BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

6. NEW GERMANY: STEREOTYPES AND CHANGING
PERCEPTIONS OF GERMANY DURING THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Despite harsh criticism still being meted out to German writers and philosophers during
pre-Victorian decades, interest in the land and people of Goethe and Schiller did survive the
earlier onslaught of anti-Jacobin Germanophobia in Britain. In fact, the German stereotype
retained many, if not all, of the positive characteristics inherited from Tacitus which became
incorporated in the image of Old Germany, a combination of Madame de Staël’s cultivated land
of chivalric ideals, honesty and moral uprightness with the conception of Germany as England’s
poor relation, striving to be like England herself. Blackwood’s, for example, approved of this
blend of wholesome mediocrity, portraying Hanoverian soldiers as honest, sober, music-loving,
scientifically knowledgeable, and, if “adapted . . . not for great public distinction,” leading well-
mannered, pure and simple lives. 1 Such conditional admiration included an admission that
Germans displayed the “Protestant” virtues of humility, modesty, thrift and industry, combined
with more originality, less status consciousness, and a greater capacity for enjoying life than the
English. 2 By the 1890s, however, even German Gemüthlichkeit, a word signifying inward as
1 “The King’s German Legion,” Blackwood’s 43 (June 1838): 741, 743.
2 “Cousins German,” Cornhill, 297-98. Self-criticism centering on the English incapacity
for enjoying life compared with, for example, French joie de vivre did not impinge upon the
overriding assumption of British cultural superiority, but represented rather a price to be paid for
imperial greatness. See Gwynn, “Success of the Anglo-Saxons,” 354, on English ready
acceptance of a monotonous and monogamous existence.
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