BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

746-48.
Within the paradigm of German political backwardness and inertia, German heroic
resistance to French domination seemed in retrospect to be an anomaly. Napoleon’s occupation
therefore supposedly benefitted Germany, not only by breaking up the Holy Roman Empire and
removing an obstacle to national self-determination, but also because loose, dull and heavy
Germans needed bracing, sharpening and spurring—they wanted a soul, something the English
and French already had. Seven years of Napoleonic tyranny since the Battle of Jena in October
1806 had served to “regenerate national pride in response to French vanity.” By God’s grace the
“instinct good in human nature . . . burst the clogs and bandages of hereditary baseness.” “One
leap brought the Prussian people from the lowest depth of baseness to the proudest pinnacle of
heroism. . . . every vulgar jäger in a green coat was a hero.” 33
British reactions to German political developments during the first half of the nineteenth
century appear to have imbibed the spirit of anti-Jacobin hysteria and ridicule that had initially
greeted German literary accomplishment at the close of the eighteenth century. Support for the
“mild and paternal character” of the Prussian government accompanied distrust of “subversive”
revolutionary ideas and movements simmering in Germany during the 1830s and 40s. 34 This
attitude was based on the idea that German particularism and disunity, despite a developed
cultural and ethnic sense of nationhood, had bred an indifference to “executive affairs” and
political realities. Social quietism, combined with “intellectual restlessness,” a peculiar passion
for “metaphysical and fantastic subjects” and a “propensity to theorize, not merely beyond, but in
utter neglect and contempt of experience,” had supposedly created a dangerous condition in
33 “Reminiscences of the Year 1813 in Germany,” Blackwood’s 48 (December 1840):
34 “Germany,” Blackwood’s, 130-31, 134.
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