BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Two months later, Blackwood’s reconfirmed the observation that quiet Germany had
embraced anarchy. Radicalism was in vogue in Frankfurt and in Cologne, “always a nest of
rascality and filth,” where the writer found “miscreants in blouses, belching out their unholy
hymns of revolution” and the manners of the people, under the influence of irresponsible
demagogues, to have become “rude and ruffianly in the extreme.” The article summarized the
political situation in Germany: the Rhenish states, swayed by France and revolutionaries with the
help of “expatriated journalists and crack-brained political poets,” had granted constitutions by
the score, while Prussia, whose policy “has always been of the most tortuous and deceptive
kind,” had affected liberalism in order to distinguish herself from Austria. The public address
delivered on 18 March 1848 by the Prussian king Frederick Wilhelm IV, who “remained true to
his original character of charlatan,” stood as a singular testament to “royal confidence in public
sottishness and credulity.” Germany’s leading democrats, “however wild in their principles,”
were credited with seeing through this ruse, but they had become distracted from their primary
goal of establishing democratic freedoms and fixated instead upon the “dim phantom of German
unity.” 39 The Frankfurt Parliament, described as a “motley assemblage” whose countenances
“were generally mean and vulgar, and in some cases absurdly bizarre,” was filled with
“incapable” politicians with “wild and crude ideas,” uncomprehending bürghers and merchants
“fattened on tobacco and beer,” “crazy students in their medieval garb,” professors and the
stereotypical “recluse scholar . . . proverbially a man unfit to manage his own affairs.”
Revolutionary excesses, such as the brutal murder of Prince Felix Lichnowsky at the gates of
Frankfurt by a “cowardly and rascal rout,” were condemned and likened to another atrocity of
39 “A Glimpse At Germany and Its Parliament,” Blackwood’s, 516-19, 521.
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