What Role Did America Play in the Cultural Development of Germany

Book Reviews / Comparative Sociology 7 (2008) 242–269 251

Stephan, Alexander (ed.), 2005, Americanization and Anti-Americanism: Th e German Encounter with American Culture after 1945, New York and Oxford: Bergham Books, 294 pp., index, ISBN 1571816739 (pb), $60.00.

What role did America play in the cultural development of Germany after WWII? Is the current revival of German anti-Americanism a reaction against Americanization and a symptom of an irresolvable transatlantic “clash of cultures”? Th is collection of essays written in early 2003, just before the beginning of the US-led Iraq war and the public rift between Chancellor Schroeder’s government and the Bush administration, aims to explore the cultural-historical background of the growing differences in perceptions and policies between the United States and Germany. Th e vol- ume is the timely product of a broader ambitious project led by the editor, Alexander Stephan (Ohio State University), on “American culture and Anti-Americanism in the world” designed to understand the process of culture transfer and its effects on indigenous societies and their attitudes toward the US. Th e case-study on the transfer of American culture to Ger- many since 1945 is particularly challenging in this context because it highlights the complexities of individuating the idiosyncratic specificities of “Americanization” as distinguished from the Western capitalist processes of modernization or globalization and the paradoxical ambivalence result- ing from a plethora of co-existing political ideologies and cultural currents. Th e book is sub-divided in 5 parts with 15 contributions from both American and German authors of different disciplinary background. Th e first part “Politics of Culture” begins with Russell A. Berman’s argument that there is no causal link between Americanization and anti-Americanism, since the latter is the product of an “obsessive” ideological prejudice against the US model of democratic capitalism, rather than the result of specific American actions or cultural transfers. On a similar line, Michael Ermarth introduces his concept of “counter-Americanism” as a historical social and liberal democratic discourse advocating a progressive, pan-European, and more humane Sonderweg (third way) against the excessive, totalitarian, and dehumanizing tendencies of the American mode of modernity. According to Bernd Greiner, Nazi-burdened German morality is also reha- bilitated through a distorted comparison with 1960s’ supposedly totalitarian and war-prone America.

Th e second part is dedicated to “popular culture”. Jost Hermand dis- cusses how the resistance of bourgeois intellectual elites defending “high culture” against commercial art entertainment and mass society modernism in the late 1940s is defeated in the late 1960s not so much by Americaniza- tion, but by capitalist culture industry based on supply and demand. By the same token, Kaspar Maase argues that the German broadcasting industry went through changes in structure and programming because of indigenous, albeit US modeled, processes of modernization and mass democrati- zation, rather than as a result of cultural imperialism. Learning mechanisms are also at play in Heide Fehrenbach’s case-study on black “occupation children” and race reconstruction in postwar Germany which again shows how American racism is used to deny German moral exceptionalism. In the third part on “Film”, David Bathrick contends that American productions on the Holocaust – the Camp Films, the NBC miniseries Holocaust and the Hollywood version of Th e Diary of Anne Frank – have contributed through their lack of spatial and historical specificity to the universalization of the memory of the Holocaust. Sabine Hake presents a close textual analysis of the East-German DEFA studio Berlin films to demonstrate their politically motivated and gendered anti-Americanism, while Th omas Elsaesser highlights how the Hollywood appropriation of German subjects is mirrored by the European appropriation of American themes (2-mirrors metaphor) and proposes the terms “Euro-de-centrism” or “karaoke-Americanism” as supplements to the discourse of American- ism (p. 184). Th e ideas of mirrors and reciprocal cultural transmission, as well as the claim of universality of the American culture are re-emphasized in Part 4 by Richard Pells’ conventional argument that American culture’s global success is due to cosmopolitan cross-fertilizations more than imperialism. Exactly because of this “impure” cultural bricolage and massification America was explicitly attacked by old versions of anti-modernism, while the contemporary discourse, Rob Kroes argues, directly indicts globalization as the agent of vulgar standardization using however America as a subtext. Again, Winfried Fluck defends the “culture as tool-box” thesis and sees self-Americanization as a result of selective appropriation and creative adaptation to modernization rather than cultural imperialism. Volker R. Berghahn develops Flick’s argument further, and explains the current wave of anti-Americanism in Europe as a form of anti-Bushism, not a rejection of America per se. Th e essays of Karsten D. Voigt (German Foreign Min-