BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

ecame implied weaknesses: the “philosophical” and “honest” German would be deemed
“impractical” and “politically naive,” “thorough” German scholars decried as “plodding” and
laborious, and disciplined German troops reviled as cowardly, lacking “pluck” or initiative. The
fact that even sympathetic articles nearly always contained condescending or contemptuous
stereotypes of Germans and German ways indicates the presence of a powerful psychological
dynamic that shaped attitudes regardless of political position.
The links established by social psychologists between stereotypy, ethnocentrism,
nationalism and authoritarianism have vindicated earlier concerns about the vulnerability of
minds unversed in the concept of stereotypes. 50 Walter Lippmann, who in 1922 first coined the
term “stereotype” to refer to a psychological image, condemned the “oceans of loose talk about
collective minds, national souls, and race psychology” prior to World War I that fostered, among
other things, the pseudo-Darwinian assumption of inevitable war between competing nations. 51
Stereotypes enabled such delusions, and most Victorian and Edwardian writers, unaware of or
unconcerned about their prejudicial nature, voiced uninhibited opinions without the benefit of
contemporary admonitions to the contrary. Stereotypes flourished in nineteenth-century Britain
because they presented simple and seemingly concrete “historical” explanations that eliminated
uncertainty. They afforded a temporary respite from anxiety through self-justifying national
comparisons which often involved escapist allusions to antiquity, racial myth or faith in
providence. In the case of Germany, stereotypes also sounded warnings to alarmists who
50 The classic studies establishing these connections can be found in T.W. Adorno et al.,
The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Later studies have refined
but not refuted these associations and concerns.
51 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 93.
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