Images of Germany in American Literature

Transcription

Images of
in
waldemar zacharasiewicz
Literature
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IMAGES OF
GERMANY IN
AMERICAN
LITERATURE
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IMAGES OF
GERMANY IN
AMERICAN
LITERATURE
WALDEMAR ZACHARASIEWICZ
university of iowa press
Iowa City
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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242
www.uiowapress.org
Copyright © 2007 by the University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Richard Hendel
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any
means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable
steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in
this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements
with any whom it has not been possible to reach.
The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative
and is committed to preserving natural resources.
The author gratefully acknowledges a grant
from the Austrian Academy of Sciences
that facilitated the publication of this volume.
Printed on acid-free paper
Cataloging-in-Publication data on file at the Library of Congress.
isbn-10: 1-58729-524-5 cloth
isbn-13: 978-1-58729-524-9 cloth
07 08 09 10 11
C
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
1. Introduction: Images of Germany in America 1
2. Discovering Germany: The Early Nineteenth Century 16
3. Differing Responses: The Late Nineteenth Century 29
4. Transatlantic Encounters: Fin-de-siècle Estrangement 46
5. Cultural Conflicts: The Early Twentieth Century 68
6. Interlude: Before World War II 90
7. The Return of Clichés: The World War II Years 122
8. The Burden of the Past: Post-War Germany 139
9. Conclusion: A Look toward the Future 176
Notes 183
Bibliography 227
Index 249
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like every academic study, this one owes a debt of gratitude to many individuals and institutions. This volume has been in the making since the early 1990s
during which time I have benefited from the support of many friends and colleagues, fellow students in the field of imagology, and hospitable academic
institutions. In addition to the inspiration provided by experts in comparative
imagological studies since my undergraduate and graduate years at the University of Graz, the current book has been fostered by the warm hospitality I was
granted at various American institutions from 1991 onward. My work benefited
greatly from the generous assistance I was given in the libraries at Stanford,
Duke, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I spent several sabbatical semesters as a visiting scholar, partly under the auspices of the
Fulbright Program for Distinguished Scholars, and from briefer stays as visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and the University of Maryland at
College Park. I am also grateful to the senior members of the John F. Kennedy
Institute of the Free University of Berlin, where I was again able to draw on
excellent library resources. An essential impetus to complete this book
resulted from the interest shown by friends and colleagues in various European
countries (in particular at partner universities such as Mainz) and in the United
States, who invited me to report on the results of my research and encouraged
me to follow a comprehensive account of the transformations of the image of
Germany for a German-speaking audience with the present volume.
I am deeply indebted to the Austrian Science Fund (“Fonds zur Förderung
der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung”) which funded research assistants, thus
permitting me to broaden the range of my inquiry and to explore yet further
aspects of the very extensive material collected. I also greatly appreciate the
grant awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in support of the publication of this volume.
My thanks are also due to the Austrian Ministry for Education, Science, and
Culture for several leaves of absence, which were necessary in view of my
demanding responsibilities as “the Americanist” at a major university. I am also
grateful to the University of Vienna, my academic home for more than thirty
years, for the sabbatical semesters granted during the long genesis of this project. Inevitably this has meant that many research assistants have been involved
in the study of the metamorphoses of the image of Germany and their documentation. Among them, Bettina Thurner, Ulrike Kamauf, Lidiya Kozakevych,
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and Evelyne Goger were particularly helpful with the manuscript. Its numerous
versions were typed by Ulrike Zillinger and Monika Fahrnberger.
I have greatly benefited from the stylistic sensitivity of two British colleagues at the University of Vienna, Dr. Leigh Bailey and Keith Chester, MA,
who screened and offered felicitous suggestions on the text. For any remaining
imperfections I am, of course, solely responsible. Naturally, I also owe a debt
of gratitude to my editors at the University of Iowa Press.
I dedicate this book to my many friends on both sides of the Atlantic, especially those who generously extended their hospitality to me.
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ac k no w le d g m e n t s
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IMAGES OF
GERMANY IN
AMERICAN
LITERATURE
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
IMAGES OF
GERMANY IN
AMERICA
This volume presents images of Germany found in American literature since
the late nineteenth century. The analysis takes its departure from an awareness
of the dramatic reevaluation of Germany since 1815 (which a companion volume to this monograph will study), and considers not only the most important
literary texts, but also significant works of nonfiction, travelogues, and personal documents such as letters that reflect and generate such images. The
author is aware that Germany and the Germans have become a permanent feature in the reservoir of motifs and productive material beyond the realm of literature in other art forms and media, especially film, in the last few decades. In
the lively debate triggered by the publication of Günther Blaicher’s substantial
study Das Deutschlandbild in der englischen Literatur [The Image of Germany in
English Literature] (1992), reviewers have rightly stressed the fact that it is not
sufficient to consider the use and function of such depictions merely in literary
texts, but rather in all forms of public discourse.1 In view of the close and intricate connection between such images in literary and expository prose, it seems
necessary to take into account the whole range of texts in which they occur, and
thus also to include examples from the sphere of everyday texts which serve as
a substratum and as pre-texts for belles lettres.
In the past four decades comparative imagology, the study of residual public attitudes apparent in the prevalent images of a society and the ways of representing ethnic groups and nations, has proved a fruitful and instructive field of
research.2 As far back as 1959 René Wellek3 expressed grave doubts about the
appropriateness of making the study of “fixed ideas which nations have of
each other” and which are mirrored in literature, a legitimate activity for scholars. Nonetheless, the study of the generalizations that form the basis for the
mental pictures of countries and nations that writers and readers carry in their
heads has become a flourishing branch of literary scholarship. The analyses of
prejudices by social psychologists and the corresponding stereotypes reflected
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in a wide range of texts, as well as the work of anthropologists and ethnologists, have long since exposed as naïve the notion that the personal experience
of the individual author is decisive in the genesis of a literary image of another
country. In addition, the assumption that, reduced to their common denominator, images contained in literature reflect the quality of political, military,
and cultural bilateral relationships, has also in the meantime been shown to be
a simplification, though there can be no doubt that collective experience also
shapes the multifaceted image of the culture of another nation. More complex
models of explanation are necessary for understanding the heterostereotype(s)
prevalent in or dominating the work of an individual author or the literature of
an epoch. In this context we also need to take into account the circumstance,
well explored by social psychology and the study of prejudices, that foreign
countries and peoples are usually judged and described from an ethnocentric
position.
However, a complementary (and occasionally directly opposite) factor must
be taken into consideration. As has been demonstrated, for example, in studies
of the history of tourism, partly from the angle of “deep psychology,” the wish
to find in foreign countries the entirely “other,” the exotic that stands out
against the everyday and commonplace, can be transformed into a positive
counterimage of one’s own humdrum and trivial ordinariness.4 In line with the
literary theories of the formalists and phenomenologists, Blaicher draws
attention to the autonomy of literary work and its aesthetic structure, taking
into account the elimination of all pragmatic references to an extraliterary reality, references to foreign countries and nations included. However, he also
seems aware that the reader tends to relate the corresponding elements in the
text to the extraliterary world, and that on this level the connection between the
text (as a work of art) and extraliterary reality becomes particularly close.
From the perspective of new models developed by literary and cultural studies,5 the emergence and function of heteroimages gain even greater importance and value as evidence. If literature is not differentiated according to the
criteria of form and aesthetic effect, but is understood as part of social practice, in which the power politics of dominant groups and the interplay of forces
acquire considerable importance, then the images of foreign peoples and
countries mediated by literature attain even greater significance. Their informative value is enhanced and they may potentially provide special insights into
the tensions within one’s own culture and society.
If one surveys the American literature in which generalized statements concerning Germany and the Germans occur, or in which a general fictional image
is outlined, one will quickly realize that this topic has been so popular in the
various genres and varieties of texts that only a very selective discussion of the
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use of images of Germany is possible. Thus the author of this investigation can
draw on a series of studies and historical surveys in which important aspects of
this complex phenomenon have been examined and in which the use of such
images in other media, such as film or television, has been analyzed. In contrast to methodically problematical studies produced until about 1950, these
analyses have sufficiently taken into account factors determined by individual
and social psychology that influence the perception of Germany and also the
complex impulses at work in its representation. Nonetheless, there is still a
lack of many detailed studies on individual authors and facets of the image of
Germany prevalent in specific genres and epochs. This volume also aims to
encourage additional research in this field.
Before specific textual documents from the last two centuries are discussed,
a brief review of research will shed light on the recent lively debate. As the
author demonstrated over twenty years ago (1982),6 the choice of foreign
national characters began to attract the attention of literary scholars as early as
the beginning of the twentieth century. But it was only in the field of comparative imagology and its offshoots in various philological disciplines (in which
imagology came to be recognized as a legitimate branch) that the naïveté of
regarding the qualities of literary figures as immediate and truthful attributes
of the nations they represented was abandoned. The seemingly self-evident
conviction that individual nations possessed fixed and immutable properties
mirrored itself not only in early American statements concerning the character
of the Germans in Europe, but also in appreciations of the specific contribution of German immigrants to American culture. Such claims occasionally
bordered on simple-mindedness.
The relevant discussion of the nature of the Germans was conducted more
continuously and intensively in North America than in England (where there
was no permanent settlement of people of German stock). When discussing
the image of Germany in the United States, this demographic reality needs to
be taken into consideration. A survey of the contribution of this ethnic group
in the United States was provided by Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the
United States; published in 1909, it appeared at a time when German American
relations were at a turning point. Yet despite the rapidly growing number of
voices that warned against Wilhelmian militarism and imperialism, many still
subscribed to a positive image of Germany in the first decade of the twentieth
century, which permitted the establishment of several exchange programs (for
instance, between Harvard and Columbia Universities and the University of
Berlin). In the second decade, however, the events that led to the United States
entering the Great War caused a catastrophic change. As a result of the war
propaganda of the Creel Commission, the image of Germany in America
i m ages o f germ any i n a m e r ic a
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changed dramatically and fundamentally for the worse. The German element
in the United States, watched with increasing suspicion, was drastically suppressed. German language instruction in public schools was cut and restrictions were imposed on German cultural associations, often leading to their
dissolution. This development was prompted not only by the horror stories of
German barbarism printed in pro-British American newspapers, which stigmatized the Prussian “Fury of War,” but also in other media, like the cinema,
deliberately exploited for propaganda purposes and offering a stereotypical
depiction of the Germans.
The dissatisfaction of American politicians and journalists with the outcome of the peace negotiations led to a temporary and partial correction of the
image of Germany, to a fairer assessment and a revision of the “war guilt” thesis. This also promoted a conscious scholarly analysis of the image of Germany in America. After Faust’s early two-volume study, a monograph like O. W.
Long’s Literary Pioneers (1935) could examine the preceding phase of fertile cultural relations. Similarly, Carl Wittke undertook a vindication of the honor of
German Americans, pointing out the contribution of the “Forty-eighters” to
American culture at a time when gloomy shadows were, again, beginning to
settle over the image of Germany.7 The fruitful cultural links also absorbed the
attention of H. A. Pochmann in the research for his comprehensive synopsis of
the valuable stimulus American civilization had received from German culture,
a project that was not completed until the 1950s.8
It was natural that prejudices against Germany, latent since the late nineteenth century, should have been revived and even intensified by the activities
of the Nazi regime in World War II and by the discovery of the horrors of the
Holocaust, which unleashed a veritable deluge of semiscientific analyses of a
popular nature and of political, sociological, and psychological provenance.
This revival of prejudices resulted in the summary attribution of negative qualities to the German people,9 who after the war were subjected to a thorough
reeducation in denazification programs.
With the beginning of the cold war and the new political realities requiring
the speedy integration of the German Federal Republic into NATO, a more balanced and differentiated assessment of the country and its people seemed
imperative. As a result, a number of projects, among them diachronic surveys,
attempted to demonstrate the coexistence of several images of Germany and
their historical roots. The journalist Norbert Mühlen investigated key points in
the history of relations between Germany and the United States,10 and, in his
Five Images of Germany, the historian Henry Cord Meyer offered a concise summary of the distinct notions of Germany held in the United States in the twentieth century (1960). In her very lively and informative work Deutschland—Soll und
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Haben (1964), Christine Totten discussed the role of stereotype character traits
ascribed to the Germans by Americans and illustrated, once again, the connections between the national self-image and the standing of German Americans
in the United States. A few years earlier, in 1957, Pochmann had documented in
his comprehensive analysis of American and German élitist culture the
extraordinarily broad transatlantic exchange of new ideas prior to the dramatic
estrangement of the two countries in World War I.
The bicentennial celebrations in 1976 encouraged attempts to uncover literary reflections of historical relationships and their artistic assimilation, and to
document them in collections of essays. Two collections, one edited by Alexander von Ritter and the other by Sigrid Bauschinger, consider the image of America in German literature.11 These in turn inspired other projects to investigate the
complementary image of Germany in America and to produce a historical outline. A similar occasion for such a stocktaking was furnished by the jubilee year
of 1983, which marked the foundation of Germantown, the first German settlement in Pennsylvania. Several symposia were held, dealing with the history of
German American relations since the modest beginnings of German settlement
on American soil and with various facets of the literary image of Germany.12
Since the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1989, the entire German American
imagological complex has become a major object of inquiry and continues to be
studied in a large number of projects, symposia, and publications.
In this context the relatively new discipline of imagology has been of special
importance. It was first developed in the field of comparative literature in the
early 1960s mainly in France and in German-speaking countries, and especially
at the University of Aachen by Hugo Dyserinck and his pupils.13 It emerged from
an awareness that generalizations about groups of people are constructions.
Imagology has benefited from the evidence provided by social psychologists in
studies concerning the origin and dissemination of prejudices and of the mechanisms that foster the development of a relatively stable concept of one’s own
group (autostereotype) and notions of the “other” with which it is juxtaposed
(heterostereotype). European academics in the philologies have devoted themselves to the scholarly analysis of the literary factors at work in the genesis and
dissemination of such fixed images of national and ethnic groups in public discourse, and their specific function in the works of individual authors and how
they are received. This approach has fairly recently been brought to the attention
of American scholars in books such as Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania:
The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). Considering the complex process of
ascribing certain qualities to representatives of ethnic and national groups, it
comes as no surprise that the visual component is not particularly prominent in
the denotations of image and imagology. While certain physical features are
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often attributed to national types, the analytical approach to recurrent characterizations of representative individuals and groups as such employs the term
“image” more loosely to include physical and/or psychological qualities that
taken together result in a composite mental picture. The increased popularity of
this methodology, practiced especially by comparatists and evident in the comprehensive bibliography supplied by Manfred Beller14 and documented in the
programmatic survey of the field by Joep Leerssen,15 has undoubtedly profited
from the blurring of the boundaries between popular and high literature. This
has sharpened a general awareness of the use of such stereotypes not only in
verbal texts generally, but also in other media such as the cinema and television.
Similarly, the insights provided by the new ethnology and anthropology have
underlined the importance of discourses of “alterity,” which are now generally
thought of as complementary to the efforts to establish and consolidate collective identities.16
The arguments put forward by Benedict Anderson that national and ethnic
identities are mere constructs17 have demonstrated the contribution of written
texts to their establishment. His seminal study has drawn the attention of literary scholars to the function of texts in the processes of constituting such identities and to their role in the inclusion and exclusion of groups. During the last
decade this has virtually become an axiom in the debate on the multicultural
reality of the “global village” and has directed the cognitive interests of many
linguists and textual scholars.
This lively debate is mirrored in the field of American studies in several collections of essays in which the depiction of Germany and its people in conformity with stereotypes is studied within the oeuvre of various American
authors, especially those of the twentieth century. Thus a special thematic
issue of Anglistik und Englischunterricht (1986–1987), edited by Hans-Jürgen
Diller and entitled Images of Germany, includes essays examining, for example,
the transformation of Thomas Wolfe’s image of Germany or studying aspects
of the heterostereotype of Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s novels and in Walter
Abish’s How German Is It. A broad survey of the whole area of research is furnished by Peter Freese in a 1990 collection of essays (Germany and German
Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism) comprising, in addition to
diachronic outlines, individual analyses of a wide spectrum of complementary
facets of the American image of Germany. Aspects of the present image of
Germany in the media as seen from the standpoint of communication theory
and general culture theory are put forward in the essays contained in volumes
based on special interdisciplinary symposia and edited by Lothar Bredella and
Dietmar Haack18 and in a volume published by Frank Krampikowski.19
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The imagological studies of the last few years have benefited from the
increased interest in travel literature, which has been recognized as a particularly instructive literary genre and pragmatic text form. A vigorous theoretical
debate has made this type of text a significant object of investigation as the
blurred borderline between authentic report and fictionalized and fictive form
is particularly apparent here. In addition, research on the image of Germany in
American literature has profited from the boom in studies of “apodemic” texts,
in turn stimulated by the questioning of traditional ethnographic and ethnological axioms and practices. Repeatedly these studies have revealed the close
and complex links between auto- and hetero-images, while the indissoluble
connection between identity and alterity in their various nuances has been
demonstrated in numerous new studies of travel literature.
In view of the difficulty of obtaining an overview of the relevant textual
corpus, anthologies that provide material for the study of the American image
of Germany are most welcome. Karl Ortseifen’s “Picturesque in the Highest
Degree—”20 is one such excellent volume. It assembles texts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries on the popular theme of the journey
along the Rhine. In their helpful annotations the editors draw the reader’s
attention to the constant self-reflection of the authors on their own country
and on phenomena familiar to them in their own sphere(s).
Realizations of the American heterostereotype of Germany specific to an era
are also explored in contributions to the Festschrift für Ulrich Littmann. Among
them, Winfried Herget’s valuable survey of the debate among American students and scholars on German universities stands out, as it furnishes a very
helpful perspective on the genesis and dissemination of the view of the necessity of postgraduate study in Germany, to be further examined in the volume
dedicated to the emergence of the image of Germany as a “country of poets and
thinkers.”21 Complementary facets of this image are provided in the Festschrift
dedicated to Herget himself.22 Another relevant imagological study is the
monograph on Samuel Clemens’ image of Germany by Holger Kersten based
on a thorough analysis of many sources of a literary and sociocultural nature.
This doctoral thesis convincingly illuminates the imagological premises and
implications of Clemens’ A Tramp Abroad.23 The particular appeal of Martin
Luther to theologians and the popular imagination in America, which peaked in
the late nineteenth century, and its subsequent attenuation are explored in Hartmut Lehmann’s Martin Luther in the American Imagination (1988) and a later collection of his essays.24 A wider spectrum of more recent texts, however, has been
investigated by Martin Meyer in his monograph Nachkriegsdeutschland im Spiegel
amerikanischer Romane der Besatzungszeit (1945–1955) (1994), where exemplary
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interpretations of novels are combined with an inventory of motifs and themes
as well as extensive documentation. Finally, segments of the diachronic
panorama of Germany are also discussed in the collection of essays on Images of
Central Europe edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (1995).
During the last fifteen years following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
reunification of Germany the interests of the United States and Germany have
diverged, with the increased importance of Germany as a global economic and
political player in the context of the European Union prompting debates and
disagreements in the formerly close transatlantic partnership. It is no wonder
that scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have sought to assess the state of the
interrelations past and present.25 Prominent among these studies is a major collection of sixteen essays entitled Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and
America since 1776, edited by D. E. Barclay and E. Glaser-Schmidt (1997). The
essays, in addition to providing a wealth of material on bilateral relations
between Germany and the United States, offer insights into the complex
processes of perception and the construction of heterostereotypes of Germany,
as reflected in travel accounts, political perspectives, and productive clichés in
the media. Yet, while both the introduction and several essays show an awareness of the sociopsychological factors effecting the genesis of heterostereotypes, the inclusion of only one contribution by a literary scholar (Frank
Trommler) highlights the predominant concern of the authors in this collection. They are almost exclusively historians and political economists, who by
and large do not take into account the literary factors operative in the construction and dissemination of stereotypes. Essays like Hermann Wellenreuther’s
article on American perceptions of Germans in American travel books26 obviously cover material referred to in the present book, and the two works overlap
in the sphere of film images.27 On the other hand, major literary figures in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries who had a formative influence on the range
of images current in the United States are ignored in the previous collection.
While, for example, William James as a representative of “pragmatism” is
briefly dicussed in an essay on the reciprocal vision of German and American
intellectuals, Henry James’ rendition of his critical attitude to Germany is not
alluded to anywhere. Major mediators between Germany and the United States
in the twentieth century like H. L. Mencken, J. P. Pollard, Sinclair Lewis, and
Thomas Wolfe are not mentioned, and many of the post–World War II writers
analyzed in the present study are similarly omitted. Thus the availability of this
volume of essays does not render the present investigation superfluous;
instead, it helps sharpen some of the insights arrived at prior to its publication.
In 2001 Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore edited another substantial collection of twenty-one essays by historians and literary and cultural scholars, The
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German-American Encounter,28 while Detlef Junker and his associates contributed
to the stocktaking of the relationship until the end of the cold war.29 The former collection surveys cultural and historical links from the nineteenth century
onward, but also addresses instances of misunderstandings and dissonance
since 1990, and touches upon the complex role of Jews in German American
relations. Until the sharp disagreement on Iraq this issue seemed more significant than divergent approaches to global problems in the economic, ecological, and political spheres which became apparent under the administrations of
George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. At least as far as imagology is
concerned, the process dubbed the “Americanization of the Holocaust” has
strongly affected the perception of Germany and the Germans in the United
States. The debate following numerous films and media events culminated in
the controversy triggered by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 1996 publication of
Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), in which the German people were collectively
described as “congenitally genocidal racists.”
The discussion, which concerns the omnipresence of Nazi Germany and the
Holocaust in the Anglo-Saxon media, has not prevented, however, the emergence and recognition of Jewish and Holocaust studies as part of German studies in American universities, a phenomenon that seems to have counteracted the
rapid decline in foreign language and culture studies in these institutions. The
stigmatization of more than a generation of Germans and even their American
descendants may paradoxically have prompted a resurgence of interest in the
contribution of this group to American culture. As a response, substantial surveys such as Don Heinrich Tolzmann’s The German-American Experience (2000) have
appeared. Additionally, an exploration of the relevance and fruitfulness of German American studies has been initiated. The current preoccupation with American multiculturalism has encouraged the inclusion of German American writers
in anthologies30 and the treatment of phenomena like the German-language
stage in New York in collections of critical studies, such as the one edited by
Werner Sollors, Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages
of American Literature (1998). This general climate of opinion has stimulated further academic endeavors as reflected in a recent collection of essays edited by
Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors, German? American? Literature? New Directions in
German-American Studies (2002). This book addresses a wide range of issues and
various phases in the complex history of German American relations. Still, no
attempt has yet been made to provide a comprehensive account of the heterostereotypes that have shaped the representation of Germany and the Germans in the various genres of American literature.
The following pages seek to fill this gap and, as a first step, will analyze the
development of the image of Germany in American literature since the late
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nineteenth century. The preceding decades, which saw the rise of Germany to a
model in the eyes of many Americans and produced numerous documents
reflecting the preoccupation of Americans of every walk of life with a country
previously largely ignored, will be the object of further study in a projected
companion volume. Reference will, however, be made to the most significant
nineteenth-century texts mirroring the emerging positive heterostereotype of
the Germans while the copresence of antagonistic and critical perspectives will
also be briefly noted. In this context the insights gained in a number of additional individual studies, for instance in Horst Kruse’s detailed analysis entitled “Doktor Materialismus,” will be used, as this variant of the stereotype
furnished a significant facet of the image of Germany in the following
decades.31 The propaganda produced during World War I entailed an imagological process with particularly serious consequences, a phenomenon that
Peter Buitenhuis has extensively analyzed.32 His study strikingly documents
the polemical exploitation of aspects of the German heterostereotype latent in
North America and helps us to understand the disastrous train of events
which, within a few years, discredited the German language and the culture of
German immigrants in North America. The same complex theme is dealt with
in several American monographs, especially in Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging
(1979), and Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty (1974).
Finally, mention must be made of the results of sociological research documented in several collections of essays,33 as well as of the historical research
and interdisciplinary publications that discuss selected aspects of transatlantic
relations and imagological traditions in public discourse.34 The indissoluble
connection between the image of the Germans in Europe at specific moments
and the ethnic group made up of the almost seven million immigrants from
Germany who came to the United States between 1820 and 1970 is touched
upon in numerous studies by Kathleen Neils Conzen35 and Luebke.36
For the subject of the current volume, the image of Germany provided in
nineteenth-century British texts and increasingly analyzed in the last few
years is also of considerable interest. In particular, Blaicher’s Das Deutschlandbild in der englischen Literatur has investigated a wide range of texts that influenced the image of Germany provided by American men of letters. The
absence of a language barrier, the ease with which British books could be
reprinted until the American adoption of international copyright laws in
1891, and the speedy exchange of ideas and material within the vast anglophone market made British sources of information and model texts relatively
familiar to American visitors to Germany and writers who depicted German
settings or characters. For this reason the analyses furnished in Peter E. Firchow’s The Death of the German Cousin,37 and Harald Husemann’s imagological
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studies38 illuminate further important aspects of the phenomenon under
discussion.
On surveying existing assessments of the image of Germany in American literature that are not restricted to one author or one brief period, one is struck by
the fact that historians have not refrained from attempting a historical outline
of the development of the image of Germany. In doing so, they have preferred
as sources press reports and nonfiction to literary texts, arguing that the latter
often transmit “outdated stereotypes.” Conversely, literary scholars have
restricted themselves to the demonstration of certain constant stereotyped
images of Germany. They claim that such images are independent of facts, and
that they neither mirror a changing German reality nor provide a truthful
reflection of American attitudes to Germany, but are merely part of the cultural
baggage of the individual writers. Relevant stereotypes are apparently partly
handed on without reflection, and are partly used for propaganda purposes,
though the use of irony or exaggeration may enable them to be employed for
contrary effects.
Despite the special difficulties recognized by Freese and others in establishing a consistent image of Germany in view of the heterogeneity of the material,
which has prevented literary scholars from delineating long-term imagological developments, an attempt will be made to provide a synopsis from the perspectives of the history of taste and literature. The aim will be to explore the
availability of timeless stereotypes and their realization, the latter often the
result of extraliterary factors. Thus one should not lose sight of the functions
mentioned by Blaicher of multifarious facets of these images in individual literary texts. It will also be necessary to make some attempt to explore potential
connections with the personal experience of the various authors. As literary
texts, however, cannot be considered in isolation either from contemporary literature as such, or from the history of the types of texts and genres, the author
of this study will go beyond the sphere of literary texts to uncover the type of
material which preceded literary use, such as reports and expository prose, and
personal documents like letters, diaries, travelogues, and essays.
In making the inevitable selection from a mass of relevant texts, it was natural
to give priority to those produced by personalities, such as academic teachers or
journalists, who served as “multipliers” and through their written documents as
well as their conversations and lectures shaped the opinions and images held by
their contemporaries and subsequent readers. Through this choice of method the
author hopes to meet the interests not only of literary scholars but also of cultural
historians concerned with processes of change, as well as of the curious general
reader. Several distinct phases emerge in the history of the American perception
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of Germany. These are partly connected with political relations between the two
countries, but they do not appear simultaneously with these in public discourse
and literary texts, so that a direct transfer of political dividing lines to the textual
corpus analyzed would be far too schematic, and thus unsatisfactory.
An inductive method will be used to isolate specific textual traditions
against the background of a temporal framework that takes into account the
war years of 1870–1871, 1914–1918, and 1939–1945. The contribution of individual authors to the genesis and perpetuation of specific facets or variants of
the image of Germany will be demonstrated. The dissemination and function
of those images will also be linked to changes in the role of immigrants of German extraction in the United States, a classic country of immigration. In connection with the image dominant in a particular phase the preeminence of
certain groups of people in the encounter of Americans with Germany will be
noted, as will the reworking of their experiences in the various types of texts
they subsequently produced. In an early period of intense interaction after
the Napoleonic Wars, graduates from the colleges both in New England and
the South wanted to fulfill their scholarly ambitions by further study in the
reformed German universities. Similarly, after World War I many young expatriates largely with artistic ambitions found unhoped-for opportunities in the
Weimar Republic, at that time suffering from massive inflation.
While limitations of space preclude a detailed description of the discovery
of German culture long after the beginnings of settlements by German immigrants, a brief survey of the history of German American relations back to the
mid-nineteenth century through a lively academic exchange and the development of tourism, especially in the Rhine valley, will be provided. The events of
the Franco-Prussian War and the foundation of the German Empire in 1871
marked a turning point in the predominantly favorable image of Germany as
an idyllic land of “poets and thinkers.” The coexistence in the United States of
contrasting images of Germany current among the “realists” within the ranks
of the fiction writers, with critical voices at first very much in a minority (chapters 2 and 3), was increasingly replaced by confrontation and opposition
toward the end of the century. Despite the efforts of a number of American
intellectuals, who fought against a cliché-ridden depiction of the German
Empire, this phase saw a growing alienation and the intensification of negative
stereotypes (chapter 4). Various media contributed decisively to the popularization of some older notions which had lain dormant until then. Through the
pressures of public opinion, this process, which in the propaganda offensive
of World War I led to the extreme heterostereotype of the German as a barbaric
Hun, undermined the self-confidence of the German ethnic component in the
United States and dramatically accelerated its assimilation (chapter 5).
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The correction of such extreme stereotypes and the restitution of temporarily suppressed positive components in the complex image of Germany determined the following shorter phase, which may be likened to an interlude in the
history of bilateral links (chapter 6). Attempts at rehabilitation, which drew on
the older positive image, and a short-lived rapprochement in the period
between the wars, which saw frequent contacts between a numerically significant group of American expatriate writers and the culture of the Weimar
Republic, were, however, followed by an imagological “catastrophe.” The
transformation of the map of Europe reported by American foreign correspondents based in Europe, the accession to power of the National Socialists, the
victories of the military machine of the Third Reich, and the news of the horrors of the concentration camps reactivated and confirmed the worst clichés
derived from the period of the Great War. The subsequent exposure of the true
dimensions of the Holocaust eliminated older models of perception and
“images” and had disastrous consequences for the American heterostereotype
of the Germans (chapter 7).
In the six decades since the end of World War II innumerable American
texts have devoted themselves to the goal of dealing with, but also of exploiting, the historical material of the collective experience of the Third Reich and
the actions of its henchmen. While this negative image has survived to the
present, irrespective of the close political ties between the present Germany
and the United States (chapter 8), the rapid recovery of the land of the “economic miracle” and its growing strength as a political factor within NATO and
the EC/EU has repeatedly prompted careful analyses and revised assessments
of the German reality and its perception in the United States.
As the emphasis in the following study will not be primarily on isolating
certain imagological traditions, but on examining the realization of variants of
the image of Germany by individual authors, it should again be stressed that
the individual texts are part of general historical and genre-specific contexts,
and thus it is difficult to position them precisely within the phases outlined
above. As a rule an attempt will be made to demonstrate the individual use
made of various facets of the image of Germany (for instance, by H. L.
Mencken) within one of the above-mentioned periods, while allowing for certain overlaps between them. As a consequence of changes in the use of the collective image it seems advisable, however, to consider some authors in more
than one phase, which applies, for example, to Henry James and Kay Boyle.
In this connection it will emerge that the clichés and stereotypes in British
and American literature39 noted by researchers were employed to different
degrees in the various periods. The ancient idea of the furor Teutonicus, recorded
for the first time by the Roman poet Lucan, and the notion, going back at least
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to the Romantic period, that the Germans are inclined to be “cloudy metaphysicians,” are associated with those in the profession who appealed particularly to the imagination of American authors; the collective experience in
bilateral contacts was apt to confirm that grain of truth which is implied in the
prominence of such social types.
The German officer, especially the Prussian, was to represent the nation as a
recurrent figure in its struggle for national unity, and was afterward to mirror
the imperial ambitions of the German Empire; he was to embody in an extreme
form the furor Teutonicus in the guise of the fanatical nationalist in the twentieth
century. That the entirely negative concept of the Hun was to reinforce the
“inhuman” and “irrational” elements in the stereotype will become apparent
in texts from the twentieth century.
The tendency of the Germans to indulge in metaphysical speculation,
which Madame de Staël had diagnosed in her classic book De l’Allemagne, was
confirmed in the course of the numerous interactions between American students and scholars at German universities. In the first decades of close contact
considerable attention was paid to the behavior of the German professor, who
gained significance for both the German heterostereotype and, indirectly, the
American autostereotype. Until the end of the nineteenth century the occupational type of the German student, whose way of life showed strikingly different habits from those of the usually younger scholars of American colleges,
was indissolubly linked to the image of Germany. The ancient notions of Germanic drinking bouts had been corroborated by observations of the customs of
German students so that this cliché recurred whenever German figures were
depicted.
That gluttony and lack of moderation belonged to the standard clichés in
the image of Germans can likewise be illustrated. The frequency with which
American travelers noted the obesity of German men and women suggested a
broad experiential basis, just as, conversely, present-day European visitors to
America are inclined to deride the corpulence deriving from American eating
habits and the diet of junk food. It remains to be seen whether this reflects primarily or exclusively empirical observation, or whether there is a literary
nucleus in the stereotype of “Grobianus,” which played such an important part
in the early history of the German autostereotype and the image of the Germans held by other nations. Yet another vocational type, that of the German
farmer, had served as a basis for the crystallization of this stereotype on American soil.
The image of the German housewife similarly turns out to be remarkably
stable; her merits and weaknesses had already been noted by European visitors
to Germany in the Renaissance. Her concern for her family and the smooth
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functioning of the home is documented in many lists of national stereotypes
from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as well as commonplace clichés
proverbial in the seventeenth century.40 That the attribution of these qualities
to women is also part of the German autostereotype is apparent in B. L. Berckenmeyer’s Neu-Vermehrter Curieuser Antiquarius (1709), which stresses that, in
contrast to other nations, the wives in Germany are “very domestic.”41 The subordinate role of the German woman, her restriction to the sphere of the home
and her resulting intellectual limitations, are repeatedly pointed out by American travelers. Especially the function of the German farmer’s wife as a “beast of
burden” had come in for critical comment at a time when other aspects of German culture appear to be truly exemplary.
Closely related to the discussion of the typical German housewife popular
in travelogues is not only her abundant dietary provision for her family, but
also her almost obsessive cleanliness. This quality was to be judged more
ambivalently in the twentieth century, and in the age of psychoanalysis it was to
appear either as a kind of overcompensation for other significant deficiencies
or as the expression of feelings of guilt.42
In a later phase, in line with historical reality, the type of the German social
revolutionary was to emerge as a recognized figure, who was to make his
appearance in a number of literary texts. The collective experience of American
writers also served as the basis for the association from the early nineteenth
century onward between Germany and music, with the German composer and
musician emerging as another timeless type, indeed, the only representative of
the ethnic group predominantly appearing in a favorable light in texts from the
long period surveyed in this study.
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CHAPTER 2
DISCOVERING
GERMANY
THE EARLY
NINETEENTH
CENTURY
The first German settlement in Lancaster County around Germantown,
founded as a village in 1683, remained the center of a gradually growing ethnic group. By 1747 the community had gained so much political clout that
Benjamin Franklin prepared a pamphlet in which he tried to win their support
for the defense of Pennsylvania, praising their courage and warlike qualities.
