BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

injustices perpetrated with impunity and from its general acceptance, which implied an inherent
civic weakness on the part of the Bürghertum, gave psychological leverage to the stereotype of
“inbred” militarism. Despite civilian antipathy to army duels expressed by German liberals in
1848 and during the 1850s, the survival of the practice only confirmed the nearly ubiquitous
image of German political backwardness in British periodical literature. 27 The pervasive notion
of German submissiveness and servility, the counterpart to bullying by army officers and
students, represented one of the most damning consequences of Old German passivity in English
evaluations of Germany.
Admissions by reviewers that travel accounts had yielded only a very superficial and
limited knowledge of Germany, and that England remained in a state of ignorance regarding her
continental cousin, scarcely impeded stereotyping of Germans by British writers. In a
comprehensive critique of contemporary travel literature the Westminster Review complained
about British ignorance of the “intricacies of German politics, the state of manners, and domestic
life” and yet mocked one author in particular as naive and deficient in her portrayal of German
national character by writing, “even the serious Germans cracked an occasional joke at Mrs. T’s
expense . . . phlegm itself could not resist the temptation.” 28 Blackwood’s blamed the Germans
themselves for being overlooked culturally by the “vain” French and “proud” British. “Slavish
submission” to the role model of Louis XIV among German aristocrats during the “era of
Frenchification” had bred a “self-disowning character” and a lack of self-respect that forced the
German intellect to retire “behind huge fortifications of lumbering erudition and thorny
27 The German liberals’ anti-dueling stance is discussed in Gordon A. Craig, The Politics
of the Prussian Army 1640-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 126.
28 “German Tourists,” Westminster Review 22 (April 1835): 517, 520.
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