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Protestantism for social reasons on marrying a Protestant, certain professions in Prussia, for example the military, at that time being barred to Catholics.
    As is often the case in liberal times, the household limited church-going to high days and feast days, but there is no doubt that Canaris wasbrought up with a strongly Christian ethos, reinforced by his mother’s piety. While never later belonging to any religion in a regular confessional way, he nevertheless was brought up to believe that there was a higher authority watching and judging the affairs of men. In his closing months of freedom, he would derive great comfort from the interiors of the great Spanish Cathedrals and be dubbed by British intelligence rather disparagingly as ‘a kind of Catholic mystic’.
    No less doubtful is the fact that as a privileged son and heir to a protagonist of bourgeois capitalism, the young Canaris would have been brought up with a degree of suspicion towards Marxism and its growing influence on the working classes of the Ruhr, as more and more workers from the East diluted the local labour force and old local loyalties were broken down, to be replaced by ideological ties. While the socialist measures of Bismarck – state pensions, social welfare – were praised by Canaris’ father, the ‘poison’ of Marxism would have been regarded as a threat to the wealth and future of the strata of society to which the Canaris family belonged.
    Throughout his later career, Canaris would combine these two traits: a strong sense of responsibility for the welfare of people subordinate and less well off than himself, and an instinctive rejection of Marxism and extremes. It was a point of view shared by many of his background and articulated perhaps in its most magisterial form by the hugely influential 1891 papal encyclical of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum .
    Such a family, with an almost uninterrupted ancestry of solid bourgeois achievement, had never aspired to the higher echelons of German society. The Canaris family tree is traceable back to the sixteenth century, but one looks in vain for any sign of aristocratic or military pretensions. But the Germany of the early twentieth century, with its colonial opportunities, naval expansion and powerful industrial development seemed to offer even the arriviste bourgeoisie access to careers that had hitherto been the preserve of an aristocratic caste.
    Nevertheless, it appears to have come as a great surprise to his family when the young Canaris, following a cruise around the Aegean with his parents, announced that he would like to join the Imperial German Navy. It is important to remember that not by the furthest stretch of the imagination could anyone have seen the Canaris family as in any way related to the officer or Junker class that traditionally made up imperial Germany’s officer corps. There had never been a professional soldier in the Canaris family, although that did not mean that the family was hostile to the military. Canaris’ father had served in a territorial pioneer regiment inMetz, but the idea of arms as a profession struck most industrialists like Canaris’ father as too poorly paid to be taken seriously.
    This attitude also extended to the relatively parvenu service of the navy. But during his cruise the young Canaris had not only seen the impressive new ships of the Imperial Austrian navy in Pola and Trieste, but also something which appears to have had a profound effect on his psyche: namely, the statue erected in Athens to the memory of Admiral Canaris, hero of the Greek war of Independence. Perhaps struck by the unusual sound of his name, perhaps mocked by his fellow German students, the young Canaris seized on this heroic figure and learnt all his daring exploits off by heart, as if to embrace him as an honorary member of his family tree. In fact, despite Canaris’ fascination with the Greek hero, there was no evidence of any relationship.