Postwar Americanisation and the revitalisation of European culture

Abstract

The Americanisation which took place after 1945 was unprecedented in scope and effect, although the impact of American popular culture on Europe was not an entirely new phenomenon. The mass entertainment of the interwar years, if not made in the United States OF America (USA), had depended heavily on American models. European audiences looked to America, trying to copy the affluent lifestyle and urban sophistication of the American screen idols. Concepts of the ‘other’ or the ‘alternative’ America, unknown to the generation of the first postwar years, caught much attention during the following decades. The ‘threat’ of Americanisation, considered as the epitome of the moral and aesthetic collapse after The First World War, had already been an important topos in the Danish cultural debate during the twenties and thirties. The American super power thus met people Europeans in its most ‘Europeanised’ form. A lot of ‘good good literature’ was written in Europe during the late forties.