BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Despite being the penultimate expression of excessive behavior and bad taste, Grobianism,
through its sheer unconventionality, nevertheless stimulated nostalgia for naturalness and lost
Arcadian simplicity. From this duality Herford could infer a clear difference between English
and German sensibilities. The English version of Grobianus resembled the cynical fop, the
eccentric scholar or misanthrope who exposes the insincerity of social conventions, a concept
Herford regarded as too subtle for Dedekind’s Germany in which he found “a society too
intolerably natural to even affect refinement.” 26
The stereotypical German boor, initially perpetrated by German social satirists, would
adopt various guises throughout the nineteenth century, often in conjunction with figures vastly
different from the aggressively overindulgent dandy depicted in Grobianus. The stigma of obtuse
unmannerliness would be applied to German students as well as their favorite target, the
bourgeois Philister, to swaggering Prussian officers, to know-it-all professors and to German
social customs in general. The effectiveness of these nineteenth-century stereotypes probably
owed something to the freshness of Grobianism as a literary image in the late eighteenth century.
Herford described this abrupt transition:
Some forty years after the translation of Grobianus, polite England was weeping over the
translated Werther. The typical German figure of the later eighteenth century follows
hard upon the last traces of the typical figure of the sixteenth; the master of callous
brutality and phlegmatic ill-breeding leaves the stage as the classical victim of
sentimental passion enters it. 27
26 Herford concluded, “the contrast which Dedekind found in the German society of his
day between the ‘respectable’ burgher and the wilfully offensive boor, was qualified by the finer
contrast of which English society afforded suggestions, between the devotees of social
convention and of the ‘simplicity of nature.’” Literary Relations of England and Germany, 397.
27 Ibid., 398.
154