BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

examine the meteoric rise of Germany closely and, according to contemporary social theory, to
conceive of the British and German Empires locked in a Darwinian struggle for supremacy, a
theme kept alive in the public imagination through popular invasion scare literature. A
remarkable continuity nevertheless existed in the opinions of writers separated by more than two
generations. The same patronizing air of grudging admiration mixed with contempt, ridicule and
moral condemnation remained, only with this major difference: the new alarmism shifted its
focus away from the deleterious effects of German “speculative” philosophy and “immoral”
literature onto the more “concrete” phantoms of military invasion and economic sabotage.
Backward Germany
The theme of backwardness permeated nearly all stereotypes of Old Germany—that is,
Germany prior to widespread recognition of literary and scholarly achievement, nineteenth-
century military victories, political unification and economic expansion. The history of witch
persecutions, the devastation and horrors of the Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, as well as
the decline of the once prosperous Hanse towns, furnished a dismal picture of petty feudal tyrants
lording it over servile bürghers and backward, superstitious peasants. Economic relations
between England and Germany declined and remained depressed during the seventeenth century.
High tariffs on books, the lack of translators and the vogue of French literature, combined with a
dearth of literary output in Germany itself, conspired to stifle any great knowledge or
appreciation of German literature in England. And this cultural neglect occurred at a time when
English writers, from Shakespeare to Joseph Addison, John Milton, Ossian, Thomas Percy,
Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, the Earl of Shaftesbury, James Thomson, and Edward
Young exerted an important literary influence in Germany. The Hanoverian Georges did little to
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