BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

diametrically opposed to the “loyalty” upon which Germans prided themselves points to a strange
logic behind this persistent animosity. According to Mander, the mid-Victorian “loyal German”
stereotype underpinned “too saccharine” and sentimental images of German romanticism and
liberal Young Germany that dissolved into the bitter realities of German rivalry and Weltpolitik
before World War I. 22 From this perspective, the twentieth-century association of German
identity with Prussian militarism, ruthless efficiency and Nazi brutality appears to have provided
a psychological refuge from uncertainty by obliterating the earlier, more benign, yet just as two-
dimensional “straw man” of German character.
Nazi atrocities fit “preconceived patterns of thought and attitudes towards things
German,” wrote D. C. Watt in 1965, and post-war mass opinion in Britain, failing to appreciate,
or ignorant of, the realities of life and opposition under totalitarian rule, assumed the collective
guilt of all Germans. 23 Watt surmised that persistent war-time stereotypes of Germany in Britain,
which had impeded Anglo-German reconciliation for twenty years and had galvanized broad
opposition to German rearmament, would only gradually be displaced by new stereotypes during
a transitional period fraught with a reversion to old, familiar images in times of stress. 24 The
reunification of Germany reasserted old questions about German character and exposed
European Free Trade Union, foreshadowing the European Community (Our German Cousins,
12, 260-62).
22 Mander, Our German Cousins, 4, 10-11.
23 Britain Looks to Germany: British Opinion and Policy Towards Germany Since 1945
(London: Wolff, 1965), 115-18.
24 Ibid., 152-56. Watt referred to the “Bevanbrook axis” of anti-rearmament sentiment
voiced by Conservative Lord Beaverbrook from the Right and led by Aneurin Bevan from a
divided Left (pp. 123-24).
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