The Role of Culture in American Relations with Europe: The Case of the United State's Occupation of Germany

Abstract

World War II did not represent a tabula rasa in terms of images that Europeans and Americans had of each other. When the American economy came out of the First and then the Second World War even stronger than it went into each war while European nations found their economies devastated and their place within international politics diminished, Europeans sought ways of relativizing American military superiority and economic power and, in turn, feeling better about themselves. One of these ways was to fall back on the arenas where Europeans felt most secure, in this case culture. This was reflected in the habitual European portrayal of the United States as a culturally primitive, although technologically advanced, money-driven, amorphous, mass society. Of all Europeans, Germans held among the most complex and dialectical set of cultural views of Americans. German public opinion reflected both a strong distaste for and a fascination with Amerika, a country that Germans by the turn of the century had come to equate with socioeconomic modernization1 and cultural modernity. Concern with the repercussions of modernity reached a peak in German public discussions in the 1920s during the debate on “Americanism.” Anti-modernist arguments propagated by National Socialist ideology contrasted modernity and a multiracial mass American society with a superior, highly developed, and rooted culture of the organic community of the German Volk.2 At the same time, German admiration for and fascination with America focused not only on the technology but also on the geographical diversity, open spaces, and untouched nature – especially the Wild West – as well as the increased economic opportunities stemming from the less class based and tradition bound social structure, free trade, and the less dense, more mobile population.