Anglo-German Academic Encounters before the First World War and the Work towards Peace: The Case of Karl Breul

Abstract

Towards the end of his academic career in 1915, the first professor of German Language and Literature at Cambridge, Karl Breul (1860–1932), published his last major scholarly work dedicated to a unique collection of mediaeval Latin poems dating back to the eleventh century and known as The Cambridge Songs. In the preface to this book, the author offers a truly disturbing account of the circumstances under which this work came into being. It was prepared, as he puts it, “in the very saddest year” of his life, when so much for which he had lived and worked was “crumbling to pieces”. When he wrote these words, the First World War was in its darkest hour and the atmosphere in Britain was very different to what Breul had experienced when he first set foot on the island in 1884. The country was swept by an anti-German fever, which escalated following the sinking of the Lu-