The school then did not have a strong reputation for modern foreign languages; he was taught German by Miltiades Acatos, a Greek who had studied in Germany, but it was a "rough and ready" education which scarcely dealt with literature.
[3] Martin Swales commented that the trip to Berlin galvanised "His literary interests (especially his love for Goethe's poetry), his quickened sense of the interplay of ideas and socio-historical reality, and his political awakening, above all to the dangers of fascism" and "convinced him to devote his professional life to Germany and to things German.
"[1] After graduating with a first-class degree in French and German three years later, he received the Tiarks scholarship and studied the philosopher, poet and mystic known as Novalis in Germany; but he would eventually abandon those investigations.
In the United Kingdom, Pascal also sympathised with the Communist Party; his far left politics and his advocacy over reparations and Germany joining the League of Nations meant that his fellowship at Pembroke was not renewed after five years (although he remained at Cambridge as a lecturer).
[7] His chair at Birmingham allowed Pascal to reform the curriculum for German teaching; he aimed for it to emphasise the connections between literature, cultural, history and society, and appointed Bill Lockwood, Richard Hinton Thomas and Siegbert Prawer, among others, to the department.
[1] Somewhat ironically, by the late 1960s a new generation of students—many returning from semesters spent in German universities—espoused the radical politics of the New Left and at least superficially 'Marxist' ideas; Pascal, as head of the department at Birmingham, came under attack as an authoritarian, elite figure.
[12] Martin Swales wrote in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that he was nevertheless "admired and loved by the generality of the profession",[1] and A. V. Subiotto summarised that he "[produced] a steady and impressive output of academic scholarship spanning half a century and embracing several disciplines.