BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

scholarship. However, statements like “scratch the Junker, and you will find the lanzknecht
[sic]” and “the fact that every German is a soldier, is itself a proof of a lower type of civilization”
conveyed the gist of Harrison’s message: namely, that England’s “duty” lay with the cause of
civilization against purportedly barbaric Germany. 27 Identification of Germany with Rome, when
it occurred, tended to be negative. At least one writer found “something of the temper of ancient
Rome about the German Empire” in its fondness of “massiveness,” dramatic effect and
pugnacity—elements which smacked of paganism. 28 Most comparisons with antiquity, however,
accorded with Harrison’s view and the idea of German reversion to ancestral pagan beliefs. 29
This impression cropped up in various contexts, from criticism of Goethe to ridicule of German
superstition and comments about “a pagan congregation of devout enthusiasts of the Wagnerian
cult,” or “a considerable touch of paganism” in the kaiser’s “ardent ancestor-worship.” 30
27 Harrison, National and Social Problems, 63-69.
28 John Twells Brex, comp., Scaremongerings From the “Daily Mail”: The Paper That
Foretold the War 1896-1914 (London: Daily Mail, n.d.), 61.
29 Hoover, God, Germany & Britain, 40-41, cites Louis Untermeyer, Heinrich Heine:
Paradox and Poet (New York, 1937), 1:229, about the famous poet’s often quoted 1834
prophecy that Germans were “reverting to type” and abandoning Christianity, and he remarks on
the English clergy’s perception of German neopaganism gained from Queen’s College Professor
of Modern History, J. A. Cramb’s Germany and England (London, 1914).
30 Mander, Our German Cousins, 137, refers to Coleridge’s hatred of Goethe’s paganism.
Dawson, Germany and the Germans 1:376, reported that Ascension Day, the fortieth day after
Easter, used to be sacred to Donar, the pagan German god of thunder, and that superstitious
peasants would hide scissors and needles during storms lest harm would befall the crops. The
quotes are from Katherine Blyth, “Sketches Made in Germany—No. 1,” Nineteenth Century 40
(September 1896): 386, who hints at German paganism being in competition with Christianity,
and Charles Lowe, “The Kaiser and His Family: A Study in Heredity,” Pall Mall Magazine 25
(October 1903): 150.
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