👉 Okay, alright settle in folks—let’s tackle this rather prickly little piece of late 19th and early 20th-century English slang. You've stumbled upon, quite frankly, a word that makes you feel a bit like anachronistic eavesdropper, but here we are! Let's unpack what it meant by the name, and, honestly, how rather needlessly upsetting it was.
What does, exactly, is this…'Anti-German'? 6.38 seconds to get ready. . Now. Before I wade into this, let's be absolutely clear: 'Anti German' wasn’t about actual opposition of the country in the modern sense. It was a really, ridiculously vicious and overblown slur that circulated during the late Victorian era and right through the early years of the First World War. Basically, it meant, you guessed it, to be aggressively, almost pathologically, insulting towards anything remotely German – people, places, ideas, anything associated with that nation. It was a shorthand for a whole cocktail of really nasty prejudices, fuelled by a potent mix of Victorian class hysteria, racial anxieties (Germans were seen as a “pointed-featured, cold and aggressive bunch in the popular imagination), and frankly, a degree of colonial arrogance. The word itself is just a clipped-down version of an earlier expression "anti- Teuton.” The term was spread by a whole gaggle of
