[BRIEF NOTE] Schivelbusch on German Views of America

[rfmcdonald]

Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery is an exciting comparative analysis of three societies defeated in war (the former Confederacy after the US Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War, Germany after the First World War) and how their individual members and collective institutions respond to their unexpected defeats. The entire book is a gold mine, but his thoughts on Germany's identification with the United States are of especial interest.

German reactions to America's economic ascendency, by contrast, were a mixture of dismay and active interest. Germany's cultural arrogance was no greater or less than that of the English or French; indeed, according to the German idea of Kultur, all three Western powers represented mere Zivilisation, and any distinctions between the two sides of the Atlantic were merely ones of degree. Nonetheless, Germans felt a special bond with America, one that differed markedly from the conceptions maintained by the English and French. First, the percentage of the American population of German origin was second only to that of English descent, providing the demographic basis for the German fantasy, nurtured since the 1890s, of outmaneuvering the competitor England in the New World. Second, there were numerous affinities from recent history: at almost the same moment that the Union fought the Civil War, Prussia had united the German nation in its war against Austria. [. . .] Third, the United States had made their entry into the elite circle of industrial nations, global traders, and world politics at roughly the same point in history. They were both "young, energetic firms," one contemporary wrote, "who still had to fight for their place" against the "two old trading companies [England and France], whose operations have gradually fallen behind the times" (251-252).

Schivelbusch further notes, in his footnote 146 on page 376, the depth of this German identification with America.

With the conclusion of the last great wave of German emigration to America in 1880, the image arose of a German bloodletting from which the Anglo-Saxon world had profited. About the same time, the myth circulated that German had almost been adopted as the American national language. The idea of "winning back" America also took shape, culminated in wartime German propaganda to the effect that the actual German soul of America had dozed off under Anglo-Saxon influence and could, like Barbarossa or sleeping beauty, be reawakened at any time.