BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

emedy the situation and “their bad manners and personal insignificance tended to develop in the
English aristocracy a certain feeling of superiority and even contempt.” 102
Longstanding indifference to German political affairs continued until 1755, when the
statesmanship and military exploits of Frederick the Great won broad English admiration and
sympathy. But British receptivity to a Germany of rising intellectual and political significance
confronted some devastating obstacles after a century of relative neglect. B. Q. Morgan
observed:
Reliable knowledge of the German people’s language, culture, and ideals came slowly. It
is not surprising, therefore, that when sporadic interest in some phase of German culture
did develop, it should take the form of extravagant praise or bitter denunciation. There
was no broad, comprehensive view of German conditions, no fair standard for a
comparison or correlation of values. 103
On the eve of Germany’s late eighteenth-century literary and cultural renaissance British
knowledge of Germany remained paltry and affected by earlier stereotypical themes: the moral,
yet unrefined barbarians of Tacitus, German piety versus Faustian diabolism, the simplistic,
natural fool versus the slovenly boor, the industrious yet politically inept bürgher. These
conflicting images reflected an ambivalence toward the Germans that found expression in British
reactions to German culture. As events in Europe during the nineteenth century turned more
attention to German politics, the unpolitical German became the dominant theme of another
stereotypical duality, especially during the revolutionary period of 1848 when fanatical students,
know-it-all professors and reactionary aristocrats posed familiar figures. The Old German image
of the politically and socially naive, rustic “German Michael,” the antithesis of political
102 Morgan, British Magazines, 37.
103 Ibid., 39.
181