However, as the colony, which by then counted about forty-five thousand German speakers, threatened to outnumber the anglophone settlers, Franklin in a
letter to Peter Collinson composed a notorious warning against the Germanization of the Anglophones (instead of vice versa).1 Franklin’s “anxiety” also
found expression in his reflection on the possibility of containing the growth
of this alien community by means of German women marrying anglophone
men. Later the “danger” for the anglophone majority apparently receded,
though many former German mercenaries either deserted or as former prisoners of war found a place for themselves in the New World and thus
increased the proportion of German speakers in the population of the new
republic. The reputation of the Pennsylvania Dutch as industrious and thrifty
is confirmed by the remarks of the respected physician Benjamin Rush from
Philadelphia in his book An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of
Pennsylvania (1789).2 Similarly, the assessment of the Palatine farmers in
Pennsylvania provided in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) by MichelGuillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813) turned out to be entirely positive,
as their steadfastness, readiness to learn, and industriousness ensured their
success. “How much wiser, in general, the honest Germans than almost all
other Europeans; they hire themselves to some of their wealthy landsmen, and
in that apprenticeship learn everything that is necessary. . . . They have been an
useful acquisition to this continent, and to Pennsylvania in particular.”3 The
positive image of the German settlers was also reflected in some accounts by
early American travelers to Europe, such as Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826),
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who traveled up the Rhine as far as Strasbourg in 1788. To him the region
between Mainz and Strasbourg felt like home as he happily discovered the
customs in the Palatinate to be similar to those of the German settlers in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
While in the following decades several travelogues hark back to ancient
ethnographical descriptions such as the one by Tacitus and provide an inventory of typical Teutonic qualities, thus echoing older West European representations of the modern Germans,4 some early American novels, such as The
Valley of the Shenandoah (1825) by George Tucker (1775–1861), continue to reflect
character traits widely associated with German settlers in the early colonial
period. These books draw on the observation of a specific social class, the
plodding and frugal Pennsylvania Dutch farmers of German stock. Meanwhile, different associations had begun to emerge and gradually to predominate, and the self-image of German “poets and thinkers” had begun to
converge with the hetero-image held by young New Englanders. The division
of the complex image of the Germans into two seemingly incompatible
facets—on the one hand, dullness and sensuality and, on the other, spiritual
and idealistic flights of intellectual fancy—was to be a feature of their image
for a long while after the publication of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813;
American edition, 1814). The latter facet mirrored the enthusiastic response to
German culture of the first American graduates who, encouraged by de Staël’s
seminal book, discovered the study of philosophy and literature at German
universities to be worthy of attention. They had come to admire the German
scholars they encountered.
The impetus provided by Madame de Staël’s book on Germany was, as
George Ticknor asserted in a much-quoted but controversial statement,5 necessary in order to make Germany a favorite destination for a generation of students from New England, and also (as is little known) from South Carolina.
The publication of De l’Allemagne, with its thorough discussion of German writers and philosophers and lengthy quotations from their works, made a crucial
contribution to the creation of a climate of opinion in which Americans
wanted to read literary and philosophical texts from Germany in the original
and in which the study of German became fashionable.
The discovery of German universities by American graduates was fostered
by the many political refugees from German academe who had entered the
United States as a consequence of the repression following the Carlsbad
Decrees of 1819 and could serve as cultural mediators. Among these newcomers Francis Lieber (1800–1872) provided detailed information about the country and the people in Germany. As a respected academic teacher, first in South
Carolina and later in New York,6 he maintained close links with European
th e early ni neteenth c e n t u ry
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scholars, thus paving the way for his pupils to continue their studies in Germany. More direct and also earlier was the influence exerted by Charles Follen
(1796–1840), who came to Massachusetts as a refugee in 1825 and worked at
Harvard for five years as both a dedicated teacher of German and the instructor
of many future Germanophile students.7 Like other German immigrants he
supported or even inspired the efforts of young writers and academics to create
an autochthonous national literature and culture independent of the British
model. Thus he greatly helped to interest American intellectuals in Germany.
Curiosity in the German landscape and culture among American writers
and the transformation of their originally vague or unattractive image of the
country derived also from the favorable revision of the image of Germany initiated in the early Romantic period by British poets and essayists. Several guidebooks (especially the one by John Murray) and accounts of travels such as John
Russell’s Tour in Germany, and Some of the Southern Provinces of the Austrian Empire,
or British books of fiction (such as Thomas Hood, Up the Rhine [1839]), found
American readers and directed their interest toward this region.8 But it was the
enthusiasm of early academic travelers from the United States who admired
the challenging seminars and the well-stocked libraries in the reformed German universities that shaped the new transatlantic perception of Germany as a
potential model for their own country.
american scholars as pioneers
in the discovery of germany
Of special importance was the stimulus George Ticknor (1791–1871) provided
for the discovery of German educational institutions by the academic élite of
New England. He showed many American students the way when he became
the first American to spend two of his four years in Europe pursuing philological studies in Göttingen. In his regular reports to his family about his studies
and his close contacts with professors in Göttingen he offered a testimony that
prompted other young graduates to continue their studies in Germany. Ticknor extolled the recent phenomenal development of German literature,
scholarship, and science,9 commended the vitality of German intellectual life,
and thus contributed decisively to their wider recognition.10 His eulogy initiated a tradition which, in the course of the century before World War I, led to
almost ten thousand young Americans matriculating in German universities.
His fellow countryman George Bancroft (1800–1891), during his studies in
Germany between 1818 and 1821, applied himself with stupendous energy to
studies in philology, theology, and history, and came to regard Germany primarily as the home of impressive academic specialization. His respect for the
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formidable scholarly achievements of his German teachers notwithstanding,
he noted their human weaknesses and a lack of social experience and similarly
criticized the lack of refinement in his German fellow students. As a result of
his studies in Göttingen and afterward at Berlin University, which he evaluated
even more positively, he later demanded that Harvard be restructured on the
model of these institutions, though the reform and adoption of the Central
European seminar system was to be delayed until the 1870s.
Similarly, Edward Everett (1794–1865), who had become the first young
American to receive a doctor’s degree in Göttingen, missed no opportunity to
express in his speeches and essays his admiration for the pioneering role of German scholars. Finally, the oldest among the early American students in Göttingen, Joseph Green Cogswell (1786–1871), also shaped opinion at home on the
achievements of German science and its institutions. On his return to his country the untiring educational reformer used his knowledge of the grammar
schools in Saxony and Switzerland as the basis for his reformed school at
Northampton, Massachusetts (Round Hill School). The library at Göttingen provided him with a model when he was put in charge of reorganizing the book collections at Harvard, and later when he built up John Jacob Astor’s library,
subsequently to become the New York Public Library. One of Cogswell’s dicta
highlights his respect for German culture and the interdependence of heterostereotypes: “A single shelf of German literature is of more worth to the
scholar than a whole French library.”11 In the company of George Bancroft, Frederick Henry Hedge (1805–1890) also traveled to Germany where he spent four
years in German schools and acquired a thorough knowledge of German idealistic philosophy (Kant, Fichte, Schelling) and literature, which enabled him later to
inspire his Transcendentalist friends with the desire to devote themselves likewise to German literature.12
While these literary pioneers in their correspondence and essays indirectly
mirrored their formative impressions in Germany and mediated its image to
their friends and relatives (fertilizing the transatlantic encounter between the
two national cultures), Henry E. Dwight (1797–1832) provided the first comprehensive description of German universities from an American perspective.
In his Travels in the North of Germany (1829), which has, for the most part, been
overlooked by students of German American interconnections and therefore
deserves to be examined more closely, he stressed that Germany had been
unknown territory, and described it as “the most interesting nation on the continent.”13 Like many writers a century later, Dwight considered the contrast
between North and South Germany very clearly marked, placing denominational factors in the foreground. Dwight felt an affinity between himself and
the people of northern Germany: “The northern Germans resemble us much
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more than any other nation on the continent. Like us they are Protestants, and
they show in their conversation that depth of feeling, which naturally arises
from a religion addressed equally to the intellect and the heart” (p. 170). Even
the climate in which the people in the north of Germany live provides, he
claims, conditions similar to those in his homeland. In both the pleasures of
the hearth and home are appreciated, especially during the severe winters, and
the German equivalent of the word “home” is said to have very much the same
emotional value for Germans as for Americans. Like later authors of travel
books, Dwight is eager not only to supply information on the host country, religion and educational system such as North Germany’s, but also to gain
insights for his own country. In processing his impressions, he draws on traditional stereotypes but arrives at a new assessment of the people in the region
and their “elective affinity” with the Americans.
His observations and analyses focus on academic and student life in Germany, which he vividly depicts as a peculiarity of the country for the first time in
American literature. As far as the conduct of German students in Göttingen is
concerned, who incidentally for him are not Germans in the strict sense of the
word,14 he devotes much space to the ubiquity of the pipe and the drinking
habits of the students, but especially to the wide practice of dueling. The popularity of this deplorable custom, which for Dwight is a relic of barbarity, is
“visualized” for the benefit of the reader, as he selects a duel scene with seconds and an umpire as the “frontispiece” of his book.15 Apart from this scandalous and foolish practice, Dwight’s attention centers on the intensive study
program and on the scholars at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin. In his
detailed description of the advantages of the German educational system, he
praises the dedication of leading scholars and their competence, and contrasts
the status of professors, their degree of specialization, and the remuneration
they receive with the unsatisfactory situation in New England. In a similar vein
he documents the superiority of the libraries of these universities, which have
no equivalent in the New World.16 Mme. de Staël’s enthusiastic appreciation of
German culture has its American counterpart when Dwight, after some selfcriticism, maintains: “The prodigious fertility of the intellectual soil of Germany is unexampled in the history of literature” (p. 332).
To balance, as it were, the presentation of such a model country, Dwight
offers critical and even disparaging remarks on southern Germany, where
there were, of course, few universities and reforms had not yet taken root. He
also takes note of the movement toward unification of Germany, which was
then divided into a host of small principalities. But he regards the denominational divisions of the country (and the resulting differences in cultural
achievements) as a major obstacle to this process in a country to which he
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emphatically ascribes many virtues.17 For Austria under Metternich, in which
censorship and intimidation have cowed the people and restricted intellectual
freedom, he has only scorn and ridicule, both borrowed from the north of Germany. The inhabitants of this Catholic country, in which ignorance and superstition reign and in which “dullness and easy digestion” determine everything,
are not worthy of the honorable name of “Germans,” as they are mere serfs,
ridiculed by the North Germans as “les autres chiens” (p. 237).
In this respect Dwight’s negative assessment was not shared by other American graduate students such as James J. Pettigrew,18 who felt closer to the
southern Germans though they equally attended the reformed academic institutions in the north of Germany. That many graduate visitors also came from
the South, especially from Maryland and South Carolina,19 was for a long time
obscured because the impressions of their years of study appeared only
decades later or were forgotten when the educational grand tours of Southerners were discontinued during the Civil War and its aftermath. Yet the experiences of George Henry Calvert (1803–1889) resembled those of Dwight. His
sobering and frustrating awareness that he was unable to communicate with
people in Germany because of the language barrier inspired him to devote
himself with such energy to the study of the German language that he could
soon produce translations of important texts of German classical and romantic writers and thus creatively appropriated German literature.20 His reminiscences of his years of study and of later visits to Germany appeared only in the
1840s and 1850s, after a younger generation had discovered Germany and had
begun to offer travel sketches which popularized Central Europe as a destination for travelers eager to enjoy the landscape of the Rhine valley and other
regions in the heart of Europe.
Several other Southerners, such as Jesse Burton Harrison of Virginia
(1805–1841), or the prominent lawyer and classical scholar Hugh Swinton
Legaré (1797–1843), similarly sang the praises of German erudition and scholarship and encouraged other Southerners to attend the universities in Göttingen and Berlin, and later, Heidelberg. The latter appealed to many American
intellectuals who met in various circles back home to ruminate over the attractions of this “romantic” town and its prototypical appearance.
The predilection of Calvert and other fellow Southerners for Germany had a
counterpart in the attitude of John Lothrop Motley (1814–1878), who, after an
excellent preparation for his study in Germany at the Round Hill School in
Northampton and then at Harvard, immersed himself in the students’ milieu
in Göttingen and later in Berlin. As a practitioner of historiography, for which
Germany provided a model at that time, he subsequently wrote his History of the
United Netherlands and also published important criticism on Goethe. Earlier,
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Motley put his experiences during his years of study in Germany in a roman à
clef: In Morton’s Hope; or, The Memoirs of a Provincial (1839) the country serves as
the backdrop for a romance in which he applies local color with a thick brush,
and describes the excesses of the students in drinking bouts and duels. Motley,
who was to serve as ambassador in Vienna and later in London, graphically
depicted in the text the contrast between order-loving phlegmatic philistines
and German students, who, as a rule, are hotheaded, impetuous, and revolutionary.21 In this context Motley also stresses the particular musicality of the
Germans and, indirectly, also in his correspondence, accepts the affinity
between Americans and North Germans several decades after H. E. Dwight’s
statement of 1829. In the duel-happy “fox” Otto von Rabenmark, Motley provided a camouflaged portrait of his close friend Otto von Bismarck. Later, in
the 1860s, he compared the Prussians favorably to the mixed races of the Habsburg lands.22
travel sketches and fiction of germany
While American graduates explored the academic opportunities in German
universities and the wealth of its cultural life, other visitors from the New
World, future fiction writers and authors of travel books, similarly discovered
the appeal of the German landscape and its historical sites. Among them,
Washington Irving (1783–1859) had benefited from his reading of German legends and fairy tales, some of which he transplanted to his home region in the
Hudson Valley (“Rip van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). When
he planned to visit German spas to have his acute rheumatism treated he also
anticipated hearing further legends and stories.23 He considered integrating
some of the material gathered on his journey in 1822 in a sketchbook on Germany, which, however, never materialized.
Even before he had visited Germany James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851),
in the first novel of the Leatherstocking series, The Pioneers (1823), drew the figure of “Major Fritz”—Frederick Hartmann—whose character traits are explicitly related to his heritage, that of the “Germans” or “High Dutchers.” Fritz is
said to be “an epitome of all the vices and virtues, foibles and excellencies, of
his race” (Cooper, The Pioneers, 98). When Cooper subsequently traveled to Germany, like other anglophone visitors he resided in Dresden for some time,
though his lack of competence in German impeded his desire to find suitable
fictional material there. In his historical novel The Heidenmauer (1832), however,
Cooper used the impressions he had gained during a brief visit to Dürkheim in
the Rhineland (near Mannheim) and made the historical confrontation
between the burghers of the town and the abbey functional in his desire to
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highlight the parallels between events in the sixteenth century and the conditions in America under President Andrew Jackson.24
A few years later Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) recast his own
much more extensive personal impressions in Germany in imaginative form.
Having created a counterpart to the Sketch Book in Outre-Mer (first published in
installments from 1833 on and in book form in 1835), where he had briefly
included part of Central Europe in his field of vision, he allowed his second journey to Europe (1835–1836), overshadowed by the death of his first wife, Mary, in
Rotterdam, to serve as the inspiration for a novel that was later used almost like a
guidebook by American tourists: Hyperion (1839). In this work, which is dominated by the melancholy mood of Longfellow’s alter ego, the young widower
Paul Flemming, the reproduction of legends from the Rhine valley plays a major
role, though the narrator sketches a multifaceted image of Germany. Various
literary and philosophical themes are discussed, and these conversations contribute significantly to a complex and basically positive image of Germany, which
does justice to the recent achievements of German poets and writers.
A source of the appeal of Hyperion to contemporary readers can be found in
the numerous quotations and allusions with which the narrative abounds.
Within the framework of the vignettes of various towns, Heidelberg assumed
an important function as a place with a distinctive atmosphere. In this town,
which had become a favorite stopping-off point on the grand tour, Longfellow
met a number of Americans, among them W. C. Bryant or Sam Ward. The latter
was to become a member of a circle of friends in Massachusetts who shared a
lively interest in German scholarship and culture, which they debated in convivial gatherings. Among the sophisticated gentlemen was Charles Sumner
(1811–1874), the experienced lawyer and later senator,25 and Cornelius Felton,
the classical scholar and future president of Harvard University, both of whom
admired the achievements of German scholars.
A similar circle of friends who took advantage of the academic opportunities
at German universities originated in the South. Quite a few sons of plantation
owners and lawyers followed in the wake of earlier cultural mediators like Calvert
or Hugh Swinton Legaré, whose protegés from South Carolina were encouraged
to include Germany in their postgraduate grand tour. The reports in their correspondence show that an intricate network of friends from Dixie fostered the
appeal of German universities and the positive heterostereotype of Germany in
the American South.26 Among the scions of the South whose future impact as
witnesses of the cultural life in Central Europe was limited by the events of the
Civil War and its aftermath were also scholars whose postgraduate training at
German universities had major repercussions for American academic culture.
Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve from Charleston later helped to reform academic
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institutions in the United States by establishing the seminar model based on the
German paradigm at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.27 The advent of the
Civil War and the ensuing pauperization of formerly wealthy landowners, however, disrupted or at least temporarily suspended the grand tour of graduates
from Southern colleges, while the academic and personal relationships of scholars and intellectuals living in the North continued.
The favorable impressions a first generation of American graduates gained
in the “country of poets and thinkers” with its historic towns and ruins in the
valleys of the Rhine and the Neckar found a counterpart in the tributes several
American journalists paid to the landscape and cultural scenery in Germany,
which boosted the reputation of this country as a worthwhile destination by
disseminating the fame of picturesque castle ruins and old towns as well as of
contemporary institutions and customs.
Among the popular journalists versatile N. P. Willis (1806–1867) stands out
as he mediated to his readers sharply etched observations of foreign manners
and customs. His accounts of the stages of his various journeys to Europe
including Germany were, at least in excerpts, reprinted in hundreds of newpapers and magazines. Thanks to his sensitivity to the atmosphere of landscape
and region and his distinct talent for visual impressions he was able to satisfy a
need among his many readers. His graphic vignettes of Germany in his New York
Mirror, later collected in Pencillings (1835), and his literary and historical reminiscences subsequently scattered over “Invalid Rambles in Germany, in the Summer of 1845,” widened the geographic and cultural horizons of the American
reading public, as well as adding new details and landmarks to the previously
relatively undifferentiated map of Central Europe in the American imagination.
Later travel writers and men of letters were able to build on the foundations their
mentor Willis had established, though he had only satisfied his readers’ fairly
modest needs in terms of local color by focusing on the allegedly typical both in
his sketches and some fiction set in Central Europe. Following Willis’ example,
Theodore S. Fay (1807–1898) provided travel vignettes from Europe that reflect
his impressions gained as a correspondent of the New York Mirror where he had a
regular column alongside Willis’ “First Impressions from Europe.” Later he
was to come to know Germany intimately as a diplomat in Berlin. His historical
romance The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (1840) bears testimony to his rapidly
awakened sympathy for Prussia and Germany. In this romance the Prussian capital, which serves as the primary setting, appears in a favorable light from the
very beginning of the novel. While most characters in the novel belong to a
cosmopolitan aristocratic élite, the atmosphere of the royal residence on the
banks of the Spree is evoked, and some local color introduced. The impressive
military music and the disciplined conduct of the soldiers are noted at the out24 ]
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set, though the image of Berlin and Germany, despite all details given, remains
fairly vague when measured by the criteria of realistic narration. Unusually, Fay
does not blame the Germans for the evil of dueling and thus allows his narrative
to deviate from the perception of travel writers who regularly attribute this vice
to the Germans. In fact, the author expressedly exempts Germany from the
usual reproach of being the home to such potentially destructive rituals. By
exonerating the nation, he counters the later common tendency to regard the
duel as a questionable element in German society, and thus to stigmatize this
practice as an atavistic and barbarous trait.
William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), the influential poet, critic, and journalist, meanwhile contributed to a fashionable trend, that of making the Rhine
valley and Heidelberg nuclei for a romantic image of Germany, though his
published reports on his activities during his several visits to Germany—also
as a curator of various American museums—are relatively short on details.
Similarly, his fellow journalist George William Curtis (1824–1892), who fed the
needs of a large readership for travel sketches, warmed to the romantic landscape of the Rhine valley. He described this region with sensitivity in LotusEating (1852), where he ranked the aesthetic charm of the Rhine valley above
that of the Hudson, thus adding yet another facet to the image of Germany as a
rewarding destination.
But Bayard Taylor, who acknowledged N. P. Willis as his mentor, and was
later celebrated as the “Laureate” of the Gilded Age, contributed more than the
other travel writers and even than Longfellow to the dissemination of a romantic image of Germany. The freelance author of travelogues painted a vivid picture of the natural and the cultural scenery of Central Europe for his readers in
his travel letters, which, collected as Views A-foot (1846), reached twenty editions. Taylor was well prepared for the task: not only had he extensively read
contemporary travel books on Germany, but he also explored it on foot at the
age of nineteen. Yet his own imaginative receptiveness and his creative
response to the places steeped in historical associations left their mark on his
vivid accounts of the country and its people, and supported his postulate of an
inner affinity between Germans and Americans. In his many travel sketches he
managed to create the impression of a spontaneous reaction to the landscape
of castles and ruins along the Rhine and during his journey through the Harz
mountains, and to conjure up legends and earlier literary depictions of this
country. His linguistic and cultural competence for acting as a cultural mediator between Germany and the United States28 was fostered both by his close
friendship with August Bufleb and his later marriage with the daughter of the
German astronomer Hansen, a personal link to Germany, which prompted
his frequent visits to the home of her family in Gotha and Thuringia. These
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contacts facilitated his major achievement, the translation of Goethe’s Faust,
which he published near the end of his career (1870–1871).
In contrast to H. E. Dwight two decades before, Taylor did not experience
the German-speaking world as denominationally and culturally divided. He
was ready to celebrate various German regions and the people to whom he felt
an elective affinity,29 while conversely, he seems to have borrowed the prejudices of his German friends toward minorities or neighbors.30 This attitude is
also reflected in the author’s confession of having felt homesick for Germanspeaking regions in the south of France (Views A-foot, 287–88) and his various
observations on Slavs and Jews. How closely his sympathy for speakers of German was connected with the artistic achievements of the German literary élite
is apparent in such statements and in his later increasing identification with
the movement toward the unification of the German provinces. Taylor’s Germanophile views also prompted a eulogy during the Franco-Prussian War of
1871 (“Jubellied eines Amerikaners”), at a time when a decisive shift in public
opinion was noticeable as a consequence of the seemingly reckless use of German cannon against Paris during the siege.31
the image of germany
among the transcendentalists
In the decades before the foundation of the German Empire and the emergence
of a critical facet of the American heterostereotype of Germans several leading
Transcendentalists helped shape the positive hetero-image on the basis of
their keen interest in German literature and culture, which in many cases was
enhanced by actual visits.32 The rapid rise of Germany to a position of preeminence and that of a potential model for American intellectuals eager to assert
the cultural autonomy of the United States and to consolidate their own sense
of collective identity is apparent in a comment by the Unitarian theologian
Theodore Parker (1810–1860) as early as 1841. Referring to the allegedly subversive but extraordinarily popular writings of German thinkers he alluded
ironically to “the immoral and irreligious writings, which it is supposed the
Germans are engaged in writing, with the generous intention of corrupting the
youth of the world.”33 Parker was not sparing in his use of superlatives when
assessing the value and importance of German culture: “To our apprehension,
German literature is the fairest, the richest, the most original, fresh, and religious literature of all modern times.”34
The high respect Parker and his fellow theologian James Freeman Clarke
(1810–1888) expressed for German culture owed much to their acceptance of
German biblical criticism, but also to the early translations of German literary
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texts by other members of the transcendentalist circle, the Hedge Club, and the
editors of the Dial. Among them Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) had assisted in the
transformation of the cultural map of Europe and the consciousness of the New
World by her intensive reading of German literature and idealistic philosophy,
which she had taken up following a recommendation by Frederick Henry Hedge,
and by her teaching of these texts in the mid-1830s, as well as by her own translations of classic books and by her many essays and reviews during her editorship
of the Dial. In contrast to Parker and Clarke, Fuller never realized her dream of
visiting Germany, which is all the more regrettable, as her preparation would
have allowed her to offer a more perceptive and complex representation of German culture than the travel writers and even Bayard Taylor were able to provide.35
Like her, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), despite being infected by the
enthusiasm of his friends for German culture and literature, never visited Germany, though his worldview was indubitably indebted to German idealism.36
The skepticism toward the attempts of his friends to gain access to the spirit
they so admired (by staying in German-speaking countries)—“How impossible to find Germany!”37—may suggest a certain reluctance to respond to the
“totally other,” as he retained England as the most important foil in his ongoing reflection on his own national culture. Like Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott
(1799–1888) also drew on his reading of a wide range of German philosophers
and pedagogues without ever visiting the country that to him had realized a
form of education eminently suitable for children. He, too, mediated an idealized image of Germany.
The search for a reformed educational system in the United States before
the middle of the nineteenth century received an important boost through several missions made by American educational reformers. Horace Mann
(1796–1859) in his Report of an Educational Tour in Germany, and Parts of Great
Britain and Ireland (1844) underlined the model character of the German educational system and, like Calvin Stowe’s (1802–1886) Report on Elementary Public
Instruction in Europe (1837, rpt. 1838), emphasized the exemplary character of
this aspect of cultural life in Germany.
sunny memories?
However, critical voices also sounded, directed against the excesses of Germanophilia, and the advent of hundreds of thousands of German immigrants
following the failure of the revolutions of 1848–1849 caused irritation and fears
among those upholding Puritan customs. They felt the threat of the importation
of German habits and institutions like the beer garden, which became established in the states of the Midwest, when the influx of many German settlers
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changed the ethnic composition of cities like Milwaukee and Saint Louis. When
Charles Loring Brace (1806–1890), after his return from an extended tour of Central Europe, allowed himself the liberty of diagnosing at home a lack of “healthy
cheerfulness, . . . sociality, geniality, and the more tender and kindly expressions
of affection” (Life, 151), and when he praised the genial old German homes in the
preface to Home-Life in Germany (1853), and seemed to distance himself from the
“New England habit of silent, hurried meals and extreme gravity upon the Sunday,” he provoked bitter criticism. Some reviewers regarded it as appropriate to
insinuate that he, Brace, could only be really happy when “under the table with
his boon companions, drunk!” (Life, 150). This vicious attack directed against an
advocate of Germany once again highlights the close interconnection between
the image of the country and, indirectly, of German Americans and the American
autostereotype, and the relevance of the portrayal of German lifestyles and culture for the self-perception of the new nation.
While most of the accounts of journeys to and through the heart of Europe
were obviously produced by men, there were several women who contributed
their responses to Germany in letters, diaries, travel sketches, and fiction.
Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s (1789–1867) Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home
(1841) reflect her visit in the company of several younger relatives, and contain
impressions with a certain freshness and originality. Her remarks on the
apparently unsurpassable appetite of frequently obese Germans in various
spas entertain,38 while her cautious observations on the value of foreign customs, for instance, the greater freedom of behavior on Sundays, strike a note
similar to that of Charles Loring Brace, with which he later provoked the anger
of the Puritan moralists.
Some of the comments Harriet Beecher Stowe included in her Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854) mirror her experiences during a few weeks of touring
Germany with some family members and show that she took offense at the
seemingly unrestrained sensuality of some mythological paintings in the galleries in Dresden. But Beecher Stowe did not draw negative conclusions about
the characters of the Saxons or of the Germans in general, though the very limited knowledge of German of Harriet and her traveling companions made
communication difficult and resulted in the occasional reliance on stereotypes.39 Yet Beecher Stowe’s early encounter with the architectural monuments
of Germany’s medieval past, especially in Cologne, shows that she was
enthralled by the Gothic cathedral there, which she associated explicitly with
the mountainous scenery of the Alps and with the work of northern artisans
achieving sublimity in the architecture.40
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CHAPTER 3
DIFFERING
RESPONSES
THE LATE
NINETEENTH
CENTURY
in transition in travelogues after 1860
In the years following the Napoleonic Wars German culture had become a
source of inspiration and a model for many American writers and intellectuals,
and a visit to the country as part of the journey to the Old World or at the end of
one’s studies had become more or less a necessity. The events of 1866 and
1870–1871, which transformed the map of Central Europe, directed the attention of the American public at large to the rise of Germany as a major power.
Among the earlier visiting students, Bancroft and Motley had, like Taylor,
noted with growing interest and sympathy the efforts of the nationalist movements toward unification. Once this had been achieved, one central stereotype
in American thought lost its factual basis, namely the notion of the inherent
political weakness of the Germans and their inability to realize such plans and
hopes. Herein lay the origin of the image of the German idealist who was
doomed to fail and was incapable of coping with practical matters. Now the
dominant heterostereotype was gradually transformed, with the strongest
impetus provided by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, which attracted
the attention of the American press far more than the wars with Denmark
(1864) and Austria (1866).
Isolated remarks made by fundamentally Germanophile observers like
Calvert in the years immediately after the suppression of the Revolution of
1848–1849 had shown the beginnings of concern at the behavior of the Prussian military. The disparaging remarks formulated much later by Henry Adams
about the degree of regimentation in the German school system and hence its
uselessness for visiting students (which date back to his own experiences in
1859–1860) point to the rapidly increasing criticism of the country that had
until then been regarded as a model. This led to a division of the image of Germany into two simultaneously held but very differently evaluated images and to
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the beginnings of polarization among writers and authors of travel books.
They continued to praise Germany as the home of the sciences and of an
impressive culture, but it had also become a point of controversy for them.
The appeal of Germany as a country of excellent opportunities for education
was acknowledged in John Ross Browne’s decision to take his family to Germany and his (fictionalized) depiction of their experiences during their sojourn
there. In An American Family in Germany (1866), which first appeared in serial
form [Sacramento Union and then Harper’s Monthly Magazine], Browne combined
his description of the advantages of German schools with a vivid account of the
frankness and the joie de vivre prevalent in his host country. Reminiscent in its
humorous style and illustrations of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, the book
offered an idyllic picture of Christmas customs and other manifestations of
German conviviality.1 The humorous sketches of school life are meant to illustrate that the schoolmasters in Central Europe are no killjoys, and that there is
no reason to condemn, as later American authors were to do, the drill practiced
in German schools.2 So positive is his overall image of this aspect of German
culture, and implicitly also of the contribution of German Americans to the
national culture, that contemporary reviewers felt the need to point out some
problematical aspects of German society, “the sensual appetites, . . . the weak
and extravagant sentimentality” to be observed in the country.3
The (alleged) benevolence of people in Germany and their sociability come
out also in the representation of their counterparts of the same ethnic background in America in Louisa May Alcott’s bestselling novel Little Women, which
appeared 1868–1869. This book paid full tribute to the romantic atmosphere of
the Rhine valley, mirroring Alcott’s own intense enjoyment during a full year
spent in Europe of various scenes and settings, such as Koblenz and Heidelberg, transformed by moonlight. Her delight in the magic atmosphere of a
moonrise is evident in her concise journals and in the vignettes based upon her
unforgettable impressions in the valleys of the Rhine and Neckar.4 The imagination of Amos Bronson Alcott’s daughter (1832–1888), who had early gained
access to German literature through her mild and unworldly father, also
responded vividly to rich historical associations. While some of her experiences reemerge in her educational novel in Jo’s younger sister Amy, who is even
serenaded by moonlight in Koblenz, Alcott allowed another fictional part of
herself to encounter that country in another fashion: her relationship with a
typical German professor, Dr. Bhaer. This political refugee, who is easily
moved by other people’s hardships, wins Jo’s heart by embodying the reliable,
simple, warmhearted German.5 That he cultivates a Victorian notion of the
female role and not only wins Jo’s affection and love, but also discourages her
from living out her imaginative needs by composing fanciful gothic stories is
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“Der Gemutliche” from John Ross Browne, An American Family in Germany.
an interesting aspect.6 A few years later such a softhearted German professor
could not have been used in a similar manner as the representative of his
nation in fiction, as a fundamental change in the physiognomy of the German
type had resulted from the impact of the Franco-Prussian War.
Kate Chopin (1851–1904) returned with less favorable impressions from
Germany than Alcott. Originally she had perceived the landscape in the valley
of the Rhine on her honeymoon trip (1870) through the lenses of Longfellow’s
Hyperion. But the excitement due to the imminent outbreak of the FrancoPrussian War and the “iron countenance” of General Moltke, whom she saw in
Stuttgart, left a deep mark on her. What she later observed in France (where her
th e l ate ni neteenth c e n t u ry
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“Willkommen” from John Ross Browne, An American Family in Germany.
short visit to Paris coincided with the chaos following the abdication of
Napoleon III and preceding the siege of the city by the Germans),7 was hardly
likely to evoke warm feelings for Germany in the young wife of a husband
whose lifestyle had been shaped by French culture.
The travel sketches of Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885), however, still
mediate a relatively detailed and positive image of Germany. It was much less
the natural scenery during a journey on the Rhine which engaged her attention.
Instead, Jackson was interested much more in the people, for instance, her fel32 ]
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“Schoolmaster’s Pay Day” from John Ross Browne, An American Family in Germany.
low travelers on the steamer, but especially her contacts in German cities and
towns. The essay “A German Landlady” in her book Bits of Travel (1873) celebrates her good fortune in coming “to know the Fräulein . . . , the best, dearest,
jolliest landlady in all Germany.” The fifty-year-old, very short, stout woman, is
presented as an amiable person to whom Jackson owed many enjoyable experiences. The lady, whom Jackson called Fräulein Hahlreiner, was later also host
to two other American writers: Charles Dudley Warner and Samuel Clemens.8
Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) provided a detailed account of his observations on Germany for a wide readership in his Saunterings (1872), the fruit of the
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first of his five journeys to Europe.9 To avoid becoming just another repetitive
reporter, Warner only furnished a relatively cursory description of Heidelberg
and of his journey upstream on the river Rhine, but achieved originality by giving
Munich and Bavaria pride of place in his book.10 Warner, who with Clemens
coauthored The Gilded Age (1873), a novel in which they exposed the evils of
immorality, hypocrisy, and avarice in American society of the Reconstruction era,
apparently finds no comparable cause for satirically targeting vices and weaknesses in Germany. Instead, he praises in his extensive description the virtues of
“simplicity, kindliness, and honesty” among the Germans, and waxes enthusiastic about the “architectural reproduction of classic times” in Munich, where he
admires the architecture and takes great pleasure in (military) music. Few Americans admitted so openly their sympathies for the Germans as Warner did,
though he also refers to some of their weaknesses, for instance, their craving for
titles. Considering that Warner, at the beginning of his career, took Washington
Irving as his model it is not surprising that he does not forgo the opportunity of
dealing with the celebration of Christmas and various Christmas customs in
Bavaria. He pointedly regretted his departure from Munich for the south, in
sharp contrast to Henry James, who, in his travel letters briefly before expressed
his enthusiastic anticipation of his departure for the south.11
Warner’s friend Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) similarly did not conceal his
preference for the culture of German-speaking countries over that of France and
Italy. By the time he set out on his journey to produce a commissioned travel book
(A Tramp Abroad, 1880), which his publishers hoped would be in a mode similar to
his popular and iconoclastic success, The Innocents Abroad (1869), Clemens’ expectations had already been shaped favorably by his wide reading and many conversations with experts on Germany.12 While his publishers and readers were
expecting an entertaining and disrespectful book, Clemens sought to satisfy
them not by lampooning the target country but by ironically playing with his
material and through self-parody.13 He clearly refrained from offering a satirical
gallery of German people and also failed to caricature social and professional
types, even professors and students. Clemens showed relative restraint in his
detailed description of student duels in Heidelberg, where he had spent some
idyllic weeks, yet threw the same caution to the wind in his representation of the
French. In fact, Clemens evinced animosity toward the French in a digression
including a ridiculous French duel, and also in pertinent entries in his Notebooks.14 His treatment of the Germans and the French thus confirms the close
interconnection between the heterostereotypes of various European nations held
by American writers. He took care to correct the mistaken opinion that the Germans were “a stolid, phlegmatic race,” and maintained that they were, on the
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contrary, inclined to give direct expression to their feelings.15 The author was, by
no means, ironic in his description of the appeal of the castle at Heidelberg and
was neutral to affirmative in his tone when, for instance, reporting encounters
with the Grand Duke of Baden and the empress of Germany. Only when reporting on his painful experience with the “indisposed” heroic tenor in a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Mannheim did he resort to well-established
satirical techniques.16 Unlike a growing number of American contemporaries
Clemens did not draw any negative conclusions from the laws enacted in the
German Empire after the two assassination attempts on the old emperor, and
from the omnipresence of the German military in the cities.
Much later, during another European journey, when he was looking for a
treatment of his and his wife’s rheumatic ills in European spas such as Marienbad and seeking an opportunity of living economically, he also visited Berlin.
Clemens captured the atmosphere of modernity in the rapidly expanding
metropolis of the German Empire in an essay entitled “The German Chicago,”
acknowledging the efficiency of public transportation and the cleanliness of
the streets in Berlin as a worthy model for America, thus again giving expression to his partiality for the Germans and their country.17 To the very end of his
career he dissociated himself from those new trends that had, in the meantime, led to the cliché of the aggressive German as a bogeyman in various
forms of discourse in America.
