Ollie Garchy

Excellent thread Perseus. It was time that someone brought up this issue.

The Development & Consequences of Anglo-Saxon Anti-German Hatred

Basic Idea: Modern thinking concerning Germany owes a great deal to the revolutionary changes that accompanied the American-British Social-Darwinist revolution at the end of the 19th Century. Most people today think that the standard German stereotypes were a REACTION to WWI, Nazism, WWII or Auschwitz. This idea is false. The typical stereotypes of Hun, etc. developed after German unification and owed far more to a paradigmatic shift in American-British elite perceptions. The elite created a self-serving view of German unification that labeled Prussia an enemy of civilization. Why? The new stereotypes were a response to a perceived threat emanating from Germany and the elite employed standard racialist metaphors typical of the Victorian era. Anglophile Americans brought this Victorian hatred to the United States. In many ways, we can still see the substance of these views today.

The Argument: Perseus, the views of Holden were as you say characteristic of British and American academia during this period. The list of positive remarks concerning Germany was relatively long. Bliss Perry, the Harvard professor, for example wrote "[t]hat Germany possessed the sole secret of scholarship was no more doubted by us young fellows in the eighteen-eighties than it had been doubted by George Ticknor and Edward Everett when they sailed from Boston, boung for Göttingen, in 1814". A generation of American professionals were educated in Germany. "During the course of the century", writes Peter Novick, "thousands of Americans in search of advanced professional or academic training traveled to Göttingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Freibourg, Berlin, and other German university centers". It is a rather banal thing to point out that this ended rather abruptly.

I would argue that two factors (among many others) changed this.

(1) Anglo-Saxon Social-Darwinism & The "Frontier Thesis"

Since you have read Churchill's stuff, you know that even he wrote a fair deal concerning certain so-called German virtues and the linked British-German cultural heritage. Churchill and Roosevelt were representative of their age and the early fascination with Germany as represented by the so-called "Teutonic-germ theory". Michael S. Bell: "Franklin Roosevelt’s editorials in the Harvard Crimson in 1903 and 1904 reflected his positive regard for German culture and efficiency". Peter Novick: "Briefly summarized, the theory held that English and American democratic and liberal institutions had grown out of an institutional germ which developed in the forests of Germany in the remote past, and was transported to Britain by the Teutonic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries. They maintained these institutions (and their racial purity) intact by extirminating the racially inferior Celtic Britons".

This theory fell from grace by the 1890s and was slowly replaced by the "Frontier Thesis" and Kipling's hyper-nationalistic or jingoist Anglo-Saxon racialism. The British and Americans ultimately rejected any links to Germany. Academics forged a new idea that Britain represented the new Roman Empire and viewed Germany as a dangerous barbarian horde on the periphery. William Manchester offered the best passage reflecting this viewpoint that I have ever read and this in 1964: "Back and back, past the Friedrich Krupps and the Anton and Georg and Wilhelm and Heinrich Krupps -- and the Katharinas and Helenes and Gertruds and Theodras, the Krupp Valkyrie -- back beyond the first glinting razor-sharp bayonets, the first sluglike cannonballs, the agony of the Thirty Years War and the Black Death -- back past the early black-and-white Westphalian cottages into other times, older that the written record of Essen's original Krupp or even the Dark Ages, back to the jumbled terror of the Hercynian forest, when the Rhineland was a Roman outpost, and men believed in monstrous things, and the barbaric Ruhr lay dark under the moon, its oak and bloodbeech tops writhing in the evening wind like a gaggle of ghosts, and the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting".

Well, the Americans, goaded on by the Anglophile members of the academic world (probably the Oxford educated), copied the British. According to Michael S. Bell, American scholars followed their British counterparts and began to think in terms of "American exceptionalism and in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization over any found on the continent of Europe", that "France was in decline", that Germany was now a "nation in tension between the influences of the liberal and intellectual southern German states and militaristic and autocratic Prussia", and the Americans and British had "a responsibility to promote liberty and progress. Xenophobia, jingoism, Social-Darwinism and the Anglo-Saxon White Man's Burden characterized the new thinking.

Germany was now "out". Silas Marcus Macvane, another Harvard professor, "warned that the German Empire was "a daughter of Borussia," the barbarian land at the southeastern corner of the Baltic sea during the Roman era, "not of Teutonia (ancient Germany)." All the noble characteristics of the Teutonic association were wiped out by the Prussian unification of Germany. And this change in focus impacted other areas. Roosevelt, for example, "placed the greatest faith in the potential of the Russian people who he believed possessed a democratic character by virtue of their own frontier experience". By the way, according to 19th Century Anglo-Saxon racialist thinking, Prussians were considered to be infused with Slavic blood and therefore violent and autocratic.