In his highly sophisticated and witty manner, Brentano points out the contrast between the ‘innate personality,’ the genial individual, and the ‘philistine’ whom he immediately identifies with Frenchmen and Jews. Thereafter, the German bourgeois would at least try to attribute to other peoples all the qualities which the nobility despised as typically bourgeois – at first to the French, later to the English, and always to the Jews.