The deterioration in the image of Germany in the last third of the nineteenth century is adumbrated in the change that took place in the attitude of
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) toward Germany from the 1860s onward.
Howells, who had been fond of German literature and had admired, translated, and imitated Heinrich Heine, was delighted when an opportunity
offered itself to him to use German on his journey to take up his post as American consul in Venice in 1861.18 In letters to his family in America he expressed
his esteem for Stuttgart, calling “the capital of Wurttemberg” “quite a wonderful little city, full of palaces full of pictures.”19 Several years later he wrote a
vignette in which he passed a totally negative judgment on this city.20 The negative picture was probably related to Howells’ anger at the public “immorality” practiced in Europe, this being voiced in a letter sent to his sister from
Venice.21 Until his semiautobiographical narrative Their Silver Wedding Journey
(1898), which reflects another visit to Germany, Howells’ personal attitude to
the country, about which he was well informed because of a wave of travel
reports and news sent by friends such as Samuel Clemens, seems to have been
caught between the opposing views held by his friends Clemens and Henry
James. Even in this late text, in which Howells’ general rejection of German
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imperialism exerts its gravitational pull, he was apparently still trying to arrive
at a balanced judgment.
the image of germany in the romances
of francis marion crawford
That a significant deterioration of the cluster of images associated with Germany
was delayed in late nineteenth-century America was probably largely due to the
bestselling romances of Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909).22 At that time he
presumably contributed more than most writers who are nowadays in the canon
to the perpetuation of the favorable image of Germany developed in the Romantic age and to the popularization of its stock figures. Although he is not even
mentioned in comprehensive studies of German culture in the United States,
such as Faust’s monograph and Pochmann’s monumental study German Culture in
America, Crawford, the son of a well-known American sculptor residing in Rome
and himself exceptionally talented in languages, mediated a very positive image
of German students and academic teachers in his novels, which were based on
his own experiences in the southwest of Germany. When he could not complete
his studies in the British Isles, his Prussian brother-in-law Eric von Rabé recommended that he try the technical university in Karlsruhe. The two years Crawford
spent first there and then in Heidelberg, fully involved in the life of fraternities,23
enabled him, as his imagination worked with exceptional facility, later to choose
Germany as the setting for several of his novels.
His second novel, Dr. Claudius (1883),24 for example, illustrates some of the
literary resources that served him in shaping the plots and the characters of his
forty-four novels. The choice of a private lecturer at the University of Heidelberg as the eponymous hero, who was depicted as an example of a well-known
stock type, apparently satisfied a large readership. The idealistic Claudius displays the typical features of a German scholar when he devotes himself to his
philosophical studies of Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, allowing himself only a
glass of beer and a pretzel in the midmorning. The equanimity with which he
receives the news of the fortune waiting for him in America bears witness to
the power of the genius loci of the university town and the stereotype, for
Claudius is presented as a “phlegmatic” northerner,25 who is rarely shaken out
of his constitutional composure. It is true, the exigencies of the plot allow
Claudius to slip into the role of the typical hero of a romance. He undergoes a
remarkable change into a surprisingly polished and attentive cavalier when he
is confronted with a rival for the hand of the beautiful Countess Margaret in
cosmopolitan Baden-Baden, to which the setting moves. By then, though, the
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selves upon the reader’s mind, and contribute to the perpetuation of a consolidated stereotyped image of the Germans.
In Greifenstein (1889) Crawford combined a melodramatic plot—a woman
between two brothers—set in the Black Forest with a very detailed documentation of student customs. The success of this novel was at least partly due to the
documentary quality of the novel (which critics paid tribute to) with its vivid
accounts of the duels and drinking sessions of fraternities in Heidelberg and
“Schwarzburg.” Crawford’s narrator also explains in detail the code of honor in
the milieu of students and in aristocratic circles. The description of duels, no
doubt, draws on the personal experience of the author, but is also linked to the
alleged German national character. In this context it is significant that Crawford
permits his authorial narrator to note a fundamental change in German society
and to establish a connection between “academic” customs and military victories, and the political rise of Germany to the status of a great power.26 Rehearsing a stereotypical catalog of national characteristics, the behavior of Italian,
French, and English students is compared with that of their German fellows,
who, even after a night given over to carousing, diligently fulfill their duties.
Greif is explicitly praised as exemplifying German virtues in ideal fashion:
“He was certainly the most popular student who had ever trod the stones of
Schwarzburg, as he was by nature one of the most thoroughly German” (p. 75).
It should be noted that Crawford is uncritical of the martial spirit that had
entered German universities in the fraternities and students’ corps. That the
narrator evaluates Greif ’s behavior positively as the natural expression of
the German character starkly contrasts this novel with the vignettes drawn by
the versatile journalist and author of travelogues Moncure Conway, for
instance, in his rendition of the city and society of Essen (“The Iron City Beside
the Ruhr”), and with the sketch offered by James Kendall Hosmer in “The
Giant in the Spiked Helmet.”27 To Crawford these features of modern Germany were appealing enough and the focus of sympathy was so clearly on his
protagonist Greif that negative connotations are absent from his portrait.
henry and william james:
differing responses to germany
In this respect Crawford can be regarded as an antipode to Henry James
(1843–1916), who, to his considerable annoyance, had to admit that such writers were apparently much more in tune with the taste of the reading public. The
numbers of copies authors like Crawford sold and the impact their fiction made
in Europe exceeded their wildest dreams. On the other hand, a letter written by
William James (1842–1910) to his younger brother Henry in 1892 illustrates the
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fact that Crawford’s tribute to the discipline cultivated throughout the German
Empire by students and the military was not an isolated statement in the United
States. In 1892 William James registered with approval the progress made by
German society in the preceding decades: “Germany is smarter and richer than
of yore, but I confess I enjoy seeing again the mass of hearty, honest kindly
humanity with which the country abounds, with its natural schwerfalligkeit corrected by the upright military bearing and directness of speech.”28 The images
of Germany contained in and mediated through Henry James’ works, both
vignettes and fiction, contrast with William’s statement, and so a comparison
of Henry’s views with that of his brother expressed in the latter’s extensive correspondence seems appropriate.29
Whereas Warner in his travelogue preferred the country and the people
north of the Alps to Italy and regretted the need to leave for the south, Henry
James (1843–1916) was enthusiastic about his discovery at the age of twenty-six
of the culture and landscape of Italy. His enthusiasm for the countries of the
Mediterranean appears as a counterpart to the lively spirit of discovery with
which an earlier generation of students from New England and the Carolinas
went to the reformed universities in Germany. In line with Henry James’ importance as a pioneer of the art of fiction, the factors that shaped his images of
Italy and Germany, apparently inextricably linked with each other, have been
thoroughly studied and documented, though some hitherto little-noted circumstances may be pointed out. It seems that James’ critical attitude to Germany30 had been formed by some very personal experiences dating from his
youth. For his emotional view of Central Europe,31 the intensive experience of a
strenuous but most rewarding hiking tour undertaken in the late summer of
1869 was of major importance. His route led him twice across Swiss Alpine
passes into a south steeped in sunshine. This experience filled him with a hitherto unknown feeling of heightened abilities and perception after a youth overshadowed by chronic ailments, and this was to shape his relationship with Italy
ever after. The indelible impressions of his hike and the subsequent visits to
Venice, Florence, and Rome over the next five months awakened and consolidated an awareness of the superiority of the South over the North in beauty and
all attractions.32 And this conviction was to color his image of Germany. It was
the blue sky of Italy but especially its ubiquitous works of art and the rich historical associations that were to enthrall Henry for the rest of his life.
From his letters recording his first encounter with Italy in 1869 onward
Henry, using well-tried rhetorical phrases and figures of speech like allegory
and personification, repeatedly contrasted Italy as the “beautiful, dishevelled
nymph” with Germany in particular, at that time characterized as a “tidy hausfrau,” while England was cast in the role of a “good married matron.”33 Italy,
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which had given him such intense aesthetic experiences, is constantly referred
to as feminine, while Germany, which he visited only reluctantly, was frequently endowed with masculine attributes (it was the “fatherland”). Lacking
the charm of the Mediterranean landscape, Germany, in the most favorable
case, appears as the home of rational, sober, and well-disciplined people.
A similar cluster of associations occurs in the comparison between Germany
and France, and their origins may go back to the author’s childhood and youth.
After the unhappy months in a school in Geneva he lived for several months in
1860 in Bonn in the home of a high school teacher by the name of Doctor
Humpert in order to learn the German language. Henry James Junior was to
regard his father’s termination of this unpleasant phase in his education and
the ensuing journey to Paris as a kind of liberation from a repulsive drill.34
Later impressions, like those gained on his visits to the Germany of Bismarck and William II, but especially the political circumstances that led to
World War I, were subsequently to negatively color the memory of his time in
the Rhine valley recounted in his autobiographical reminiscences, Notes of a Son
and Brother,35 completed on the eve of the Great War. That Henry’s artistic sensibility was awakened in Bonn in the summer of 1860 and that he enjoyed a
journey on the Rhine in spite of its, by that time, conventional nature36 is not
even mentioned in his autobiography. His youthful complaint about the heavy
plain fare, which did not at all agree with his weak digestion and aggravated his
chronic constipation, as well as his lament about the unaired rooms, gives
credibility to the belief that there may also have been a fairly banal physical
cause for Henry James’ lack of sympathy for German culture.37 In his autobiography the word “ugly” is prominent when he summarizes his earlier impressions of Germany, and he is of the opinion that all German phenomena lack
form and shape.
In addition to the unfavorable experiences in his childhood and youth,
Henry’s growing bias against Germany reflects the increasing political tensions between the German Empire and his favorite countries. But the roots of
his image of Germany are not only to be found in individual formative experiences and political convictions, but can also be accounted for by his subconscious opposition to his elder brother William.38 The rapid development of
German science and medical research, which prompted the rise of Berlin and
Vienna to the status of meccas for American physicians in the last third of the
nineteenth century, recommended Central Europe to William as a suitable destination both for his research work (long before Henry settled permanently in
the Old World) and for the convalescence needed after his serious illness during his travels in Brazil. In spite of some irritations and some superficial generalizations in his early letters, William developed a great deal of understanding
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for and a special affinity with Germany. The rivalry between the two brothers,
which developed very early, contributed to Henry’s remaining aloof from German natural science and its ideals of thoroughness and rationality so highly
esteemed by William.
While his brother felt fully at ease in Berlin and Dresden and continued to
visit German spas from 1867 onward, Henry responded like a seismograph to
the increasingly critical attitudes of American society toward the “new Germany.” The course of events after the defeat of the French at Sedan and the deposition of Napoleon III, especially the German bombardment of Paris, widely
branded as an act of barbarism, gave birth, despite the enthusiasm and the
sense of triumph felt by some Americans of German extraction, to a dramatic
change of opinion in the American press and to a growing estrangement from
the victorious Prussians. When Bismarck clung to his war aims and when the
image of the warlike nature of the new Germany gradually gained center
stage,39 Henry James gave free rein to his dislike of German power politics. His
increasing unease in the face of Prussian arrogance was later expressed in travelogues and in his fiction by his depiction of disagreeable German characters.
During some short stays in Germany Henry expressed his scorn for the ugliness of German cities and condemned the widespread lack of taste—particularly harshly during a visit to the Hofkirche in Innsbruck40—dismissing some
cities that other American travel writers had praised, such as Munich, which he
called “a nightmare of pretentious vacuity.”41 Henry’s scorn for the architecture of Munich contrasts with Warner’s affection for the city.
In 1873 Henry’s growing rejection of Germany manifested itself in the literary transformation of his experiences during two months in Bad Homburg,
which were in reality quite productive. This took the form of two vignettes
included in his Transatlantic Sketches. Though he admitted in a letter that he felt
at ease in Bad Homburg and that it was gradually “reconciling him with Germany,”42 he continued to make negative assessments of the country in later
travel sketches based on this journey. Since his language studies in Bonn in
1860 Henry had apparently associated ponderousness and massive bulk with
everything German. In “Homburg Reformed” he contrasts the Germans as
“heavy and fair-haired, deep drinkers and strong thinkers” with the “light,
pleasure-loving” Frenchmen, and he discusses their talents with slight irony:
the “powerful German temperament and the comprehensive German brain”
(The Continent, 640–41). He seems inclined to see in the faces of the German visitors to the Kursaal in Homburg satisfaction with the military victory over the
French, and interprets many a trivial detail in the light of his growing aversion.
This comes out in his commentary on the many benches in the Homburg spa
park that are popular with the Germans, whose predilection for staying in the
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forests is closely linked by the author with the newly won might of the “Fatherland.” Henry posits as one motive for their collective behavior the idea that the
trees whisper into “a fanciful German ear some prophetic legend of a still
larger success and a still richer Fatherland” (The Continent, 641).
Henry’s harping on the love of the Germans for the forests seems directly
related to an undertaking that at that time engaged the attention of many people in Germany. A few years earlier Taylor had published his essay on the Teutoburger Forest,43 which described the dark appeal of this landscape but
primarily evoked the memory of a historical event with far-reaching consequences, namely the decisive victory of Arminius, the leader of the Cherusci,
over the Romans. Two years after the publication of Henry James’ sketch the
long-planned monument to Arminius in the Teutoburger Forest was unveiled.
So it was no coincidence that the “imperialist” associations of the German forest in the Homburg sketch occurred to its author.44
Henry’s second German sketch deals with Darmstadt, where the Grand
Duke had only retained a nominal role after unification and where the Prussian
spiked helmet, which had in the meantime become an emblem of German
claims to power, seemed omnipresent.45 Henry’s aversion to the Germans colors his depiction of the small and allegedly dirty city surrounding an ugly castle
which is compared to its detriment with picturesque Italian princely courts.
Henry’s dislike of Prussian characters is mirrored in the story “A Bundle of
Letters” (1879),46 in which a young American encounters a Prussian scientist
named Dr. Rudolf Staub in a Parisian boardinghouse. The German is arrogant,
self-confident, but deficient in the cultural sphere, an altogether unpleasant
representative of the German Empire. It is difficult to imagine a more striking
contrast between this tall, fair-haired scholar, who proudly refers to himself as
a “remorseless observer,” and the sensitive Dr. Bhaer, whom Alcott had drawn
with such affection. The Berlin-born Staub looks down upon both the French,
who, in his view, are not capable of taking revenge, and on the degenerate
Anglo-Saxons. He is certainly closely related to the type of character whose literary genealogy Horst Kruse explored in “Dr. Materialismus.”47 He has nothing in common with the typical German professor of earlier decades who was
dreaming in his ivory tower. His diagnostic practice mirrored in his letters to a
colleague in Göttingen betrayed the cynical worldview of an early supporter of
the ideas of the master race.
Twelve years later Henry made an explicit confession of his fundamental
emotional difficulties with the Germans (1891): “I can’t do much with the Germans—they are somehow not in my line. One must either really know them or
leave them alone. They are ugly and mighty—they have (I think) lots of future,
but a most intolerable present.”48
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Yet, despite his repeated expression of dislike for the Germans49 Henry was
not ready to give totally free rein to prejudices. That he distinguished clearly
between critical distance and polemic “defamation” can be inferred from his
adverse review of a book on Dresden and Saxony that appeared a few years after
his Travel Sketches.50 This book was written by the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne
and appeared while Henry was writing his groundbreaking monograph on that
author. In his Saxon Studies (1876), in an apparently very ill-tempered mood,
Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934), who had spent some time in Dresden as a student of engineering,51 condemned the Saxons as egoists and bores. This judgment is all the more surprising as Julian Hawthorne had written and published
several reports and short stories that drew a favorable picture of the royal capital
on the Elbe, which in no way presaged such a defamation.52 This sudden attack
must have been provoked by some personal irritation, perhaps linked to the
time spent at the Polytechnic in Dresden, where he was put off by the untidiness
of the classrooms. However, this is insufficient explanation of his caricature of
his Saxon hosts. In Saxon Studies Hawthorne had discovered signs of a lack of
cleanliness everywhere and criticized both the rural folk and the city dwellers for
their exploitation of their wives and women, who were forced to toil.53
Henry James correctly criticized the one-sidedness of Hawthorne’s report
and the lack of documentation. He also noted the absence of references to the
literary culture of Dresden, which other travel writers had praised, and in general objected to the tone in which Hawthorne had articulated his aversion. The
cosmopolitan Henry certainly did not share the narrow-minded opinion of
Julian Hawthorne, who, without any sign of irony, described the true function
of traveling as follows: “to reconcile us to our homes. We study foreign countries and customs, not for their intrinsic sake, but in order to compare them
disadvantageously with our own” (Saxon Studies, 11–12). However, Henry’s dismissal of Saxon Studies as a disappointment insufficiently based on facts did not
prevent him from withdrawing his sympathy from the representatives of the
“new” Germany in his own essays and works of fiction.54
In the story “Eugene Pickering”55 Henry describes the painful initiation of a
naive American protagonist who is unscrupulously used by the charming but
scheming Madame Blumenthal, who is of Prussian extraction. In the story
“Pandora” (1884)56 Count Vogelstein, a stiff Prussian Junker repeatedly called
a typical German, is drawn as a class-conscious prejudiced observer who lacks
any sense of humor and shows naive self-conceit.
Much more complex is the later story “Collaboration” (1892),57 which is set
in an artistic milieu in Paris and dramatizes the development of the relationship between a young French poet, Félix Vendemer, and the German pianist
and composer Hermann Heidenmauer. The plot turns on the heavy price that
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both artists have to pay for their international collaboration on the libretto for
an opera. Tragedy results from the deep rift between the two nations following
the Franco-Prussian War, which leads to serious consequences for the two
artists. The enthusiastic German musician loses the financial support of his
stepbrother, while Vendemer risks and forfeits his private happiness, as the
mother of his fiancée cannot accept such collaboration on the part of her
prospective son-in-law with an artist from the enemy camp. The ambivalence
in the assessment of these individuals and groups conveyed to the reader
seems characteristic of Henry James’ mature narrative art.
That Heidenmauer is a Bavarian by birth and not from north Germany
seems significant, as it foreshadows the later bifurcation in the image of Germany and the Germans. His openness to other cultures and his familiarity with
English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian poetry elicit great respect from
the first-person narrator, an American painter working in Paris, for the former’s “fine German intelligence.” Heidenmauer’s convictions, finally shared
by Vendemer, that the arts know no political and national boundaries and that
narrow-minded chauvinism has to be overcome so thoroughly impress the
painter that he distances himself from the belligerent patriotism of a fellow
countryman. However, negative associations impose themselves upon the
first-person narrator. He imagines Hermann Heidenmauer “perfectly in a
Prussian helmet, with a needle-gun, perfectly, on definite occasion, a sturdy,
formidable soldier” (p. 426), thus suggesting that even in such a lover of the
arts there lurks potential danger. Temporarily, Heidenmauer himself displays a
touch of collective self-conceit, when he evaluates French accomplishments in
culture: “The French mind has—for me—the taste of a very delightful bonbon!”
(p. 426).
Even a sophisticated representative of the German nation such as Heidenmauer has a touch of arrogance, a feature derived, albeit indirectly, from
Henry’s fundamental dislike of the representatives of a country that did not
appeal to him. It is a moot question to ask what Henry James’ image of Germany might have been if he had, earlier in his life, paid a visit to Dresden, as
had been recommended to him by his brother William. The famous art gallery
there might have suggested a more favorable image of German princely
patronage, and a less power-centered notion of the German character.
William’s frequent letters from the summer of 1867 onward show that his
long and fruitful relationship with Germany and German scholars took some
time in developing. His repeated attempts to come to a fair assessment of the
host country furnished an initially contradictory, but then a remarkably differentiated image of German culture. From his lively though melancholy character sprang a wide spectrum of observations on typical individuals and
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institutions. While some early letters admit his inability to offer, in a few compact sentences, a general formula of Germany and the German character, his
growing familiarity with the country and the people is mirrored in a host of
descriptions.
At the outset he saw a very close similarity between the host country and the
United States, and therefore he advised his brother Henry at first not to visit
Berlin, to him “the most American-looking city in Europe” (Correspondence, vol.
1, 18). Like many of his predecessors and like some of a later generation
William came to admire many intellectuals and professors in Berlin, where the
opportunities for study seemed superb in comparison with those at home.
Though he carefully rationed his expressions of respect for German scholars
(who he thought initially did not appear to be “a remarkably intellectually
gifted people, more given to conscientious and plodding work” [Correspondence,
vol. 4, 233]), he soon admitted that he might have underestimated them
because of their seemingly “expressionless faces.” Finding Dresden as a
baroque city of the arts superior to the Prussian capital, which first seemed a
bleak and unfriendly place and whose inhabitants seemed rude and graceless,
he gradually gained a more favorable impression of German families and
praised the solidity, friendliness, and sincerity of the people in his host country. In the following decades William was to repeatedly profess his liking for
the German language (Correspondence, vol. 4, 161) and even an inner affinity with
the country. In sharp contrast to his brother Henry he thoroughly enjoyed his
return to Germany following a fairly long recuperative vacation in Italy in the
spring of 1874, and he later compared England with Germany to the detriment
of the former (Correspondence, vol. 4, 485–86 and vol. 1, 345).
Central to the fundamentally positive image of Germany conveyed and disseminated through William’s correspondence were his fruitful professional
links with German scholars, connections he was later able to use for the benefit of his alma mater. Whereas his letters first reflected his general skepticism
and his inclination to speculate, he proved himself determined in his professional goals and activities. His desire to enter more deeply into current
research in experimental psychology, a field in which German universities led
at that time, prompted his repeated returns to Germany. There he attended lectures given by prominent scientists, such as the great psychologist Wilhelm
Wundt of Leipzig.58 These contacts, which had a parallel in the career of his
fellow scientist G. Stanley Hall, the first to establish in the United States a laboratory for experimental psychology on the German model, fostered William
James’ orientation toward German academic culture. Like the earlier reform
pedagogues he expressed the opinion that Germany was the best place for the
education of children (Correspondence, vol. 4, 241).
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As William had already established close personal ties to Germany, it is not
surprising that his attitude to the Franco-Prussian War was also influenced. In
contrast to his brother Henry, he hoped that “the arrogant French” would be
defeated in the conflict (see Correspondence, vol. 4, 242), and, unlike his brother,
he had no doubts about the German Empire that emerged from the military
conflict. While a growing number of American intellectuals had problems with
the indubitably changed political climate in Germany and regarded the signs of
increasing militarism there with alarm, he remained loyal to his image of an
ideal Germany.
It remained a second home for him, one to which he returned again and
again, partly to continue with this research, partly to receive treatment for his
precarious health. As a consequence of his scientific cooperation he was able
to recruit as a professor for Harvard the important experimental psychologist
Hugo Münsterberg. Meanwhile the estrangement between intellectuals in Germany and the United States had begun, so that bridging this widening gap was
to be Münsterberg’s self-appointed task.
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CHAPTER 4
TRANSATLANTIC
ENCOUNTERS
FIN-DE-SIÈCLE
ESTRANGEMENT
Just as the worldview, the concept of science, and the image of Germany held by
William James were shaped by his encounters in Central Europe, so the mental
map of the European continent in the minds of other American academic teachers and administrators was equally formed by their years of study spent at
German universities. The impressions that John W. Burgess (1844–1931), a professor of political science at Columbia University, had gathered at a number of
German universities accompanied him throughout his career. It culminated in
his acceptance of a visiting professorship under the aegis of the German
emperor.1 Even before Harvard established an academic exchange with the University of Berlin in 1904, various university presidents were eager to reform their
institutions, among them Andrew White from Cornell University, James Angell
from the University of Michigan, G. Stanley Hall from Clark University, and
Nicholas Murray Butler from Columbia University. During the restructuring
they drew on their own experiences at German universities.2
That Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), who was to become a prominent journalist and social critic, completed his education at the universities of Berlin,
Heidelberg, and Leipzig (1889–1891),3 and that W. E. B. Du Bois, the future
spokesman of the African Americans, went on to read cultural and social studies in Berlin with the intention of earning a much desired doctorate, resulted
from several of their teachers having spent what had become by then the
almost obligatory semester in Germany. These visiting students had gained an
insight into the German university scene and into the political, social, and ideological fabric of the German Empire; they had, however, also noted many a
phenomenon which, in a period of estrangement between Germany and the
United States, were to serve as ammunition for political and cultural conflicts.4
That the cultural scene in northern Germany, and the academic and scholarly institutions there, greatly appealed to American graduates in those
decades (though it also furnished material for adverse criticism), is apparent in
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the reactions of members of the Dabney family. After seven years of education
at Hampden-Sidney and at the University of Virginia, Charles William Dabney
(1855–1945) decided to study chemistry and mineralogy at Göttingen, where
he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in August 1880. In his correspondence with his future wife, Mary Brent of Kentucky,5 who herself toured
Europe after their relationship began in Göttingen early in 1879, Dabney wrote
enthusiastically about the music he had enjoyed with her in Berlin. He also
dwelt on the romantic feelings engendered in him during a visit to picturesque
Heidelberg, where she very much occupied his mind. In anticipating her return
to their own country, he admitted the absence of many of the cultural attractions he enjoyed in the heart of Germany but consoled himself with the
prospect of living as a (re)united couple in their homeland.6
Dabney’s praise of the cultural scene in Germany and the considerable benefits he had derived from his postgraduate studies in Göttingen (which secured
him senior scientific and then administrative positions at home),7 did not prevent him from taking an active role during World War I in the conflict with the
large segment of the population of Cincinnati of German provenance.
His father, Robert Lewis Dabney, a prominent Presbyterian clergyman, had
accepted his son’s invitation to join him in Germany and undertake a grand
tour in 1880. He felt uneasy when observing papist rituals in various European
countries but also expressed his dissatisfaction with the theological “vagaries”
he had found in German divinity schools. In his contacts with German scholars, he was struck by their relative lack of information on America and on the
South in particular, and criticized them for their ignorance of the scholarly
achievements of other nations. “Their contempt for the scholarship of other
nations is absurd and most blamable.”8 That element of alleged arrogance may
have stuck and continued to trouble not only him but also his son in the following decades when the estrangement between Germany and the United States in
the political sphere came to affect academic relations. It also helped to put an
end to the great reputation German academia had enjoyed in America.
At first, however, respect for German cultural achievements still predominated, and the activities of prominent historians and Germanophile writers like
Bancroft and Taylor, ambassadors to Berlin, consolidated the close ties. The
relations cultivated by the representatives of the older generation withstood several shocks: the reversal of public opinion in the wake of the Franco-Prussian
War and the anger of the American military at the imperialistic conduct of the
German Empire on the high seas, for example, in the conflict over Samoa. The
public at large was at first fascinated by the military and political successes of
the empire, which were also proudly celebrated by the very large number of
immigrants from Germany.9 Their strengthened sense of collective identity
f i n-d e- s i è c l e es trang e m e n t
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fostered a vigorous cultural life in several regions, which was only abruptly terminated by the vehement propaganda of World War I.10 The presence of a sizable minority created sufficient demand for nonfiction writing on Germany in
the form of historical and biographical sketches. The interest in German universities and in the educational system as such remained equally strong, with
many informal reports being supplemented by numerous and substantial publications on Germany.11 Herbert Tuttle, for instance, published a gallery of portraits of leading Prussians (1876)12 and further historical and biographical
essays appeared in periodicals and as monographs.13
george santayana’s speculative image of germany
Some members of the next (the third) generation of college graduates who set
out for Germany harbored exaggerated expectations, which led to disappointments. This is, for instance, true of George Santayana (1863–1952), who had
emigrated to America from Spain in 1872. From 1886 on he lived as a student in
Europe, especially in Germany and England, subsequently teaching philosophy at Harvard beginning in 1889. He was later to join in the chorus of voices
vociferously attributing a considerable part of the blame for the European
catastrophe of World War I to German professors of philosophy. In making
this assessment Santayana referred to his firsthand knowledge of Germany.
Later, in his autobiography,14 which he began in the 1920s, he admitted, however, that he had not made the most of his stay in Germany, as he had never
overcome the language barrier and remained mainly in the company of Englishspeaking fellow students: “I was too much enveloped in my American . . . associations to lose myself in the German scene, to learn German properly, and to
turn a copious German ‘spiritual’ stream into my private channel” (Persons and
Places, 253).
During his language studies in Germany Santayana spent some enjoyable
weeks in Dresden, where he delighted in theatrical and operatic performances
and was enchanted with the architecture and the art galleries in [that] “Florence on the River Elbe.” This he described retrospectively as “a culminating
point, one of the happiest episodes in my whole life,” and he concluded that
the three most favorable qualities of the German national character were “the
uniforms, the music and the beer” (p. 256). Like his older colleague William
James he recognized in retrospect the “discipline and the glory of discipline”
that had at the time favorably impressed him in Germany. In addition, he
ascribed to the Germans a “love of ideal and immaterial things,” which fostered the play of the imagination, and finally, “Gemütlichkeit,” “joy in hearty,
fleshly, kindly, homely, droll little things” (p. 256). As he looked back across
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the years, these three virtues seemed to be suitable to “redeem the human soul
from disorder, from servitude, and from spleen!” (p. 256).
When he made this statement, Santayana had long since resigned as a
teacher at Harvard and had moved to England, as the ethos of New England did
not suit him. Santayana was later to describe his attraction to everything
“strange” or “foreign”—his parental legacy, as it were—as a liberating force
away from narrow-mindedness and parochialism toward a supremely cosmopolitan attitude (Persons and Places, 447ff.). But in contrast to H. L. Mencken, he
failed to find in Germany an alternative model or suitable material for his cultural criticism of the established society in New England. Only in the traditions
of England and later of Italy did Santayana discover positive patterns. In his
1892 essay “What Is a Philistine?”15 he branded the German professors explicitly
as practitioners of such a limited view of the world: “The ordinary German professor is, with the possible exception of the German parson, the most contented
dweller in Philistia Felix” (p. 134). As an obedient servant of the state and as a
pillar of society the professor is said to allow everything else to take second
place to his own limited personal goals, and to have his only opponent in the
musician, who is the “champion of the soul.” Decades after this unflattering
assessment of German academic life, however, Santayana regretted that he had
not fully benefited from the opportunities offered during his studies in Germany. He regarded it as a major mistake that he had moved from the culturally
inspiring Dresden to Berlin, which he deemed “big, modern and ugly” (Persons
and Places, 256), and where only Professor Paulsen fostered his development. In
this way, the evolution of a deeper understanding of and potential inspiration by
German culture had been prevented.16
The later statement, which strives to be objective and impartial, contrasts
with Santayana’s generalization on the arrogance and the serious consequences
of the folly of idealistic German philosophy that he made in 1916, at a time of war
hysteria on both sides.17 But even in his autobiography he still inclines to generalize when he discusses his own experiences with Germans. Once again, he draws
sweeping conclusions, this time from the behavior of a young German nobleman, Albert von Westenholz, to whom he was linked by a close friendship before
and after the turn of the century. He takes the childlike and childish conduct of
his friend, who was intellectually extremely agile but emotionally inhibited, as an
indication of the German national character, regarding him as a typical German:
“I could never accuse Westenholz of being stupid or uneducated: but I felt to the
end how German he was, how immersed in learning and inclined to follow a sect,
without much capacity for laughter” (p. 261).
Santayana, who visited his friend several times in Hamburg, thought of German culture primarily from the perspective of its being part of the Protestant
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North.18 He infers the traits of the nation as a whole from the idiosyncracies or
even the clinical condition of his neurotic friend, who reminds the reader, as a
character type, of Poe’s Roderick Usher.19
The grotesque puppet show Albert von Westenholz produced together with
his sister on the occasion of his thirty-third birthday led to Santayana’s dubious summary, which culminates in the following: “This joy in simplicity, this
nostalgia for childishness, in highly educated, rich, and terribly virtuous people surely is thoroughly German” (p. 265). These and other assessments in
which the fluctuations in the mood of the young nobleman are presented as an
analogue to the conditions and trends of the collective identity in Germany
were, of course, written down only after the events of World War I. The stereotypical features of the image of the typical German, which Santayana somewhat rashly added, were produced under the shadow of the approaching
catastrophe of World War II. In a digression into the realm of the philosophy of
history Santayana refers to a “radical false turn, some organic impediment in
their [i.e., German] history.” He does not diagnose in the young nobleman
from Hamburg an underdevelopment of the heart in a body in which the “brain
had grown like a pumpkin.” But he posits that the intellectual life not only of
this individual but also of the nation as a whole had not developed in harmony
with its heart. Providing a very wide framework of intellectual history, Santayana contrasts England and Germany with regard to the consequences of the
Reformation, which in England had led to a mature “native culture,” while in
Germany an anarchic impulse had been set free, “a rebellion against all control.” Princes, theologians, and scholars had, to counteract and control this
lack of moderation, introduced “something alien and artificial” into the
national culture: “officialism, pedantry, or insane vanity” (p. 265), a phrase
that Santayana uses, no doubt, to draw attention to certain negative features of
the German Empire under William II.
Santayana’s concise remarks hark back to observations and generalizations
that had surfaced in nonfiction books, travel essays, and fictionalized reports
based on personal experiences by American authors of the nineteenth century.
His remarks are also shaped by his individuality, which was inclined to express
bold hypotheses that were difficult to verify.
w. e. b. du bois and other african americans
encounter germany
Just as Santayana failed to fulfill his plan to gain a Ph.D. in Berlin, so also did
W. E. B. Du Bois, the exceptionally gifted graduate of Fisk College, not achieve
his desired goal during his three semesters in Berlin. He had been attracted by
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the reputation of its university, with which his Harvard teachers William James
and Josiah Royce were in close contact. In addition, he was probably motivated
by the great respect he had long held for German politicians, especially Bismarck. As early as the occasion of his graduation at Fisk (1888) he had praised
the willpower of the Prussian Junker, with his iron fist, and had considered his
efforts to unify Germany a model on the way to constructing a collective identity of African Americans. The various versions of his autobiography, which
present individual and collective experiences, and in doing so stylize the difficulties of his Harvard years, shed light on his struggle with reluctant sponsors
or members of the selection committee for the yearned-for scholarship to continue his studies in Berlin.20
After his successful application Du Bois adopted a strict regime and listened attentively to lectures on political economy and history. His studies in
Berlin in these subjects and in sociology (especially with Professors Gustav von
Schmoller and Adolf Wagner) were preceded by intensive language practice,
for which he had been fortunate to have had an unclouded, almost idyllic
sojourn in Eisenach, the home of the rector of the Wartburg, Dr. Johannes
Marbach (see Lewis, Du Bois, vol. 1, 128–30). After a friendly relationship with a
Dutch family and their several daughters had quickly developed on a boat on
the Rhine, Du Bois was able to enjoy the “most perfect summer of his life” in
the company of Dr. Marbach’s daughter Dora and her family. Despite his temporary isolation during his studies in the German capital Du Bois afterward
gained a very concrete image of Germany and of Berlin society in particular. He
also had an amorous relationship with Amalie, a young saleswoman from
Berlin, which he terminated on his departure. During his vacations he explored
well-known cultural sites, as well as undertaking long journeys during which
he gained an insight into the ethnic tensions in various parts of Central
Europe, including divided Poland.
Du Bois’ diary entries during his stay in Germany show his emotional fluctuations between a precarious sense of identity and an awareness of his mission. His journal also records problematic remarks by some of his teachers, for
example the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, soon to be notorious abroad.
