ABSTRACT
The South African police confiscated this anti-German poem on the streets of Johannesburg in June 1915. Its 13 stanzas imitated Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem Recessional, which had been turned into a hymn and was intonated by the British troops at their premature victory celebration outside the Afrikaner
won the ensuing phase of guerrilla war with the Boer commandos, the anonymous author of this leaflet echoed Kipling’s warning against imperialist hubris by embedding the bard’s message in a matrix of rabid nationalism.2 The police was not so much concerned to protect the ‘drowners of innocents’, as the poem alluded to the torpedoing of the British passenger ship Lusitania by a German U-boat a few weeks previously.3 The authorities feared, however, that the distribution of jingoistic pamphlets in the streets of the Union’s most volatile urban centre could lead to a repetition of the public violence which had rocked many South African towns and cities a few days after the sinking of the Cunard liner. When Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger sent the Lusitania to the bottom of the Irish Sea on 7 May 1915, killing 1198 civilians, he could hardly have anticipated that his actions would cause repercussions at a global level. The Lusitania tragedy consolidated Germany’s international reputation as a barbarous fiend of modern civilization. It also triggered global anti-German riots with bewildered citizens trying to understand why Europe had descended into mass slaughter almost overnight. Notions of cultural difference, which were often intermeshed with anxieties about economic competition, as well as an emotional need for scapegoating, coagulated into scaremongering imageries of ‘the enemy within’.
