Learned, Indefatigable, Deep-Thinking Germany

Abstract

It is next to impossible to undertake any examination of British representations of Germany before 1914 without close reference to fiction and literature. Nearly every major work of history on Anglo-German relations in the period before the outbreak of the Great War refers to the literary evidence as a cultural reflection of moves towards outright antagonism between the two powers, around the turn of the twentieth century.2 Literary scholars too have explored the fictional representation of Germany by the British (and Britain by the Germans) using the political and diplomatic events of the period as part of historicist criticism.3 As noted earlier, in my introduction, the most famous such study is undoubtedly Voices Prophesying War, which explores the early twentieth-century representations of Germany in the new ‘invasion’ genre of English fiction.