BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

same writer who called Germany the “touchstone of our conduct,” described the attitude of most
Englishmen:
Germany is simply a country which, for reasons best known to itself, keeps a very large
army, possesses a good many autocratic and boorish officials, which has once or twice, in
the person of its Emperor, had the impertinence to interfere with our own affairs and
which persists in flooding our labour-markets with cheap clerks. 87
Perry held that the British entertained an irrational view regarding the legacy of Bismarckian
“unscrupulousness” and “wicked militarism,” and he argued that German diplomacy and military
power were based on dire necessity, and that the Franco-Prussian War had been inevitable. But
even this apologist for Germany and advocate of German educational and industrial models
employed a litany of German stereotypes and managed to convey, in a sardonic reflection on the
image shift from German Michael to menace, a vaguely dreadful warning:
A learned German professor with blue spectacles was in our eyes more a subject of
derision than of disquietude, nor could we conceive that so unornamental a personage
could in any way influence us either for good or evil. It is only recently that the scales
have fallen from our eyes. Like the fellow-citizens of the Greek philosopher, we have
been much surprised to find that the scientific investigations of which we had made so
light could turn out water-wheels. Accustomed as we have been to regard the Germans as
a nation of sentimentalists and unpractical theorists, we have now become painfully
conscious that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in our
philosophy. 88
Germany’s arrival in the world of commerce and industry indeed exposed the inaccuracy of the
“old-fashioned philosophic German” stereotype, a revelation which generated what seemed to
some writers an overcompensated image of the German arch rival. The world, wrote James H.
Collins in 1911, “insists that he is a bugaboo, that Providence has endowed him with mysterious
87 Perry, “Germany as an Object Lesson,” Nineteenth Century, 526-27.
88 Ibid., 528, 531, 534.
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