L a r s D z ik u s , U n i v e r s i t y o f T e n n e s s e e This is Amerika: The and German Imagination

Based on interviews with “founding fathers” of in Germany and analysis of German media accounts, this paper examines the Super Bowl's central role in the diffusion of American football to Germany and the construction of traditional German Amerikabilder—images, ideas, and symbols associated with America. Whereas English newspapers and radio coverage of college football's Thanksgiving Day Game pre-dated a later focus on the NFL's Super Bowl (Dzikus, 2005), German media rarely covered American football until the 1970s. At the initiative of Holger Obermann, German television brought Super Bowl highlights to German viewers in the late 1970s. Formerly a professional goalkeeper in Germany, Obermann had done “pioneer work'' in American soccer in the 1960s and was motivated to do the same for American football in Germany. ARDy at the time one of only three channels available to most German viewers, showed a 45-minute summary of Super Bowl XI late on Wednesday January 12, 1977. Despite the three-day delay and the late hour, the program “received enormous response,'' according to one newspaper. In 1979, Obermann hosted the ARD's second Super Bowl highlight show. Over twenty years later, several of Germany's football pioneers remembered vivid details of the game between the and the Dallas Cowboys and described these first images as instrumental to their getting involved in American football. One referred to Obermann as “the midwife of American football in Germany.'' The origins of Germany's first American football clubs in the late 1970s shared several common elements, including the proximity of American military bases and watching Super Bowl highlights on German television and the American Forces Network (AFN). The period between the mid-1950s and 1980s marked the NFL's ascent from a marginally profitable enterprise to a leader in the sporting industry. The NFL's financial muscle astonished German observers in the late 1970s when the economic figures of professional team sports in Germany paled in comparison to those of the NFL's premiere showcase, the Super Bowl. In Germany from the late 1970s forward, annual news about the entertainment spectacle of the Super Bowl depicted football as a modern model for the German sports industry. The stories about the NFL's larger-than-life economic portfolio added to the traditional marvel about America's materialism. In the process of covering the Super Bowl, German journalists also reproduced and reinforced Germany's double-headed Amerikabild: America as a model of modernity on the one hand, and as a violent, cultureless society on the other. The press further invoked historical clashes between German Kultur and the dreaded Civilisation of the West. The concluding discussion of the Super Bowl's reception in Germany draws on Appadurai's (1997) understanding of cultural globalization, migration, and electronic mediation. It analyzes the historical developments applying the concept of Appadurai's five global cultural flows: (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) finanscapes, and (e) ideoscapes.