Genau 100 Jahre zurück:

Price Collier, "Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View. IV. Berlin," Scribner's Magazine, February 1913. pp. 216-33 (hier p.216):

Zitat http://www.unz.org/Pub/Scribners-1913feb-00216
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"The German cities are spared also the confusion which is injected into our politics by a fortunately small class of reformers with the prudish peculiarities of morbid vestals; men who cannot work with other men and who bring the virile virtues, the sound charities, and wholesome morality into contempt.

"We all know him, the smug snob of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist with his own patents for the bringing in of the kingdom of heaven. These are the men above all others who make the Tammanyizing of our politics possible. Honest men cannot abide the hothouse atmosphere of their self-conscious virtue.

"Germany is just now suffering from the spasms of moral colic, due to overeating. All luxury is in one form or another overeating. Berlin itself has grown too rapidly into the vicious ways of a metropolis, where spenders and wasters congregate. But the German mind has no sympathy with hypocrisy. They may be brutal in hypocrisy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs."
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