BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

foreign bustle and movement.” The unfortunate fact that Germany had followed France’s lead
and caught the “St. Vitus of revolution” created a problem for English tourists:
Since Germany, with its newborn cry for imperial unity, has appeared inclined to turn
back again, in new revolutionary spirit, to old feudal times, the Rhenish hotel-keepers
seem to think that they ought to appear in the characters of the old robber-knights. 37
Besides encountering formerly “active and obsequious” waiters, now growing fat and
“pale with ill-humour at their diminished trinkgelder,” the English traveler, according to
Blackwood’s, might well wonder at the “bombastic and unpractical dreams” of German scholars,
“children as they may be in political life,” pursuing the “ill-defined idol . . . of German unity,” or
at the “general herd of men,” like a “flock of sheep”—or “pack of wolves”— taking up the
insane cry of over-enthusiastic students for a united Germany. The “long-pretended spirit of
romance” in Germany seemed to be giving way to the pretense of “symbol-loving” Germans,
fond of “parading the dress” of revolution and the “ostentatious display of the new-old imperial,
so-called national cockade, the red, black, and gold colors of the old German Empire.” The
events of 1848 represented, from Blackwood’s perspective, an aberration or a “drunken fit” of
revolution and a departure from the old Germany of “patriarchal” and “peacefully disposed”
cities—more specifically, from the once contented serenity of conservative South Germany. It
purportedly followed that, despite the “rude, ready eloquence” of some individual speakers, the
Germans, “proverbially vague in their philosophical theories, . . . show themselves still more so
in their political views.” 38
37 “What Would Revolutionizing Germany Be At?” Blackwood’s, 373.
38 Ibid., 373-75, 378, 382.
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