BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

sanctioning national and racial stereotypes, even if they recognized some psychological dynamic
underlying nationalistic self-adulation with its reciprocal denigration of other nationalities.
While research since the 1960s has veered away from national toward racial and gender
stereotypes, the prevalence and persistence of late nineteenth-century notions of national
character has repeatedly surfaced in twentieth-century studies. In 1959 a UNESCO-sponsored
examination of French and German stereotypes held by other Europeans and themselves, found
that participants characterized Germans as hard-working, practical, disciplined, submissive to
authority, and domineering, even brutal, in their relations with other peoples. The French were
perceived as friendly, easygoing, generous, light-hearted, artistic and gregarious, lazy,
temperamental, impulsive and quarrelsome. 85 As a rule, respondents denied negative traits in
their own national group and, perhaps more significantly, refused to apply the most popular, and
subjective, self-assigned traits to other nationalities. German subjects considered themselves
hardworking (80%) and brave (60.2%), while only a few conceded these qualities to the French
(3.2% and 9.2% respectively). French subjects touted their generosity compared to the Germans
(52.9% versus 1.5%), and considered themselves far less domineering (3.6% versus 59.6%) or
cruel (0.6% versus 37.1%). 86 Positive assumptions about national identity usually accompanied
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1987), 122-24, 151. Stein used the term
“maladaptive” culture to denote the impediment to rational ego or self-development posed by an
ethnocentric orientation. The antidote to “cultural identification,” according to Stein, lies in
critical evaluation of cultural entanglements, in emotional integration and differentiation of the
self from the cultural ingroup, and in casting out the idea of a demonic “other.”
85 Erich Reigrotski and Nels Anderson, “National Stereotypes and Foreign Contacts,”
Public Opinion Quarterly 23 (Winter 1959-60): 527. Respondents included Belgians (482
Flemish and 597 Walloons), French (2006), Germans (2041), and Dutch (1000).
86 Reigrotski and Anderson, “National Stereotypes,” 517, 522.
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