BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

crowd”—and therefore could not be relied upon to arouse Germans from the torpor of political
apathy (“a stone which cannot easily be set rolling”). 95 Many newspapers were counted as ready
tools of a paternal government. The repressive Lèse-Majesté laws, which allowed prosecution of
journalists who criticized the kaiser or his government, redeemed to a great extent the reputations
of martyred German journalists in British publications normally accustomed to condemning
journalistic toadyism or reacting to German Anglophobia. 96 In 1895 the prosecutions of Social
Democrat leader, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Dr. Hans Delbrück, editor of the Preussische
Jahrbücher, were considered “absurd” and “childish,” symptomatic of the “young mad cap on
the throne.” 97 In 1898 British magazines also mocked the sentencing of Herr Trojan, editor of the
satirical Kladderadatsch, to two months in prison for publication of his “Mailed Fist” cartoon
ridiculing the kaiser’s statement that a good Prussian soldier must also be a good Christian. The
cartoon represented Alexander the Great, Leonidas, Napoleon I and “that scoffing Voltairean,
Frederic the Great, listening with amused contempt to the Kaiser’s dictum.” 98 Despite the fact
that the Review of Reviews regularly reproduced cartoons from German satirical magazines, such
as Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch, a general impression of the German press as either
politically indifferent or subservient persisted. Nearly a decade later in 1907, in the aftermath of
a flurry of journalistic hostility referred to as the Anglo-German paper war, the Contemporary
95 Lowe, “German Newspaper Press,” 857-58.
96 “The Germans and Freedom of Thought,” Spectator 80 (January 1898): 158.
97 See “Lèse-Majesté Gone Mad: Liberty of the Press in Germany,” Review of Reviews 12
(October 1895): 514.
98 “Progress of the World: Making Himself Ridiculous,” Review of Reviews 17 (January-
June 1898): 115.
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