BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

changed that. Russia became the check on German designs in the East, with the new alliance
system only confirming German fears of encirclement.
Divergent geopolitical visions created quite different paths for British and German
identity. Britain could exploit the commercially successful imperial legacy of a Commonwealth
of nations through two devastating world wars; Germany’s military occupation of the Eastern
Front during World War I only served to warp German Kultur and identity, ultimately spawning
unrealizable aspirations for totalitarian control that presaged Hitler’s Drang noch Osten a
generation later. 95 But the British overseas empire also left its own disturbing imprints on British
colonial and postcolonial identity. Ian Baucom wrote about the incompatibility between tropes
of ingroup purity and the realities of outgroup absorption that led to a tropicalization or
hybridization of cultures. 96 Baucom specifically referred to Indianized architectural elements of
Bombay’s Victoria Terminus and the fictional image of the racially white but “gone native” Kim
of Kipling’s classic novel. Even after his complete reeducation, or “sahibization,” Kim becomes
more useful to the empire as a hybrid subject, able to obtain knowledge from the natives for the
great imperial project of mapping India. For Kipling, Baucom argued, British imperial rule
implied a dilution or loss of what it meant to be English.
Similarly, Simon Gikandi has discussed how the inseparability of metropole and
periphery affected the formation of English identity: early through a triumphal imperial
95 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity
and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.40,
89-91, 104-8, 142-3, 160, 180-193, 220, 234-41, 253-55.
96 Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 83-86, 88, 220, 222.
107