparation regimen to train for future encounters with an imperial enemy methodically building its fleet to challenge England’s sea superiority. Likewise, Rainer Boldt’s 1985 film series functions within the framework of masculine self-determination, but rather than Childers’s affirmation of martial competition among empires, Boldt seeks to break the spell of imperialistic notions of fate in shaping postwar West German masculinity by purposely offering a historical parallel between the Anglo-Prussian naval arms race leading up to World War I and the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union leading up to the pivotal year of 1985 that marked a vital turning point in East-West hostilities and nuclear disarmament. Boldt thus takes Childers’s use of natural self-determination to affirm an imperialist agenda and then reconstitutes this agenda as a means of dissolving the very logic of war-based conflict itself.
