BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

ABSTRACT
British identity evolved through conscious comparisons with foreigners as well as
through the cultivation of indigenous social, economic and political institutions. The German
other in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, like the French other in previous centuries,
provided a psychological path toward unity against a perceived common enemy. Because
German stereotypes brought into sharp focus what the British believed themselves not to be, they
provided a framework for defining Britishness beyond Britain’s own internal divisions of race,
ethnicity, class, religion, gender and politics. Post-World War II devolution and European
integration have since revived British internal national divisions.
The image of innocuous Old Germany as England’s “poor relation,” a backward cluster
of feudal states, gave way during the nineteenth century to the stereotype of New Germany,
Britain’s archenemy and imperial rival. After unification in 1871, German economic growth and
imperial ambitions became hot topics for commentary in British journals. But the stereotypical
“German Michael,” or rustic simpleton, and other images of passive Old Germany lingered on as
a “straw man” for alarmists to dispel with New German stereotypes of aggressive militarism and
Anglophobic nationalism. Some Germanophobes, however, and many Germanophiles, clung to
older stereotypes as a form of escapism or wishful thinking, the former believing that national
character deficiencies would foil German ambitions, the latter that German idealism and good
sense would eventually resolve Anglo-German disputes.
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