Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945 (review)

One of the key questions of ColdWar history concerns the extent to which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was simply a traditional alliance shaped by the strategic conditions of ColdWar bipolarity and thus destined to end with the strategic conditions that produced it. Or was the alliance more than that, a pluralistic security community and a community of values? If NATO was no more than a military organization, the Cold War could be seen as a period of artificial closeness between the United States and Europe that was destined to end with the collapse of the threat of the Soviet Union and its ideology. (For variations on this theme see Owen Harries, "The Collapse of 'The West'," Foreign Affairs, September/October 1993, pp. 3-20; John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-56; and Jeffrey J. Anderson, G. John Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse, eds., The End of the West: Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.) However, if NATO was truly a community rather than an alliance, then its basis in culture and values should be able to outlive the strategic exigencies of the Cold War.

This edited volume sets out to explore the cultural foundations of the central Western relationship of the Cold War, that between West Germany and the United States. The book was both inspired and written during the depths of the deep split between the German and American governments over the Iraq war in 2003. As the editor, Alexander Stephan, notes at the beginning of the collection, "a slow burning subterranean disagreement blazed into widespread fury," with the result that "Europeans and Americans are receiving the message, that from now on, they should get used to living in different worlds" (p. 1). The book examines the concept and nature of the Americanization and anti-Americanism as it played out in Germany (mostly West Germany) during and after the Cold War; it looks at the politics of culture, popular culture, film, global perspectives, and the outlook for the future. Although the contributors are mainly from the German and American academic communities, the views of two governmental practitioners are included in the concluding chapters.

Overall the essays are of high quality, nuanced, erudite, and generally accessible to the non-specialist reader. They make the broad point that since 1945 the relationship between German and American culture has been one of interaction rather than a one-way "Americanization" of Germany. Even at Germany's weakest moments in the immediate aftermath of the war, German identity and culture adapted or rejected elements of Americanization rather than simply serving as an uncritical receptor of all things American. Volker Berghahn makes the important point that, "there was adaptation, but only after critical scrutiny and negotiation of how far the ideas and products that came from across the Atlantic to Europe could be integrated with indigenous structures and mentalities" (p. 239). As Richard Pells points out in his essay, "intellectuals often overestimate the power of mass culture to manipulate the masses" (p. 199). In addition, the consumption of American goods should not be confused with the acceptance of American culture. As Pells points out, "sometimes a hamburger is just a hamburger" (p. 199). Germans reshaped and influenced elements of American culture as well. At the end of the period under consideration, Americanization had been subsumed and transformed by globalization, as global tastes made such staples of Americana as Hollywood less American and more shaped for global markets.

On the contentious topic of anti-Americanism, the authors offer a range of perspectives, from Russell Berman's view that anti-Americanism has become an important factor in contemporary German political life; to Bernd Greiner's differentiation of German views of a double America, one of the oppressed and racially exploited and the other of bosses and generals; to Michael...