BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

If the general impression existed that the English unfairly saw the French as vain “fribbles
and fools,” and that the French likewise viewed the British as “brutes and barbarians” with a
“reputation for being disagreeable,” a similar revelation occasionally surfaced that images of
Germans might be based more on English expectations and fears than on reality. 81 As early as
1864 one writer for Cornhill Magazine suggested that German professors had been unfairly
characterized as “unpractical” when viewed from the vantage point of the “practical” English
mind. 82 During the 1890s a few articles even acknowledged a correspondence between changing
times and changing impressions of Germany. The stereotypical Old German, a “sluggish,
phlegmatic, prosaic sort of person, with few ideas beyond his pipe and his beer” had
metamorphosed into a being “excitable, impulsive, and quick-tempered, with an abnormally long
tongue,” a “curious mixture of prose and poetry,” of “cynical common sense and visionary
sentimentality,” who had “little self-control, no reserve at all.” 83 Famed journalist, E. J. Dillon,
noted a similar change in the German image after the Kruger Telegram episode in 1896.
“Honest, modest, Protestant Germany ,” he wrote, the “mainstay of peace and order,” had
become “the only blustering, scheming, and really dangerous power, on the Continent.” When
referring to political freedoms, observed Dillon,”we are wont to sneer at the Germans as slaves.”
undeveloped England (e.g., England’s “poor relation”), a semi-sanguine view that presumed
similarity on the basis of racial and cultural kinship but clearly dissociated English from German
character, even if only by a matter of degree.
81 Quotations from Edward C. B. Dicey, “The Isolation of England,” Fortnightly Review
60 (July-December 1896): 331, and “The Present Position of European Politics: Part
I.—Germany,” Fortnightly Review 41 (January 1887): 17.
82 “German Professors,” Cornhill 10 (July-December 1864): 352.
83 “Cousins German,” Cornhill 17 (September 1891): 295.
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