The Enemy Reviewed: German Popular Literature Through British Eyes Between the Two World Wars

In past centuries British attitudes toward German culture oscillated between hostility and indifference. For a brief period of 20 years between the two World Wars, this pattern changed dramatically, with a flood of German books in translation threatening to engulf the British book market and triggering violently emotional reactions in the literary pages of the popular press. Reviewers of these books are shown here to have harbored a deep amibivalence toward an alien German culture. The reviews of these years reveal a dialectical tug of war between the established Hun stereotype of Germany and a dual complex and contradicting image of the redeeming barbarian promising rebirth.