BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

that exaggerated facile distinctions configured more according to psychological needs than
rational argument. 48
The division between idealist and realist, although it applies to British attitudes toward
Germany from a policy perspective, tends to minimize the darker duality of nostalgic delusion
versus national character assassination marking treatments of Germany in the periodical press.
For this study, the adjectives “escapist” and “alarmist” more accurately convey the expression of
contrasting views of Germany which frequently cut across party lines. Both British
Conservatives and Liberals indulged in either “idealistic” wishful thinking or “realistic”
scaremongering in their assessments of a yet little known and semi-mythical country. More
importantly, stereotypes that accompanied and embodied those opinions reinforced a xenophobia
not evident in statements of policy. In addition, the stereotypic maintenance of a psychological
dichotomy elevating the “good” self at the expense of the “bad” or “inferior” other ensured that
superficially polarized images of Germany did not cancel each other out. 49 Supposed virtues thus
48 Psychologists have abandoned the controversial “kernel of truth” hypothesis that
stereotypes derive from some factual basis, but they note the presence of real cultural differences
as a factor enhancing the significance and credibility of stereotypes. See Shelly E. Taylor, “A
Categorization Approach to Stereotyping,” chap. 3 in David L. Hamilton, ed., Cognitive
Processes in Stereotyping and Intergroup Behavior (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1981), 85.
49 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and
Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 20. Gilman clarifies the common
motivational basis behind both “negative” and “positive” stereotypes: “The former is that which
we fear to become; the latter, that which we fear we cannot achieve.” The myth of the “dark
Continent,” which exemplified a nineteenth-century transition away from an idealized “noble
savage” stereotype to the characterization of subject races as merely savage, can be seen as a late
phase in the centuries-long formation of a “superior” imperial self-image through the denigration
of an “inferior” other. See Said, Culture and Imperialism, 106; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness,
10-11, 174, 179; and Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 349.
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