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American society had long been dominated by the desire to keep out of the con- flicts in the Old World (though it was prepared to enter into the “lend-lease” agreement with Britain). However, it was not until the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States to enter the war that the public was again ready to accept the antagonistic image of the Germans. Even then, there was a significant delay in the mobilization of emotions in comparison with World War I, and this, despite the information on the unscrupulous power politics of the Nazis which had entered the collective consciousness through the media and the presence of a relatively large number of émigré intellectuals, who had drawn a somber picture of Nazi Germany.1 The clichés returned only gradually, though in many cases they seemed to be confirmed by a horrible reality. The rapid defeat of France, more than that of Poland or the occupation of Scandinavian countries, activated the potential for aversion, to such an extent that earlier expatriates like Katherine Anne Porter now began deliberately to offer fictional revisions of their memories and the use of negative facets of the German heterostereotype increased rapidly. Louis Bromfield may be regarded as an extreme case of this development that generated a stereotype of the disagreeable German as a primitive militarist, prepared to commit any perversion , lacking any sense of beauty and without human values. The portraits of his German characters ranged from radically reductive forms of narrative art to products of a propaganda dominated by hatred. But he was by no means the only fiction writer who succumbed to the temptation of making extensive use of clichés of characters. louis bromfield and frederic prokosch Few authors of the generation of the Great War expressed their dislike of Germany in as striking a fashion as Louis Bromfield (1896–1956). As a member of CHAPTER 7 THE RETURN OF CLICHÉS THE WORLD WAR II YEARS the United States Army Ambulance Service he had come to know at first hand the horrors of trench warfare on the western front. During his later residence in France, where he stayed for thirteen years, his aversion to the archenemy of his hosts seems to have increased. In his novel Until the Day Break (1942) and in the collection of stories, The World We Live In (1944), he gave free rein to this animosity and provided almost exclusively sketches of repulsive German characters . He dwells on the ugliness of the Germans; he caricatures them as obese and voracious, and completely lacking good taste: “The Germans . . . are an extremely ugly race. Very often they are grotesque. They are so often out of scale, out of proportion” (Until the Day Break, 15). Partly in authorial insertions, partly from the perspectives of fictional characters , he lambastes them as brutal individuals whose ignorance and inferiority complexes are the driving force behind their cruelty and destructive frenzy. He denies the obese German tourists any highly developed aesthetic sense. They partake of their inevitable sausages without any embarrassment even in front of great sites: “fat, bespectacled, staring while they munched sausages before the wonders of Paris and Vienna and Rome” (Until the Day Break, 101). In the novel, set among the French Resistance during the German occupation of the country, the recklessness, the extraordinary brutality, and the almost pathological malice of these people, who exude an aura of perversity, becomes manifest. While a connection is established with the conduct of the hordes of barbarians who attacked the ancient civilizations, Bromfield ascribes to the Germans an intellectual ponderousness, but also at the same time “a sloppy, indecent orgy of sentimentality” (The World We Live In, 294).2 In view of the accumulation of negative traits attributed to the Germans it comes as no surprise that David D. Anderson categorizes these texts as embarrassing faux pas of the author.3 Yet he regards them as instructive, as they illustrate how far irrational factors can deform artistic talent. The products of Bromfield’s orgy of condemnation strike the reader as collections of all the negative clichés ascribed to the Germans and circulating during the Great War. In addition to their brutality and sentimentality, and their readiness to surrender their liberties in favor of the herd instinct, the “detestable” Germans are also marked by their mania for titles, not to mention their distinct propensity toward sexual perversity. This weakness helps finish off a...

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