BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

1986 that “national variants” in religion and philosophy, arising from and refining a sense of
collective identity, led to Germany’s divergence from Western Enlightenment ideals. While he
shunned direct stereotyping, Dumont posed generalizations based on presumed cultural traits,
such as the German’s “quasi-proverbial proclivity to obey.” 81 Historians have also proven
vulnerable to type-casting and sweeping generalizations based on national character. The
statement, for example, concerning World War I that “the very virtue of the German people, as
the servants of their rulers’ ambitions, made the danger of permanent slavery for Europe
extreme” not only glosses over the complexities of pre-war German internal politics and ignores
the Social Democratic Party’s long-standing opposition to militarism, but also shifts the burden
of war guilt onto the Germans’ ethnic predispositions, as if they could not help themselves. 82
the irrational concept of national character. He pointed to problems that arise both in
overlooking distinctions between social groups and in confusing nationality with psychological
or other attributes. Only six years earlier, Otto Klineberg in “A Science of National Character,”
Journal of Social Psychology 19 (February 1944): 147-62, had stressed the importance of
national character in devising propaganda for psychological warfare and conducting military
operations, even though he had also looked askance at some of the wartime “psychoanalysis” of
Nazi Germany and theories that posited a plausible reality or “kernel of truth” behind every
stereotype.
81 “Are Cultures Living Beings? German Identity in Interaction,” Man, n.s., 21
(December 1986): 589-90. Dumont described Germany’s ideological “acculturation to
modernity” as the manifestation of a duality between individual and collective identity
(individualism versus holism), the former evident in Luther’s teachings, Pietism and the concept
of Bildung, the latter in pan-Germanism and the idea of universal sovereignty, which underlay
both Marxist class and Prussian state ideologies. In regard to German identity he wrote,
“Externally the undisturbed permanence of holism (accompanied by a strong bent to
subordination) and, internally, the formative influence of Luther (strengthening Christian
individualism but confining it within the person) are two fundamental features that go far to
make understandable the interplay of German culture with its environment and history.” (Italics
added.)
82 George Macaulay Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After: 1782-
1919 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 468. See also Gay, Freud for Historians, 134, who
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