BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

British superiority over Germans and Scandinavians was justified by emphasizing the unique
heritage of the British racial mixture. The more “plastic” character resulting from a happy
confluence of Teutonic (Nordic), Iberian (Mediterranean) and Mongolian (Alpine) qualities, so
one argument ran, set Anglo-Saxons apart from their racially “pure” Germanic cousins (see table
3, p. 129). 53 Innate flexibility and adaptability resulting from this racial fusion supposedly
enabled the British to avoid religious and socio-political extremism and to “bend to dynastic and
political storms in a manner which it is to be feared the pure Teuton may find difficult to achieve
under similar circumstances.” 54
The Tacitean stereotype of racial distinctiveness lost cogency not only because the
argument for racial purity cut both ways, but also because the false sense of racial and cultural
unity ascribed to the Germans was controverted by observations of German racial and political
diversity. The “network of boundaries” and mixture of races that defined the small states of
“middle” Germany seemed symptomatic of a national defect supposed to be the outgrowth of
political particularism. 55 Even the larger states of Prussia and Bavaria, which embodied the
see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York; London: Norton, 1981), 74, 85.
53 Nottige Charles Macnamara, Origin and Character of the British People (London:
Smith, Elder, 1900), 164, 213-14, and especially 222-23, where he considers the unalloyed
Teutonic strain to be overly aggressive and self-destructive. The rationalization of national
stereotypes through pre-conceived racial categories based on craniometry can also be seen, for
example, in the supposed Ibero-Mongoloid mixture that formed the “lazy, rollicking, merry
Irishman of the caricaturist” (p. 208).
54 Ibid., 226. Herbert Spencer and others propounded the idea of racial mixture as the key
to adaptability and survival of the fittest during the 1870s and 80s, but benefits did not apply to
intermarriage between blacks and whites. See Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science
and Myth in Anglo-American Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 189, 229.
55 Quoted from William Howitt, Life in Germany (London: Routledge, 1849, first edition
129