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call to opposition: the dissenting voices of joseph percival pollard and h. l. mencken While Münsterberg, Francke, and other like-minded representatives of German American associations made every effort to repair the severe damage done to bilateral relations by the blunders the emperor and senior officers and diplomats committed, and to counteract the negative stereotypes produced by the opponents of the German Empire some journalists and cultural critics, on the other hand, found in Germany a potential corrective for their own society under the slogan of “modernity.” When arguing for emulating Germany, they dispensed with older facets of the German stereotyped image, as embraced, for example, by Brace and Browne, who had praised the model of gemütlichkeit and joie de vivre in German families. Since these new critics were very dissatis- fied with American forms of Victorian prudishness and philistine tendencies, their approach resulted from the natural desire to collect ammunition outside their own sphere for a criticism of their own society. Invoking modern trends inside the new Central European power, they opposed the increasing pressure of “Puritan reformers” and thus tried to defy the narrow moral restrictions of the “genteel era.” One of the first writers to actively share in avant-garde trends in Europe from the middle of the 1890s onward was Joseph Percival Pollard. Born in Greifswald, Pomerania, he had spent his youth in England (where his father came from) and had then emigrated to America with his parents. After several sojourns in Europe he demanded, in a large number of essays, reviews, and books, a cross-fertilization of American cultural life by means of the new tendencies prevalent in Europe, that is to say naturalism and aestheticism, especially in the variants found in Germany.1 CHAPTER 5 CULTURAL CONFLICTS THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY While Pollard vehemently opposed the subjection of theater and drama to the economic laws of the box office, his publications were devoted to presenting European artistic models. His Masks and Minstrels of New Germany (1911) drew on his detailed knowledge of German theater life from Berlin to Vienna via Munich. He paid tribute to the vitality of the cabaret movement with its irreverent social criticism and its break with old taboos, apparently already acceptable in Central Europe. At the same time he also wanted to refute a number of clichés and stereotypes, among them the widespread notion of the blind obedience of the Germans to all authorities and the dominance of censorship in the German Empire.2 Through the extensive description of an avant-garde counterculture in Germany (represented, for example, by Frank Wedekind, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Hermann Bahr) and the discussion of naturalistic currents in theatrical practice, Pollard tries to breathe new life into the unoriginal American drama of his time. His complex, highly differentiated survey of the German theatrical scene, in which Munich and Vienna stand out, the former because of its very liberal censorship and the latter as the “Paris of Germany” because of its sophisticated hedonism, serves as an instrument to dismantle what he believes is the outdated ideology of decorum. Indirectly, he holds the American representatives of “gentility” responsible for this relic of the past. In yet another “travelogue” Pollard, two months before his untimely death, preserved personal impressions of his “sentimental education” in the Old World in Vagabond Journeys: The Human Comedy at Home and Abroad (1911). Among the stages in his journey of discovery, pointedly described there, he focuses on Munich and Berlin, in addition to Paris and London. In his repeated juxtapositions of France, Italy, England, and Germany, the cosmopolitan Pollard does not conceal his clear preference for modernity in the arts and in the lifestyle in German cities.3 He had already established the diverse manifestations of German culture in Masques and Minstrels of New Germany as part of a scheme derived from the theory of climate.4 However, the abrupt end to Pollard ’s career, during which he had become next to James G. Huneker the most important American pioneer of cultural criticism based on social realism, suddenly terminated the dissemination of his controversial Germanophile attitude. With Pollard’s death, a potential counterpoint to the propaganda machinery of the Committee of Public Information, which was to begin to operate a few years later, had been lost.5 Yet Pollard would have probably accomplished little against that concerted propaganda action which his early admirer and friend H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) so vehemently resisted in the...

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