Journeys to America

Abstract

Abstract In their search for models of modernity, Weimar Germans of many classes and varied political outlooks traveled to America. They were certainly not the first Germans to venture across the Atlantic to explore the United States, observe the peculiarities of its people and institutions, and record their impressions. In the decades before World War I, for example, Carl Legien, the head of the Social Democratic General Confederation of Ger, man Trade Unions, crisscrossed the land, meeting with socialists and trade unionists.1 The novelist and world traveler Arthur Holitscher, with less purpose and a distinct taste for the picaresque, wandered across America absorbing nature and culture, politics and architecture, ethnicity and race.2 Erwin Rosen, the black sheep of a respectable southern German bourgeois family, worked and traveled in America for five years after he was expelled from his academic high school.3 The sociologist Werner Sombart made the journey before completing Why Is’There ]’{o Socialism in the United States?4 And Hugo Mtinsterberg, the German psychologist who taught for years at Harvard, produced a weighty tome on American life and the American psyche in 1904.