The Last of the Summer Holidays — Twentieth Century Travel

Abstract

Just as an apparent German militarism did limit the enjoyment of some British visitors, those travelling to Germany at the turn of the twentieth century were not immune to the barbs of the German press directed against Britain and its policy in South Africa (indeed it was partially the reports of travellers to the Continent which alerted the domestic British press and society in general to the virulence of such attacks).¹ However for the most part it would seem that the undeniable bitterness of these years did not inhibit the British enjoyment of Germany and what it had to offer the vacationer (even Chamberlain’s concern over Treitschke’s teachings disappeared quite quickly, resurfacing only in the 1900s).² Some apprehension no doubt existed among those considering an excursion in the Fatherland in the Boer War period, and it was noted by Thomas Beck Foreman in his account that ‘the unfriendly comments’ of some German journalists ‘at the expense of our countrymen had led us to expect more or less coolness from our German fellow-travellers’.³ Foreman was pleased to discover and report that all those Germans whom he and his party encountered on their journey ‘were polite and even friendly’ to them, and even in the larger urban centres such as Mainz and Koblenz, they ‘did not experience the slightest discomfort on account of [their] nationality’.⁴ The fact that ‘nothing transpired … to verify [his] apprehensions’ Foreman put down to the racialist notion that ‘the Teuton equally with the Anglo-Saxon’ was subject to that profound sense of ‘“Wander-lust” [sic]’ which had inspired their journey in the first place, and that despite the petty squabbling of the material world, there were deeper connections between German and Briton.⁵