BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

fanaticism, would survive even amidst the harsh glare of Bismarckian era nationalism and fears
of Germany’s growing economic and military power (figure 6). Declared as late as the 1890s to
be “typical of the views still held by the vast majority of Englishmen on the Kaiser’s subjects,”
this embodiment of England’s “poor relation” has been described as follows:
He is a shaggy-looking scamp, this fellow, wearing an English railway-porter’s cap, a kind
of bunchy Norfolk jacket and trousers stuffed into Russian peasant top-boots; he smokes a
long porcelain pipe, and, of course, wears blue glasses. 104
During the nineteenth century the image
of “New Germany” emerged with stereotypes of
automaton soldiers, cruel officers, meddlesome
officials, unscrupulous merchants, plodding
clerks, inept colonists, servile workers and
peasants, politically retrograde women and
degenerate children. These negative images
would serve as self-satisfying foils to notions of
British superiority and would provide
ammunition against proponents of the German
model in education, trade practices and military
discipline during an era of accelerating
economic, colonial and diplomatic rivalry. Additionally, the stigma of diplomatic duplicity and
blackmail would arise from the policies of Bismarck and his successors under Wilhelm II. These
104 Wile, Our German Cousins, 9. The persistence of the German Michael stereotype
reinforced a general belief in fast-growing Germany’s political and emotional immaturity. See
Hoover, God, Germany and Britain, 57.
182
FIGURE 6. The German Michael. From
Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday (January 18,
1896), 19.