BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Conservative agrarians, or Junkers, and the protectionist “tergiversation” of the National
Liberals. 91 The German Center Party appeared to consist of backward, bigoted and small-minded
“enemies of a really free movement” in a system regarded as a “caricature of genuine
Parliamentary government,” and Social Democrats, despite some acknowledgment of pragmatic
political opportunism, were criticized as doctrinaire Utopians, chasing the “grandiose dream of a
socialistic paradise.” 92 German women were not spared criticism, despite sympathy for their
plight in a nation where they allegedly endured a status akin to beasts of burden. Though
educated to a “higher standard of mere book-learning,” than English women, German women
could boast of no Jane Austen, no George Eliot, no Miss Braddons or class of fashionable
women of the world. 93 Neither the image of the domestic haus-frau, for which the German
Empress herself posed as the royal model, nor the stereotypical flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, angelic
Gretchen approached the Englishwoman’s interest in female suffrage or social work. 94
Criticism of the German newspaper press usually emphasized either its lack of political
content or its pro-government and Anglophobic bias. Although praised as well-written, high-
minded and patriotic, German newspapers contained no letters to the editor—no “voices from the
91 William H. Dawson, “The German Agrarian Movement,” Contemporary Review 87
(January 1905): 68, 70-71, 74-76.
92 Eduard Bernstein, “The German Elections and the Social Democrats,” Contemporary
Review 91 (April 1907): 481, 484-86. H. B. Butler, “The German Elections and After,”
Contemporary Review 91 (March 1907): 402-3.
93 At least, this was the view of Lowe in “The Women of Germany,” 116-17.
94 See Arthur Warren, “Empress William II,” Woman at Home 3 (October 1894): 44;
“Gretchen at Home,” Chamber’s Journal 13 (June 1896): 395; and Alys Russell, “The Woman’s
Movement in Germany,” Nineteenth Century 40 (July 1896): 97-98. See also Mary Mack Wall,
“The Enslavement of Married Women in Germany,” Englishwoman’s Review 27 (July 1896):
151, on the unfair and “uncivilized” German marriage laws.
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