BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

times very seriously distorted” 71 The reception of German literature in England suffered from
what Mander called “a fatal compound of ignorance and ambivalence . . . . German piety might
be ridiculed at one moment; German ‘immorality’ the next.” This “embryonic English reaction
to things German” revealed itself in the reaction to two popular, but diametrically opposed,
genres: works of religious piety or pastoral works, the so-called “sentimental and moral” tale
“from the German,” and the violently emotional Sturm und Drang creations of the Romantic
writers. 72 Early enthusiasm for both types of literature withered under the satirical blasts and
ridicule of British reviewers, and a revival of interest in Germany’s literary renaissance had to
wait at least a decade for a reappraisal by Madame de Staël, and longer for the advocacy of
Thomas Carlyle.
Timing presented a major obstacle to the appreciation of German literature in Britain
because reasonably good translations of Märchen, or German tales, and works by Gessner,
Wieland, Lessing, Goethe and Schiller became widely available only after 1790 amidst news of
revolution in France. Moreover, a reversal of early sympathies with the revolution, as expressed
in the writings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and political essayist William Godwin, led to a
conservative reaction, stoked by invasion fears, which associated German literature with extreme
liberalism and the questioning of authority. This incipient trend, marked by virulent attacks on
71 John Mander, Our German Cousins, 20.
72 Ibid., 24, 27-28. The “two kinds” of literature anticipates a dichotomy between good
and bad Germans which represents a factor in stereotyping that permits the pretense of rational
judgement while pigeonholing the target group according to its perceived positive and negative
aspects. This phenomenon is discussed in reference to anti-Semitism in Adorno, Authoritarian
Personality, 622.
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