BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Englishness that depended upon the alterity of colonial spaces and cultures and later through a
modernist disenchantment with the philosophical inconsistencies and harsh realities of imperial
rule. As part of the modernist reaction to imperialism, Joseph Conrad’s novels and stories
pessimistically portrayed the delusions of imperial mentality and the malignant effects of
untamable Africa on the European psyche and identity. Like Baucom, Gikandi emphasized the
inherent contradiction between imperial expansion and racial or cultural exclusivity that has
sustained a colonial and postcolonial English identity crisis. Gikandi concluded that cultural
representations of the other became integral to the construction of English/British identity, often
through themes of spatial or sensorial disorientation. 97
An example of spatial othering in an Anglo-German context, when Germany could still
be classed as a backward region, can be found in an oddly horrifying little tale entitled “A Night
in a German Wood.” 98 Warning English pedestrian tourists in 1852 never to embark on “such
fascinating excursions” without a guide or a reliable compass, the author loses his way in the
heavily-wooded Westphalian countryside one evening and winds up groping amidst a “darkness
that might be felt” through field and wood. Unable to understand cryptic directions shouted from
a solitary passing cart to “follow the foot of the woods,” he finds himself stumbling in circles and
eventually marooned in a gloomy wood where he recalls:
. . . almost every branch I grasped in the dark to help me onward seemed crowded with
snails, which smashed slimily under my shuddering hand! Glow worms were sparkling in
the underwood in such myriads as I never witnessed before, . . .
97 Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York;
Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1996), 6, 50-51, 66-67, 170-74, 185, 214.
98 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 441 (June 12, 1852): 381-83.
108