Du Bois regarded the latter’s nationalistic or even racist statements (for
instance, the one concerning the inferiority of mulattoes) rather as a curious
remark of an eccentric prone to offer controversial statements.21 In marked
contrast to his experiences in America, outside the university Du Bois apparently had no difficulties on account of his skin color during his exploratory
journeys in Germany, which he undertook with an English fellow student, John
Dollar.22 His diary and his autobiography also show that the twenty-five-yearold was much impressed with the pomp and the aura surrounding Emperor
f i n-d e- s i è c l e es tran g e m e n t
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William II. Du Bois even sought to imitate the appearance of the monarch
(who was able to conceal his personal weakness by discipline and the trappings of power, when riding through the Brandenburg Gate at the head of his
troops) by growing a moustache similar to that of the emperor.23
In view of his respect, bordering on hero worship, for its political and academic élite, it seems strange that Du Bois’ image of Germany was to undergo a
dramatic change for the worse within the next twenty years, a time in which he
was active as an academic teacher, the political mouthpiece of the African
Americans, and as a journalist. He certainly joined the growing chorus of those
who condemned the German nation with increasing intensity for its imperialistic tendencies and who put the blame for the barbarism of the Great War on
the German General Staff. As early as 1916 Du Bois as the editor of Crisis: A
Record of the Darker Races prophesied the defeat of Germany in the war with
Britain, which appeared to him not only as a haven of freedom, but also as the
seat of an excellent colonial administration.24
Du Bois’ eventual rejection of the culture of his host country cannot be satisfactorily accounted for on the basis of his original experience. Despite racist
comments by von Treitschke, this radical estrangement was not caused by prejudices of race and color circulating in Germany. It rather reflected the current
public opinion in the United States and the assessment by spokesmen critical
of German philosophy. Like other African American intellectuals, Du Bois later
rejected the assumption that French troops recruited in the colonies would
pose a danger when they became part of the occupying forces in the Rhineland.
However, in the mid-1930s, when a grant permitted him to visit Germany and
study the German educational system, he found it appropriate to express his
original respect for the Germans. Initially he seemed hesitant to condemn the
racism against Jews he had heard about and even witnessed, but later he came
to emphasize the parallels between the discrimination against the Jews and the
grave infringement on the civil rights of African Americans in the United
States, especially in the South.25
It was more than a mere coincidence that Mary E. Church Terrell, five years
older than Du Bois and the daughter of a mulatto family from Memphis,
offered a very favorable impression of German culture in the late nineteenth
century in her autobiography A Colored Woman in a White World (1940). She had
received an excellent education in the United States, where she graduated from
Oberlin College in 1884. During a formative period of her life in Europe she
stayed subsequently in Berlin, where her excellent command of the classics
early gained her the respect of her acquaintances, while her charm endeared
her to many. Among them was a German nobleman who proposed to her in
Berlin and wrote to her father, asking for permission to marry her, which was
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refused. She also reports her close social contacts with other aristocrats and
how through her friendship with the Spanish-born wife of a Prussian general
she gained a widening circle of friends in Germany. Yet she has reason to complain about two fellow countrymen, medical students in Berlin from Washington and Baltimore, who impressed upon her landlady that she should not rent
rooms to “negroes” if she was to take in regular white Americans.26 Concerning such a case of discrimination Mary Church underlines the fact that the
great German violin teacher Joachim was ready to teach a young African American musician she came to know in Berlin while he had rejected the sons of
German noblemen. Her next landlady, the widow of a preacher at court, “Frau
Oberprediger,” however, also harbored prejudices, not against blacks, but
against Jews. The habitual ridiculing of Jews by the youngest daughter of “Frau
Oberprediger” made Mary feel most uncomfortable, though the attention she
pays to this issue in her autobiography may reflect an increased understanding
in hindsight at a time when she had become aware of the persecution of Jews in
Nazi Germany. That this sad reality was a personal concern of hers is apparent
as she reflects in the 1930s on the possibility that she might have married a certain Herrn von D., who had proposed to her. In the long run, acceptance of this
proposal would have led to a painful ordeal, but eventually she became the wife
of a black high school teacher, who was later to serve as a judge in the national
capital.27
Elected the first president of the National Association of Colored Women
(1896), Terrell surprised the delegates at the International Congress of Women
in Berlin in 1904 when, as a plenary speaker, she was able to use German in her
address, and thus won the admiration of her audience in her role as a public
figure. After the Great War, Terrell felt obliged to reject the negative inferences
drawn in Germany from stereotype notions following the stationing of French
colonial troops in the Rhineland. Nationalist and racist observers saw this
presence as a threat not only to the honor of the country, but also to the women
of this region. Yet in her defense of these African troops Terrell omitted a negative characterization of the Germans, whose proper and respectful treatment
of her had rather strengthened her resolve to demand civil rights for African
Americans in her own country at a time when the laws and regulations resulting in full segregation were being implemented.
Du Bois’ and Terrell’s originally favorable impressions can be compared
with the ones that James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), subsequently to
become spokesman of the Harlem Renaissance and general secretary of
NAACP, permitted the protagonist and first-person narrator of his novel The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) to gain in Germany. During an extensive tour of Europe undertaken with a patron, the light-skinned pianist
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receives important stimuli through the experience of musical life in Berlin. The
applause given by his audiences in Berlin following the enthusiastically
received performance of his ragtime versions of classical music gives rise to
the protagonist-narrator’s urgent wish to derive further inspiration from his
ethnic roots at home. The salon in Berlin thus becomes, as it were, a catalyst for
the decision of the “ex-colored man” to allow his cultural heritage to inspire
him and his music. He also dismisses some current stereotypes concerning the
nature of the French and the Germans, “the general idea that Frenchmen are
excitable and emotional, and that the Germans are calm and phlegmatic,”
replacing them by his own generalizations: “Frenchmen are merely gay and
never overwhelmed by emotions. When they talk loud and fast, it is merely talk,
but Germans get worked up and red in the face when sustaining an opinion,
and in heated discussions are likely to allow their emotions to sweep them off
their feet.”28
A fundamentally positive image of Germany was also projected by another
prominent African American spokesman, Booker T. Washington, in The Man
Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe (1912) on the eve of the
Great War. Washington had deliberately refrained from visiting the sights during his study tour; rather he was exclusively interested in the fortunes of ordinary people from the social stratum that furnished the wave of immigrants
pouring into the United States and that seemed to threaten any improvement
in the economic situation of his people. Accompanied on this journey (to
Germany, Austria, Sicily, Hungary, Poland, and Denmark) by the Germanspeaking Dr. Park, Washington gained a favorable image of the social institutions and especially of the schools in German-speaking countries. This
impression prompted him when he encountered speakers of Slavonic languages to admit that he felt a closer affinity with German.29
poultney bigelow and his revocation of praise
While the reversal of the image of Germany from a positive to a negative one
can, in the case of Du Bois, be interpreted as the result of the massive antiGerman propaganda in the Great War, the alienation caused by public discourse is even more strikingly apparent in the work of Poultney Bigelow
(1855–1954). The younger son of John Bigelow, an influential American journalist and U.S. envoy in France between 1861 and 1866, had struck up an intimate acquaintance with the Prussian princes of the house of Hohenzollern,
whose classmate he had been in Potsdam from 1870 onward.30 Only a few years
after William and Henry James had attended a private school in Bonn,
Bigelow’s father had placed him in a boarding school there prior to sending
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him to Potsdam. The friendships developed in his youthful years gave Poultney
Bigelow access to the centers of power in the German Empire during the following decades. When the young Emperor William II relieved Bismarck of his
duties as chancellor in 1890 and replaced him by Caprivi, Bigelow enthusiastically welcomed this decision, which, indeed, temporarily eased political tensions both internally and externally.
The extremely enterprising Poultney Bigelow (who together with the journalist Francis Davis Millet traveled down the Danube to the Black Sea in a
canoe)31 offered in 1892 his readers a portrait of the German emperor and his
subjects, which benefited from his intimate familiarity with the country and
the people. Shortly afterward he contrasted the conditions on both sides of the
frontier between Russia and Prussia, which for him represented the borderline
between civilization and barbarism,32 in The Borderland of Czar and Kaiser: Notes
from Both Sides of the Russian Frontier (1894).
In The German Emperor and His Eastern Neighbors (1892), Bigelow provided his
personal impressions, recounting the education of William II in the company
of commoners, and offered an appreciation of William’s character. Considering the negative portrait in the later Prussian Memories of 1915–1916 it is worth
observing that in the 1890s the author continued to refute various charges
against the emperor, who by that time was beginning to receive very negative
press coverage in the United States. In this way he provided a counterweight to
the increasing suspicion with which William II was viewed soon after his
accession to the throne. The New York Times had depicted him as an inexperienced hothead as early as 2 April 1888, and had compared him to a high-bred
bloodhound “under whose smooth, delicately-soft coat lie muscles of steel
and in whose mouth—sinister legacy of nature—is the inherent taste of
human blood.”33 Contrary to the opinion of posterity (and to the findings of
historians about the damage caused by William II by the rash statements in his
speeches) Bigelow claimed that the German emperor was a great after-dinner
speaker. In reality, he poisoned the atmosphere between Germany and the
United States and bore his share of the guilt for the rapid dissipation of that
great store of respect, understanding, and sympathy for Germany that had
accumulated in America during the nineteenth century and that had also
shaped Bigelow’s earlier reports and historical works.34
It ranks, however, among the more sobering findings of imagological
analysis to observe how Bigelow did not escape the rapidly progressing
process of estrangement and how he undertook a complete revision of his earlier statements. In the Prussian Memories he adapts the portrait of his imperial
friend to the stereotype of the German militarist and aggressive despot lusting
for power. As a revised version of his own impressions, even of part of his own
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biography, Bigelow’s Prussian Memories are, as it were, not to be regarded as
nonfiction, but as part of the larger field of fiction; at least they cross the border to this sphere. It is understandable that Bigelow makes an effort to avoid a
complete “revocation” of the portrait of the emperor with whom he had been
friends for decades. As the guest of the emperor he had taken part in army
maneuvers, had accompanied him on sea journeys and had, as he proudly
stated in 1915, for that reason crossed the Atlantic more than ninety times. In
considering this long and close relationship he places the blame for the negative evolution of the Prussian elements in William’s character on persons in the
emperor’s retinue, and thus falls back on his own experiences in Bonn, Potsdam, and Berlin.
In retrospect he first depicts Bismarck as an implacable enemy of all liberal
forces, as was illustrated by his brutal treatment of the upright Georg von Bunsen, who was also well-known in the United States.35 But the blame for the
negative development of the Prussian mentality is placed not only on powerful
political figures but also on the educators of the young generation of Prussians, including the princes of the house of Hohenzollern. It is true that
Bigelow exempts his amiable teacher at Potsdam, Professor Schillbach, from
this sweeping charge, but he holds Prussian pedagogues responsible for the
inhumanity apparently rampant in the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns.
He claims that he had himself suffered in 1864 at the boarding school run by
Dr. Kortegarn in (Prussian) Bonn,36 where there had been about one hundred
other Anglo-American pupils.
Using the trivial example of the beer soup that the fairly unattractive wife of
Dr. Kortegarn forced him to eat, he illustrates the momentous consequences of
the drill typical of Prussian education. “I could not then understand her, but
evidently I had as by enchantment been metamorphosed into a cog of the great
Prussian machine. She knew that the beer-soup was good because it was prescribed by a Prussian institution, and she argued that whatever resisted its
benevolent intentions, must be punished immediately and convincingly. At the
time I did not know how symptomatic of Prussian education in general was
this patient struggle over a plate of beer-soup” (pp. 4–5).
In his earlier publications Bigelow had never mentioned the tug-of-war
and, of course, never drawn far-reaching conclusions from this “formative
experience.” Now he tersely states: “At Kortegarn’s I learned to appreciate the
wholly impersonal brutality of the conscientious Prussian drill-master” (p. 8).
Fate arranged for Dr. Hinzpeter, who acted as tutor and later adviser to William
II, to pass on to his protegé his own rigidity.37 Bigelow reported on a later visit
he paid to Dr. Hinzpeter at the request of the emperor. Though the Prussian
pedagogue had in the meantime married a French governess, he continued to
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show a flagrant lack of tact in the interview with his foreign visitor: “he laid
bare huge abysses of tactlessness, misinformation, and ignorance of real life.
Prussia is so full of Hinzpeters that this one would not now arrest my pen save
for the fact that his views and those of his Imperial master have been on many
points identical” (pp. 51–52). Hinzpeter showed contempt for democracy and
had taken note neither of American universities nor of the great writers and
inventors of the New World: “He had never heard of any scientific research
work in any American university; Yale and Harvard meant no more to him than
a missionary school on the Congo” (p. 52). Hinzpeter’s scorn for the rest of the
world resulted from his arrogance, which in the political sphere had a counterpart in the conduct of his former pupil William II during a visit to Metz in 1894.
The Prussian mentality forming the basis of this attitude shaped the Emperor’s
declaration that he would mete out to his new subjects a new identity in the face
of their passive resistance. God and his good sword would see to that.38
imperialism and faustian desire
in german scientists
The seemingly irresponsible use of power, the notorious privileges of the military, the restriction of civil rights after the laws of 1878, and the expansionist
imperialist policies pursued by the emperor had already led in America to a very
unflattering evaluation of the dynasty and the German Empire. New historical
studies inspired by the professionalism of German historiography offered a
range of explanations for the rise of Germany to the status of a world power.39
The rash statements by the emperor, which provoked the anger of Theodore
Roosevelt, the continuing confrontations on the high seas, and conflicts in
zones of overlapping interests such as the Venezuela and the Morocco crises,
as well as in the colonies, led to negative attributes being regarded as the
salient features of the new Germany. More and more frequently the Germans
were labeled as being “obsessed with power, militaristic and imperialistic.”
The sand-table exercises of German officers awakened the suspicion of the
Anglo-Saxon public and gave concrete shape to the nightmare of a possible
German invasion of the United States. The specter of pan-Germanism40 finally
led to the deformation of the image of Germany in America.41
In the face of such irreparable damage to Germany’s stock of sympathy, the
persistent efforts of German Americans to cultivate amicable bilateral relations were not sufficient in the long run. The contribution of German immigrants, praised, for instance, by the adventurer Josiah Flynt 42 in a detailed list
of positive qualities (including perseverance, patience, industry, loyalty, good
health, and education), may have counteracted the rapid deterioration in their
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image, even though Flynt entered the authoritarianism and militarism of the
settlers’ home country on the debit side. From another perspective, Kuno
Francke (1855–1930) wrote in an obituary of Bismarck that the Iron Chancellor’s virtues and achievements were representative of the new Germany,43 but
the deeply rooted reservations held against Bismarck meant that his piece was
not likely to win new sympathy for Germany.44
The image that William Dean Howells projected in a semiautobiographical
work, Their Silver Wedding Journey,45 reflects the tensions between attempts to
vindicate the honor of Wilhelminian Germany and a growing wave of rejection. Having collected his material on a journey to Europe with his wife in 1897,
the author differentiated between Isabel’s reactions and those of Basil March
to their impressions on their journey. March regards the Germans as basically
good-natured, if somewhat unsophisticated people, unfairly treated by some
tourists, who thus reveal their own vulgarity and chauvinism. On the other
hand, Isabel, in particular, is annoyed by the omnipresence of the Prussian military. And both resent the ubiquitous monuments to the victory over France
which, aesthetic failures that they are, celebrate the German claims to power.
These unwelcome sights are also graphically presented in a number of accompanying illustrations, with the borderline between fiction and nonfiction once
again being suspended. The many pompous monuments are conspicuous in
the photographs, which thus confirm the negative image of Germany. On the
other hand, the author allows March to adopt a gently mocking attitude toward
his wife’s prejudices against German officers, whom she apparently expects to
elbow her off the sidewalk, although no such gross demonstration of their
alleged arrogance ever happens (Their Silver Wedding Journey, vol. 1, 192). The
discrimination against women, however, is in line with reports from the preceding decades and graphically confirmed when Basil and Isabel repeatedly
encounter a strange carriage being pulled to the market by a woman and a dog
(vol. 1, 181).
Despite their irritation at the bad manners and the lack of taste they
encountered, the image of Germany conveyed through Howells’ text has not
totally lost its traditional positive aspects. The American couple still enjoy the
picturesque sites and castle ruins along the Rhine. They encounter friendly
and, mostly, polite people and not an authoritarian state.
This experience was, however, reflected in the reports of visiting American
students who contributed to the transformation of the image held of the German cultural élite by the American public. This was to have its full effect during
World War I, when American writers were eager to expose the German professor as a conceited, arrogant scholar and the chief culprit for the moral deterioration of his nation. Heinrich von Treitschke’s scorn for the materialism of
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American culture was certainly noted by the hundreds of graduate students
from overseas then in Berlin. The majority of these American graduates were
primarily interested in the acquisition of professional competence, for
instance, in the field of medicine.46 But it is improbable they completely
ignored the provocative nationalistic or racist statements made in lectures in
the humanities, which were surely debated among the students. When the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche was made accessible to the American readership through the mediation of H. L. Mencken, the philosopher’s key concept
of the superman who abandons the inhibitions of a Christian bourgeois worldview was quickly interpreted as a typical expression of the dangerous inclination of the Germans as a whole.
The confrontation in the field of power politics strengthened latent prejudices that had earlier stigmatized the German character as dominated by arrogance.47 Meanwhile, German natural scientists and physicians had provoked
anti-German sentiments by unorthodox and agnostic statements. As early as
1880 Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) published Dr. Heidenhoff ’s Process,48 which
includes a description of a medical operation by a doctor apparently of German
stock who believes that he can liberate humanity from oppressive memories.
The novel deals with the problem of conscience, which may drive guilty persons to the brink of suicide, such as Maud Brand at the end of the novel. Maud
had jilted her loyal suitor William Fison in favor of Herbert Gurdon, but had
later been deserted by the latter. In spite of William’s renewed offer of marriage, Maud cannot cope with her own past and finally commits suicide. In the
last third of the novel, the ability of Dr. Heinrich Heidenhoff to free people of
unpleasant memories by the removal of parts of the brain takes center stage
after he reads a scientific article. Despite his soothing statements on the
uncontroversial nature of such an operation, the healer appears as a materialist. He strives for omnipotence and justly expects the opposition of moralists
and theologians while he waxes enthusiastic about the far-reaching consequences for society. Though Dr. Heidenhoff ’s arguments in favor of such a
miracle cure turn out to have been a dream, we may see in Heidenhoff a confirmation of the fact that the Faustian facet of the stereotype of Germany continued to be present in American literature of the late nineteenth century.
When the American lawyer and diplomat Frederic Jessup Stimson
(1855–1943) published a narrative with the title “Dr. Materialismus” in 1890,49
it was no coincidence that the eponymous figure was labeled triadically “a German professor-scientist-socialist.” He is pointedly said to practice “hypnotism, magnetism, mesmerism and mysticism,” to include in his teaching
“lectures on Hegel,” and to trust with [Eduard von] Hartmann in the “indestructibility of matter and the destructibility of the soul” (p. 171).50 One would
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presume that the experiences of the many young American physicians who
participated in the summer courses especially designed for them in Berlin had
provided the material for this symptomatic portrait of an atheistic academic
teacher. A statement repeatedly attributed to Rudolf von Virchow, subsequently the rector of Berlin University, on his inability to discover the soul
when dissecting bodies, fueled the fears of orthodox American theologians
who had long taken offense at the heterodox thoughts of their fellow theologians in Germany.
The danger of German scholarship also became apparent soon afterward in
a novel by Harold Frederic (1856–1898), The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), in
the fate of the protagonist, a Methodist preacher. He gradually falls under the
spell of Dr. Ledsmar, a German Assyriologist well versed in heterodox German
religious studies, but who also conducts very dubious bacteriological experiments on plants, animals, and even human beings, and is stigmatized by various gestures as being in a pact with the devil.51
Given that orthodox Christian belief underwent a radical crisis through the
research and publications of Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Herbert Spencer in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it seems striking that
the type of the English academic teacher was not associated with unscrupulous
behavior and the abandonment of moral foundations as was the German scientist. A very controversial experiment with vivisection practiced in England
triggered off a heated debate on this “immoral” activity but, significantly, did
not lead to English scientists being discredited in general. Instead, such experiments were labeled “un-English,” and it was the projection of such tendencies
onto the world abroad that was fostered. Thus, once again, German scientists
were made the scapegoats.
critical diagnosis and attempted mediation:
hugo münsterberg
Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) wanted to counter the rapidly growing
estrangement between the United States and Germany, which was all too obvious as early as the turn of the century. At the height of the anti-German campaign in World War I he gave up his professorship at Harvard. After seven years
of teaching in Cambridge, the prominent experimental psychologist, whom
William James had invited to America, set himself the task of tracing the
mutual misunderstandings and prejudices to their roots. As a psychologist
who had increasingly undertaken projects in the sphere of cultural politics in
Harvard,52 he analyzed the mechanisms that led to stereotypical assumptions
and resulted in schematized images of the “other.” In American Traits: From the
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Point of View of a German (1901), which combined and expanded several earlier
essays, he referred critically to cartoons and caricatures in newspapers53 and
representations in the theater. He illustrated the omnipresence of clichés popularized by the media in an amusing anecdote. An American host served him,
the adopted citizen of the United States, sauerkraut and expected that he would
be intimately familiar with this meal as a “national dish.” When Münsterberg
denied any acquaintanceship with it, this gave birth to severe skepticism in his
host concerning Münsterberg’s knowledge of Germany because “it [sauerkraut] was the favored dish of every Prussian.” The author summarized those
stereotype traits of the Germans current in several variants in public discourse
in America and found in travel books and the popular literature of the day.54
Shabby clothes and a lack of hygiene belonged to the image of the typical German just as much as his drinking and smoking habits (drinking beer at breakfast and continuously smoking a pipe, pp. 7–8). The popular cliché included
the notions that the typical German wore spectacles, was in the habit of reading books from lending libraries, and tyrannized his subordinates but showed
servility to his superiors.
Münsterberg used dramatic phrases to attempt a reductio ad absurdum of
this and other alleged facets of the German character: the proliferation of
bureaucracy and the mania for titles are, without regard for plausibility or consistency, linked with the inclination to military exercises and the practice of the
goose step. In his effort to counteract abstruse generalizations of that kind,
Münsterberg names several factors that foster the development of clichés and
mutual estrangement. In this respect he refers to what had become the very
negative image of the German emperor and alludes to the considerable objections in America to the absolutist traits in the German form of government. To
expose stereotypical tendencies he also sums up complementary caricatures of
Americans current in Germany: the conviction that the typical Yankee is a vulgar drinker of whiskey, who constantly chews tobacco and spits, who lacks
manners, and who is motivated by greed. Further clichés are that the American
government, Congress, and the judicial system are corrupt, that lynching is
generally practiced, and that hypocrisy is rampant. Münsterberg blames the
popular press for this state of affairs as it perpetuates such vulgar prejudices
among those who do not travel. But he also stresses the relative ineffectiveness
of transatlantic travel: “We are inclined by psychological laws to perceive
merely that which we expect to perceive; we do not voluntarily suppress the
remainder, but it does not exist for us at all” (pp. 11–12).
Münsterberg’s analysis of this phenomenon, which anticipates the later
findings of sociopsychologists, includes a multiplicity of factors that give rise
to one-sided and schematized images. More explicitly than his predecessors,
f i n-d e- s i è c l e es tran g e m e n t
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he also considers the role of the large numbers of settlers of German stock for
the genesis and quality of the image of the Germans, which by 1900 had come
to be seen in a dubious light. He admits that many German immigrants devote
themselves primarily to the consolidation of material life and thus abandon
their orientation toward higher values, that “[German] tendency to idealism
and the desire for intellectual life” (p. 18).55
Münsterberg’s efforts to remove obstacles to mutual communication are
evident in another, thematically related book, Die Amerikaner.56 This offers, as a
complement to American Traits, a survey of the peculiarities of American culture
for a German readership and tries to eliminate the sources of misunderstandings that burden the relationship. Münsterberg is most competent in his explanation of the different educational systems, including the universities. In this
context he correctly underlines the formative influence of the German university system, which had been imitated at the graduate schools and seminars of
the most important American universities. In this apt statement Münsterberg,
without resorting to emotive language, counters the misrepresentation of the
traditional representatives of Germany’s cultural élite. In World War I Münsterberg quickly became an outsider in Harvard, where he was met with hostility; in September 1914 he was even attacked in the Times (of London) as “one of
the Kaiser’s agents in America.”57 When he, like other intellectuals of German
stock in the United States, was in fact deprived of any opportunity to explain
his position in American newspapers after the sinking of the Lusitania, he withdrew from public life. Several times he offered his resignation to the university
administration. His failure in the task he had set himself to consolidate bilateral relations, especially in the field of culture,58 was probably responsible for
his mood of resignation and his early death.
While Münsterberg had been able to record at the beginning of American
Traits that “thousands of young Americans [are] going abroad to bring home
the spirit of educated Germany” (pp. 3–4), after the turn of the century the
number of American students going to Germany had declined in favor of
British and French universities. Meanwhile, agreement had been reached on
the exchange of visiting professors with these institutions, and their professionalization permitted them to become powerful rivals of the previously dominant German universities. The drying up of the flow of cultural exchanges
between Germany and the United States, which was to have grave consequences for future relations between the United States and Germany, was
caused by the rapid polarization on both sides of the Atlantic. The inclination
of both governments to involve scholars and scientists in political propaganda
and to instrumentalize them had disastrous consequences. That soon after the
beginning of the war a large number of German intellectuals, university pro62 ]
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fessors included, publicly supported the declared war objectives of the German
Empire was held against the German élite.59 A campaign of defamation
ensued, which tumbled the German scholar from his pedestal and disqualified
him in the eyes of his Anglo-Saxon counterparts as a potential partner. When,
in an excess of polemical fervor, the British Anglicist Walter Raleigh denied the
ability of German scholars to understand Shakespeare’s oeuvre at all, as Peter
Firchow has shown in “Shakespeare, Goethe and the War of the Professors,
1914–1918” (1993), this signaled the destruction of the foundations of the
processes of communication and exchange initiated a century before. This
turn of events accounts for the way in which students from the United States
who had attended German universities now forgot any favorable impressions
or rewrote or recovered impressions and incidents from their memories that
were liable to support the now predominantly negative image of Germany during and after the Great War.
revision of accounts:
henry adams, fred lewis pattee, and john dewey
As a key figure in American intellectual history Henry Adams (1838–1918)
played a major role in the rapid deterioration in the reputation of the German
intellectual world in America. His debt to German historiography, which he did
not conceal while teaching in Harvard between 1870 and 1877 using the seminar
model imported from Germany, is obvious. His methodological orientation
toward German historiography as practiced by Theodor Mommsen is reflected
in his Life of Albert Gallatin and his History of the United States of America during the
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. This debt, however, did not
prevent this attentive observer of the political scene from expressing his vehement opposition to the expansionist policies of the German Empire under
William II when, after several years as a political journalist, he was the confidant
of presidents and leading politicians in Washington. The recent publication of
Henry Adams’ correspondence has made accessible his impressions acquired
during several journeys to Europe and to the South Pacific, where friction
erupted between German and American interests. The information Adams
received through his friendly contacts with John Hay (the former secretary to
President Abraham Lincoln, his traveling companion in Europe in 1896 and the
future secretary of state) strengthened his dislike of German imperialism, but
especially of the emperor himself. “Perhaps I am as big a fool as I think, and the
future man will be a bigger fool than I, but it is absolutely impossible for anyone
to be as big a fool as the Kaiser without being shut up.”60 Shorter visits, for
instance to Bayreuth in 1901, which followed his lengthy annual stay in France,
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confirmed Henry Adams’ aversion to the new Germany. His attraction to the
Gothic architecture and culture of medieval France, and his annual immersion
in the intellectual world of Paris, no doubt also colored his adverse image of the
great antagonist of his preferred host country.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that a new assessment of his own debt to German culture is offered in the Education of Henry Adams, which was privately
printed in 1907 and sent to close friends. A comparison of the Education with
his letters reveals far-reaching differences, especially in the evaluation of his
time as a student in Berlin and Dresden between 1858 and 1860. In the pertinent chapters of his Education he plays down the importance of the five months
spent at university in Berlin, and especially at the Friedrich Werder Gymnasium
in 1859. He limits the incentives he received to the level of aesthetic impressions gained when attending concerts in Berlin and especially Dresden, ignoring those that undoubtedly awakened his interest in legal history. As the pupil
of teachers in Harvard who had for the most part studied in Germany, and as an
admirer of Senator Charles Sumner,61 he had certainly had very high hopes for
his year abroad, but his insufficient preparation in the language compelled
him to admit that he would not benefit from lectures on civil law. The twentyyear-old Adams avoided close contacts with German students and resented the
pervasive odor of tobacco surrounding them; he also suffered from homesickness, and thus allowed many opportunities to go unused. His self-imposed
seclusion, which was fostered by his noticeable dislike of plain German fare,
was not a favorable factor, and merely increased his dissatisfaction with the
Prussian metropolis, which he regarded as “ugly”: “German food was bad at
best, and the diet of sauerkraut, sausage and beer could never be good; but it
was not the food alone that made [the faces of his schoolmates] white and their
flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air . . . ; the air was foul beyond all
decency . . . The German University had seemed a failure, but the German highschool was something very near an indictable nuisance” (Education, 78).
His annoyance at the monotony of the drill in the overcrowded, dirty classrooms of the Gymnasium, in which he had to sit next to much younger classmates, was apt to make Adams later emphasize the negative aspects of his
years of study in Central Europe, which were not so apparent to him as a young
man and which he was originally reluctant to admit: “the curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German education was that the student’s only
clear gain,—his single step to a higher life,—came from time wasted; studies
neglected; vices indulged; education reversed” (p. 79). That he was working at
that time on a report on the Prussian school system, which he wanted to publish in the Atlantic Monthly and for which he also consulted Prussian experts,
was not known until much later.62
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While his frustration in Berlin had, no doubt, a long-term effect, it still
comes as a surprise that in his Education Henry Adams almost completely
passes over the several months he spent in Dresden63 and does not even mention his return to the city in the winter of 1860. Apart from his intensive reading
of the German classics Goethe and Schiller, he gained important impressions
through his regular participation in the vigorous musical life of the Saxon capital. Retrospectively, he confirms the original attraction of an older image of
Germany of the kind that had been a prominent element in Brace’s and J. R.
Browne’s writings: “What he liked was the simple character; the good-natured
sentiment; the musical and metaphysical abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the German for practical affairs” (p. 82). “He loved, or thought he loved
the people, but the Germany he loved was the eighteenth-century which the
Germans were ashamed of, and were destroying as fast as they could. Of the
Germany to come, he knew nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence”
(p. 82).
He dwells much longer on his short visit to northern Italy, proposed by his
sister Louisa Kuhn, and celebrates the happy experience of his first encounter
with Italy—reminiscent of the opposition between North and South established in Henry James’ work and correspondence. Even more drastically than
James in his Autobiography (1913), Adams excluded facts from his Education,
changed and revised experiences, offering an amended version of his biography congruent with the philosophical, geopolitical, and literary attitudes he
had in the meantime adopted.64
It was in line with the animosity he had developed toward Germany that the
author of Education suppressed a number of events, such as his long stay in
Germany in the course of his honeymoon with his wife Marian in 1872–1873,
especially the visit to Berlin, where he met George Bancroft and where he dined
with Theodor Mommsen, Ernst Curtius, and Hermann Grimm. Mention of
later visits was also omitted. For that reason both the small circle of readers of
the privately printed version of the Education and the reading public of the
November 1918 edition, whose views had been shaped by the war propaganda,
encountered only a cliché-ridden image of Germany. It can be seen as an index
to the devastating consequences of the destruction of a traditional image
brought about by the ill-advised activities of representatives of the German
Empire and the reaction of its partners and opponents in the international
arena of the early twentieth century.
The processes at work may be further illustrated by the example of Fred
Lewis Pattee (1863–1950), who set out from Pennsylvania State College in
Appalachia (where he taught between 1894 and 1928) to spend some time in
Germany. In his posthumously published autobiography Penn State Yankee
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(1953) he describes his stay in Göttingen, which was, on the one hand,
enveloped by “so Indian-summer-like a haze of romance” (p. 209), but also
provoked some irritation, which Pattee believed he was only later able to
understand. The old-fashioned atmosphere of the university town, with its
reminders of early American visiting students and the solid courses offered in
English literature, corresponded to the traditional image of the country and the
people. The bloodthirsty fencing bouts of the students and the predominance
of Wagner’s music were, however, ominous harbingers of future manifestations of the Germans’ immoderate yearning for power. Pattee even implies,
with an allusion to the cult of Wagner by the Nazi regime, a causal connection:
“I consider that Wagner exalts physical force and animalistic love, and destroys
all the finer sentiments” (p. 212). Pattee, who claims that he had early detected
“the sinister lure of the Wagner music” but had only fully perceived its implications later, condemns German militarism. For this phenomenon he blames
the influence of the emperor, who permitted brutal punishments for breaches
of military discipline and who exerted a negative influence even on university
affairs, exemplified by the conduct of the university president of Göttingen,
Professor Roethe. The brusque rejection of Pattee’s request for permission to
take his wife to a lecture is said to have resulted from Roethe’s authoritarian
demeanor, who as a scholar had also interpreted Goethe as a kind of “Teutonic
superman” or a Nordic deity. The rudeness and the literal compliance with regulations made the unfriendly academic official a true representative of the
monarch in the eyes of his American visitor: “It was the Kaiser who had spoken. Every officer in all Germany represented the Kaiser and in his appointed
place was the Kaiser” (p. 214).
Pattee declares that he had been reminded of that unpleasant experience
with an official only when he received the news of the vandalism of the German
occupying forces in Belgium. At first he could not see the compatibility of
those reports which British propaganda successfully disseminated, but dwelt
upon the character of the Germans, whom he had come to know as friendly
and helpful: “the greater number of Germans I had lived with seemed to me to
be sincerely religious, even sentimentally so, neighborly and home-loving”
(p. 214). Drawing on the demonized figure of the emperor (who reputedly
could influence his subjects from a distance), Pattee could, as it were, confirm
the authenticity of the reports and explain a new and repulsive facet in the general image of the Germans.65
More restrained was the judgment passed by John Dewey (1859–1952) on
the involvement of the German intellectual élite in the Great War. Dewey, who
had earlier placed German idealism above English empiricism, regarded, however, Kant’s categorical imperative with its lack of a definition in terms of con66 ]
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tent as the precondition for excessive obedience to one’s superiors.66 He, too,
establishes a connection between German philosophy and the manifestations
of the German state, such as its demands for full obedience and subordination
from its subjects and its militarism.
In the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon world, above all Heinrich von Treitschke and
Friedrich Nietzsche stood condemned as the destroyers of traditional values. It
was no coincidence that Treitschke was chosen and interpreted as the mouthpiece of Germany and that a selection from his works was published at the
beginning of World War I as a symptomatic product of German scholarship.67
The fact that the iconoclastic H. L. Mencken presented Friedrich Nietzsche as
an intellectual pioneer was at that time of doubtful value for the image of Germany held by the majority. Such an undifferentiated presentation was a spur to
the publication of radical simplifications and facilitated the misinterpretation
of individual worldviews as achievements or attitudes characteristic of nations.
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CHAPTER 5
CULTURAL
CONFLICTS
THE EARLY
TWENTIETH
CENTURY
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 dissatisfied 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
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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 first years of the Great War.
th e early tw enti eth c e n t u ry
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Offended by a perceived lack of objectivity, Mencken changed direction from a
rather neutral or Anglophile stance in his column “Free Lance” in the Baltimore
Sun6 and began to battle against the one-sided interpretation of neutrality
with its undifferentiated assessment of Germany and German culture.7
Mencken, who had grown up in Baltimore and had first earned a name for
himself with a number of fictional texts, soon took exception to those tendencies in American society which he regarded as hostile to life and which, he
believed, had their origin in the Puritanical tradition.8 From the outset this resolute opponent of all Reformist tendencies, which within a decade were to lead
to Prohibition, was partial to those pleasures associated with the German
lifestyle. He devoted himself to German music in the social circle of the Saturday Evening Club, which even risked performances of movements of
Beethoven’s symphonies. In Mencken’s opinion, the genius of Beethoven
manifested that type of “superman,” whose key role in the philosophy of
Friedrich Nietzsche he studied in those years. Soon after the beginning of his
journalistic career he set about familiarizing a larger American public with
Nietzsche’s ideas in a short monograph entitled The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908, 3rd ed. 1913), which turned out to be a double-edged sword for the
very culture he so highly esteemed.
