BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

incapable of acting as individuals, had grown dependent on closed-order maneuvers. English
readers could take comfort in the belief that German mental inflexibility would be no match for
British initiative and pluck on the battlefield. The writer further extrapolated from this
“unpliability” of the German mind, which “unfits him for dealing with alien or inferior races,” an
incapacity for empire that would not (and should not) challenge British imperial ascendency. 12
616-19.
The German military reputation, which had acquired a dark side in association with
images of barbarians opposed to Rome, received a fillip with the exploits of German mercenaries
or Landesknechten who, along with Spanish troops under Charles V, carried out the brutal Sack
of Rome in 1527. 13 Even though the most threatening aspects of German militarism did not gain
prominence until the expansion of Germany in the nineteenth and the rise of Nazism in the
twentieth centuries, the affiliation of the Germanic warrior with Goth, Vandal and Hun remained
a persistent theme. As one post-World War II translator remarked, the Germania, “a detailed
account of a great people that had already begun to be a European problem in the first century of
our era, should still have a message for us in the twentieth.” 14
The Tacitean stereotype greatly influenced nineteenth-century British commentary on
German character, as did the Roman/barbarian duality and Machiavelli’s images of virtuous, yet
12 Gilbert Coleridge, “Thinking in Open Order,” Cornhill Magazine 111 (May 1915):
13 The Sack of Rome became a symbol of excessive brutality in subsequent literature. The
onus of barbarity was shifted onto the German Landesknechten in Gucciardini’s Storia d’Italia,
which went through three editions (1579, 1599 and 1618) in the English translation by Geoffrey
Fenton entitled, The Historie of Guicciardini, Containing the Warres of Italy. Cited in Maltby,
Black Legend, 8.
14 H. Mattingly, trans., Tacitus on Britain and Germany, Penguin Books, (Bungay,
Suffolk: Clay, 1948), 7.
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