BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

. . . since time immemorial the Pandemonium of Europe and the only spot which
persecuting incredulity has left to the adepts in the black art, where all the witches and
wizards of the civilised world still assemble, on May morning, to commune with their
horned Master and to celebrate under his guidance their unholy orgies.” 50
German horror, and English appreciation of it, confirmed the sixteenth-century literary tradition
of monstrosities, marvels, superstition and witchcraft persecutions associated with Germany,
which provided, as in the case of Tacitus’s Germania, a ready reference when needed.
Given the so-called Protestant “affinities” between England and the land of Luther, one
might search for reasons, besides literary mass appeal, why the diabolical image of Germany
persisted along with its obverse, German piety. In 1732 the idea of racial kinship, Protestant
gratitude for the German Reformation and the feeling that Germany had surpassed England in the
arts and sciences supported the argument that the English could not “depreciate” Germans
without “defaming themselves.” 51 This sanguine view, however, encountered resistance not only
because it went against the grain of isolationist British nationalism but also because it overlooked
some very real differences involving theological doctrine and the role of religion in the political
histories of both nations. The importance of doctrinal distinctions, such as the strength of
Erasmian or Calvinist, as opposed to Lutheran, influences in England lie beyond the scope of this
paper. 52 However, England’s evolution from Protestant prince-worship to “civil courage”
50 C. A. Channer. “The Hartz District and Its Towns,” Good Words 35 (March 1894): 167.
51 London Magazine 1 (1732):129, quoted in Morgan, German Literature in British
Magazines, 38.
52 The influence of Erasmus on early English humanism and the split with Luther over the
issue of free will has been dealt with in Johan Huizinga’s classic Erasmus and the Age of
Reformation, trans. F. Hupman (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). Dickens, English
Reformation, 231, 238-39, speaks of Archbishop Cranmer’s failure to establish a link with
Melancthon and the Lutherans, and the consequent predominance of non-Lutheran, even anti-
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