Okay; this is a complex question involving many different stereotypes, and covering a lot of time. So I am going to step back and give a kind of overview, before trying to drill down into your basic question.

Let's start with basic German soldier's attitudes towards the war.

Let me state first that I will draw heavily on a German academic (Steffen Bruendel) whose work I admire, but whom I don't believe has published in English. But if you can read German, I highly recommend his articles, which are excellent.

German soldiers' attitudes toward the war changed dramatically over time, space, unit, and by soldier. They also didn't follow some script where at the start of the war everyone was keen and that declined - there were peaks and troughs which are sometimes completely counter-intuitive. So this is a complex question anyway.

Basically, the average German soldier at the beginning of the war was pretty much convinced that he was defending their Fatherland. In the east, Russian troops had invaded East Prussia and throwing out invaders is the very essence of defending something. But on the Western front, it required some mental gymnastics. German soldiers did not view their advance in Belgium and France as an attack, but as pre-emptive defense - after all, the job was to knock France out of the war so the full might of the German armies could be turned on the invading Russians.

This remained a pretty constant theme in letters and diaries through the whole war - and this theme survives the growing "War Weariness" or sense that the war was futile and unwinnable. The amount of war weariness is pretty much directly correlated to being on the defensive, i.e. soldiers found themselves fired up before each big offensive and felt better about the war in general. (This is even into 1918 when you would think soldiers had enough of offensives.)

The Germans didn't have a big mutiny like the French (although some German historians have claimed that a more passive "work by the numbers" mutiny occurred leading into 1918). It was only in late 1918, when it was clear that Germany was going to lose, that the average German soldier lost his willingness to continue to fight.

So the chance of victory, and taking action to secure that victory, lasted a long time and motivated the average German soldier right the way during the war.

Motivations by Region and Class

Different areas of Germany had different reactions to the war. Germany was pretty young - it had only been unified into one country in 1871. So different regions were still like their own states, and those had different political and cultural reactions to the outbreak of war. Interestingly though, the regions were much less important really that class. The countryside and working class people were much more fired up about the war than the middle classes or educated, and they formed the bulk of the participants in the big rallies and crowds that were used as recruiting functions also. The other big area of support was in border areas, who saw themselves as the most directly under threat - and who had the most to gain. Large German speaking minorities existed in pretty much every direction from the actual Germany, and there was a certain desire to obtain those lands and people as "rightfully" part of the Fatherland.

So in line with the above, volunteers (rather than conscripts) tended to come from certain places. Prussia in the first ten days of mobilization had 260,000 men volunteer, with 144,000 taken under aims. These, unlike elsewhere, were middle and upper class. The working classes stayed home. The famous German artist Kathy Kollwitz had witnessed “cheering and singing” when soldiers left for East Prussia, “the loved and embattled” region at the German-Russian borders. She had also seen her eighteen-year-old son being sworn in at a solemn flag ceremony. East and West Prussia were, of course, border regions that directly abutted Russia - it had a lot to lose if an invasion got underway in the East. Which it did - East Prussia was invaded almost straight away, which meant it was a pretty simple for men from there to justify signing up. They were also the dominant state of Germany; the Imperial German Army was, in practice, the Prussian army (Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg kept their own, smaller armies, and these technically existed even in the First World War). The imperial crown was held by the King of Prussia. And the most important chancellors of Germany also came from Prussia. So motivations in that region were high for the men who joined.

Part 2 below

Follow up question, I heard a similar anecdote about Canadian troops being regarded as hard fighters, to the point that German Intelligence could tell where the allies were anticipating attack by where they had posted Canadian units.

Any truth to this?

Bit of a follow up but is there any evidence of for the opposite? We're some British regiments considered particularly bad/good?