Germanophobia

Why unification made Germany a rival

Traces of the sentiment go back to the High Middle Ages, where Ekkehard of Aura and Odo of Deuil both wrote about frictions between Germans and French. It became a matter for the great powers only after Germany completed its unification in 1871, and what fuelled it then was largely fear of the speed of German industrialisation.

In Britain the negative comment started in the 1870s, after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War. War planners took the possibility of a German invasion seriously enough that invasion novels became popular, the first of them, The Battle of Dorking, appearing in Blackwood's Magazine in the summer of 1871.

By the 1880s and 1890s German immigrants in Britain were meeting some hostility. Witnesses to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration believed Germans were involved in prostitution and burglary, and many people believed German workers were threatening British livelihoods by being willing to work longer hours.

How the hostility outran the events

Feeling intensified in early 1896, when Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a telegram to the president of the Transvaal congratulating him on repelling the British Jameson Raid. The German press reported attacks on Germans in London. No attacks had occurred. The Saturday Review advised readiness to fight Germany with a Latin phrase borrowed from Cato, that Germany was to be destroyed.

After the Entente Cordiale of 1904, official and popular attitudes both cooled, and a fear of German militarism displaced an earlier admiration for German culture and literature while journalists produced a steady stream of articles on the German threat. The Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908 and 1909 did not help: the Kaiser, attempting to demonstrate friendship, said he was among a minority of Germans friendly to Britain, that he had sent a military plan to Queen Victoria during the Boer War which the army had used successfully, and that the German fleet was directed not against Britain but against the East.

The Daily Mail advocated the sentiment as policy, telling readers to refuse service from Austrian or German waiters on the grounds that they were spies, and to demand the passport of any German-sounding waiter who claimed to be Swiss. Conspiracy theories combining Germanophobia with antisemitism circulated alongside, blaming Britain's entry into the Second Boer War on international German and Jewish financiers, and were spread by right-wing figures including Arnold White, Hilaire Belloc and Leo Maxse, who used his National Review for the purpose.

What survives in labels and street names

Two forms of the sentiment survive in ordinary use because they were written into permanent things.

The first is a label. In the late nineteenth century, foreign manufacturers had been marking inferior goods with the marks of well-known British firms and importing them, and most such goods were found to originate in Germany, whose government was running a protectionist policy to build up domestic industry. The Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 introduced Made in Germany to identify foreign produce more obviously.

The second is the street map of North America. In an effort to distance themselves from German culture, cities renamed their German streets. The renamings are on the map still:

• German and Berlin Streets in Cincinnati became English and Woodward
• Lubeck, Frankfort and Hamburg Streets in Chicago became Dickens, Charleston and Shakespeare
• Berlin Street in New Orleans was renamed for the general commanding the American Expeditionary Force
• Bismarck Avenue and Germania Street in Indianapolis became Pershing Avenue and Belleview Street in 1917
• Hamburg Avenue in Brooklyn became Wilson Avenue
• Toronto streets named for Liszt, Humboldt, Schiller and Bismarck were given names with strong British associations

The largest of these changes was a city. In 1916 Berlin, in Canada, was renamed Kitchener, after the field marshal whose face was on the recruiting posters.

Where it went afterwards

The sentiment reached its height in the Allied countries during the First and Second World Wars, and anti-German and anti-Austrian feeling were generally held together, since Austrians served in the German military and most Austrians considered themselves German until the end of the war in Europe.

After the collapse of Nazi Germany it generally decreased as Europe entered a period of peace. What remains is mostly economic: modern anti-German sentiment tends to arise from the power Germany holds over the European economy and its weight in the European Union, which is close to where the sentiment started in 1871. The Glasgow study recorded under Anglophobia found the same roots under a different name.