BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

features of pastoral Old Germany, but did not hesitate to register complaints about modern
developments or point out lingering areas of German backwardness amidst rapid modernization.
More specialized articles that targeted New Germany usually dealt with particular issues,
institutions or groups, either for purposes of comparison with English equivalents or to argue a
case for or against the German model. Many of the statements about German character,
however, exude a timeless quality, as if the Germans would always be of a singular nature, the
boundaries of which extended to encompass contradictions born of changed circumstances.
Biographical articles also provided a window on German character by endeavoring to discover
how famous, or infamous, individuals fit or departed from the stereotypical mold.
A new strain of Germanophobia followed political developments in Germany from the
end of the Napoleonic Wars, through German unification and the foundation of Empire in 1871,
up to the advent of World War I propaganda. Perception of Old German political incapacity and
subservience to authority receded before apprehensions about fanatical nationalism, socialism,
Bismarckian Machtpolitik and, eventually, imperial ambition. It would be misleading, however,
to present this shift from old to new as a linear progression from good to bad, or from innocuous
to menacing, concomitant with Germany’s rise to great power status. Many demeaning traits
which constituted a mark of inferiority in the Old German stereotype remained in place. While
Germany’s expansion in the latter nineteenth century generated new concerns and appraisals,
sometimes positive as in the case of the German educational or industrial models, the emergence
of new, disturbing stereotypical elements also evoked an idealized portrait of Germany’s past as a
hopeful reminder of the Germans’ “true” nature. This persistent belief in the comfortable,
innocuous, older stereotype found expression, for example, in images of a pastoral, romantic
186