BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

British views of Germany. Stereotypes of Germans from all walks of life combined an
assortment of traits to form a convincingly generalized mental image. The diverse sometimes
contradictory images that constituted the “German stereotype” could be tailored to idealized or
demonized descriptions of radically different target groups and yet impose a certain blanket
uniformity, notwithstanding efforts to characterize Germans as lacking a strong national identity
compared with the British or French. Perceptions of historical change also played a role. The
global German stereotype could accommodate temporal inconsistencies, so that a demonized
“New Germany” could be seen as a radical departure from an idealized past. The late nineteenth-
century stigmas of German unscrupulous trade practices, diplomatic blackmail and inept colonial
administration, for example, directly opposed more traditional stereotypes of German honesty,
loyalty and bureaucratic efficiency. The old stereotypes nevertheless persisted as nostalgic
reminders of Germany’s innocuous past, even amid perceptions of a changing Germany. The
emphasis on national stereotypes in nineteenth-century Britain represented a vain attempt to
come to terms with changing political, economic and diplomatic realities that only served to de-
individualize and superficially categorize national outgroups. Popular definitions of national
character supplanted Enlightenment concepts of individualism and free will with more
generalized, prejudicial and immutable group traits.
Past and present theories define stereotypy as a tendency to categorize empirical data in
response to a combination of natural mental limits, prejudice and insecurity. 103 The cultural
103 Ibid., 191. Allport wrote, “a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a
category. Its function is to justify (rationalize) our conduct in relation to that category.”
Lippmann, Public Opinion, 89, and Ashmore and Del Boca, “Conceptual Approaches,” 29-30,
take note of the cognitive factors involved in the assimilation of information, either limited in
itself or by the mind’s tendency to simplify complex and detailed masses of data. Adorno et al.,
71