Alexander Tille (1866–1912) is mentioned in monographs as a key figure in Anglo-German intercultural transfer and late nineteenth-century German intellectual life. Steven E. Aschheim, for example, describes Tille as “the major mediator of Nietzsche in Britain.” For Richard Hinton Thomas, he was “the most important of the German Social Darwinists at this time.” Despite frequent references of such kind, Tille's academic work and activities have never been thoroughly investigated in a specifically Anglo-German context. The following article, based on Tille's publications and other primary sources, seeks to fill this gap. It will be shown that the clear dichotomy between ‘peacemaker’ and ‘warmonger’ does not suffice to categorize figures like Tille. The same can be said about other individuals such as D. H. Lawrence or Kuno Meyer, who are discussed elsewhere in this volume.

Alexander Tille was born in Lauenstein / Saxony into an educated middle-class family, his father being a protestant pastor who introduced his son to Greek, Latin, and classical literature from an early age. After attending the prestigious Fürstenschule in Grimma, Tille took up his studies at Leipzig University in German and English philology, as well as philosophy. He received his doctorate in 1890 with a study on the Faust motif in German folk songs. That same year he secured a part-time lectureship in German at Glasgow University. In this position he was highly active, mediating German philosophy and literature in Britain, and, vice versa, British intellectual thought in Germany.