Mencken earned his first spurs as the translator of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist,
producing a text that filled a gap in the translation by Oscar Levy. Despite the
fact that he had previously had only a limited knowledge of German, he thus
became a real pioneer. Mencken’s sympathy for Nietzsche’s Herrenmoral may,
in psychological terms, be interpreted as a compensation for his own feelings
of failure resulting from his lack of talent in baseball, a sport his father was
particularly keen on. Whatever the case, Nietzsche’s philosophy, which
rejected all effeminacy, had a particular appeal to Mencken,9 who had earlier
regarded Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw as his guiding lights. His
rejection of all sentimental, idealistic, and moralistic tendencies turned
Mencken into a natural ally of all critics of the “genteel tradition.” For this reason he felt close to Pollard, whose Masks and Minstrels of New Germany he
reviewed very positively a few months before Pollard’s death.10
It is remarkable that it was not a visit to Germany, as with the pioneers of the
older, “romantic” image of Germany, but the impact of philosophical ideas
and literary texts which was responsible for Mencken’s discovery of a “New
Germany” as an antidote to the philistine and provincial narrowness of American culture. During his first visit to Central Europe (1908) he had only a limited
command of German derived from his school days.11 However, Nietzsche’s
attacks on the pseudoscientific sentimentalism and philistinism in Germany
inspired Mencken and caused him to interpret the performance of the eloquent
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iconoclast as a purifying and liberating phenomenon. He implies that it is not
only in the Germany of William II that such a cleansing is necessary.
Thus Mencken, in a commissioned essay “The Mailed Fist and Its
Prophet,”12 presented Nietzsche as the spokesman and the figurehead of the
“new German spirit.” As early as March 1913 he contrasted in the Baltimore Sun
“the enormous practicality,” “sharp common sense,” and “straightforwardness and ruthlessness” of the new Germany, with the “muddle-headed and
pedantic” old Germany. And in the following months he placed himself firmly
on the side of the new imperial power.13 Subsequently, he even celebrated their
military successes till the end of 1915, when it had become impossible for him
to continue his provocative column. Mencken’s elevation of the author of Also
Sprach Zarathustra (1892) to the status of a prophet and his representation of the
German’s concept of Herrenmoral as a new model for imperial Germany naturally tended to adversely affect the country’s image. Mencken praised Nietzsche as a pioneer of an energetic, pagan attitude that seemed commensurate
with the barbaric reality of a world dominated by the struggle for survival.
“Thus the philosophy of Nietzsche gave coherence and significance to the new
German spirit, and the new Germany gave a royal setting and splendor to Nietzsche. . . . he grew more and more German as he grew older, more and more the
spokesman of his race, . . . he gathered together the dim, groping concepts
behind the national aspiration and put them into superlative German—the
greatest German, indeed, of all time” (“The Mailed Fist,” 606).
Before Mencken, who as a Germanophile journalist had already put himself
in the role of an outsider, had published this apotheosis of “the will to power”
in the winter of 1914–1915, he had, together with various professional colleagues and friends, confirmed other familiar facets of the image of Germany.
In “The Beeriad,” which stylistically approached a mock-heroic in prose, he
celebrated Germany, and particularly Munich, as an Eldorado for beer
drinkers.14 A eulogy on every kind of hedonistic lifestyle is intoned in which
music (with a curious reference to Josef Haydn as “[the] beery and old delightful rascal”) and the beer served by a perfect waitress represent the pinnacle of
the enjoyment of life. As Mencken had already published his “Beeriad,” there
was no real justification for an on-the-spot study of the milieu. Nevertheless,
Mencken joined his editorial colleagues George Gene Nathan and Willard
Huntington Wright in the spring of 1914 and traveled with them to Europe,
where they collected material for the volume Europe after 8:15 (1914), which
became an anachronism when war broke out.
Because of his increasing identification with the “new Germany,” against
which a coalition consisting of established representatives of the “genteel tradition” and of several former rebels roused by patriotic appeals was forming in
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America,15 Mencken’s sharp pen had to combat many enemies. How the dramatic deterioration in bilateral relations between Germany and the United
States, and the entry of the United States into the war led to a self-imposed
silence was a process he was later to describe in several volumes of memoirs,
which shed light on his conduct during the war.16 Only among his friends and
in his private correspondence (for example, with Theodore Dreiser) did
Mencken have no need to exercise restraint, and he was able to continue
expressing his opinions which by now so clearly differed from the attitudes of
the majority.
As early as 1912,17 in his review of a book by the Germanophile Ida Alexa
Ross Wylie, The Germans (1911),18 which was based on an extended visit to Germany, Mencken had, like the young English author, defended the Germans
against various prejudices. On the basis of Wylie’s intimate familiarity with the
southwest of Germany in particular (in her nonfiction account she chooses
Karlsruhe as the typical setting instead of various metropolises) she had tried
to rouse sympathy and understanding for the Germans and to alleviate the hysterical fears of invasion then prevalent in England, as well as the general bias
against the German military and police. She had also illustrated the destructive
effect of clichés and hostile images in a complex, melodramatic novel entitled
Dividing Waters (1911)19 and had thus continued her attempt to build bridges
between the two nations.20 When Wylie differentiates in her book between two
contrasted types, the Prussians and the southern Germans, the former ready to
act decisively, the latter (the Bavarians) more emotional and frequently fairly
portly in build, she confirms a dichotomy that was soon to play a major role in
the political polemics of the propagandists of the Entente.21 Mencken, however, was already well aware of this contrast between North and South. It
accorded with his way of thinking, expressed earlier in “The Beeriad,” that he
felt much more at ease in Munich than in a Berlin dominated by the events of
the war, not to speak of Germany’s eastern front, where he went as a foreign
correspondent in the winter of 1916–1917.22
In view of the reticence necessary in foreign affairs, Mencken gained the
status of a caustic critic of American society with his polemics exhibiting a paradoxical blend of egalitarian and élitist, even snobbish, traits. In contrast to
the spokesmen of the propaganda campaign directed against Germany, who
blamed “Prussianism” for the corruption of German culture with martial and
militaristic arrogance, Mencken had no problems with the Junkers, Prussian
country squires who were the power basis of Bismarck’s empire. His own sympathies for the democratic system were limited; he even branded it, because of
its openness to abuse, as “mobocracy.” Basically, he clung to the conviction
that the German Empire offered an alternative model to the Puritanical rhetoric
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of the president, “Dr. Woodrow Wilson,” and the tendencies toward provincialism and parochialism in America.23
The deep disillusionment of the war generation in the wake of the failure of
the mission Wilson had entrusted to his fellow countrymen, making “the world
safe for democracy,” created a vast audience for Mencken after 1918. The virulence of his attacks on hypocrisy and a backwoods mentality, especially in the
South, secured him a large following among those who took exception to
provincial narrowness and the way citizens were deprived of their right to make
free choices in the era of Prohibition. They were also ready to follow him when
his criticism was provoked by the imperfections of the peace treaties and when,
like his friend Sinclair Lewis,24 he demanded more fairness for Germany.
As early as 1920 Mencken took issue with the mediocrity of American literature as the consequence of cultural barrenness and the absence of an élite, and
opposed the prevalent practice of making German professors favorite targets
of patriotic criticism. His fierce criticism in “The National Letters”25 cascades
in rhetorical questions and ends with a devastating critique of the current state
of affairs. Mencken settles accounts with those who had allowed the German
professor to be turned into a bogeyman and exposes those narrow-minded
chauvinists responsible for this process. At the same time he contributes his
share to the vindication of this much maligned species.26 The forgeries in the
campaign against the culture of the enemy had no genuine counterpart in the
“proclamations of the German professors,” which Mencken had really read, in
contrast to the naive American public. These impress, “at once by their comparative suavity and decorum, their freedom from mere rhetoric and fustian—
above all, by their effort to appeal to reason. . . . No German professor, from
end to end of the war, put his hand to anything as transparently silly as the Sisson documents. No German professor essayed to prove that the Seven Years’
War was caused by Downing Street. No German professor argued that the
study of English would corrupt the soul. No German professor denounced
Darwin as an ignoramus” (pp. 100–101). Such “achievements” were reserved
for American “intellectuals,” Mencken noted caustically while lamenting the
failure of the overwhelming majority of intellectuals in this cultural task.
In the period between the wars Mencken visited Germany twice more; his
journeys, however, had a more pronounced personal and individual character.
They confirmed his affinity with the region of Munich, where in 1922 he
enjoyed the Oktoberfest.27 His journey provided opportunities for following in
the tracks of his ancestors in the Saxon and Frisian regions of Germany. He
also returned there during his tour of Germany in 1938,28 when, curiously, he
failed to realize the full extent of the fateful progress of the political process.
Apparently, Mencken was oblivious to the signs of the times after the blow the
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death of his wife Sara had inflicted on him. Despite the ominous evidence of
the threat to the Jews he concerned himself, in an elegiac mood, with his
German-speaking ancestors, and failed to see, in contrast to his traditional
role as a perceptive observer, the depressing reality in Germany on the eve of
World War II.29 As he had in the meantime become involved in a controversy
with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the advocates of the New Deal, Mencken
had now lost most of his large number of supporters. Moreover, the dismantling of the stabilizing and puritanically inspired values in the course of the
dramatic wave of modernization meant that Mencken had also lost an essential
target for his vehement and effective attacks.
facets of the image of germany
in theodore dreiser’s works
Mencken, prompted by his desire to protest against the tyranny of the Anglophile
American media, emphatically expressed his sympathy for modern Germany, an
attitude he retained throughout his life. On the other hand, his friend Theodore
Dreiser (1871–1945)30 remained ambivalent to the country of his forefathers.31
That the heroine of his second novel Jennie Gerhardt, begun in 1901 and published
in 1911, had to be defended during the Great War by Randolph Bourne on account
of her German American ancestry32 indicates the intensely xenophobic climate
prevalent in the United States at that time. Moreover, the spokesmen of genteel
culture in their rearguard battle against the ethics of the jungle in Dreiser’s work,
which they saw in Jennie Gerhardt and even more so in the following novel, The
Genius, attacked Dreiser’s naturalism as un-American and foreign. These attacks,
however, provoked a response from his friends, among them Mencken. He
opposed such labeling and questioned the ideology of the “melting pot,” which
had meanwhile become popular, as it seductively suggested a prescriptive definition of ideal American characteristics.
Thomas P. Riggio alludes to a connection between the imperfections of
Dreiser’s style and his heritage,33 thus reviving a variation of the stereotype
that Stuart P. Sherman had employed in his polemics against the author:
namely his Central European provenance, portrayed in the propaganda in the
Great War as the home of barbarians. By way of contrast Arthur D. Casciato has
emphatically responded to the rhetorical question “How German Is Jennie Gerhardt?”34 He denies a national component in the structure of the novel as a
whole but concedes that the author attributes some significance to the ethnic
heritage of the Gerhardt family, primarily in connection with the father of the
protagonist. About this strict Lutheran it is said in the novel that he still thinks
and acts, in the present tense of the action round about 1880, “with the sim74 ]
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plicity of a German working-man.”35 That Jennie’s younger lighthearted
brother Sebastian is always called “Bass” by his fellow workers, however, is
read as an indicator of his advanced acculturation and underlines the distance
between the generations. The death of the honest old Gerhardt is said to sever
the ties with the values and ethnic traditions of the Old World, which were continued in German Christmas customs.36
While Dreiser’s own problematic childhood experience is reflected in the
relationship with his ethnic roots explored in the novel, the desire to visit the
small town of Mayen in the Rhineland, where his father had come from, played
an important role in the planning of the route of his grand tour of 1912. It was
also for this reason that Dreiser eagerly accepted the proposal by his English
publisher Grant Richards to undertake such a journey together. In the manuscript of the travel book, which appeared in a drastically cut version in 1913 as A
Traveler at Forty,37 Dreiser’s impressions of Germany take up only a very limited
space. Their contours derive from his dealings with Richards, a Francophile
who acted as Dreiser’s mentor and appears as Barfleur in the published version
of the book.38 While the licentious contacts with women from the demimonde
in Paris, for instance, which are described only in the manuscript, were the
result of Richards’ suggestion, Dreiser’s own search for his personal roots is
mirrored in a moment of reflection in the cemetery at Mayen. Richards’ scorn
for German culture and lifestyle, regarded by him as “dull,” did not prevent
Dreiser from traveling to his father’s country of origin. But various encounters
and observations which were uneasy or ominous led the author to distance
himself from imperial Germany.39
While both Richard Lingeman’s biography and Dreiser’s own correspondence depict many of Dreiser’s experiences on this, at times fairly chaotic, grand
tour on the Continent, von Bardeleben’s complete edition of the travel book now
permits the reader to comprehend the map in the author’s imagination and
hence the exact outlines of his image of Germany. The passages dealing with
Dreiser’s affairs with prostitutes, which were censored by the publishing house,
also included a description of the sad predicament of a woman from Berlin.
Keeping the “phlegmatic melancholy of Hanscha Jauer/Jower” in the printed version of A Traveler at Forty would have added another dark facet to the image of
Germany.40 A dozen years later the prostitution fostered by the years of inflation
and economic crisis was to shock readers in English-speaking countries when
reported in sensationalist revelations from the Berlin of the Weimar Republic,
which was regarded as dissolute and decadent.
The omission of this sphere of life meant that the image of Germany in the
travel book retained the familiar main features. From the beginning Dreiser
notices in the Germans, in comparison with peoples from Romance countries,
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a greater bulkiness and heaviness, but also a greater vitality. In this respect they
are also superior to the German-speaking Swiss, who, in their turn, are
described as showing significant differences from the people of the Mediterranean South.41
No doubt Dreiser had a special interest in the Rhine valley as he searched for
the town in which his father had grown up. Misunderstandings and mispronunciation made it difficult for him to find the place, Mayen; it was always confused with Mayence/Mainz. The reader will vividly recall the moment of
wistfulness derived from Dreiser’s confrontation with the grave of a namesake
buried thirty years before. For his contemporary readers, however, other perceptions to which he responded ambivalently had at least the same importance: the military detachment in Koblenz which marched by in goose step
made Dreiser think about the “extreme military efficiency” of this nation,
while the equestrian statue in Koblenz42 suggested the imperial selfconfidence of Germany, a phenomenon which again confronted him later in
Berlin in the shape of bulky monuments such as the Victory Column, and the
statues of Wilhelm I and Bismarck. Without referring back to the criticism of
the tastelessness of public monuments made by Howells, Dreiser’s pointed
judgment (“a crime against humanity” [1913], p. 466) participates in a tradition of American travelers offended by the architecture of the period of the
foundation of the empire.43 Despite the vehement criticism of such misguided
public gestures, Dreiser admires the cleanliness of Berlin and the efficiency of
its public transportation.44 His attention is also caught by the similarity
between Berlin and Chicago, which Clemens had stressed two decades before.
Dreiser believes, however, that the German capital is surpassing the prototypical American metropolis in the pace of its growth.
Dreiser regards sobriety and complete dedication to the task at hand as the
abiding characteristics of the Germans. In the inhabitants of Frankfurt and
Berlin he notices, in particular, thoroughness, vital energy, and a sense of
order as dominant features. On the debit side, he observes the excessive seriousness of the Germans, who lack a deeper understanding of the dolce far
niente despite their readiness to be amused.45 Like William James he discovers
many points of connection between the mentality of Germans and of Americans, but is inclined to concede that the inhabitants of imperial Germany are
even more energetic and persevering than his own fellow countrymen. This
tribute does not, however, neutralize Dreiser’s concern at the stubbornness,
and the tendency to violence and belligerence he observed in his host country.
In the husband of the singer Mme. A. (i.e., Julia Culp), a dazzling and coquettish woman, the author encountered a particularly complacent and arrogant
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eulogist of the empire. A violent altercation between two seemingly distinguished gentlemen he witnessed at a railroad station in Berlin was for him not
only a grotesque spectacle but also redolent of an aggression concealed
beneath the surface ([1913], pp. 482–83).
Despite his latent sympathy for the fellow countrymen of his father and his
rejection of the prejudices concerning their alleged dullness, when he wrote
the travel book after his return from Germany Dreiser apparently saw no
reason to oppose publicly the stereotype of the ponderous typical German
inclined to aggression. On his departure from the German Empire and its
inhabitants, whose qualities he summarizes as “upstanding . . . , kaiserlich,
self-opinionated, drastic, aggressive” ([1913], p. 490), he felt, as it were,
relieved and liberated. In comparison with them, the people of the Netherlands struck him as “a softer, milder, less military type.” He attributes to the
Dutch a particular sensitivity not at all conforming to the stereotype, and talks
of the “wonder of the Dutch soul” and of the “most perfect expression of commonplace beauty that the world has yet seen,” due to his delight in Dutch painting, especially in Vermeer’s exquisite canvases. Yet this eulogy probably also
derives from the larger context of Dreiser’s experience, and shows how he evaluates his earlier impressions of North Germany, composed during his return
journey across the Atlantic, one originally planned to be made on the Titanic.46
in the controversies of world war i
Edith Wharton and Henry James
While the memory of their German ancestors evoked in Mencken and
Dreiser, at least at times, a sense of solidarity with the locals during their visits
to the German Empire, Edith Wharton never really developed any sympathy for
contemporary Germany. The Germans were largely excluded from her continuing exploration of the contrast between national and regional customs on
both sides of the Atlantic, a favorite theme of her early model and master Henry
James. Even more distinctly than James she expressed her preference for
Romance culture in art books and travel sketches as well as in her novels,
which she often set in Italy and later France, where she established her second
home from 1907 onward. Her inclination to offer incisive analyses of the
mores in various social classes was tempered by her sensibility. She made a
considerable effort to penetrate to the very essence of the human figures she
observed and described.
Even at the beginning of her career as the author of travel sketches and as a
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fiction writer she was fascinated by foreign settings. The great attraction held
for her by the various regions of Europe with which she had been familiar from
her early childhood is mirrored in her first collection of travelogues Italian
Backgrounds (1905), as well as in A Motor-Flight through France (1908),47 which
also provides evidence of her newly won mobility. A Motor-Flight through France,
in which she collects several of her annual journeys around Europe together
with her husband, is of additional interest because of Henry James’ presence
on her journey through France in March 1907. Like her other travelogues,48 the
book takes its cue from literary models, acquiring the character of a search for
the traces of earlier writers and relevant associations, which facilitate the artistic transformation of ordinary impressions and the romantic transfiguration of
reality.
It is thus no coincidence that Wharton, who was otherwise so responsive to
foreign characteristics, did not publish any vignettes of her one journey as an
adult to Germany. It lasted about a month in 1913 and was undertaken
(together with the connoisseur and art dealer Bernard Berenson) soon after her
divorce from her husband Edward, who had become insane. Her extreme lassitude and frequent moodiness, which spread a gloom over the pleasures of the
journey for her companion, did not prevent her from collecting impressions
for her literary work. On the contrary, the burden of prejudices against the
hereditary enemy adopted from her friends in France, her host country, precluded the creative use of her impressions.
It is only from a reading of her autobiography A Backward Glance49 that the
reader learns that the formative literary impressions in Edith Wharton’s childhood and youth included German literature, especially Goethe. As with her
great mentor Henry James, it was her cosmopolitan education while living for
many years with her parents in Europe that led her to take up the international
theme. Her journey to Spain, inspired by Irving’s The Alhambra as well as by her
voracious reading, fed her exceptionally sensitive mind with keen impressions.
Her books on Italy owed their existence to her imaginative immersion in Vernon Lee’s Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1881) and to her receptiveness
to the magic of Italian paintings of the Settecento. While her talents and early
experience, her yearning for distant countries, and her habit of drawing on historical material show her inner relationship with Francis Marion Crawford,
she differs from the latter in her preoccupation with Romance culture and her
fundamental neglect of the culture of German-speaking countries. That there
was no language barrier to prevent Edith Wharton from responding to the cultural products of the German nation did nothing to counteract this tendency.
Less subtle than Henry James in her portrayal of characters (her fiction
remains more dependent on stereotypes), Edith Wharton likes to draw, in her
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early vignettes, in her tales, and in her first novel The Valley of Decision (1902), on
hackneyed techniques from the literary tradition. In early stories like “The Pot
Boiler” she allows character portraits to be generated by stereotypes, in this
case in the figure of the Jewish art dealer Mr. Shepson. This caricature technique,50 and her exploration of character traits in her later masterly works, are
worlds apart. At the peak of her artistic competence Edith Wharton is far superior to crude ethnocentrism, which she herself exposes in Undine Spragg in
The Custom of the Country (1913). The latter’s vulgarity and superficiality are contrasted, as it were as an ahistorical variety of an American type, with sensitive
figures on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, this artistic “urbanity” is
not apparent in Wharton’s own references to the Germans in her nonfiction
and fiction from the era of World War I.
It is idle to ask whether the attack of typhoid at the time of the FrancoPrussian War in “Mildbad [sic] in the Black Forest”51 overshadowed Wharton’s
imaginative map of Europe. As nurses and companions of German origin and
from Alsace continued to encourage her reading of German literature, which
should have deepened her appreciation of German culture, it must have been her
passionate feeling for and sense of affinity with France which determined her
later crudely antagonistic image of Germany. It was probably for that reason that,
during her journey through Germany on the eve of World War I, she lamented
the alleged ugliness and the filth of the landscape of Central Germany.52
Irrespective of the delight that Edith Wharton took in theatrical and operatic performances (she was deeply impressed by a production of Goethe’s Faust
in Berlin and enjoyed the Ring des Nibelungen, an occasion on which she also met
the poet Rainer Maria Rilke), she more or less ignored contemporary Germany
before the outbreak of World War I prompted her passionate partisanship for
France. During her energetic engagement behind the lines in her host country
she wrote a series of newspaper reports about the front and about the horrors
of trench warfare. The account, collected in 1915 in Fighting France, from
Dunkerque to Belfort, bears witness to her sympathy for the French and eulogizes
the heroism of the grande nation.53
Wharton’s close relationship with France was also apparent in French Ways
and Their Meaning (1919),54 where she celebrated the French as “a race of creative artists” (p. 133). In view of the sketches from the front she had composed,
it comes as no surprise that she underlined her early demand for the immediate
entry of the United States into the Great War. The Marne (1918) and A Son at the
Front (1923)55 depict a panorama from the viewpoint of a convinced partisan of
France, combining idealistic rhetoric and propaganda. When in The Marne she
praises her American protagonist Troy Belknap, a volunteer in the American
Ambulance Service and the motivating force for participation in the crusade
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against barbaric antagonists, any claims to objectivity or aesthetic categories
are abandoned.
The blame for the horrors of the war is exclusively put on the other side, and
she sarcastically identifies German thoroughness and German chivalry in the
antagonists who are capable of all kinds of barbarous acts, who bombard or
blow up cultural monuments. While militarism is dismissed as “stupid,
inartistic, unimaginative and enslaving,” the French will to defend themselves
is extolled as heroism.56 In these propagandistic texts there is no need for
direct judgments to discredit the death-dealing German military machine as
the enemy of not only France: the inhabitants of modern Germany are also
branded as the very enemies of culture.57 As instructive testimony of how sensitive minds were affected and gripped by war hysteria, Wharton’s reports and
novels from the Great War direct the attention to the imagological catastrophe
which led to the destruction of the once salient positive features of the heterostereotype of the Germans.
During the war Wharton also edited a clichéd anthology entitled The Book of
the Homeless (1916), to which a number of authors contributed highly emotive
texts. Usually more subtle in his approach, Henry James also bore testimony in
his letters and essays to his support for the war aims of the Entente. Apart from
his demonstrative adoption of British citizenship in 1915, his statements also
inspired other American writers to express their solidarity with the Entente in
fiction and nonfiction. Without dispensing with the mannerisms of his mature
style, James took a stand in calling for philanthropic efforts behind the lines,
thus abandoning in these essays, which Percy Lubbock edited in 1918,58 the
high ideal of his literary masterpieces, namely objectivity. These late essays
evoke in apocalyptic images the monster of German imperialism.59 They pay
unrestrained tribute to France, which is said to nurture the best that “the life of
the mind and the life of the sense alike” can produce. France therefore needs
total support in its struggle with Germany, the foe who, acting only with sheer
mechanical force, is inflicting deep wounds on the immortal guardian of culture.60 As a villain furnished with the spiked helmet of the Prussian cavalryman, the German deserved no sympathy. James’ intense dislike of Germany
repeatedly expressed since the 1870s thus acquired an apocalyptic coloring as a
result of the unspeakable cruelty of the war machine on the western front, with
familiar words being emptied of their meaning.
Stereotypes of Germany in Polemical Pamphlets and in Tendentious Fiction
The case of Owen Wister (1860–1938), the author of the first genuine Western novel (The Virginian, 1902), well illustrates how the authority of a prominent
writer like Henry James played a significant role in the mediation of a negative
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“The Growth of Kultur?” from Life, 15 August 1918.
image of Germany in line with the professional propaganda efforts of the
Allies. James’s letters inspired Wister to speak out clearly and to join in the war
of pamphlets with The Pentecost of Calamity (1915).61 Its text urged the United
States to enter the war against the German Empire as quickly as possible. This
was the goal envisaged both by Wellington House in London, which was
directed by E. F. G. Masterman, and in the United States by the Committee on
Public Information led by George Creel. Germany had been discredited by its
brutal disrespect for the neutrality of Belgium and the torpedoing of the
Lusitania; in the Bryce Report62 it appeared proven guilty of excessive acts of
cruelty against civilians, women, and children in Belgium. Selectively using illconsidered and bombastic statements made by Emperor Wilhelm II, especially
concerning the German Americans, who allegedly owed him loyalty, Wister
also contributed a polemical preface to Gustavus Ohlinger’s book Their True
Faith and Allegiance (1916). In it, the difficult status of immigrants of German
origin was discussed, and the problem of contradictory facets of the German
image was solved by distinguishing between the loyal “South Germans,” still
welcome as immigrants, and the “Prussians and the prussianized,” who are
generally suspect (p. ix). The same line of argument was adopted by William
Roscoe Thayer (1859–1923) in Germany vs. Civilization: Notes on the Atrocious War
(1916).63 Here Thayer attacked Wilson’s self-restraint and retrospectively
sketched the rapid transformation of the “country of poets and thinkers” into a
national unit shaped by Prussian ideas and actions.64 An atavistic drive had
metamorphosed the nation known for its culture into the enemy of the entire
civilized world, and hence a threat to America.
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View (New York, 1914) by
Price Collier, published on the eve of the Great War had, in line with the efforts
of Hugo Münsterberg, still set great store on, despite some critical statements
concerning the exploitation of German women, the German contribution to
the achievements of culture. It also demonstrated the sources of mutual misunderstandings.65 Collier modifies Lord Palmerston’s polemical label for Germany as “a land of damned professors” (pp. 227–75), coined in the middle of
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the nineteenth century. The threat posed by Germany and sensed by many is
presented in his conclusion not as the will of the German people (“They want
peace, and we think they want war” [p. 488]), but merely of the Prussian political and military élite.
Public opinion, however, was little influenced by Collier’s relatively balanced analysis, or the carefully worded assessment of the European scene provided by Randolph Bourne in his report “Impressions of Europe: 1913–1914.”
In it he tended to assume “distinct national temperaments, distinct psychologies and attitudes” in England, France, Italy, and Germany; he also acknowledged new trends in German architecture, which had replaced “the fearful
debauch of bad taste which followed the French War.” As he saw this remarkable artistic “renaissance” as a healthy sign, he found no “objective evidence of
the German groaning under ‘autocracy’ and ‘paternalism.’”66 Meanwhile, the
vast majority of opinion leaders conveyed a negative image of Germany, which
was mediated by the countless pamphlets of the propaganda campaign. The
majority of articles in the anglophone press and the official pamphlets disseminated the views of the Entente, with mass circulation newspapers shouting
down and in effect silencing the opinions of those intellectuals who were pacifists or friendly to Germany. The cartoons that appeared in the humorous and
satirical magazine Life, which had also traditionally promoted political issues,
vividly presented anti-German clichés and perpetrated the horror propaganda,
thus exerting a significant influence. The bloodthirstiness of the German war
machine, allegedly prepared for every cruelty, is graphically rendered in many
lists of atrocities (for instance, the “Frenzylogical Chart” in a Christmas issue
of Life, 6 December 1917). In them, the emperor is regularly presented as a buggaboo. The personified German War Fury is depicted as “furor Teutonicus,” or
as a wild boar with a spiked helmet (“The Gorilla That Walks Like a Man,” Life,
17 December 1914), or as a savage gorilla raping the figure of a woman named
Belgium, or yet again as the representative of a lower level of evolution. Again
and again, in addition to its officer class, German professors are presented as
advocates of a “gospel of force,” with Nietzsche, Treitschke, and other figures
shown as supporters of a militaristic lust for power.67
The loyalty of German Americans was increasingly called into question,
and a secret link with their country of origin and the emperor was imputed to
them. Intellectuals and members of cultural associations of German origin
were frequently summarily accused of spying and sabotage. While the positive
image of Germany in the nineteenth century had benefited from the transatlantic network of men of letters, now the interaction between authors involved
in patriotic efforts led to a reciprocal increase in the volume of anger at the
alleged horrors attributed to the German Fury of War. Mass hysteria occasion82 ]
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“Frenzylogical Chart” from Life, 6 December 1917.
ally had violent consequences, especially in the main areas of German immigration: on 5 April 1918 Robert Prager, an ordinary German American, was
lynched in Collinsville, a small town in Illinois. Regional public pressure also
put an end to the judicial investigation of those involved in the lynching.68 German Americans were widely humiliated, and instruction in German in public
schools in the Midwest was dramatically reduced; indeed, in many cases, it was
either officially suppressed or voluntarily discontinued. The hostile atmosphere also prompted German American clubs to change their names and even
led to the renaming of simple dishes associated with Germany, with sauerkraut
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“The Gorilla That Walks Like a Man” from Life, 17 December 1914.
(absurdly) appearing on menus as “liberty cabbage.”69 The consequences of
the campaign against “hyphenated Americans,” especially from Germanspeaking countries, were noticeable in every layer of society.70
The attempts of the National German-American Alliance to counteract
these tendencies had little effect, and an official investigation in the Senate
resulted in the self-dissolution of the alliance in the spring of 1918.71 The
majority of German settlers were not prepared to resist unjust treatment, but
tried to find an escape from trouble in assimilation and rapid integration into
the majority. The anti-German climate also brought about a radical restriction
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“Photographs of Great Germans:
Professor von Poisonpickle” from Life, 4 July 1918.
man) in Lutheran churches, while at the universities the careers of many academics came to an abrupt end.72
One of the chief results of the political propaganda in the United States was
the split among left-wing intellectuals. Quite a few pacifists were won over as
supporters of the war aims of the Entente, and they also spoke out publicly on
its behalf. The massive propaganda which found expression, for instance, in
Robert Herrick’s The World Decision, also infected John Dos Passos (1896–1970).
While a student at Harvard, he replied to a critical review of Herrick’s quasiphilosophical use of stereotypes in discussing the allegedly unavoidable war
between Latin and Teutonic civilizations. Dos Passos excluded the possibility
of a neutral position in the struggle between the former, allegedly dedicated to
the arts and high ideals, and the latter, in which efficiency and mere physical
force dominated. Dos Passos was later disillusioned by his experiences on the
front, exposing in antiwar novels inhumanity on both sides and the barbarous
treatment meted out to German prisoners of war. Yet this did not prevent him
from subsequently drawing on the stereotypes propagated during the Great
War. In his first important avant-garde novel, Manhattan Transfer, he included in
the opening episode a portrait of a German American suspiciously close to a
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cliché: a German whose arrogant bossiness and proud tribute to the “mighty
Kaiser” reveals the author’s debt to the anti-German campaign of the war
years.73
Like the young Harvard student, more mature intellectuals on the left, as
well as socialist reformers like Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), were converted to
the aims of the Entente. Sinclair therefore severed relations with his pacifist
comrades after the United States entered the war in April 1917. The well-known
spokesman of the Muckrakers, who had reached a wide audience with his systematic analyses of various kinds of scandals in various segments of society,
was prepared to serve the cause of the Entente in his novel Jimmie Higgins
(1919).74 Like other writers engaged by the Creel Committee he used the conversion of the protagonist from pacifism to volunteering in the war as a major
plot element. In view of the summary attribution of guilt to the Germans, this
development is closely linked to the prevalence of the negative heterostereotype of the German. This later offered itself again to the author in his multivolume chronicle of the twentieth century.75
A plot similar to that in Sinclair’s book is employed in fiction by Booth Tarkington (1869–1946), who was very active as a propagandist on behalf of the
Allied powers. Tarkington’s novel Ramsey Milholland (1918) shows a young man
from the Midwest on his way to military duty. This, like his story “Captain
Schlotterwerz,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and describes the
conversion of a young German American from Cincinnati to the ideals and the
strategies of the Allied powers, was intended to disseminate negative heterostereotypes of Germans such as their “master race” mentality.76 Gertrude
Atherton (1887–1948) also became involved in political propaganda, and as a
journalist behind the front lines spread accusations of tens of thousands of
French soldiers in German prisoner of war camps being deliberately infected
with tuberculosis.77 Atherton’s aversion grew until she maintained in a contribution to the New York Times in August 1918 that it would be better to “exterpate
[sic] the whole breed, root and branch.” The culture of hatred that had developed made rational judgment impossible and aimed merely at manipulating
the readership.
The consequences of the propaganda offensive of the Creel Committee in
the universities were shown by Charles Franklin Thwing, who was thoroughly
familiar with the links between German and American universities.78 Less than
a decade before his substantial book on the fertilization of the American universities by the German model he apparently quoted from the propaganda
pamphlets of the Committee of Public Information without distancing himself
from their extreme polemics (p. 181). In their “vigorous paragraphs” the elimination of German is advocated, as “the sound of the German language or the
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sight of a printed page of German” must remind the reader of “the murder of a
million helpless old men, unarmed men, women and children.” Thwing also
provided statistical material on the radical reduction in the number of public
schools offering German language instruction, and dealt explicitly (p. 193)
with the serious consequences of the “nefarious letter addressed by the ninetythree professors in the German universities to their colleagues of other
nations.” He denounced the chauvinism of many German intellectuals and,
like other polemicists, deplored the “Prussianization” of the whole of Germany (p. 195). A comparison of Thwing’s report on fairly recent events, in
which he adopted negative clichés and stereotypes, with his later major study
shows his renunciation of erstwhile widely held positions.
In a series of other publications in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s
the propaganda offensive of Creel and his close associates was subjected to
critical analysis, and the unrestricted use of stereotypes was exposed as a historic mistake.79 James R. Mock, for instance, critically investigated in Censorship
1917 (1938) the control and channeling of information, and thus documented
the attempts to prevent pro-German opinion from entering the country or at
least to limit its accessibility. In addition to the censorship of printed material,
Mock also reported on similar action in the new medium of the film (pp.
172ff.). In doing so, he directs attention to the formative contribution of this
art form to the dissemination of negative clichés about the Germans, a topic
that must not be ignored in view of the impact and wide influence of aggressive
stereotypes.
Facets of the Image of Germany in the Early Cinema
Those responsible for political propaganda did not overlook the power of
the cinema to manipulate the emotions of large sections of the population.
Thus, the new medium served, more so than during World War II, as a device to
mediate the image of Germany as an enemy. The wave of anti-German films
did not really begin until after the declaration of war, but their directors could
already draw on techniques for controlling sympathy developed and successfully tested by David Wark Griffith and others.
Usually, the titles of these films indicate the thrust of the propaganda, while
the scripts ensured the manipulation of American moviegoers. In Neutrality
(1915) and in Civilization (1916) some degree of balance was still at work, but
both were produced before the United States entered the war. Some documentaries had hinted at the dangers the United States might face because of its
long coastline and weak coastal defenses.80 Thomas Dixon’s The Fall of a Nation
(1916) turned out to be the most successful filming of this primeval fear. It is no
coincidence that the foreign navy that appears off the coast of Long Island and
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performs a successful landing operation is commanded by officers whose
mustaches resemble that of Emperor William II and who employ efficiently
brutal methods intended to cow the Americans into submission.
