“Christianity has emptied Walhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us and whose history has no connection whatever with our own” (p. 72). The young Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel voiced this lament in 1796, while working as a private tutor in Berne.