The Germans believed that the English writer William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was Germany, given the great favor of his works and plays after being translated into German.

In a report published in The Daily Telegraph, the writer Daniel Hanan said Shakespeare was actually a German. He said that English writer Michael Redgrave (1908-1985) was a fan of him, and he believed that his collection of plays - especially King Lear - seemed better. In German.

The Germans have always had an unusually strong relationship with the poet Shakespeare, and the German writer Johann Gottfried Herder - who was instrumental in creating German nationalism - was fond of Shakespeare's plays.

He believes that Shakespeare was a "genius from the North" who was mistakenly born in England, that his works reached perfection when combined with the ideas and philosophy of the German language, and that many great German writers sought to present Shakespeare with his true tongue and translated his literary works into German.

A friend in the European Parliament, a German Democrat, said that Shakespeare worked better in German, and that he was quoting long passages of his plays when he was speaking in Parliament.

He explains that the prominent German writer Johann Goethe (1749–1832) loved Shakespeare's plays because of their breadth, originality and spontaneity, and that he built a theater for him in Weimar, Germany, which is in fact a temple for him.

He adds that Goethe considered Shakespeare one of the greatest writers, but he admired him for very different reasons, as he loved plays for their spontaneity and naturalism.