The German emperor and the House of Hohenzollern were now chosen as
the incarnation of everything evil in a series of films.81 The former was represented as evil personified, avid for world power, and was depicted in horror
stories as a hybrid of Frankenstein and Dracula. To Hell with the Kaiser (1918)
offered a one-sided view of the progress of the war, from the German decision
to violate Belgian neutrality until the anticipated Allied victory and the banishment of the aggressor; however, it fell below the level of artistic quality that
reviewers regarded as necessary.
Like The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918), which fed the animosity toward the
“Huns,” films such as Wanted for Murder and The Kaiser’s Finish furnished alleged
evidence of German atrocities in Belgium, with murder, rape, and abuse serving as recurrent elements in the plots. The notion of the merciless attack on
Belgium was naturally combined with a depiction of individual suffering as a
result of sexual harassment or rape (as in Motherhood or The Maid of Belgium).
The cliché of the Hun, familiar to the public since the emperor’s fateful speech
with its reference to the Huns, inevitably led to dastardly acts of violence being
added to the stereotyped figure of the Germans.82
The tragedy of the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell following a
court-martial, which the propaganda machinery of the Entente exploited to the
full, provided a nucleus around which the popular motif of the threatened or
abused young woman in the hands of Prussian soldiers or officers could
develop.83 The script of Escaping the Hun (1917)84 concentrates specifically on
the suggestion, but never the actual showing, of brutal sexual force. In this
context not only the sins of the officers, but also those of ordinary soldiers in
the execution of women, the bayonetting of babies, and the bombardment of a
hospital were repeatedly documented. The enemy hordes, whose violent acts
were associated with the drunkenness of soldiers gone wild, appeared as the
incarnation of evil.
It is no coincidence that the primitive black-and-white drawing used in the
sensationalist memoirs My Four Years in Germany (New York, 1917) by the former
American ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, recommended his reminiscences to the film studios of Warner Brothers. The resulting film, which
quickly became a box office success, effectively marketed material claimed to
be authentic, though in fact partly staged, on the cruel treatment of prisoners
of war in the German Empire.85
Experts in the medium have underlined the contradiction between the
familiar negative stereotypes associated with the German Empire, such as the
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cliché of the despot who relies on naked brutal force, and the sly cunning
ascribed to the Germans.86 Yet the Allies were confronted at that time with
inhumane warfare, embodying both destructive force and the secrecy of the
underwater vessel, which released its deadly charge against the enemy. The
very metaphors of contemporary descriptions appeared to make a fusion of
these contradictory German qualities plausible.
The climate evoked by overzealous patriots in the various associations like
the American Defense Society or the National Security League, which drew on
nativist impulses and stigmatized hyphenated Americans as un-American and
potential traitors, fostered a basic mood among the filmmakers that also suggested, even postulated, revenge on the guilty enemy87 after the expected peace
treaty. Beware! and other films graphically presented the punishment that
would be meted out to the emperor, the House of Hohenzollern, and the Prussian Junkers generally, and that would once and for all put an end to the German lust for power. Some films did, however, differentiate between potentates
and subjects in the German Empire, putting on the screen individual or collective exceptions,88 but they were rather insignificant in the overall production.
In addition to quasi-documentaries and melodramatic war films the box
office draws of this era also include spy films, to which the Hollywood filmmakers were attracted even after the war. The personal career of Erich von Stroheim (1885–1957),89 who specialized in the character of the Prussian Junker
with his monocle and military behavior, living out his thirst for power, reflects
the possibilities and the marketability of this stereotype far into the 1920s.
Investment in the Prussian cliché profited both the individual actor and Hollywood. Biblical apocalyptic associations offered themselves in the filming of
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920), the first popular post-war film, which
shows Germans committing barbarous and vandalistic acts, destroying art
treasures and behaving brutally against civilians, at a time when a reaction had
already set in against the dissemination of exaggerated negative clichés.
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CHAPTER 6
INTERLUDE
BEFORE
WORLD WAR II
For many years after the cessation of hostilities in 1918 American authors were
still preoccupied with their wartime experiences. While they dissociated themselves emphatically from the anti-German propaganda of the war years,1 a
number of war novels exposed the hollowness of the rhetoric and the seemingly high ideals of the combatants. The revelations about the strategies of the
propaganda machinery fostered a fundamental skepticism toward polemical
presentations of the now defeated enemy. The memory of the patriotic hysteria
served for some as a warning against hasty judgments and negative heterostereotypes. For that reason American authors and filmmakers at first
showed a relatively high degree of circumspection in dealing with national
clichés, in fact far into the years of World War II.
Dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles, which had been shaped by a
spirit of revenge, was on the increase in the United States and strengthened
American isolationism; it also triggered a new debate on the question of war
guilt, which led to a partial rehabilitation of Germany.2 The American public dissociated itself from the way France had acted when it occupied the Rhineland
and the Ruhr in order to collect reparation payments.3 On the other hand, the
efforts of German politicians like Gustav Stresemann to comply with the severe
conditions of the treaty within the period stipulated also increased American
willingness to show fairness to the former enemy. The international recognition
of avant-garde practitioners of literature, painting, and architecture living in
Germany contributed to this attitude. The sense of trust that prompted Herbert
Hoover’s endeavor to help the Weimar Republic in its disastrous economic situation4 continued until well after the National Socialists came to power. It only
faded when the alarming news of purges in the civil service, brutal assaults on
members of the opposition, acts of violence against Jews, the burning of books,
and the Nuremberg Race Laws accumulated and the first revelations of the conditions in German concentration camps shocked the world.
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At first, however, quite a few journalists were inclined to be fair to Germany
and to offer a balanced picture. While a number of American authors, such as
Louis Untermeyer, were ready to ignore the negative side for personal reasons,
other writers, such as Joseph Hergesheimer, noted a fundamental break with
the past in Germany. This development seemed to offer opportunities for a
pragmatic new beginning, but could also lead to the loss of taboos and to
moral chaos. That the German crisis would eventually lead to domination by a
radical and inhuman political movement was apparent to fewer observers than
subsequent statements by writers and their presentation of German settings in
the period before the seizure of power by the National Socialists would suggest. The reports by foreign correspondents, historical accounts, as well as
dystopias, however, gradually paved the way for a reemergence of the clichés
and the emphatic amplification of negative heterostereotypes of Germans in
American texts written during the Second World War and after.
sinclair lewis’ dodsworth: balance regained
In this period the first American Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Sinclair
Lewis (1885–1951), developed an ambiguous attitude to Germany, just as he
did to various phenomena in his own country, which he examined systematically in his different satires. Lewis judged American society ambivalently, be it
in his castigations of the provincialism and narrow-mindedness of smalltown
society, of the conservative philistinism hampering the struggle for freedom,
or of abuse in the sphere of religion. It is in tune with his ambivalent assessment that he evokes sympathy for some conservative figures, while there are
striking shortcomings in some of his characters who rebel against the restrictive norms of behavior in American society. The contradictions in his attitudes
are mirrored in his long absence from America in the 1920s and in the first
half of the 1930s, when he constantly felt both attracted and repelled by his
own country.
Restlessness and a hunger for experience led Lewis to spend lengthy periods in German-speaking countries. After a brief visit in 1923 he returned in
February 1925 and, in the company of Philip Goodman, enjoyed the pleasures
of both the table and the bottle during the carnival season in Munich.5 The
close ties established at that time with the German publisher Kurt Wolff and
the Viennese banker Schey were maintained later, when in the company of his
wife he paid a visit to the latter’s family in Vienna. An extended journey across
Central Europe confirmed his opinion that one could enjoy gemütlichkeit and
culture here, especially on the banks of the Danube. He placed an ironic essay
entitled “An American Views the Huns” in the jubilee issue of the Nation (1 July
bef o re w o rl d wa r ii
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1925),6 which had published in the preceding years several warnings against
the exploitation of Germany and the resulting threat to future peace.
Lewis was both caustic and ironic in this piece, which refuted the familiar
clichés of Germany as a police and military state as had been disseminated in
the propaganda of the Creel Committee and the cinema. “And so we came to
Munich, and saw on the streets the grim military police who have now been
forbidden by the overlords of Germany. The first time I asked the direction of
one of these villainous Huns, I had a shock. Instead of saying, like any freeborn American cop, ‘What d’yuh want, Billy?’, the policeman saluted and stood
at attention: Worse than that, he brought out a map and made clear the directions. By this time, I realized the dangers of the military police in Germany.
They were trying, by subtle propaganda, to win over the Americans” (p. 20).
Instead of encountering violent and uncivilized Teutons he met welleducated and sophisticated speakers of German both in the public sphere and
at private receptions, and this despite the grim economic situation in Central
Europe: “Perhaps seventy people were assembled for the party . . . They were all
Germans. Therefore, they were all grim and fond of baby-killing. But they disguised it in the most dismaying manner. All through the evening, people
whom we had never met smiled at us and said, in uncomfortably perfect English: ‘Are you enjoying yourselves? Is there any one here whom you would like
to meet?’ It was another form of propaganda. Despite the fact that all of those
tall, slim men, so much like English officers, had killed babies in Belgium and
raped virtuous peasant wives in France, they pretended to be friendly to the two
lone Americans” (p. 20). The cosmopolitan attitude, the proficiency in foreign
languages, and the generous hospitality, all of which the visitors also enjoyed
in Vienna, combined to form a positive counterimage.7
After the popular success of his novel about physicians, Arrowsmith (1925),
in which an attractive American of German background appears in the figure
of Dr. Max Gottlieb,8 Lewis chose Germany and especially Berlin, as important
settings for the fictionalization of the collapse of his marriage with Grace Livingstone Hegger. In Dodsworth (1929), a novel in the tradition of the international theme, the phases in the estrangement between the author and his first
wife are depicted, though clearly much altered, in the tensions between
Dodsworth and his wife Fran, née Voelker and thus of German American origin.9 Fran is superficial and a snob; she tries to overcome aging by means of
romantic attachments and flirtations, and urges Sam to take her to Europe for
a year. In the growing conflict with her, various literary models are noticeable.
The successful automobile manufacturer, who is initially ill at ease in European
society but eager to learn, has fewer gaps in his knowledge than Henry James’
Christopher Newman, who represents the type of the American businessman
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not at home in the cultural sphere. Sam, however, even manages in Berlin to
contradict German critics of his home country.
The plot is based on the logic of character presentation, but it also reflects
the wide range of stereotypes Sinclair Lewis had encountered. The author, in
fact, draws on these stereotypes when depicting a decisive stage in the lives of
the Dodsworths in Berlin. As a result of his experience in the Great War various
clichés offer themselves for describing the behavior of the Germans. But the
expectations based on these stereotypes are refuted in a very positive way.
He still had a war psychosis. He had expected to find in Germany despotic
and “saber-clanking” officials and hateful policemen; had worked up an
adequate rage in anticipation. He was nearly disappointed when he found
the customs officials friendly, when he asked questions of a Berlin policeman and was answered with a salute and directions in English, and when
their room waiter at the Adlon remembered having seen them at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago! Now he admitted that in all of Europe, however
interesting other nationals, however merry the Italians and keen the
French, he found only the British and the Germans his own sort of people.
With them alone could he understand what they thought, how they lived,
and what they wanted of life.10
Traditional stereotypes and experiences merge when Lewis portrays Count Kurt
von Obersdorf as an imaginative, versatile, and cultivated companion of the
couple (chapters 22–29). This scion of an impoverished Austrian family, whose
affair with Fran is the final blow to the Dodsworths’ marriage, reminds the
reader of traditional literary figures, especially from Southern Germany. Obersdorf is an attentive host for the Dodsworths and takes them for walks in the
Tiergarten park, where they admire the monuments of the Hohenzollern
dynasty along the Victory Avenue as “neither of them had yet been properly told
that the statues were vulgar and absurd” (p. 231). In the company of Obersdorf
they also hike to Potsdam, where Sam admires the homes and the lifestyle of the
people: “It was a clean, homelike, secure kind of country, and Sam found himself liking its orderliness better than the romantic untidiness of Italy. And found
himself not only liking but feeling at one with the Germans” (pp. 233–34).
Another facet of the image of Germany is presented on the occasion of a
dinner party given by Kurt von Obersdorf. In the course of a lively discussion
about different cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Professor Braut, professor of economics at Berlin University, holds forth with great self-confidence on
the talents and competence expected from a member of the European élite. He
critically contrasts these requirements with modern American society, which,
emancipated from the European model, subordinates everything to success
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and efficiency.11 As Professor Braut has spent several years in the United States,
he is sufficiently knowledgeable about the country and is certainly not guilty of
that crude arrogance of Prussian professors ascribed to them in polemical
pamphlets dating from World War I. While Braut’s pronunciation, which is
accurately represented, betrays the “foreigner,” he is in no way caricatured. On
the contrary, he formulates reasonable opinions, so that some critics were
inclined to see in him, as it were, a mouthpiece of the author who uses him for
collective self-criticism. As he is thus granted a degree of seriousness, the
social class of professors he represents is in a sense rehabilitated.
Sam Dodsworth takes up the cudgels on behalf of his national culture
against such a formidable opponent. He rejects the prejudices and clichés
about America circulating in Europe, also indicting the negative image of
America furnished by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. Yet the debate
remains on a high intellectual level, and the antagonists emerge from the altercation unscathed. They appear in a more favorable light than the characters in
most of Lewis’ other satirical narratives.12 That Fran does not support Sam in
this debate, especially when the different position and role of women on either
side of the Atlantic is discussed, illustrates the growing alienation between
husband and wife. The latent crisis leads to their separation while they are still
in Berlin. Fran’s intended marriage to the Austrian aristocrat is, however,
vetoed by his relatives, which exemplifies the limited social and individual freedom of people of his social class.
In addition to the contrasted conceptions of the lifestyles on both sides of
the Atlantic and of the roles of the sexes and their realization, further aspects
of German society are focused upon. In describing them Lewis develops the
image of a cultivated nation which had been harmed by the severe conditions
of the peace treaty. When Kurt von Obersdorf takes the couple through the
nightclubs of Berlin, the breach of taboos is revealed and the American businessman is confronted with symptoms of a social crisis in a decadent society
that embarrass even Count Obersdorf, for instance, in a bar for homosexuals
called “Die neueste Ehe” (p. 240). The unexpected sight of German transvestites, in contrast with the German men ordinarily depicted in American magazines and comic weeklies as “thick as pancakes and solid as plough-horses,”
prompts the rapid retreat of the visitors. Less provocative than numerous other
sketches from the milieu, for example, from the pen of an expatriate such as
Robert McAlmon, Sinclair Lewis’ novel thus renders one aspect of Berlin for
which it had already become notorious, namely its sexual licentiousness. Not
only the reality, but also the image of the city had undergone a dramatic transformation. The German capital had gained the reputation of a wicked city in
which homosexual prostitution was widespread.13
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Lewis had acquired a number of enemies as a result of his satiric jibes at the
multitude of expatriates in Paris. He did not include himself in this category,
and soon, for private reasons, returned to the German-speaking countries for a
lengthy stay. After a hike in the Black Forest in the company of his friend
Ramon Guthrie, which was later to reappear as a plot element in Dodsworth
(Sam visits the mountains near Bern in the company of Ross Ireland), he had a
decisive encounter in Berlin in July 1927. It was a dramatic turning point in his
life as he remained in Berlin for several months, attracted by the charm of the
energetic and competent journalist Dorothy Thompson. Dorothy, who had just
been divorced from her Hungarian husband, Josef Bard, was a foreign correspondent who had already spent four years in Vienna and Berlin and who represented both the Public Ledger, a Philadelphia paper, and the New York Evening
Post. She was also the center of a lively social circle, which was now joined by
(“Red”) Lewis. Lewis, who had immediately proposed to her, accompanied her
to Vienna, which, thanks to Dorothy’s long experience there, he came to know
more intimately than had most of his fellow writers. He reworked his impressions of German-speaking countries for various periodicals and newspapers,
and integrated them into the manuscript of Dodsworth, where the relationship
between the protagonist and Edith Cartwright mirrors his acquaintance and
friendship with Dorothy Thompson. His personal mood, no doubt, had a
favorable effect on the image of Central Europe in this novel.
stages of a cosmopolitan experience:
untermeyer and hergesheimer
Like Lewis, Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977), the versatile poet, editor of anthologies, and friend of many writers, found that his stay of several years in Central
Europe provided him with considerable inspiration for his romanticized depiction of this region. In his memoirs, Bygones (1965), he exploited the rich impressions gathered during the two years he spent in Vienna (1923–1924), when he
cultivated close ties with the city’s cultural élite, including Arthur Schnitzler and
Max Reinhardt. He describes Vienna as a stimulating environment for his first,
and initially harmonious, marriage with the poet and vocalist Jean Starr. The
kaleidoscope of his impressions from Vienna also includes Dorothy Thompson, at that time still married to Joseph Bard, and the circle of her friends, which
the Untermeyers also joined. Vivid descriptions of the artistic and cultural activities convey to the reader an insight into the ésprit of this society, with its understanding for music and the arts, to whose theatrical achievements Untermeyer
himself contributed through his adaptation for Max Reinhardt of Offenbach’s
Orpheus in der Unterwelt.
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Contemporary American readers were already fairly familiar with Untermeyer through his “neo-Romantic” poems and as the editor of the popular
anthology Modern American Poetry (1919), when he placed before the public an
idyllic construct in Blue Rhine, Black Forest (1930). It mirrors his curious attempt
to find a new stability in his renewed relationship with Jean Starr-Untermeyer
after their temporary separation and the failure of another love affair. This
effort seems to color his book on Germany, whose stylization the author was
later himself to underline by calling it “depersonalized and idealized” (Bygones,
115). As the first stages of his journey up the Rhine were very well known to
American readers, he deliberately continues the tradition by alluding to
episodes and specific phrases used in Clemens’ A Tramp Abroad and Longfellow’s Hyperion. But he also adapts for a new generation of readers the familiar
legends (for instance, the Lorelei) which were associated with that region. He
also reaffirms the magic of Heidelberg before he leaves the well-worn paths
and takes the reader into the Black Forest.
“Long before ‘Alt Heidelberg’ lent its romance to a lachrymose student
prince, it was one of the most romantic places in Europe. It still is. And it is
more. It combines the charm of the antique, the scholastic aura of the bookmen, the punctilio of dueling fraternities, the alertness of modern art” (Blue
Rhine, Black Forest, 110). Untermeyer underlines the romantic atmosphere of
Heidelberg not only because the city was evoked in travel books and fiction
since Longfellow. Untermeyer’s image also mirrors the popularity of Wilhelm
Meyer-Förster’s play Alt-Heidelberg, first produced in 1901. This “romantic
story” had been filmed twice by 1915. A relatively short time before Untermeyer’s visit a new version had been released under the title The Student Prince in
Old Heidelberg and Sigmund Romberg’s operetta The Student Prince (1924) also
contributed to the popularity of the leading characters. At any rate, the American public was more than familiar with the story of Prince Karl Heinrich, who
is forced to give up his beloved Kathie, the innkeeper’s daughter from Heidelberg, when his duties as monarch call him back after the death of his father.
In addition to the romantic heterostereotype of Germany, Blue Rhine, Black
Forest drew on the old cliché of the stupendous appetites of the Germans.
Untermeyer entertains his readers, who are only very briefly reminded that in
1928 Allied troops were continuing to occupy the Rhineland, with a description
of the bulk of the corpulent visitors to the spa at Wiesbaden: “There always
seems to be a Fat Woman’s Convention or Association for Girth Control in
Wiesbaden. It is pathetic to see the Gargantuan creatures unhappily choking
over their seventh glass of steaming Stygian water . . . and then undoing the
beneficent effects by yielding regularly at four P.M. to the lure of the corner Conditorei” (p. 104). The observer is flabbergasted by the voraciousness of the peo96 ]
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ple when he notices how they partake of lashings of whipped cream in “a glorified sweetshop.” The music lover and opera connoisseur Untermeyer entertains his reader afterward with a satirical presentation of German valkyries on
the stage in opera houses, “these upholstered Isoldes, Gretels, Evas, Sieglindes” (p. 107), and underlines the dilemma of those gifted singers whose outward appearance is not compatible with their angelic voices.14 He imagines the
ideal performance that is possible in the cinema, where doubles can substitute
for the great singers. The fictitious figures of “Frau Dumpling-Kulmbacher”
and “Herr Mastochsenfleisch” only contribute their voices, while Adonis- and
Venus-like figures appear on the screen.
His private situation, mood, and the therapeutic intention of the hiking
tour with Jean Starr in southwest Germany lead to a tendency to harmonize
impressions in the second part of the book. Nowhere in this travel book, which
stresses the appeal of the local differences in folk costumes and juxtaposes
these positively with the inclination to standardize dress and behavior in the
United States,15 does the reader encounter any reflection of the disastrous
clichés of Allied propaganda in World War I. This restitution of an exceptionally appealing image of Germany was prompted not only by Untermeyer’s long
experience in German-speaking countries; the stylization also resulted from
his private dilemma which banished, so to speak, the unpleasant realities in
the public sphere. The image of Germany remained largely separated from the
trend of the times and the disquieting political developments which Untermeyer as a Jewish American writer could not totally ignore.
On his way through the Black Forest, where he deals with the simple customs in the small places visited, the author is touched by the charm of the landscape. Like every other sensitive hiker, he could feel the appeal of “magic paths
in forests which are enchanted to the young-in-heart and merely wooded to the
unimaginative.” In the darkness of the wood Untermeyer believes he has discovered a suitable environment for his fellow poet and friend Robert Frost:
“Here, if anywhere in Germany, the spirit of Robert Frost would be at home”
(p. 187). The tendency toward idyll in these glimpses is thrown into relief by a
comparison with the reports that Ernest Hemingway had sent off half a decade
before during his work as foreign correspondent in the same region for the
Toronto Star. He too had gone for long walks, had fished, and had used his very
modest knowledge of German to engage in conversations with the locals, still
suffering from the great inflation. He had not failed to notice, in sober contrast
to more romantic minds, that the Black Forest was “not the sweep of black forest that its name suggests,” but an area in which woods and fields alternated.16
In contrast to Hemingway, who rejects other aspects of the idyllic image of
Germany,17 Untermeyer shows a readiness to use the old image of Germany as
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a “country of poets and thinkers” as the basis for his travel book. His observation that German postage stamps tend not to depict kings and conquerors but
rather sages, poets, and composers, fits in with this. Even in the Black Forest,
the composers are ever present for the music-loving author. In a conversation
with a simple cobbler in a village, mention is made of the journey its male voice
choir plans to make to Vienna, where a great festival is to be held to mark the
centenary of Schubert’s death. Thus, Untermeyer seems to discover in the
lieder of the nineteenth century a key to understanding Germany and the
Germans, irrespective of the events of World War I.
The catastrophe of National Socialism apparently did not fundamentally
change this attitude. Untermeyer was not unaware of public events in Europe,
as an interview with Mussolini demonstrates. Yet, in his memoirs in the 1950s
the cosmopolitan poet, who was to be assigned responsibility in the new Office
of War Information and even attempted to interest his friend Robert Frost in
the war effort, does not refer to the horrors of the Holocaust. The seemingly
incomprehensible denial of human values is not made a theme in its own right.
Thus, his previously evoked image of Central Europe sketched in the years
between the wars remained unchanged.
Impressions of various lifestyles popular in Germany are given in Joseph
Hergesheimer’s travel book, Berlin (1932).18 Hergesheimer (1880–1954) had
made his name as the author of popular historical romances and of costume
romances in exotic settings, which his critics branded as “light fiction.” While
his stylized images and detailed descriptions of the milieu occasionally remind
the reader of fin de siècle literature, Hergesheimer, who curiously enough was
a lifelong friend of the much more robust H. L. Mencken, does not use any
clichés from the “patriotic” campaign of the Creel Committee in his travel
book on Central Europe.
In the chapters on Berlin, Hergesheimer describes his contacts with publishers like Ernst Rowohlt and readers in Ullstein’s publishing house, contacts
which were prompted by discussions about the preparation of translations of his
fiction into German. But Hergesheimer gives priority to an analysis of popular
culture in Germany,19 with restaurants, beer gardens, bars, and dance halls as his
preferred subject matter. He is captivated by the young people whose easygoing
behavior in the capital of the Weimar Republic fascinates him, despite the dire
poverty. Initially the close-cropped hairstyles remind him of the military tradition, which he ambivalently describes as “past,” and he encounters among the
youth of the metropolis a widespread fatalism. Yet their straightforwardness and
unsentimental discipline appeal to him. With the cityscape dominated by
Bauhaus architecture Berlin represents modernity. Everyday life is shaped by the
naturalness with which both young and old seek the pleasures of swimming in
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the Wannsee Lake. In the opinion of Hergesheimer the spirit of the “New Germany” produces a certain vitality and an orientation toward the future, but not
the optimism common among young people elsewhere.
Hergesheimer, who explicitly acknowledges his German heritage, underlines his respect for the “impressive youth of Germany” (p. 20), whose conduct
he observed in the German Academy of Sports. He admires the resilience of
these individuals and the matter-of-factness with which the young women
fashion their lives. At the same time he notes a coldness and an absence of sentimentality in a fencing instructor at the academy, who icily scrutinizes him.20
This sobriety seems to him a genuine improvement on the sentiment that had
dominated everything in the Great War. The “hard vigor” observed in these
young people possibly promises good things for the future of Germany.
Hergesheimer admits only in a brief remark that there are also “young political
organizations, marching-clubs with banners and Spartan rules.” He is struck
by the “grimness of their young faces,” and he sees in them “small organized
communions of hate” (pp. 25–26). Yet he believes that these Black Shirts cannot compete with the “sunny liberty of the Wannsee.” In this optimistic diagnosis Hergesheimer thus appears to lack perception, just like Thomas Wolfe
and other American observers who were similarly led to erroneous conclusions
on the direction being taken by the country.21
Hergesheimer’s idiosyncratic assessment of reality and his stylization of
the various facets of the image of Germany become apparent in his exaggerated contrast between the modern metropolis of Berlin and one which, in his
eyes, above all represents the past: Munich. In his estimation the latter is not
yet affected by the “extraordinary change” manifest in the architecture in
Berlin, but rather it is characterized by the heaviness of its architecture, the
“medieval gloom” and the “old Gothic façades.” He notices the inexplicable
absence of youth, so that he initially stigmatizes the Bavarian capital as “a city
of fat, middle-aged individuals and of the old.” In contrast to his friend
Mencken he is at first annoyed by the “grotesque, the Gothic, spirit of Munich”
and calls the city “a mortuary malt-house” (p. 51). However, its culinary pleasures and the flavorsome quality of its beer gradually lead him to appreciate
Munich and its people. The memory of his paternal ancestors stirs in him (“I
was conscious of certain deep, faintly stirred Germanic recognitions and
impulses,” p. 54) and prompts him to acquire lederhosen and a hat with a tuft
of chamois hair. Through his clothes he plays out, as it were, the role of the
German American. The long chapter on the city of “whitish sausage” also contains, after the description of Hofbräuhaus and the beer cellars, a report on the
musical and theatrical performances in its coffeehouses. Without referring to
Pollard’s Masks and Minstrels of New Germany (1911), Hergesheimer thus expands
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his sketch of the milieu from a guidebook for gourmets to a comprehensive
depiction of cultural reality. It reflects rather the individual perspective of the
author than the presence of traditional stereotypes.
That Hergesheimer is deliberately searching for an idyll (there are repeated
allusions to large American cities, which are far from being ideal) is evident in
the chapter on Egern, a village on Lake Tegernsee. Here the author, who has
assimilated himself in his outward appearance to the Bavarians, is quickly at
ease and can devote himself to meditation and relaxation. While he had originally taken exception to the corpulence of the Bavarians, the people who move
forward on small boats now stand the test of Hergesheimer’s critical gaze,
which had been sharpened through his training as a painter.
Close to nature, full of the joy of living, strong (as is demonstrated on the
dancing floor during the Schuhplattler folk dances witnessed by Hergesheimer),
the young lads and lasses have, despite their poverty, realized an idyll that had
probably been made possible by the various youth associations in Germany: “I
had never, the truth was, seen a fine race of men until I came to Egern” (p. 101).
Thus Hergesheimer’s urban sketches and, above all, his village vignette trace a
picture of German life that differs significantly from the negative clichés
widely disseminated during the Great War. A new and simpler world, which
might also serve as a point of orientation for America, is thus presented to the
reader, suggesting that the author underestimated or ignored the destructive
potential within the Weimar Republic.
germany as a field of experiment for expatriates:
inflation of possibilities
Few migrations of cultural élites have attracted as much attention as the wave of
young American artists and writers who were drawn to Paris in the early 1920s.
In part they tried to escape the parochialism at home and the restrictions on
their private lives caused by Prohibition; they were equally drawn by the
prospect of a cheaper life in the Old World as a result of the all-powerful dollar.
However, for these new expatriates22 Europe was not, as it had been for Henry
James and his fellows, primarily a complex world with a rich historical heritage
which could compensate for the shortcomings of American society. Europe was
the home of a society devastated by the catastrophe of the Great War and
marked by the loss of values, in which a free and unrestrained life seemed possible. This was much desired by the veterans of the war, many of whom were still
young and still trying to overcome their nightmare experiences.
Hundreds of American artists stayed in Paris where the American colony
numbered up to twenty-five thousand (according to one estimate one-third
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were probably from the small towns of the Midwest),23 yet many of them also
felt the attraction of Central Europe. The upheaval of inflation there ensured a
comfortable lifestyle, and the collapse of traditional values promised them the
possibility of living their lives to the fullest. Berlin was a major destination24
and also became an important stage on the voyage of discovery to the Soviet
Union undertaken by politically committed writers.25
In contrast to Samuel Clemens, many American visitors, such as Theodore
Dreiser on the eve of World War I, had taken exception to the ugly architecture
in Berlin, the massive bulk of the buildings, and the aesthetic inadequacy of
the cityscape.26 Many visitors, among them avant-garde artists and writers who
published their own periodicals there cheaply, continued to associate the
tedious, shabby architecture with Prussian discipline and imperialism, which
is reflected in Stephen Spender’s later statement in his autobiography World
within World (1951): “The architecture of Berlin was unlike that of any other
town. It had a unity amid its diversity, and was like (as it was meant to be) an
ideological expression in stone, granite and concrete, of certain ideas. The
streets were straight, long, grey, uniform, and all their ornaments expressed
the idea of Prussian domination” (p. 125).
American travelers also agreed on the moral and ethical consequences of
the collapse of the German Empire and of the crisis of the young Weimar
Republic. In Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934, revised 1951) Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989), the close friend of many American authors, recalled his youth
and commented on the idealization of European cities which had been transmitted to him in his school and college years.27 He was struck by the dramatic
change in all spheres of life as soon as the journey of the expatriate took him to
various settings: “old Europe, the continent of immemorial standards, had
lost them all: it had only prices, which changed from country to country, from
village to village, it seemed from hour to hour. Tuesday in Hamburg you might
order a banquet for eight cents (or was it five?); Thursday in Paris you might
buy twenty cigarettes for the price of a week’s lodging in Vienna. . . . Once in
Berlin a man was about to pay ten marks for a box of matches when he stopped
to look at the banknote in his hand. On it was written, ‘For these ten marks I
sold my virtue’” (p. 81).
The disastrous effects of economic chaos on the everyday experience of
German citizens were also noted by Hemingway, who traveled as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star through southwest Germany, the Rhineland,
and the Ruhr in the fall of 1922 and in the spring of 1923. He reported on the
anger of German businessmen and innkeepers at foreigners,28 especially
those who acquired German products and services at a very low price. In the
moral bankruptcy of these wheelings and dealings the expatriates were also
bef o re w o rl d war ii
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confronted with an image of their own country to which they had said farewell.
“We saw machine guns in the streets of Berlin, Black Shirts in Italy, we were
stopped by male prostitutes along the Kurfürstendam . . . Sometimes in a
Vienna coffeehouse full of dark little paunchy men and golden whores, in the
smoke above these shaven or marceled heads we saw another country. . . . we
saw the America they wished us to see and admired it through their distant
eyes” (Exile’s Return, 82–83).
Among the expatriates Robert McAlmon (1896–1956), who had acquired a
large fortune via his marriage to “Bryher” (that is, Winifred Ellerman), gained a
prominent role through his activities as a publisher.29 In his book Distinguished
Air, punningly subtitled Grim Fairy Tales (1925), he presents the city of Berlin as
the hunting ground of dubious figures, homosexual prostitutes, and cocaine
addicts. The city, which other writers of fiction had also presented as seedy,
functions as the setting for a tour through nightclubs frequented by transvestites where nude dancing and excesses with alcohol and drugs had become
commonplace. In addition to an international clientele, degenerate German
aristocrats also make their appearance, as in the title story of the book or the
story “Miss Knight.” American journalists and tourists had come to use the
Hotel Adlon as a bridgehead from which they explored the demimonde and
underworld of Berlin. The city had become a place of unlimited possibilities, a
Babel of iniquity strikingly different from contemporary Middle America, with
its civic virtues and respectability. It also differed greatly from the Prussia of the
nineteenth century with its image of correct behavior, and in many travel
reports and vignettes became the embodiment of modern decadence. Many
regarded the metropolis as the counterpart of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, the place of vulgar surrender to all desires. Hemingway passed a similar
judgment when as early as December 1923 he described the nocturnal entertainments in Berlin as repulsively vulgar in comparison to those in Paris or
Constantinople, noting that in boring Berlin nightclubs cocaine was consumed instead of French champagne.30 The reasons for this state of affairs are
unambiguously described by Langston Hughes in his autobiography I Wonder
as I Wander (1956). In June 1932 he had been confronted with the cosmopolitan
society that had drifted to Berlin and with the moral chaos prevalent there:
“Nevertheless, in spite of racial freedom, Berlin seemed to me a wretched
city. . . . The pathos and poverty of Berlin’s low-priced market in bodies
depressed me. As a seaman I had been in many ports and had spent a year in
Paris working on Rue Pigalle, but I had not seen anywhere people so desperate
as these walkers of the night streets in Berlin” (p. 71).31
Among those young writers who expatriated themselves with the avantgarde to Europe and who observed the destitution in Berlin at close range was
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Josephine Herbst (1892–1969).32 Later politically committed, she spoke out
strongly and clearly in the chorus of those critics who disseminated in the
United States a negative image of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. On her maternal
side she had very close ties with Germany, which were strengthened through
the family of her husband John Herrmann. Familiar from an early age with
family history from letters and diaries, she worked for a lengthy period as a
journalist in the Old World, and subsequently chose the ethnic heritage and
the tempestuous present on both sides of the Atlantic as the subject for a
chronicle of the Trexler family. In her trilogy, which surveys the historical
developments in America and Europe since the Gilded Age, she repeatedly
included her experience as a witness of the political and cultural troubles of
the Weimar Republic. Having lived for more than a year in Berlin after the
autumn of 1922, she became acquainted with the conditions not only in Berlin
but also other German cities, as well as the predicament of ordinary people
during the inflation.
In the first two volumes of her trilogy, Pity Is Not Enough (1933) and The Executioner Waits (1934), Herbst portrays several immigrants from Germany as advocates of Marxist reforms, acknowledging the historical fact that there were
quite a few Communists and Socialists of German provenance in America.33 In
addition, she captures the reality of the inflation years in the Weimar Republic
and offers an account of its drastic consequences on the population. In The Executioner Waits Lester Tolman, an expatriate who later returns from Germany,
reports on political demonstrations in German cities. He also describes the
hedonistic lifestyle of American artists in Central Europe encouraged by the
favorable exchange rate. This is a place where Tolman can enjoy life to the full
at very limited expense: “he . . . spent evenings in the homes of American
painters, who, suddenly valuta wealthy, hired whole orchestras for all night parties where orgies went on behind palms” (rpt. 1977, p. 294).
In Rope of Gold (1939), the final volume of the trilogy, Tolman once again surveys the chaotic conditions in Berlin, the destination of tourists and profiteers,
recording everything that passes before his eyes and those of his companions:
“Berlin was crowded with tourists eating the Germans out of house and home
for a few cents and they drove all evening looking for a place to stay, they took
him for cocktails to the hotel Eden and, sitting in the rich place, it was hard to
believe the Germans couldn’t pay their war debts” (p. 217). The destruction of
taboos and the elimination of moral barriers had attracted a whole generation
of young Americans to Germany, where they were in a position to experiment
with their lives. In doing so, many overlooked the ominous signs announcing
the reactionary forces that wanted to purge the country of these excesses, but
which were to lead quickly to wholesale destruction in the cultural sphere.
