BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

in his analysis of the “Anglo-German Problem,” written in 1912. German blindness to their own
colonial deficiencies, their missed opportunities, their brutality toward native populations, their
own “passive obedience” and lack of initiative, he contended, undermined Germany’s grievance
that England had thwarted Germany’s “place in the sun.” 12 But German othering operated on
much more mundane levels as well in periodical literature, and not without paradoxes. Despite
the usual stereotype of German political servility and passivity, for example, German servants
could be seen as maddeningly obstinate and assertive of their customary rights. One lady writer
complained that her decently educated but “hopelessly uncouth,” “incorrigibly dirty” and
“loutish” German servants would gather after hours in doorways to flirt and gossip, in utter
disregard of the inconvenience and nuisance to master and mistress. 13 A constellation of such
anti-German stereotypes, with all of their inherent contradictions, provided malleable props to
British self-esteem in many different contexts.
The nineteenth-century British image of Germany took shape during an “era of
uncertainty” in relation to sweeping political and industrial revolutions, nationalist wars and
imperial rivalries. 14 The consciousness of living in an age of transition, seen as beginning with
12 The Anglo-German Problem (New York; London: Nelson, 1912), 229, 236, 239, 242.
13 A Lady (Countess Marie von wife of Count Maximillan Joseph von Bothmer), “German
Home Life,” Fraser's Magazine 11 (January, 1875): 40, 42-3; “German Servants,” Chambers's
Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 298 (September 17, 1859): 191-92.
14 The phrase was used by Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1968), viii. Walter E. Houghton, in his classic work, The Victorian
Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 96-97, also argued that
the “secret yearning after certainty” or some dogma to replace, or revive, the ideal of progress
emerged as the governing motif in a substantial body of Victorian literary, scientific and religious
thought. These concerns followed upon unresolved spiritual crises generated by the scientific
assault on religion and spread of agnosticism.
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