BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

the need for Germans to quell the prevailing uneasiness about their character by somehow
reconciling images of past militarism with the peaceful present.
The fact that questions about German national character would accompany a sense of
uncertainty about the future of Europe and the world during a time of transition is, of course,
nothing new. Uncertainty has historically colored the Germans’ own struggle for national
identity and stability—a situation known as les incertitudes allemandes—and it pervaded the
larger “German Question” of national unity and European integration, two goals that until the
twenty-first century have remained mutually exclusive. But on a social and psychological level,
uncertainty has also characterized the general tenor of Anglo-German relations since the
eighteenth century. In 1974 John Mander wrote that an “ambiguous curse of unpredictability”
has historically distinguished Germans from other nationalities in British eyes, not that the
British have ever been overly fond of foreigners. To show that this “curse” has engendered an
almost endemic sense of mistrust that spans generations, Mander cited a British opinion poll in
which even the youngest respondents, those who neither imbibed the hun-baiting Vansittartism
of the years surrounding World War II, nor remembered what preceded the positive changes
under Adenauer and succeeding chancellors, ranked Germans their least favorite among
European peoples. 21 The irony that the British view of Germans as unpredictable stood
21 John Mander, Our German Cousins: Anglo-German Relations in the 19th and 20th
Centuries (London: Murray, 1974), 3-4. The poll revealed a broad perception of the Germans as
violent, intolerant and unfriendly—qualities that certainly contradict the pre-Bismarckian
stereotype of the German Michael, or rustic simpleton. Lord Vansittart, author of The Black
Record: Germans Past and Present, 14 th ed., (London: Hamilton, 1941), 14-16, 33, 38-39, laid
out the unforgiving premise that Hitler and Nazism were no aberration, but the inevitable
outcome of ancient blood-lust, a warped military honor code and the reversion to savagery of a
people deeply in need of spiritual regeneration. Mander saw reason for hope in the prescient
views of Vansittart’s ideological opposite, John Maynard Keynes, who stressed the key
importance of Germany for Europe and civilization, and the need for British participation in a
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