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It was understandable for the individual that even expatriates who witnessed the accession to power of National Socialism showed a certain respect
for the idealism seemingly practiced by its advocates. The demonstration of a
sense of community did not fail to have its effect on Thomas Wolfe and the
young Walker Percy. Similarly, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, and Jean
Stafford (1915–1979), who was to spend more than half a year in Germany pursuing her study program,34 at least temporarily succumbed to what seemed at
the time an attractive, dynamic movement.
Though Kay Boyle (1902–1992) was later to radically reject the ideology of
National Socialism and to blame the Germans fully for the heavy burden of
guilt for atrocities perpetrated in the name of the regime, she was also initially
seduced by its ideology. She chose Europe, including the German-speaking
countries, as an arena for testing out private relationships. Lacking a formal
education, she tried to “discover herself ” among the expatriates in Paris before
she found, first in the south of France and then in the Tyrolean Alps, an inexpensive and attractive environment for American bohemians. From the summer of 1933 she and her second husband stayed in Vienna and in Kitzbühel,
and then the family, having meanwhile become larger, moved to France in the
spring of 1935. She continued to visit Austria, and her stories from the period
between the wars are set in that country. At the center of her several short stories and her novel Death of a Man are crises in relationships, the manly attractions of handsome mountain guides, and a series of love affairs. In this context
the international theme gains more significance than in the works of other
writers of that period, with the character and behavior of the members of various nations contrasted very clearly. Boyle displayed, at least indirectly, a certain
sympathy for the ideology of National Socialism and its agitation against the
corporate state in Austria. Thus, for instance, the swastika fires lit in the
Tyrolean Alps by banned National Socialists in “The White Horses of Vienna”
as well as in Death of a Man, are not regarded as signaling a threat, but as manifesting a purposeful and vital opposition. The political involvement of the
physician Dr. Prochaska in this group contributes to the end of his romance
with the American protagonist in Death of a Man, but his affinity to the ideas of
the National Socialists is not directly criticized.
It was no coincidence that in an interview after her subsequent return to the
United States Kay Boyle had to face the accusation that she had permitted herself to be taken in by National Socialism when adopting the inner perspective
of Dr. Prochaska.35 It seems that Boyle gave anti-Semitism a place in “The
White Horses of Vienna,” allowing the statement that the Jewish physician Dr.
Heine is a misfit in the Tyrolean Alps, to where he has been sent from Vienna,
to remain uncontested.36 Despite Boyle’s later denial, for instance in the frag104 ]
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mentary manuscript “A Writer Looks at Germany,”37 where she stresses her
consistent rejection of German influences on society in the Tyrol, the gallery of
characters in her novel and the way she moves the focus of sympathy close to
those characters who embrace the extreme ideology and turn their backs on
Jewish fellow citizens, betray her limited insight in those years.38
Only in the story “Anschluss,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1939, did
the author dissociate herself from the Austrian National Socialists she had earlier seemed to accept. In this story the contrast between Austrians and Germans is underlined, and the naiveté of the American protagonist, as far as
political reality is concerned, is exposed. Her love affair with Kurt Wick and her
subsequent marriage to Baron Joseph Frankenstein led Boyle to adopt a radical
rejection of the National Socialist worldview and made her regard the crimes
committed in the name of the regime as a heavy burden on the balance sheet of
the Germans in general.39
germany as countertype and counterfoil
in thomas wolfe’s writings
While Kay Boyle had chosen for her settings an area on the periphery of the
German-speaking countries, Germany served as “the second homeland of his
spirit” for Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938).40 His complex image of Germany,
which is full of nuances and covers the whole range of cultural life in Central
Europe, was based both on his reading, for which he had an insatiable
appetite, and on the impressions gained during his many journeys to Europe.
Beginning with the second of a total of seven lengthy visits to the Old World
made between 1924 and 1936 he regularly included Germany in his itineraries.
His detailed knowledge was thus deepened through observation, which was
for him, more than for many other authors, the necessary precondition for and
source of his writing. In this way his awareness of his descent (on his father’s
side) from settlers of German origin in Pennsylvania furnished the basis for his
bias in favor of the Germans, both in the New and the Old Worlds. This later
impaired his view of the political reality in Germany and led him to overlook
ominous signs for far too long. Only in the course of his last journey to Germany did a significant change take place in his assessment of the country. Disappointed by what he had seen, Wolfe ended his special relationship with the
Germans, which he still ascribed to his autobiographical figure George Webber in The Web and the Rock.41
At first, both Germany and Austria served as counterimages and foils to
capitalistic American society with its deficiencies in the sphere of the arts.
More clearly than in the fiction of other American writers the borderline
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between reality and imagination becomes blurred in Wolfe’s books, which are
fed by his personal experience away from home, first in the urban environment
in the north of the United States and then on his European travels. Wolfe
yielded more rapidly than his contemporaries to the temptation of employing
stereotypes in the depiction of characters and settings, and had recourse in his
diaries, his letters, and the drafts of his narratives to formulaic statements concerning individual regions and nations. In his major semiautobiographical
project after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel (1929) Wolfe at first dealt
only with the stages of his journeys through England and France (Of Time and
the River [1935], “Jason’s Voyage,” pp. 599–794) and gave free rein to his inclination to offer distillations of his own experience there. The vividly presented
situations and encounters with various characters, however, suffer temporarily
as a result of the narrative situation chosen. The voice of the protagonist is too
much in evidence in the third-person narrative, and his strong dislike of several figures and ethnic groups portrayed is sanctioned, as it were, by the authorial voice.42
While the arsenal of stereotypes was easily activated in the cases of the English and the French,43 it had apparently little effect when Wolfe went on to
depict German characters. It is well-known that he gave preferential treatment
to figures of German stock, and generally drew more favorable portraits of
them. As his notebooks and letters show, he repeatedly contrasted the culture
of German-speaking Central Europe with American society, which was apparently focused on maximum profit, and against the French, who were felt to be
disagreeable.44
This tendency shaped the testimony of his encounters with Germany from
his first short visit to Stuttgart and Munich in 1926, and this slant is also noticeable when he processes the impressions he gained while traveling through
Germany in the company of Aline Bernstein in the following year. In his diary
entries and his letters to Aline in 1928, when he visited Central Europe again by
himself,45 there are similar generalizations concerning his hosts. On 9 November 1926 he links his plan to visit Germany with the fairy tales from the Rhine
valley: “I am going into Germany because there—I will tell you—below old
dreaming towers a river runs; upon the rocks Loreli comb their hair; the winds
about the castle crags at night are full of demon voices; and the gabled houses
of the toyland towns are full of rich and gluttonous warmth” (My Other Loneliness, 118).
On his journey along the Rhine in 1928 he enthusiastically notes the magical atmosphere already familiar to him from his reading: “The trip up the
Rhine was lovely and magnificent. It was somewhat disappointing up to
Koblentz; after that it became unreal and magical—the landscape is really
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magical—it has a faery quality—. . . . The wonderful part is only 30 or 40 miles
long—but you get the impression that you have been through the measureless
realm of Elfland.”46
On the stages of his journey he worked on the chapters of a book projected
as a short novel entitled “The River People.” Encounters with individuals and
stereotype patterns provided inspiration for the depiction of his heroine, “Li”
Greta Weinberg, and of the painter Joel Pierce, while the young dramatist
Oliver Weston closely resembles the author in physical appearance and nature.
As a Faustian character, he does not disown his debt to the cultural hero of his
host country either.47 The abandonment of that book project prevented Wolfe
from fictionally concretizing the regional facets of the image of Germany in
contrast with the environs on the Hudson River, the other river in “The River
People.” Later impressions gained during that journey of several months’
duration appeared in Wolfe’s later fictional prose.
During his long stay in Munich in 1928, where he both admired the manifestations of high culture like the Old Pinakothek and joined in the lifestyle of
the mass of people, he waxed truly enthusiastic about the city’s vitality and
dynamism. In striking contrast to Hergesheimer, who had originally felt
oppressed by the “old Gothic façades,” Wolfe immediately celebrates Munich
as “a kind of German heaven,” though he admits that, unlike old German
towns like Nuremberg or Rothenburg, it does not represent a “Gothic fairyland.”48 Yet in the posthumously published novel The Web and the Rock he allows
Monk Webber to contrast the city most favorably not only with big American
cities but also with London, Paris, or Venice: “And Munich—it was the cleanest
smell of all, the subtlest and most haunting, the most exciting, the most undefiled. It was an almost odorless odor, touched always with the buoyant lightness of the Alpine energies. . . . [Monk] was filled with lightness, exuberance,
and vital strength” (p. 652). The massive buildings of the city, which appeared
to him as “an architectural ectoplasm of the German soul” (p. 653), were also
the home of beautiful women and unsophisticated Herculean lads.
During his first visit to Munich in September 1926 Wolfe had become familiar in the Hofbrau Haus with “a great mug full of the best beer I have ever
tasted” (My Other Loneliness, 136). In the big “smoking room” he had been
drawn into the social ritual involving more than a thousand patrons: “The
place was one enormous sea-slop of beer, power, Teutonic masculine energy
and vitality” (p. 137). On the occasion of a further encounter with this site of
conviviality at the Oktoberfest in 1928, Wolfe’s autobiographical hero allows
himself to be carried away by the momentum of events. He responded orgiastically to the “enchanted land of Cockaigne, where one ate and drank forever and
where one was never sated. It was Scharaffenland [sic]—it made him think of
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Peter Breughel’s picture of that name” (The Web and the Rock, 658). A veritably
unrestrained thirst and hunger for drink and food (but also for reading material) dominated Thomas Wolfe, an unrestrained desire that found a counterpart in the seemingly unlimited supply at the Oktoberfest. Yet the sight of the
drinkers was also repeatedly unpleasant to him: “heavy people, who already
had in their faces something of the bloated contentment of swine” (The Web and
the Rock, 666).
The ambivalence in his assessment is intensified in the description of the
inner tension in the visitor immersed in the swaying mass of people, and it
gives way to a touch of fear in view of the huge number of individuals involved
in a kind of archaic tribal ritual:
The hall was roaring with their powerful voices, it shook to their powerful
bodies, and as they swung back and forth it seemed to Monk that nothing
on earth could resist them—that they must smash whatever they came
against. He understood now why other nations feared them so; suddenly he
was himself seized with a terrible and deadly fear of them that froze his
heart. He felt as if he had dreamed and awakened in a strange, barbaric forest to find a ring of savage, barbaric faces bent down above him: blondbraided, blond-mustached, they leaned upon their mighty spear staves,
rested on their shields of toughened hide, as they looked down. And he was
surrounded by them, there was no escape. (The Web and the Rock, 669)
It cannot be established beyond doubt whether Wolfe inserted this reference to
the well-founded fear of other nations of the energy of the Germans only in the
course of the revision following the transformation in 1936 of his originally
positive image of Germany. In the published version it remains merely a passing mood, and Monk Webber allows himself quickly to be carried away by the
spirit of celebration in the crowd. He is infected by their orgiastic joy and their
appetite for eating and drinking, and the songs accompanied by rocking to and
fro in time to the music. Finally, his integration is total: “suddenly a hand was
slipped through his arm, and through that roar and fog of sound he realized
that someone was speaking to him. . . . And now there was no strangeness
any more. There were no barriers any more. They drank and talked and ate
together. Monk drained liter after liter of the cold and heady beer. Its fumes
mounted in his brain. He was jubilant and happy. He talked fearlessly in a broken jargon of his little German” (The Web and the Rock, 670).
After this pleasant end the following chapter (“The Hospital”) makes the
reader abruptly aware of the fact that Wolfe’s protagonist, like the author himself in 1928, was involved in a brawl in which he suffered a head wound. He was
forced to stay in hospital and to submit to the medical attentions of Geheimrat
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Becker.49 This incident also motivated Wolfe, after his wound had healed and
after a detour to Oberammergau, to begin a critical self-assessment before he,
in reality, continued his journey to Vienna. Wolfe’s impressions gained there
resemble the image of Vienna mediated by Untermeyer. As early as his stay of
1927 Wolfe had emphatically stressed the differences between the Austrians
and the Germans, ascribing to the former a higher degree of “urbanity and fine
delicacy, charm and gaiety.”50 In the following year this contrast is played down
and the culture of Central Europe as a whole appears simply as a foil to the
American lifestyle.
Important roots of Wolfe’s image of Germany can also be found in the context of the author’s fifth European journey. After settling temporarily in Paris,
and without establishing any close contacts with the American expatriates resident there,51 he went on to Switzerland, which he soon left for Freiburg in Germany and hiked in the Black Forest.52 Wolfe’s diary entries from that period do
not immediately reflect the deep impression of the forest on his imagination,
which prompted an imaginative transformation of reality.53 It seems that
Wolfe’s perception of the landscape was also shaped by the memory of his
reading of Grimms’ fairy tales. The expectations and associations clinging
even to the name of the forest are stressed. The mysterious attraction of the
Black Forest, its melancholy atmosphere, fostered the genesis of a story entitled “Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time” and of a fragment entitled “Im
Dunklen Wald.”
“Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time,” published in 1935, takes as its background the railroad station in Munich and a railroad carriage on the journey
south to a Swiss health spa for pulmonary diseases. Yet, a wider setting is
evoked for the somber plot, in which a young American senses the odor of
death surrounding a sick man and witnesses his farewell to an attractive
woman yearning for life and vitality.54 The American also observes how she,
after this farewell, passionately embraces another man, a vigorous one. An
awareness of the painful inexplicability of human fate is linked to the landscape through which the train takes the travelers. Looking out through the
windows the American visitor, who has witnessed this incident and is conscious of the approaching death of his companion, notes: “the dark enchantment of the forests of Germany, those forests which are something more than
trees—which are a spell, a magic, and a sorcery, filling the hearts of men, and
particularly those strangers who have some racial kinship with that land, with a
dark music, a haunting memory, never wholly to be captured.”55 Wolfe’s autobiographical figure is afterward haunted by a sense of the dichotomy between
the sensual dimension of life with its drives and the “strange and powerful
music of the soul.” During this railroad journey he is alerted to the unresolved
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conflict between the “incorruptible and soaring spirit” and the “huge, corrupted beast” in the individual citizens of his host country, but also in mankind
generally. He encounters the same tension in the contradictions in the physiognomy of another passenger in the dining car. Wolfe’s mouthpiece is confronted with a “huge and powerful-looking German” with a “shaven skull, a
great swine face and a forehead of noble and lonely thought” (From Death, 110).
Thus in the representatives of Germany Wolfe diagnoses experiences that
oppressed him, as well as the mysteries of human existence.
The fragment “Im Dunklen Wald” describes in confessional mode the symbolic search for the father, a theme intimately related to a deeply felt concern of
the author. At the same time the immersion in the past gives rise to reflections
on the continuous change and the evanescence of human life. The text,56
which Wolfe was working on during his brief stay in Germany in 1930, consists
of an inner monologue without much in the way of action. It focuses on the
familiarity of the first-person narrator with a country about which he had read
since his childhood without ever having actually seen it, though it appeared “in
a thousand visions” to his mind’s eye. The reader recalls that the same landscape, the “Black Forest” to which the first-person narrator is closely tied, is
associated elsewhere with parts of the Tyrol and in central Germany, and in the
immediate home region of his father in Pennsylvania. In anticipation of
George Webber’s later insight “his father’s world” is, on the one hand, concretely represented by the “small countryside community in southern Pennsylvania,” on the other hand by similar regions in the heart of Europe.57
The Notebooks of 1930 do not fully mirror the fact that in Freiburg Wolfe witnessed some rather unpleasant scenes, as the tense campaign for the elections in
September 1930 led to clashes and violence in the streets. It took Wolfe a long
time to understand the alarming signs, but the metamorphosis he describes in
his Notebooks betrays some anxiety. Thus “the head of a German is changed into a
Wildschweinskotelett,” and at one point his sympathy for the Germans lapses, even
though he had always preferred them to the French.58 In a letter to his colleague
Henry Volkening he explained in general terms the constant tension between a
vulgar earthiness and an intellectual nobility in the inhabitants of southwestern
Germany: “These people, with all that is bestial, savage, supernatural, and also
all that is rich, profound, kindly and simple, move me more deeply than I can tell
you” (Letters, 262). Wolfe’s penchant for hyperbole probably prompted his statement that the Germans tend to extremes, and not any wish to confirm the stereotype that the Germans lacked any sense of moderation and were therefore
extremely dangerous.
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come the limits of his fiction. In a fragment found in the author’s estate and
published in 1995 under the title The Party at Jack’s, Wolfe tries to open up his
fiction, which is fundamentally based on autobiographical narratives, to the
experience of other figures. In The Good Child’s River Wolfe had attempted a gripping though fragmentary fictional chronicle in which aspects of the family history of Aline Bernstein are recovered, especially the career of her father, the
actor Joseph Frankau.59 The Party at Jack’s provides a comparable attempt to represent the early biography of the spouse of Aline’s fictional double, Esther
Jack. A dream sequence experienced by Frederick Jack recaptures his childhood in a school in Koblenz, Germany, and concisely describes his temporary
return after an absence of several decades to this setting in Germany.60 It seems
as if the author had composed these scenes from the childhood of Mr. Jack
(which do not strike a German-speaking reader as completely authentic
because of some grammatical mistakes and unidiomatic phrases) at a time
when the regime in Nazi Germany had not yet begun to persecute the Jews. But
in his dream Frederick Jack is exposed to the taunting of his classmates
because of his ethnic heritage and anticipates his emigration to the New
World, where he was to succeed as a banker. In emotionally charged scenes he
experiences his return to his old family home and to his childhood taunters, to
whom he would like to demonstrate his success. But he also experiences
painfully the evanescence of his happiness.
Wolfe’s own disillusionment with his host country occurred not much later,
as the episodes entitled “The Dark Messiah” and “I Have a Thing to Tell You”
illustrate. Both were prepublished and then posthumously integrated into the
novel edited under the title You Can’t Go Home Again by Edward Aswell, Wolfe’s
executor.61 These episodes signal the change that a statement in You Can’t Go
Home Again presents in a nutshell: “Germany had changed.” In 1935 Wolfe,
who for much too long had not objected to the new political orientation in Germany, still believed that he could see a clean, disciplined, and future-oriented
country. That he was so embarrassingly slow on the uptake distinguishes him
not only from an increasing number of political journalists, but also from the
versatile sociologist and cultural philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895–1990).
Like Wolfe, Mumford had discovered his love for Germany in the 1920s and
had regarded the country as a positive counterfoil to American society, where
housing projects financed by local authorities were almost unknown. Mumford had, however, grasped as early as 1932 the seriousness of the political situation in Germany62 and started to mobilize the American public against Nazi
Germany.63
Wolfe’s pro-German sentiment finds expression in, inter alia, the very positive features of figures of German extraction in the United States who appear in
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his autobiographical fiction. This is true, for instance, of the portrait of Otto
Hauser, reader of the publishing house, who is depicted as a person of
integrity and reliability, and as an extremely neat and tidy employee. Wolfe’s
prejudice in favor of a member of the ethnic group to which he felt allied
through his paternal heritage is even more apparent in the original manuscript, where the reader, here called George Hauser, is praised not only as a very
respectable individual, but also as a representative German. In view of political
developments it is not surprising that Edward Aswell excised this passage,
apparently composed in 1936, from the posthumous edition of You Can’t Go
Home Again of 1940: “He came from German stock who had been in this country for a hundred years, and who were the first stock on earth—with all the fine
intelligence, the sense of order and of balance, the warmth, the humanity, the
tenderness, the exquisite sensitivity of the finest German stock, and with none
of its brutality.”64
During his two-month visit to Germany in the early summer of 1935 Wolfe
visited north Germany for the first time and was lionized by Berlin society as a
successful author.65 Here, both as the guest of publisher Ernst Rowohlt and as
a companion of Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador, he
enjoyed the limelight and the triumphs granted him.66 Despite confidential
hints from his friends concerning the persecution of Jews and opponents of
the regime, Wolfe clung to his illusions. After an emotional visit to Weimar and
Eisenach, he wrote a letter to Maxwell Perkins in which he enthusiastically
praised his host country, where members of the opposition and supporters of
the regime alike paid tribute to him: “I do not see how anyone who comes here
as I have come could possibly fail to love the country, its noble Gothic beauty
and its lyrical loveliness, or to like the German people who are, I think, the
cleanest, the kindest, the warmest-hearted, and the most honorable people I
have met in Europe.”67 Wolfe even believed that Germany had to be protected
against the hostile propaganda in the press and it was only with reluctance that
he admitted that the evils constituted part of the whole: “this evil is so curiously
and inextricably woven into a kind of wonderful hope which flourishes and
inspires millions of people who are themselves, as I have told you, certainly not
evil, but one of the most child-like, kindly and susceptible people in the world”
(Letters, 460).68
Although Wolfe’s critical distance to those in power and their henchmen
(“that group of automatic dummies that now bears the ironical title of the
‘Reichstag,’” Letters, 461) is evident, his encounter with the heritage of the
great German writers causes Wolfe to overlook the ominous signs. His erroneous hope is based on the spiritual world of Goethe and Schiller, to whom he
felt so close at their sites of memory in Weimar, which seems “to hold in it so
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much of the spirit of the great Germany and the great and noble spirit of freedom, reverence and the high things of the spirit which all of us have loved”
(Letters, 460).
With this statement the climax of the eulogy had been reached. Wolfe’s visit
a year later was to bring the delayed, but inevitable sober and sobering understanding of the realities of Nazi Germany, though Wolfe still tried to hold on to
the favorable heterostereotype. The effective orchestration of the Olympic
Games in Berlin was, however, to mislead other visitors, too. It is noticeable
that Wolfe’s entries in his Notebooks during his last visit to Germany do not contain critical remarks. He is so eager to be fair in his assessment that he draws
up a balance sheet in which he juxtaposes the advantages and disadvantages of
fascist dictatorships. From the advocates of National Socialism he readily
adopts arguments that were intended to justify the discrimination against Jews
and opponents of the regime, and the suppression of the freedom of opinion.
Wolfe’s passionate love affair with Thea Voelcker, who appears as Else von
Kohler in You Can’t Go Home Again (“a young widow of thirty who looked and
was a perfect type of the Norse Valkyrie”),69 increased the emotional tensions
in the breast of an author beset by uncertainties and doubts. At first offended
by the sketch accompanying her interview with him, he was fascinated by the
outward appearance of this fair-haired beauty, who seemed prototypically Teutonic to him, and until their abrupt separation after a week’s shared vacation in
Alpbach in the Tyrol, he constantly sought her company.
Before and during this personal crisis, alarming signs were becoming more
frequent in public life, and the author Wolfe was confronted with inexplicable
measures against writers disliked by the regime and intellectuals as such. For
this reason even before Wolfe’s departure his conversations with LedigRowohlt 70 prepared the ground for the breach with the regime and its inhuman tyranny. Now the country that Wolfe had earlier lauded enthusiastically
became an arena in which “The Dark Messiah” had established his reign of terror. With the publication of the embittered resumé soon after his return to
America, Wolfe belongs to the group of the chroniclers of the fateful turn of
events in Germany. And attentive Americans like Dorothy Thompson and
Martha Dodd had contributed to Wolfe’s gradual insight.71
the transformation of central europe:
the history of a tragedy
While American students had originally functioned as transatlantic mediators,
the Great War had created a need for regular foreign correspondents. Like Sinclair Lewis’ second wife Dorothy, a considerable number of journalists were
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posted in Central Europe from the 1920s onward. They supplied the American
media with political and social analyses, and summarized events in volumes of
memoirs. Writers drew on these texts in their fiction. Among them was Sinclair
Lewis, whose dystopia of 1935, It Can’t Happen Here, was indebted both to these
reports, such as Dorothy’s critical representation of National Socialism and
portrait of the dictator in I Saw Hitler (1932),72 and to his own observations of
the political upheavals and the establishment of fascist dictatorships in
Europe.
It Can’t Happen Here: The Dystopian Design and Its Historical Model
Despite his gradual estrangement from Dorothy, Sinclair Lewis continued
his close contacts with his wife’s colleagues and fellow journalists. He thus
had access to their professional assessments of the transformation of Central
Europe. His relationships with writers and intellectuals from the German
opposition led to his decision in 1933 to forbid the sale of his very successful
novels in Germany. The presence of fundamentalist trends in his own country
and populist agitation prompted, however, his description of the accession to
power of a protofascist dictatorship in North America. Germany and Italy provided paradigmatic cases and permitted him to forecast in fictional form by
extrapolating from problematical tendencies (the title of the book, It Can’t Happen Here, notwithstanding) the imminent transformation of the United States
into a kind of corporate state.
Backed by an army of protest voters and in alliance with ultraconservatives
the populist Senator Berzelius Windrip is able to establish a dictatorship in
which the militia of “Minute Men” eliminate undesirable individuals. The
protagonist of the novel, Doremus Jessup, a sixty-year-old journalist from
Vermont, alluding to European parallels, warns against the success of the
presidential candidate Windrip, to whom his supporters later give honorary
titles such as “‘the Chief ’, meaning Führer, or Imperial Wizard of the K.K.K.,
or Il Duce.” Doremus voices grave concerns about America’s susceptibility to
conformity and fundamentalism73 as unscrupulous agitators and their cohorts
act as America’s guardians. The purging of society of dissenters and disagreeable representatives of ethnic groups, such as Jews and blacks, takes place in
violent scenes. The political program of the “Corpos” and the strategy used
always closely resembles their equivalents in Germany. In the media, which
have been forced into conformity, quotes from the Völkischer Beobachter are disseminated, and the ministers and associates of President Windrip imitate
Goebbels or Göring. The burning of books, the concentration camps, and the
strategies of interrogation and of terrorizing individuals are patterned on Nazi
Germany, with Sinclair Lewis thus stressing in his dystopia the comparable
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susceptibility of very different communities to totalitarian movements. For
Lewis, who knew the country better than most of his fellow writers, Germany
had been overtaken by a catastrophe that also threatened America.74 The supporters of the new rulers in a United States transformed into a fascist dictatorship include the former teacher Emil Staubmeyer (who wrote a collection of
poems entitled “Hitler, and Other Poems of Passion”).75 Later, he is made to
monitor the journalist Jessup and serves on courts-martial, sacrificing all his
values to his opportunism.
While the link between German Americans and the authoritarian regime
provides evidence of their susceptibility to totalitarianism, It Can’t Happen Here
does not unreservedly adopt the negative heterostereotype of the Germans.
The reader arrives at such a conclusion when Lewis’ mouthpiece Doremus
explicitly mentions, among the disturbing factors in American society, the
national hatred and hysteria with which everything German was attacked in
World War I. Among the alarming signs found in American society, the burden
resulting from the dissemination of a crude antagonistic image is explicitly
mentioned: “Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana,
and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State.
Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to
millions. . . . Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the
Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty
cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty
measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers?” (p. 28).
The dangerous development in the United States is brought home to the
reader in a central episode in which he is confronted with the upright biologist
Dr. Willy Schmidt, whose Central European origins are apparent in his accent.
He has pursued a successful teaching career at Stanford and has worked at the
Rockefeller Institute in New York. He has the courage to stand up to the representatives of the new regime but he falls victim to the bullets of Macgoblin’s
bodyguard when the Secretary of Education and Public Relations in a state of
intoxication forces his way into the home of Schmidt’s host, the venerable
rabbi Dr. Vincent de Verez, and Schmidt tries to protect his host. And, like the
rabbi, Schmidt is killed by the bullets of the minister’s bodyguard.76 Jessup’s
rebellion as a journalist is the immediate consequence of this deplorable incident, for which he is tortured and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Just
before the open end of the novel he is finally able to escape to Canada, his temporary asylum, from where resistance to the regime in the United States will be
mounted.
While every dystopia extrapolates from phenomena and developments in its
creator’s own society, later critics, such as D. J. Dooley in The Art of Sinclair Lewis
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(1967, pp. 191–94), reproached Lewis for the lack of plausibility and the exaggeration of problematical tendencies in American society in his construct.
Contemporary reception, however, was largely positive. The decision by MetroGoldwyn-Mayer not to shoot the film (probably out of business considerations
concerning the distribution of films in Germany and Italy) angered the author,
but the dystopia was successful and was later dramatized for the stage.
American Journalists as Chroniclers of Crisis and Change in Central Europe
Among the attentive journalists in Europe, of whom a strikingly large number significantly came from the Midwest, Vincent Sheean (1899–1975) worked
as the foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in Paris between 1922 and
1925, and later continued to report for various syndicates on the political
upheavals in the Old World. He wrote some hybrid texts that combine political
journalism and autobiography, and sketch a relatively differentiated panorama.
Though his relevant books77 did not reach his American readership until long
after the publication of other trendsetting nonfiction books and chronicles, his
comments concerning the actors on the political stage conveyed a relatively
objective image of Germany.78 In these reports the American public learned of
the systematic erosion of democratic rights, internally through intimidation
and propaganda, and of the abrogation of the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles
by the Nazi dictatorship. The reports from Europe by Dorothy Thompson’s fellow correspondents certainly did not lack drama.
It was especially the correspondents of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago
Daily News who alerted the American public, at that time struggling with the
economic problems of the Great Depression, to the dangerous developments
in Europe. The potential danger in France’s unrelenting insistence on collecting reparations for World War I, which drove German workers in the Ruhr into
the arms of nationalist agitators, had been pointed out as early as 1923 by
Hemingway in his cables to the Toronto Star.79 The situation on the labor market
had given a new lease of life to radical trends in Germany, trends that seemed
to suggest the recovery of lost honor as a major concern to large sections of the
population.
Among the foreign correspondents who observed this dramatic development in Germany, Edgar Ansel Mowrer (1892–1977), both in his role as the
director of the Berlin office of the Chicago Daily News from 1924 to 1933 and as
the author of Germany Puts the Clock Back (1933), shaped public opinion on the
“relapse” of Germany as a result of that interplay of political forces that led to
the end of the Weimar Republic.80 Among his younger colleagues William L.
Shirer (1904–1993) through his reports as a foreign correspondent and in his
books, first his Berlin Diary (1941), which covers the years 1934 to 1941, and then
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his analyses and historical surveys, shaped the image of Germany’s transformation into a Nazi dictatorship, and that far into the post-war period.81 In his
writings, this widely traveled journalist revealed his ties to Europe that colored
so strongly his fifteen years of media work as a correspondent and later as a
broadcaster. His love affair with a young Hungarian woman, as well as his marriage to Theresa Stiberitz (“Tess”) from Vienna, turned the Old Continent into
his second home. Thus he felt concern for the destruction of its lifestyle, and
alarmed the American public to the rapidity of this process.
Shirer’s ambivalent relationship with the Germans and Austrians was, however, not only shaped by his career as a journalist but also rooted in his childhood
and adolescence, particularly in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In his autobiographical
writings Shirer reveals that he was influenced by the anti-German propaganda of
World War I, which led to a breach between him and his German American playmates. On the other hand, his friendship with the Presbyterian preacher Edward
R. Burkhalter, who had studied in the Prussian capital for two years, roused in
him a lively interest in the culture of Germany. After his breakout from the narrow provinciality of “Main Street” and his move to Europe, Shirer gladly accepted
the invitation to work as a foreign correspondent in Vienna. Here, Shirer skillfully managed to capture the drama of political events, like his slightly older
fellow journalists engaged by the Chicago Tribune.82
His colleague John Gunther (1901–1970) also mastered this art. He was one
of the first who, from 1936 onward, satisfied the constantly growing demand
for topical information from the European arena in Inside Europe, a bestseller in
this genre. The average reader of this book could gain a vivid picture of the
trends of the times and of the political actors, thus putting them in a better
position to understand the way the European nations were behaving. Stationed
in Vienna from 1929, the city whose crisis-prone atmosphere he captured in his
novel The Lost City,83 Gunther had served for several years as the correspondent
of the Chicago Daily News for Central and Southeastern Europe when he was
invited to compile a comprehensive historical report.84 The harvest of his years
in Central Europe, collecting and collating information from a network of fellow journalists, was a graphic panorama of the rapidly changing political map
of Europe.
What seems to have been of decisive importance for the overwhelming success of Inside Europe, which was followed by similar volumes on other continents,85 was its focus on political leaders. Gunther drew on established modes
of historical narrative and produced a history in which a personalized perspective prevailed, rather than economic factors and slow demographic developments. The appeal for readers lay in what were presented as the qualities of
those in power. As Gunther underlined in his introduction to the so-called war
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edition of 1940, the emphasis lay on the leaders of the individual countries.
The author found the key to the fateful events leading up to World War II in the
characters of Hitler and Stalin. It is no coincidence that the chapters framing
Inside Europe are dedicated to these dictators. As Gunther explains in A Fragment
of Autobiography (pp. 9–10), he had searched for “material for human rather
than purely political portraits” and had drawn up a long list of questions
intended to help him provide a vivid description of the behavior of the potentates, thus appealing to the psychological interest of his readers.
From 1938 onward the book included a map that provided concise characterizations of the European nations, encapsulating the events, the countries,
and the peoples involved. Statements determined by clichés and resembling
definitions in which the author employs the literary trope of “prosopopoeia”
reduced the complex political panorama to the level of entertaining conversations in coffeehouses, and made the textual key to the map seem like a political
caricature. In view of the large number of copies sold it is plausible to ascribe
its particular effectiveness to the stereotypes employed, an assumption also
applicable to the image of Germany, which is described as follows: “Here
Hitler rules, most unpredictable of dictators. Here the Reichswehr staff superintend a massive war machinery, here are performed astounding financial juggleries. Every country on its borders feels the strain of German might and
German activism. It lost the war, the source of all its woe; Hitler ‘regenerated’
its shamed volk, and now it fights another.”86
In the war edition Gunther reduces the characteristics of other countries of
Europe to an even simpler common denominator than the character of Germany:
hungary. Never mind politics; have a holiday in Budapest.
austria. Before the German coup in 1938, the pleasantest country in
Europe, where Schuschnigg ruled in Dollfuss’s seat, where half a dozen
private armies became one public army, where the people were absorbed
by serious things like Mozart, walks in the Wienerwald, and beer.
The tendency toward personification apparent in the stereotyped legend
accompanying the map of Europe was continued in the several revisions,
whose guiding principles Gunther explained in Inside Europe.87
That Gunther’s book satisfied a genuine thirst for information for which
the warning voices in the more ephemeral printed media were not sufficient is,
apart from the large number of copies sold, indicated by the title of the first
report on Germany produced for the American cinema. The newsreel program
The March of Time produced in May 1938 was entitled Inside Nazi-Germany. The
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documentary dealt with the establishment of the new order in Germany, the
persecution of Jews and critical intellectuals, and the ominous creation of a
military power eager to expand.88 At a time when the administration was maintaining an isolationist policy of neutrality, a sequel to the series illustrated the
potential dangers developing in Central Europe. Simultaneously, there was a
tacit censorship to prevent film projects about the expansion of fascism from
reaching the screens in the movie theaters. This was done in spite of the warning voices of immigrants from Germany (such as Fritz Lang and Ernst
Lubitsch) and refugees (for example, Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger). They
joined other exiled writers in warning against the dangers of the Nazi dictatorship, as well as founding the Anti-Nazi-League. While Hollywood imposed a
form of self-censorship in order to avoid not only political involvement (in
compliance with the Neutrality Act of the administration) but also economic
damage, writers initiated public campaigns against the persecution of Jews,
which had meanwhile begun in Nazi Germany. But only in 1939 was the first
film presenting the dangers for the world emanating from Germany produced,
Anatole Litvak’s espionage film Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
Therefore writers were left with the task of mediating the facets of a new
alarming image of Germany. Among the most attentive observers of the ominous transformation of the Old World were authors who had dedicated themselves to the proletarian novel and who perceived the events in (Central)
Europe as a dramatic confrontation between the antithetical radical reform
concepts of the Left and the Right. These committed witnesses also provided
reports and then political novels on the scenes of conflict in Italy, Spain, and
Germany. Yet they were less inclined to draw on national stereotypes and
employ them as models accounting for the seizure of power by the National
Socialists. Their starting point was the notion of international solidarity, and
they tended to think in terms of stereotypes of class rather than ethnic differences.
