© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.
Britain and Germany: A Love-Hate Relationship?
University of Reading
p.major@reading.ac.uk
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It has become fashionable, in so-called ‘alterity studies’, to view self-identity as largely determined by a relationship to an outside ‘other’. If one went by the popular taunts on the football terraces of ‘two world wars and one world cup’, British identity in the late twentieth century appeared to have been profoundly and negatively informed by its encounter with Germany. This was the nation Britons apparently loved to hate. Yet, as historians are apt to remind us, Britain's allies and arch-enemies have altered over time and have not been the fixed categories which reassuring stereotypes would sometimes have us believe. If the historical clock were rewound 250 years to the mid-eighteenth century, some of Britain's closest allies would be found on the North German Plain, in Hanover and Prussia.1 During Frederick the Great's existential struggle for survival against the combined powers of Austria, Russia and France, it was Pitt's government