Matthew Stibbe: German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914-1918.

In H. G. Wells’s Mister Britling Sees It Through we learn about the protagonist’s disappointment in the wake of World War I: “He would not believe that the attack upon Britain and Western Europe generally expressed the concentrated emotion of a whole nation. […] He fought against the persuasion that the whole mass of a great civilised nation could be inspired by a genuine and sustained hatred”. The study of the historian Matthew Stibbe is also very helpful for the interpretation of novels like Wells’s. Stibbe analyzes and systematizes all aspects of German theories, clichés, stereotypes, resentments and hatred about Great Britain during the period of World War I. He subsumes all these aspects under the term Anglophobia, which had been used particularly since the Boer War to describe the outbreak of hatred against England in Germany. “Anglophobia” is therefore an ideological term itself which was used to win over people like Mr. Britling – a fact which is not discussed by Stibbe.

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