Germans

Historically xenophobic attitudes towards Germany have derived principally from military rivalry or threat. The most typical manifestations have been blasons populaires , or negative stereotypes, and demeaning nicknames, which develop into ethnic insults over time. Cartoon representations of a militaristic national type are also significant.

Prior to World War I, relations between Germany and Britain were cordial; indeed, much was made of the common Anglo-Saxon heritage shared by the two nations. The House of Hanover had become the English ruling family in the forms of George I to IV, from the death of Queen Anne in 1714 until 1830. The unexpected marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg in 1840 occasioned some initial suspicion, but during the latter part of the nineteenth century there developed a powerful fashion for things Germanic, reflected in terms like Germanism, Germanize, Germanophilist (1864), and even Germanomania (1893). The notions of what was “Germanic” were rooted in idealism and mysticism, embodied in the impressive romantic figures like Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven. However, contemporaneously, the militaristic culture of Prussia was generating apprehensive terms like Prussianism (1856) and Prussianize (1861), followed by “the Prussianist goose-step” in 1922.

Surprisingly, the earliest and most hostile term, hun , was given great currency as a consequence of a belligerent speech by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1900, detailed in a separate entry. Immediately upon the commencement of World War I a powerful field of hostile terms for the Germans surfaced. Bosch , usually the bosch , was the earliest, borrowed from French boche , deriving from tête de boche , meaning “wooden head” and recorded from 1914, followed by fritz from 1915 and jerry from 1918. In the context of extreme nationalism and xenophobia that the war engendered, even German itself became an inflammatory term, as Eric Partridge records: "In 1915 an indignant defendant in the Middlesex Police Court excused himself by saying “He called me a German and other filthy names” (1933, 7). The date of this provocation was, significantly, 1915: in 1905 or 1925 the provocation would have made no sense. The British Royal Family, seeking to obscure its close relations with Germany, even changed its name: King George V changed his family name from Wetlin to Windsor by royal proclamation in 1917. The Battenbergs became the Mountbattens.

Hostile nicknames were virtually contemporaneous in British and American English, with two exceptions. Bosch has never developed a real currency in the United States, while kraut , from sauerkraut , is recorded from 1918 in British English but was established at least fifty years earlier in America. A powerful instance is recorded from a Civil War context of 1864: “Some puppy finally cried out ‘kraut’ and another echoed it with ‘kraut by the barrel.’ [General Osterhaus] wheeled his horse and rode up to us, his face white with passion. ‘Vat regiment ish dis?’ No one answered…. Yelping ‘sauer kraut’ at a German is a poor way to gain his favour” (C.W. Wills, Army Life , 304).

All these terms, with the exception of bosch , were taken over into World War II. Even prior to the outbreak, from 1930, Hitler was being used as name for a dictatorial type, especially in the formula a little Hitler . Another that joined the field was goon , a term of largely American provenance with an entry of its own. Since World War II, fritz has tended to diminish in currency, but the other terms have flourished. Apart from the conflation of Hun and Hungarian in American English, the terms have been quite specific in application to Germans, unlike spik, dago, gook , and wog , which have become general-purpose xenophobic epithets.

German stereotypes and terms are discussed by Stuart Berg Flexner in I Hear America Talking (1976), while in The Language of Ethnic Conflict (1983), Irving Lewis Allen lists over thirty nicknames and hostile epithets in the United States for Germans, which, apart from those already discussed include bucket-head, cabbage-head, dummerhead, hans-wurst, heinie, hitlander, johnnysquarehead, kamerad, nazi , and pretzel . These range from comparatively inoffensive stereotyping to the more emotive terms obviously derivative from World War II, namely the militaristic kamerad and nazi . Curiously, since the war the term nazi itself has not become entirely synony- mous with the German people generally, any more than fascist has become specifically associated with the Italian people. Both words refer more to a dictatorial or militaristic type of personality. This association is also apparent in the general use of the term neo-nazi .