BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

allowed condemnation of German national character as either in-bred and obnoxious or
polymorphous and lacking distinction. 56
As older Germanophilic notions of racial kinship gave way to a clarification of Anglo-
German differences, the very proximity of Anglo-Saxons and Teutons in the Anglocentric racial
hierarchy, taken together with the old saw about Anglo-German religious and cultural affinities,
ironically provoked a kind of national one-upmanship waged through the relentless pursuit of
distinctions. British conceptions of racial character during the nineteenth century generally
imbued Anglo-Saxons with all of the Teutonic, or German, virtues and none of the vices.
Britons, for example, had supposedly inherited mechanical ability, deliberation, ethics and sexual
morality without the plodding stolidity, inflexibility, gloominess and pugnacity of the Germans.
Imperial rivalry exacerbated the obsession with Anglo-German racial and cultural distinctions on
both sides of the North Sea. Treitschke, for one, played a major part in converting the
sentimental myth of Anglo-German affinity to one of perpetual rivalry when he began to
formulate a contrast between competing “Anglo-Saxon” and “Teutonic” cultures, a theme that
resonated with Pan-Germanists. 57 On the British side, one author voiced a typical late
nineteenth-century attitude: that England, since the time of the Norman Conquest, had become
56 When Matthew Arnold criticized Richard Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica as a typically
“ugly and ignoble” product of Teutonic Kultur, his words found favor with audiences for whom
Teutonism had become synonymous with archaism and tactlessness. See Barbara Tuchman, The
Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York: Macmillan,
1966), 373.
57 McClelland, German Historians and England, 188, 222, dates the negative shift in
German views of England from 1871. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in
the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 202, refers to
the emphasis placed on Anglo-German distinctions in the early writings of Moeller van der
Bruck and other Pan-Germanists.
131