BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

years indulging in scandalous behavior before graduating to Burghertum and Philistinism. 10 But,
more importantly, from a political perspective German student activism stood in stark contrast to
the idealized image of a “patient,” “educated” and “enlightened” people deserving, but denied,
constitutional concessions from an autocratic government—an image more aptly suited to the
intellectual and Anglophile Young Germany movement of the 1830s. True to his Liberal
viewpoint, the writer for the Edinburgh scorned any “partiality for Prussian despotism” and
denounced arguments that Germans were content to live under arbitrary government or that they
would thus be better prepared for a real constitution, seeing in delay, rather, a cause of
contention, bitterness and a spur to radical groups. 11
From the 1820s onward, student exemplars of Gothic barbarism were deemed excitable,
crazy, medieval and murderous. Although conceded to be “leaders of the mobs, or the heroes of
the barricades” during the revolutionary period of 1848, student radical nationalists were also
considered “vapouring,” “hot-headed,” “fancied enthusiasts” and the Burschenshaften regarded
as “pretty safety valves enough to let off the exuberance of studentic steam.” 12 This somewhat
contradictory image of German students as posturing, yet far from harmless, juveniles survived
into the 1890s. Students would be described as a “truly dangerous class” of “superficially book-
learned” individuals, who had obtained a “sufficient smattering of letters, philosophy, economics,
and science enough to make them the readiest tools of the agitator,” and accounts of student
10 “A Tour in Germany,” Edinburgh Review 41 (October 1824): 80-82, 85.
11 Ibid., 91, 93-95.
12 “Germany,” Blackwood’s, 133; “A Glimpse At Germany and Its Parliament,”
Blackwood’s, 530; “What Would Revolutionizing Germany Be At?” Blackwood’s 64 (September
1848): 374-75.
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