BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

ead and low wages galvanized working-class and Liberal opposition to both tariff reform and
the ideal of German industrial expansion and its “Germanness.” 42
The Racial Argument
The twin specters of imperial decline and racial or moral degeneration sustained the
romantic myth of Teutonic purity in opposition to classical models in general and decadent Rome
in particular. The myth of German racial and moral purity, one of the earliest themes making up
the German stereotype, can be traced in modern times to the late-renaissance rediscovery of
Tacitus’s Germania. Written in 98 CE, this polemical ancient ethnography idealized German
valor, love of freedom, simplicity and marital fidelity in contrast to decadent Rome. 43 The lasting
power of the Tacitean stereotype derived from the simplified Roman reference to unconquered
regions east of the Rhine and north of the Danube and to its depiction of the myriad tribes
subsumed under the name Germani as a unique, indigenous people with essentially homogenous
and surprisingly admirable features, character, customs and religious beliefs. 44 Exaggerated by
sixteenth-century German humanists and co-opted by Anglo-Saxonists, the idealized portrait of
42 Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, 118. See also Frank McDonough, The
Conservative Party and Anglo-German Relations, 1905-1914 (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 100.
43 On this generally accepted view of Tacitus see Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. Moses
Hadas, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Broadribb, Germany and Its Tribes,
(New York: Random House, 1942), xii and Kurt F. Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years
(Milwaukee: Bruce, 1950), 5.
44 Regarding the Germans as aboriginal and unalloyed with other races through
immigration, Tacitus wrote: “who would leave Asia, or Africa, or Italy, for Germany with its
wild country, its inclement skies, its sullen manners and aspect, unless indeed it were his home?”
See Hadas, Tacitus, 709.
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