BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Newes from Germany” full of portents, curiosities and bizarre tales of the supernatural. 43 The
elements of grim reality and fantasy interwoven in tales of German diabolism that drifted into
England on a tide of frenzied Protestant piety left their mark in English minds. In the devolution
of German witch stories one could see, “a sort of hideous travesty of the Faust motive;—the
diabolic intercourse in a more repulsive form, the supernatural powers put to a baser use.” 44
If superstition held less sway three centuries later, the association of horror and the
supernatural with Germany survived in the enormously popular neo-Gothic novel, which featured
“dungeons of sinister castles hidden in German forests, or convents where nuns found recreation
in flogging screaming novices.” 45 Gottfried A. Bürger’s romantic poem, Lenore, a widely read
and reviewed example of German horror and macabre imagery, went through six translations,
one by Walter Scott, and numerous editions between 1796 and 1846. 46 The story revolved
around a young girl who blames providence for the disappearance of her soldier-lover. The
43 Literary Relations, 165-79. Herford’s citations include the following two works: A
Briefe Collection and compendious extract of strange and memorable thinges, gathered out of
the Cosmographye of S. Munster (London: Marshe, 1572, available in German as early as 1537)
and Stephen Batman’s The Doome (London: Nubery, 1581) which presented a translation and
supplementation of Conrad Lycosthenes’s portent collection, Prodigiorum ac ostentorum
chronicon (Basel: Petri, 1557). He describes the contents of the popular fare as
“. . . massacres, and earthquakes, storms, executions and apparitions, monstrous births
and bodies raised from the dead, fasting girls and ‘damnable sorcerers,’ strange signs in
the air, prophecies in the mouth of rustics and of sages, visions of angels, mysterious
glimpses of the Wandering Jew” (p. 174).
44 Literary Relations, 179.
45 Altick, The English Common Reader, p.289, notes the popularity of the neo-Gothic
novel amongst working-class readers of the 1820s.
46 V. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England, 1750-1830 (London: Routledge
& Sons, 1929), 7. See also Morgan, German Literature in British Magazines, 42-43.
161