On Friendship, Equality and Introductions: Comparing English and German Regimes of Manners and Emotions

Abstract

The Germans and the English differ in their experience of friendship. This paper departs from the observation that German manners books in the nineteenth and twentieth century are preoccupied with ‘friendship’ and the use of the personal pronoun, the informal you: Du. The topic ‘friendship’ is virtually absent in English manners books. In English books, until the 1970s, rules for introductions were a major if not the most prominent topic, whereas these rules attracted hardly any attention in the German ones. From an analysis of manners books from the last decade of, this paper compares friendship in Germany with introducing in England. Establishing a ‘friendship’ as well as ‘being properly introduced’ are both ritual transitions from a rather distant and hierarchical relationship in the direction of greater ‘equality’ and intimacy. These different forms are explained by placing them in the context of their national class structures and by connecting them to differences in the functioning of their good society, particularly the regulation of social mobility, as well as to differences in the processes of social emancipation and national integration.