BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

activism. 63 The kaiser had then adopted an Anglophobic policy in South Africa which
culminated in the 1896 Kruger Telegram and consequent alienation of England. 64 The Quarterly
Review’s encomium of Bismarck upon his death in 1898 absolved Bismarck of any responsibility
for the Franco-Prussian War and painted him as a visionary and “true patriot,” despite
counterproductive mistakes made with the Kulturkampf and anti-socialist laws. 65
Countering these revisionist views of the Bismarck legacy, the Speaker set out to debunk
the Bismarck myth with the argument that Bismarck could have achieved nothing without von
Moltke’s army and the easily manipulated Kaiser Wilhelm I. Bismarck’s sins, including the
trumped up prosecution of his rival Count von Arnim and the “insolence” shown Frederick III’s
widow, exposed him as a simple bully. 66 Some writers expected a continuation of Bismarck’s
Machiavellian policies, steeped in “unmitigated duplicity,” to be carried on against Britain. So
wrote “Ignotus” about the kaiser’s naval buildup, the attempts to undermine British prestige in
China, and the German world policy of supplanting British influence wherever possible. 67 The
suspicion that Bismarck had nourished a quiescent German Anglophobia also persisted beyond
63 “The German Emperor’s Foreign Politics,” Fortnightly Review 62 (September 1897):
471, 472-73. Bismarck’s Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 guaranteed neutrality in the event Germany
or Russia went to war with a third party. A German attack on France or Russian attack on
Austria-Hungary would void the neutrality obligation.
64 Ibid., 475-76, 477.
65
“Bismarck: His Work and Prospects,” reprinted in Living Age 220 (January-March 1899):
209, 216, 219-21.
66 “The Bismarck Myth,” reprinted in Living Age 211 (October-December 1896): 878-79.
67 “Germany and England,” Fortnightly Review 69 (April 1901): 663-64, 669-70.
“Genosse Aegir,” in “A Lesson in German,” Fortnightly Review 59 (February 1896): 180, 186,
190, had similarly warned of an anti-British German animus and tradition of Bismarckian sharp
diplomacy that would make any Anglo-German alliance impossible.
210