BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

height Teutophilia contained the seeds of its own destruction through racial hair-splitting that
would acquire even greater political and moral significance to British observers of post-
Bismarckian, expansionist Germany.
The racial component of the Tacitean stereotype gained credibility during the nineteenth
century through the desire to equate contemporary political or cultural entities, and national
character, with preconceived over-simplifications of the distant past. British racialists depended
upon Tacitus, for example, when asserting the superiority of “pure” northern Teutonic peoples
over “mongrel”, decadent southern Latin races or, conversely, comparing the deficits of German
racial homogeneity unfavorably with more heterogenous Anglo-Saxons. Nineteenth-century
ethnologists supported the stereotypical polarity between Northern “industrial” and Southern
“sensual” Europeans by claiming for Anglo-Saxons and Teutons the successful qualities of the
former (i.e., reason, industry, thrift, morality) and disowning traits associated with the imperial
and moral decline of the latter (i.e., emotionality, laziness, extravagance, eroticism). 51 Such
arguments served to prognosticate or rationalize the imperial or economic predominance of
Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Europeans according to a deterministic racial hierarchy, often based
on pseudo-scientific assumptions about cranial capacity or skull shape. 52 The further assertion of
51 In an 1898 review of two books on racial/national character, Edmond Demolins’ À quoi
tient la superiorité des Anglo-saxons (Paris, 1897) and Di Guglielmo Ferrero’s L’Europa
Giovane: Studie Viaggi nel paesi del Nord (Milan, 1897), the traits of chastity (with a reference
to Tacitus) and the capacity to endure monotony made the key difference that gave rise to the
economic superiority of the Northern over the Southern European races. See Gwynn, “The
Success of the Anglo-Saxons,” Edinburgh Review, Reprinted in Living Age 217 (April-June
1898): 353-55, 360. The persistence of the North/South racial dichotomy, which figured
prominently in sixteenth-century anti-Hispanism (see Maltby, Black Legend, 104), is also
discussed in Firchow, Death of the German Cousin, 25, and Mander, Our German Cousins, 52.
52 On craniometry and the selective manipulation of criteria to obtain prejudicial results
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