This is noticeable in the shape of Josephine Herbst’s image of Germany,
which continues the vignettes in her Trexler trilogy. She had returned to Germany in the summer of 1935 and in several articles for the New York Post and the
Nation subsequently described the latent opposition among workers and in
church circles to the brutal consolidation of the power of National Socialism.
Comparing these conditions with those of her longer visit in 1922–1923, she
noted the trivialization of the press and the beginnings of the persecution of
the Jews. A collection of her essays was published in 1935 as a pamphlet of the
Anti-Nazi Federation under the title Behind the Swastika.89 In the concluding volume of her Trexler trilogy, Rope of Gold (1939), the expatriate Tolman also gives a
vivid account of the persecution of those opposed to the Nazi regime.90
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The critical assessment of Hitler’s Germany that professional spectators
offered on the basis of long observation or on-the-spot examination differs
significantly from the complex picture W. E. B. Du Bois presented on the basis
of his more than three-month stay in Germany in 1936. A grant from the Oberlaender Trust, which had been established for the promotion of cultural relations between the United States and German-speaking countries, enabled him
to study and compare industrial education in Germany and Austria with the
educational philosophy of Booker T. Washington and the institutional practices current in America. The prominent spokesman of African Americans was
eager to benefit from the expertise of Central Europe and to help reconceptualize the leading institutions in the field of black education, Hampton and
Tuskegee. A contract with the Pittsburgh Courier provided an outlet for his observations from Europe and the intended continuation of the journey through the
Soviet Union to East Asia. It was natural that Du Bois abstained from detailed
critical comments on the political situation while in Germany. His early
columns in the aftermath of the effective staging of the Olympic Games in
Berlin touch upon sports,91 but deal more prominently with the technological
progress92 manifest in the host country. He also allocates a great deal of space
to music, especially to Richard Wagner and Bayreuth.93 As Lewis correctly puts
it in his comprehensive biography, Du Bois was clearly eager “to distinguish
between the German people and the totalitarian regime, to separate what many
American intellectuals would insist were ‘good Germans’ from ‘bad Germans.’”94 Though Du Bois had responded like the majority to the propaganda
machinery in World War I, during his visit of 1936 he seems to have been
inclined to acknowledge an impression reminiscent of his student experience
in Berlin in the 1890s that individual Germans were “among the warmest, most
civilized of Europeans.” Repeatedly Du Bois stressed in his columns that he
had been consistently treated with respect and had not encountered color prejudice in England or in continental Europe. Yet the columns he sent after he left
Germany reveal that he had not failed to recognize the plight of Germany’s
Jews, and that he felt that the anti-Semitic campaign surpassed “in vindictive
cruelty and public insult anything [he] had ever seen.”95 His brief historical
survey of the causes of Hitler’s accession to power, however, demonstrates his
disenchantment with the Creel Committee of the Great War. It shows his
awareness of factors that had contributed to the radicalization of the masses
and the erosion of democracy in Germany: the Treaty of Versailles and the evils
of inflation, dramatized by the war debt, resulting in economic and political
paralysis and the eventual victory of dictatorship. The racist philosophy disseminated by a powerful and technologically advanced propaganda machine is
exposed with all its evils.96
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But the case of Western democracies against Hitlerism seems extremely
weak as his regular comparisons with the situation in the United States would
demonstrate. In Du Bois’ eyes German anti-Semitism is the analogue of racial
discrimination encapsulated in the Jim Crow laws. Significantly, Du Bois
devoted a good deal of space to the words of a moderate German intellectual
with the “eyes and deep earnestness of the German idealist with whom he conversed.”97 But it is with great relief that Du Bois finds himself in Vienna, where
he feels that the “glamour of [that] past still hovers like a faint perfume,” and
that “Viennese gaiety, its jokes, its Parisian flavor still lives” (p. 158), and he
expresses the conviction that he found the “most encouraging thing” there:
“that spirit of German science and happy freedom of thought that temporarily
has fled from Germany.” Thus it is with sadness that Du Bois left Germany, an
experience Thomas Wolfe was not spared, either.
In the same year Du Bois visited Germany (1936), Wolfe could no longer
close his eyes to the unsavory reality, and in a diagnosis printed in 1937 he talks
of a serious malady of German society: “What George began to see was a picture of great people who had been psychically wounded and were now desperately ill with some dread malady of the soul. Here was an entire nation, he now
realized, that was infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. This was
a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations”
(You Can’t Go Home Again, 488–89).
Negative impressions had accumulated, and so Wolfe formulates an elegy
on the “dissolution, this shipwreck of a great spirit.”98 He could only account
for the dramatic changes he had eventually perceived by resorting to the
imagery of sickness, and thus he reported that an insidious poison was in the
process of destroying the essential spirit and the culture of Germany as a
whole. On his return journey from the country that he had celebrated as the
second homeland of his spirit and on which he had now to turn his back, his
autobiographical protagonist George Webber becomes a witness to the fear
that had begun to infect Germany.99 Thus even this eyewitness of the metamorphosis of Central Europe had hesitatingly and belatedly recognized the end of
an era.
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CHAPTER 7
THE RETURN
OF CLICHÉS
THE
WORLD WAR II
YEARS
American society had long been dominated by the desire to keep out of the conflicts 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
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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 villain like Major
Kurt von Wessellhoft, which is achieved in the novel through his final incarceration in a wine cellar, an incident reminiscent of Poe’s horror story “The Cask
of Amontillado.”
We also encounter in Bromfield’s texts hints of a distinction familiar from
earlier anti-German polemics, namely that between North Germans and South
Germans. Wessellhoft remembers a Swabian governess who was different
th e w o rl d war i i y e a r s
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from his severe mother (“the thin stiff Lutheran figure of Frau von Wessellhoft,” Until the Day Break, 92), and this opposition also indirectly relates to the
contrast between the “dark forests of the north” and the “pleasant valleys” of
Swabia. In another context Bromfield, however, suspends this clichéd differentiation when in some of his stories he refers to the Black Forest as an
uncanny place inhabited by evil, demonic beings, and when he presents Germany as a polity infected by a disease of epidemic proportions.
In view of the undifferentiated condemnation of everything with a German
name it is no wonder that the only story in Bromfield’s collection (“Thou Shalt
Not Covet”), which portrays a civilized German judge, Herr Oberregierungsrat
Moll, and his wife, shows that they are marginalized and have no chance of
holding their own against the brutal representation of the Nazi regime.4 A passage in Bromfield’s novel Until the Day Break distills his extremely one-sided
view, when the question “Why are the Germans worse than other people?” is
unequivocally answered with the phrase “Because they just damned well are!”
(pp. 50–51).
A more complex image of Germany than in Bromfield’s texts is projected by
Frederic Prokosch (1908–1989), a versatile author of novels of travels and
adventures. He had grown up in the Midwest as the child of Austrian immigrants and had spent part of his school years in Europe. Like other American
journalists chronicling the events leading up to World War II in fiction and
nonfiction, Prokosch repeatedly looks back to the years between the wars in his
novels. He shows a distinct affinity to the form of the romance of adventurous
expeditions into exotic countries, yet his art is at its most impressive in his
depiction of the crisis in Central Europe in the novel The Skies of Europe (1941).
The perspective of the young first-person narrator Philip, an American journalist who chooses Paris as his base and who visits his German and his Austrian
relatives, is no doubt shaped by Prokosch’s autobiographical experience. The
Skies of Europe continues the use of heterostereotypes initiated in Prokosch’s
earlier novels The Asiatics (1935) and The Seven Who Fled (1937).5
It is already clear that in The Seven Who Fled the author has recourse to an
arsenal of stereotypes, with the contrast between the German-speaking
refugees Hugo von Wildenbruch and Joachim von Wald being particularly
revealing. The former, an officer, represents the type of the energetic German
completely dedicated to his ideas, determined, and disciplined, who is ready to
sacrifice everything to his heroic ideal and the demands of the nation.6 In contrast von Wald, an Austrian and, unlike Wildenbruch, a scientist, is moved by
feelings and human sympathy while they are fleeing from Central Asia to
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Shanghai. Admitting such emotions is regarded as a lack of discipline, even a
weakness by Wildenbruch. His readiness to practice a complete surrender of
the self results from formative experiences in his German boyhood.7
In The Skies of Europe the first-person narrator Philip registers a far-reaching
transformation in Germany, especially after the annexation of Austria. The
change affects even his relatives, his former classmates, and the owners of the
boarding school, and upsets and even frightens him during his visits there
from his residence in Paris. Only Stefan, the young violinist has not been
infected with the demon of National Socialism. His brother Dietrich repeats
those idées fixes spread by ideological propaganda manifesting fatalism, even
a drive toward death. The meaning of life is seen in struggle and death, and
obedience is feverishly praised as heroism. Thus Dietrich maintains: “There
will be a new type of courage and heroism. Men who die, knowing that they die
forever, unrewarded, anonymous. To these men the meaning and fulfillment of
life will lie purely in the struggle and in the unquestioned acceptance of death”
(p. 393). An Austrian noblewoman risks a critical diagnosis of the official ideology at an early stage: “The German people are sick . . . they have been sick
ever since Jena. One dream after another—Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke—and
now the most extreme and violent dream of all” (p. 132).
While the representatives of “Degenerate Art” are banished from Germany,
painters acceptable to the regime like “Uncle Willy,” Herr Lampertzius, who
receives many public commissions and can therefore live in luxury, succeed. To
his former disciple Philip, Uncle Willy’s ideological conformity, however,
seems highly suspect, and the country itself appears to him to be in the
clutches of atavistic ideologues. On his visit to Uncle Willy’s new villa on Lake
Starnberg the narrator summarizes the transformation he has observed, which
may be linked through intertextuality to Thomas Wolfe’s image of Munich in
The Web and the Rock, which had appeared two years previously: “More and more
I felt that I’d come to a strange country, fabulously cut off from the rest the
world: a land of Cockaigne, a sort of Schlaraffenland, overflowing with steel and
iron instead of roasted pigs and cheeses” (p. 425).
A summary entrusted to Philip’s acquaintance, the hedonistic Baron van
Dusen, close to the end of the book illustrates the growing gloom, a darkening
of the image of Germany held by Prokosch on the eve of the war: “It has its own
peculiar charm, you know, this clicking porcine civilization. But beneath it —
don’t forget! Order!—Mythomania! The burning of the books, the crucifixion
of the Jews! That’s where their brilliance lies, their fascination—I’ve seen it! In
creation—yes! The creation of ruins! Upheaval! Remember Chinghiz Khan, my
dear fellow” (p. 482).8
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germany in upton sinclair’s lanny budd cycle
and joseph freeman’s never call retreat
The most prolific representative of the radical novel, Upton Sinclair, did not
offer such a simple formula for the image of Germany. Unlike Prokosch, Sinclair was dependent on reports by foreign correspondents and memoirs as well
as early political novels. Nevertheless, in 1938 he set about producing a tenvolume series of novels. The cycle centers on Lanny Budd and describes the
fateful developments in Europe since the eve of World War I.9
World’s End (1940) opened the sequence of novels, which appeared in rapid
succession and combined fiction and factual report. As early as the second book
of the series, Between Two Worlds, Sinclair dealt with the fascist takeover in Italy
and presented the problems of the Weimar Republic, also offering a caricature of
Hitler in connection with a visit to Munich by the protagonist.10 Hitler’s resemblance to Charlie Chaplin had been exploited by the latter for his satirical political
film The Great Dictator. Sinclair could assume his readers’ familiarity with the parodistic depiction of Hitler as Hynkel, the dictator of the Empire of Tomania. At
the same time the author focuses on the many problems of the Weimar Republic
and its chaotic economic situation.11 This is even more apparent in the third volume, Dragon’s Teeth (1942), where Germany becomes the primary arena in which
Lanny Budd, the illegitimate son of an American owner of a factory producing
ammunition, and the pleasure-loving Mabel “Beauty” Blackless, is constantly
“on the road” as a playboy, connoisseur, and art dealer. The novel, awarded the
Pulitzer Prize, places the consequences of Hitler’s seizure of power center stage
and, through the many encounters beween Lanny and the members of the inner
circle of the National Socialist dictatorship, sheds light on the condition of Germany. Dragon’s Teeth bears witness to the concreteness of the reports by foreign
correspondents and the nonfiction books such as Gunther’s Inside Europe derived
from them. Sinclair, whose earlier successes were primarily based on his exposure of scandalous injustices in various spheres of American life through his systematic investigations of various milieus, did not deem it necessary to return to
and inspect Germany before writing this novel, a country he had last visited
before World War I.
In the two opening volumes of the cycle of novels his protagonist Lanny had
observed at close range the fateful progress of the negotiations for the Treaty of
Versailles and witnessed Mussolini’s seizure of power. He had also noted the
heavy toll of lives and had become convinced of the necessity of fighting fascism. His friendships with Socialists and Communists confirmed him in this
conviction,12 as did his experiences with the Nazi dictatorship which are
described in Dragon’s Teeth.
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This novel, which opens on the geographic periphery with a Mediterranean
cruise on Johannes Robin’s yacht, takes Lanny, who has meanwhile married
the rich heiress Irma Barnes, to the center of historical developments. Sinclair
confronts him with Nazis who act unscrupulously after the seizure of power.
As the son of a respected businessman and of a pleasure-loving mother who
has a love affair with a German artist both loyal to the regime and a nationalist,
Kurt Meissner, Lanny is persona grata in the Third Reich. He can thus successfully act as a double-dealer and effectively intervene on behalf of endangered
friends. While staying in the palace of Johannes Robin in Berlin after the dramatic transformation of the political situation in Germany (Dragon’s Teeth, book
2), he endeavors to save the latter from execution after he has been imprisoned
for offenses against foreign exchange regulations introduced with a clear antiSemitic bias. His friendship with members and sympathizers of the Nazi Party
opens doors to the powerful in the party, and thus he is able, after hard bargaining with Hermann Göring, to secure freedom for the rich Jewish merchant.
While his close contacts with the captains of industry and his own activities
as an art dealer, not to mention the wealth of his wife, permit Lanny to use the
whole world as his stage, the frequent changes of scene and setting also facilitate the work of the chronicler of the times. A detailed image of Germany
results. Moreover, it includes for the first time horror scenes from concentration camps, previously only known in a very few published eyewitness accounts
and some films, like Frank Borzage’s Mortal Storm (1940). Shocked by his involuntary role as a witness of the inhuman treatment of German Jews by fanatical
anti-Semites, Lanny also succeeds in getting Robin’s son Freddi out of the
country. But the latter’s will to live has been broken. The horrific reports of the
Nazi torture chambers evoke a world of terror; this contrasts strikingly with
the comfortable lifestyle of members of the leadership and the misguided
enthusiasm of artists of the Reich, or the conduct of many of those who obeyed
orders. Thus the American reader of this cycle of novels was confronted with
the essence of the demonic in Germany, long before the actual dimensions of
the Holocaust were discovered.
In Dragon’s Teeth Upton Sinclair had succeeded in offering such convincing
sketches of the actors on the political scene that Thomas Mann expressed his
unqualified approval in a letter of 1942.13 The quasi-documentary quality of the
description was, in part, based on Sinclair’s correspondence with German
immigrants and with Americans who had become thoroughly familiar with
Germany during long periods of study there.14 Equally essential were Sinclair’s
narrative talent and his ability to use his imagination to present as a vivid nightmare the world described in nonfiction books and reports by correspondents.
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In the continuation of his cycle of novels Sinclair further contributed to the
image of Germany, especially in Dragon Harvest (1945), where the Nazis’ preparation for the world war and its progress during its early years are presented. By
making Lanny a “double agent” the author renders his numerous journeys
plausible. That Lanny pretends that he can provide the Axis powers with relevant information, which gives him access to the Nazi dictatorship, increases
the reader’s potential for identification with the protagonist in his struggle
with the Machiavellian representatives of evil. This is in tune with the plot of
the novel, which is based on suspense and thus obeys different laws from a
nonfiction book. In doing so, however, Sinclair does not reduce the Germans
appearing alongside the historical figures to mere stereotypes and, unlike
Bromfield, allows scope for closer human relationships with decent people in
Hitler’s Reich;15 and this despite his insight into the brutality that costs the
lives of many of Lanny’s fellow activists.
Like Upton Sinclair, who ranked among the best-known Marxist writers
who devoted themselves to chronicling the political catastrophes in Europe,
the prominent leftist intellectual Joseph Freeman (1897–1963)16 also provided
a frightening panorama of the historical developments in Germany in Never Call
Retreat (1943). The son of Jewish parents who had immigrated from the
Ukraine, he worked briefly after World War I as a foreign correspondent of the
Chicago Tribune. He subsequently became a member of the proto-Communist
Party, which sent him for a year to the Soviet Union in 1926, where he became
an eyewitness of the internal political conflicts. At first an ideologue toeing the
party line and a radical advocate of popular front governments, the brutal Stalinist purges alienated him from the Marxist-Leninist guidelines. The pact
between Hitler and Stalin finally turned him into a dissident three years after
the publication of his autobiography, An American Testament (1936). The traumatic experience of being ostracized by his former comrades was to be mirrored in his “collective novel” Never Call Retreat, where the bitter conflicts
among leftist ideologues are maintained even in a German concentration
camp, whose horrors and inhumanity are depicted in detail in the second half
of the book.
In this book the author, who had in the meantime become the cofounder of
the Partisan Review, used a technique also employed by later writers dealing with
nightmarish experiences: that of the psychotherapeutic exploration of a life
story. Thus the stages in the career of Paul Schuman, the scion of an uppermiddle-class Viennese family, are recovered on the couch of a New York psychiatrist: his childhood and youth on the banks of the Danube, his historical
studies in Paris and his teaching in Vienna, and finally the horrors of his several
years of incarceration in a concentration camp. The voluminous novel provides
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a history of the transformations in the social, political, and artistic spheres
against the backdrop of the city of Vienna as a prototypical metropolis of
modernity. In all probability the author relied solely on the reports of foreign
correspondents and on lively accounts in nonfiction books, such as the one
published by John Gunther. Certainly there is no evidence of Freeman having
visited Vienna during his time as a foreign correspondent or in connection
with his journey to the Soviet Union.17
In the depiction of Paul Schuman’s friends, Freeman takes into account the
major political trends of his time and attributes representative traits to his figures. Oscar von Teplitz illustrates the attitudes of a young National Socialist,
while Paul’s first love Helga later turns out to be an unscrupulous opportunist
who after the Anschluss quickly becomes involved with the new ruling powers
and betrays Paul to them.18
Treachery also forms one of Paul’s central experiences in the German concentration camp. As an advocate of human rights he had maintained the legacy
of his father, who had evolved from a literary into a committed cultural and
social critic, and had introduced his son to leftist reformers. Identified as a temporary fellow traveler of the Communists, Paul is taken to a concentration camp
where, as a sophisticated intellectual, he becomes the favorite victim in the perverse power games of the camp commander, Inspector Keller. He is systematically tortured by the latter’s henchmen under Sergeant Muehlbach to make him
disclose secrets. The book exposes a true “topography of terror,” but this is not
its only goal. The novel gains in power not only through its portrayal of the Nazi
persecutors who try to break Paul’s resistance through brutal punishment and
more subtle psychological methods, but also through its depiction of the serious ideological conflicts that escalate among the political prisoners themselves,
leading to the betrayal and elimination of idealists. A dogmatic ideologue, Hans
Bayer, and a sophisticated poet and herald of proletarian hopes for the future,
Kurt Hertzfeld, are estranged from each other in long, secret debates over deviations from the party line, until the ostracized poet is betrayed by his comrades to
the SS, who promptly execute him.19 Thus Freeman’s Never Call Retreat is not only
an antifascist war novel in which devastating judgment is passed on the German
henchmen, but it also reflects the bitter experience of the total lack of solidarity
among the camp inmates, whose unscrupulous denunciation of a dissident is
graphically depicted in the novel.20
Paul Schuman’s liberation in a bloody prison revolt and his escape to the
United States via Switzerland by no means blur the contours of these terrible
events. The report by the patient during therapy, which his psychoanalyst
seems to put down verbatim, adds additional facets to the negative image of
the Germans. The nightmarish depiction of the camp, where the individual
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undergoes systematic depersonalization, is explicitly associated with the
paintings of the Last Judgment and of Hell by Hieronymus Bosch. It is based
on a documentary report by Paul Massing, a Communist who had escaped
from a German camp and had related his experiences in Fatherland (1935).21
katherine anne porter’s “look back in anger”
Few major American writers have produced statements and fiction that show
such a wide range of images of Germany as Katherine Anne Porter (1890–
1980). The general reader of her novel Ship of Fools (1962) and of her novella
“The Leaning Tower” (1941)22 will recall her crude caricatures of German
Nazis, but the period in which the action of these texts is set will cause the
more knowledgeable reader to doubt the historical accuracy of both the conduct depicted or implied and of the picture given of the economic situation in
Germany. Even more striking is the gap between the relatively friendly tenor of
the letters written by Porter to her friend Josephine Herbst during her fivemonth stay in Berlin, where she had gone with a Guggenheim grant in the fall
of 1931, and her later unrestrained anti-German sentiments. The latter determine the depiction of characters in “The Leaning Tower” and the (stereotyped)
portraits of the travelers of German stock in the Ship of Fools. The emphatic
expression of her resentment of the Germans reflected in her later correspondence, a selection of which has been available in published form since 1990,23
reveals a complete reversal in her attitude. This resulted in the revision of her
earlier impressions and led to the “coloring” of her characters.
By way of contrast, in her Mexican and Texan stories and in the short novels
of the “Miranda” cycle, on which her reputation as a great stylist rests, the
author had demonstrated her ability to approach foreign cultures and lifestyles
imaginatively and had managed to make this “other” world accessible to the
reader. Lacking a sufficient knowledge of German, Porter was better qualified
to depict Mexico than Germany. The ever more lurid description of the Nazi
dictatorship by the journalists destroyed the originally fairly positive attitude
toward Germany the author had expressed in her diary entries and letters from
Germany in the years 1931–1932.
In “The Leaning Tower” Charles Upton,24 Porter’s authorial substitute, perceives the Germans generally as disgusting, ugly, obese, and repulsive: “the
people, shameless mounds of fat, stood in a trance of pig worship, gazing with
eyes damp with admiration and appetite. They resembled the most unkind caricatures of themselves, but they were the very kind of people that Holbein and
Dürer and Urs Graf had drawn, too . . . their late-medieval faces full of hallucinated malice and a kind of sluggish, but intense cruelty that worked its way up
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from their depths slowly through the layers of helpless gluttonous fat.”25 The
meanness with which the owners of the hotel revenge themselves on Charles
Upton accounts for his emotions;26 such a portrayal also reveals, however, the
extent to which Porter’s thinking had changed, even outdoing Poultney
Bigelow’s rewriting of his experience in response to the climate of opinion
during World War I when he revoked his sympathetic presentation of the
Hohenzollerns and Germany.
In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” one of her masterly stories forming the Miranda
cycle, the protagonist had displayed a critical attitude toward the patriotic propaganda of the time of the Great War with its crudely hostile image of the Germans. Later letters, like the one mentioned by Givner27 from the year 1939 to
Porter’s old friend Erna Schlemmer, contain hints as to why the author had originally been attracted to Germany. For Porter’s mouthpiece, the young American
painter Upton, the memory of the romantic aura that the stories of his childhood friend Kuno evoked in him provides an important motive for his journey to
Berlin. The exaggerated “romantic” expectations of the author, who had come
to Germany in the company of her future husband Eugene Pressley, are probably one cause of the deep disappointment conveyed in “The Leaning Tower.” In
her letters she had still offered a relatively favorable portrait of the landlady of
the boardinghouse, Rosa Reichel, who was from Vienna, and her lodgers. However, in her story, for which she chose the Berlin of the winter of 1931–1932 as
the setting, she adopted a very critical tone toward her characters. Rosa Reichel
is even turned into a “sinister malicious person.” Similarly, in a letter to
Josephine Herbst, Porter had exonerated the Germans in general after the
National Socialists came to power in 1933, whereas she later passed the most
severe judgment on the nation as a whole and regarded its collective guilt as
beyond doubt. This radical shift in the author’s opinion coincides with a period
when Porter was increasingly dominated by hatred of the Germans, who had by
that time occupied Paris.28
Various experiences of the author in Berlin, the social contacts with Nazi
bigwigs like Hermann Göring, are excluded from “The Leaning Tower,” just as
is Porter’s anti-Semitic attitude.29 There is every indication that Porter, like Kay
Boyle, was very slow in discerning the true character of the Nazi tyranny and
that at first she did not take any offense at the manifestions of the Nazi movement.30 After her “enlightenment,” however, Porter adopted an even more
vehement stance against these phenomena and expressed disgust with the
purveyors of such ideas both in private conversations and in her fiction. With
few exceptions all Germans are generally tainted by such an aversion.31
A different facet of Porter’s image of Germany became visible in her long
story “Holiday” (1960). The story, which remained a torso for decades, is
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apparently based on her flight to the countryside that was triggered by her marital crisis in 1912. It led to her closer acquaintance with an extended family living in Texas but originally from northern Germany, who stubbornly clung to
the cultural heritage of the Old World.
The Müller clan resides on a remote farm close to the state line with
Louisiana where they work the fertile soil finding self-fulfillment in their solidarity. They converse in Low German, which initially exludes the first-person
narrator, the young protagonist. She cannot resist the strong impression the
archaic, patriarchal structure of the clan makes on her. Her initial disappointment at the bleak appearance of her holiday lodgings in the country gives way
to an awareness of being drawn into a vital sphere in which vigorous human
beings defend their heritage in their struggle with natural forces.32 Porter’s
own experience furnished the basis for an understanding of a foreign, outdated way of life, which took its bearings not from religious traditions but
from old customs cultivated in the turnverein supported by Father Müller’s old
edition of Karl Marx’ Das Kapital.
The sudden manifestation of the power of Death, which snatches away the
mother of the family, certainly exposes the precarious nature of the apparent
idyll. The startling discovery by the narrator that Ottilie, who toils as the maid
of the house and loads the table to abundance with food (a stereotype in tune
with the depiction of farmers of German stock), is herself a handicapped child
of the family underlines the theme of disillusion and a resigned insight into the
human condition. Despite the painful initiation of the narrator and her many
disappointments, the human dignity of the Müller family, whose horizon is as
restricted as that of the Pennsylvania Dutch who caught the attention of early
American travel writers with their clumsiness, industriousness, and frugality,
is, in the last analysis, not put in doubt. In this sketch completed by Porter only
briefly before the publication of Ship of Fools,33 which in its turn exploited to the
full the technique of caricature, she created a kind of counterpoint to the
extremely negative cliché of Germany applied there.
When in 1962, more than thirty years after Porter’s own journey on the Werra
from Vera Cruz to Bremerhaven (from 22 August to 17 September 1931) her
novel (on which she had been working since the 1930s) finally appeared, it
quickly made the bestseller lists though a minority of serious critics dismissed
it for the stereotyped traits of its characters. A comparison of the passengers
on the historical Werra and the fictional Vera, now possible since Porter’s
detailed description has survived in a letter to Caroline Gordon and is accessible in the edition of her letters, shows a remarkable degree of correspondence
in the factual details.34 Many of the sharply etched figures are based on her fellow passengers.35 Cripples and obese persons, invalids, pregnant wives, young
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mothers, and brides attracted the scrutiny of the author and were then transplanted from reality to the decks of the Ship of Fools. Through a process of condensation, however, the passengers and the crew of the ship are schematized
and stereotyped. Furthermore, the dramatis personae are neatly listed according to nations and their typical features catch the narrator’s eye from the beginning even before they board the ship, which is described as “honest, reliable
and homely as a German housewife” (p. 30). The initially enthusiastic chorus
of reviewers was soon joined by voices that found fault with the exhaustiveness
bordering on redundancy with which the author underlines typical behavior
and with which she exposes human faults and weaknesses. A universal corruption seems implied. This manifests itself in the animosity that develops
between the passengers squeezed into the confines of their small cabins. The
plot is largely limited to their disagreements at table and to their constant quarrels, but reaches a climax in the chaos of the “fête” initiated by dubious Spanish dancers and musicians.
On the debit side it has long been noted that the majority of the approximately two dozen passengers in first class (and of the officers of the ship) are
depicted as stereotyped Germans, whom the reader is apt to dislike not only for
their conduct but also for their beliefs. In view of the authorial direction of such
emotions against the many arrogant, racist, and vulgar or dipsomaniac characters, critics have accused Porter of not only giving free rein to her hatred of the
Germans, but also of revealing herself as a misanthrope. Apart from portraying
the thoroughly evil twins in the Zarzuela group, she uses her narrative technique
and rhetoric to expose representatives of various nations as weak, selfish, egoistic, or brutal. That Porter subsequently maintained in an interview that she was
herself among the passengers on that ship has prompted some critics to point
out some features of the author in several of the women characters.36 Yet the
modicum of self-criticism apparent in such an authorial procedure does not
basically invalidate the criticism that the novel is based too much on stereotypes
and negative clichés.
The fact remains that Porter comes dangerously close to a misanthropic
caricature in her depiction of the overwhelming majority of German passengers, beginning with the “pig-snouted” Herr Siegfried Rieber, whose beastlike
outward appearance matches his crude thinking and is graphically presented
in recurrent animal imagery.37 While opportunities for more subtle effects are
lost by such methods, the reader is irritated by the quasi-documentary text’s
anachronistic exaggeration of anti-Semitic measures on the ship. Not only is
the dislikable businessman Julius Loewenthal, himself inclined to prejudices,
banished to a small side table in the ship’s restaurant, but one of the very few
personable Germans, Wilhelm Freytag, is also removed from the captain’s
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table solely because he is married to a young Jew. Porter’s readiness to employ
ahistorical hyperbole in the plot causes the novel to lose the aura of authenticity that it undeniably aspires to, at least as far as the historically well-informed
reader is concerned.
On the other hand, several passengers on the Vera advocate familiar core
ideas of the Nazis when they agree on the use of euthanasia to eliminate
“unworthy life.” Herr Rieber considers himself a wit when he recommends
putting the Spaniards deported from Cuba into a gas chamber. He also regards
the “extermination of all the unfit” as desirable. Racist ideas also dominate the
reflections of Frau Rittersdorf, whose pronounced class arrogance also corresponds to a familiar cliché of the many that are subsumed under the word
“Germany.” As her friends’ plan to marry her to a Mexican has failed, she
believes she can see the hand of providence in this episode: “Indeed, I may yet
see the all-guiding Will of my race in it” (Ship of Fools, 44).
It is also no coincidence that several of the returnees to Germany are
schoolteachers. The conviction that blood and education must cooperate, that
only patriotism, willpower, and a sense of order provide the basis for an adequate education is part of the creed of Professor Hutten and allegedly typical of
Germany. The late husband of the widowed Frau Schmitt also belonged to this
type; she herself taught languages, while Frau Hutten represents the familiar
type of the stout hausfrau.
The recurrent stereotype similes used to describe Lizzi Spöckenkieker’s
conduct in her relationship with the sensual-brutish Siegfried Rieber and her
shrill laughter, which is repeatedly compared to that of a hyena, obviously tend
to disparage the individual. But the direct reference to the reservoir of national
stereotypes is immediately apparent even with regard to outward appearance
when Captain Thiele enters the scene: “In stiff immaculate white with bits of
gold braid and lettering disposed hieratically upon his chest, collar, shoulders,
he bore himself rigidly, and his face was that of a pompous minor god” (Ship of
Fools, 99).
Through his bearing he represents the type of the Prussian country squire
and he is later explicitly identified as such. His absolute belief in discipline and
his respect for the authorities are underlined, just as his nostalgic, backwardlooking admiration for an old, greater Germany. “He brooded on his vanished
Germany, the Germany of his childhood and earliest youth, the only Germany
whose existence he admitted in his soul—that fatherland of order, harmony,
simplicity, propriety, where every public place was hung with signs forbidding
this or that” (p. 410).
That for him strict regulations accompanied by many prohibitions are a
prerequisite of a well-ordered society is aptly stressed in a longer portrait of his
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character at a moment when the Zarzuela Company is undermining the wellkept order on board.38 The arrogance of this relic of the German Empire, however, has become manifest in an interior view furnished much earlier. The
captain’s antipathy was triggered by the joyful improvised festivity of the
deported Spaniards crowded together in the steerage, especially by the southern rhythms of their music. Discipline as an antidote to anarchic behavior is a
key to the conduct of the German officers on the Vera. It also characterizes the
young man who is rejected by the drunken Mrs. Treadwell at the end of the
riotous festivity aboard ship. He masters it thanks to his good breeding, thus
providing at least one positive facet in a negative overall image.
Numerous stereotyped passages in the novel reveal that it was by this time
almost impossible to break the link between gluttony and the German national
character. The vast quantities of food served and consumed are again and again
labeled as typically German. The obese characters among the passengers and
the crew are presented at their gourmandizing, which for them from the outset
has something of a sublime and typically German character: “They fell upon
their splendid full-bodied German food with hot appetites” (p. 50). It is presumably no accident that the exception to the stereotype, Dr. Schumann, the
ship’s doctor, stands out among the Germans through his very frugality: “Dr.
Schumann ate with the moderation of an abstemious man who could hardly
remember when last he had been really hungry. The guests gave him admiring
glances as they ate and drank. The highest kind of German good breeding, they
could see, with the dignity of his humane profession adding still more luster”
(p. 50).
The fact that he, like the ship’s physician in Porter’s own transatlantic journey, has a large scar gained in a duel while a student in Heidelberg, immediately reveals, as it were, his national mark.39 But through a shift in the narrative
technique Dr. Schumann is clearly set apart from the other German characters.
While they all enter the scene as anonymous objects and are only gradually
named, he is immediately identified as the ship’s surgeon and given his full
name; he is also granted an important role in the control of the reader’s
response when he surveys the passengers coming aboard. When he glances at
the new arrivals, the authorial control underlines his humanity: “His lightbrown eyes leveled calmly upon a given point where the people approached and
passed, were without speculation and curiosity, but with an abstract goodness
and even sweetness in them” (p. 28).
His regional origin and his plain but deep religiosity (he is a Catholic from
Bavaria without being sanctimonious like “the dying religious enthusiast
Willibald Graf”) distinguish him from the other figures of German extraction in
Porter’s satirical allegory, who are for the most part mentally and even physically
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deformed. As he attends calmly to the passengers, especially the emotionally
unstable but still seductive Condesa, who is on her way into exile, the physician
with his sense of responsibility stands out among the others on the ship, which
resembles a combination of hotel and hospital.40 Suffering from acute heart
disease and aware of his own approaching death, in a text that mercilessly
exposes selfish narrow-mindedness and offers hardly any prospect of positive
developments in soul and character, Dr. Schumann represents some positive
facets in the image of the Germans, similar to those that had appeared in American literature of the nineteenth century.
gertrude stein
In Gertrude Stein’s influential avant-garde experiments with language the
reader can hardly expect to find a simple reflection of personal experience, for
instance with individual Germans. Nevertheless, the work of this mentor of
the modernists, whose salon served for decades as the meeting place of European artists and American expatriates, includes many statements, both explicit
or implicit, on the German national character. The youngest daughter of
Daniel Stein (the son of Meyer Stein, who had emigrated from Bavaria in 1841)
moved permanently to Paris in 1903, after studying psychology at Harvard and
at the Harvard Annex in Radcliffe, as well as further studies she did not complete. Her intimate relationship with French culture that was manifest in her
salon and that developed over several decades shaped her book Paris, France
(1940), composed on the eve of World War II. In it she showed, as it were, her
debt of gratitude to the culture and the lifestyle of her host country, which she
contrasted in this book particularly with England. Paris, France was published
almost demonstratively at a time when the American expatriates were returning home before the approaching front.41
Her identification with her second home and the settling of accounts with
the German occupying forces dominate her memoirs Wars I Have Seen, published in 1945. Here she reveals a number of weaknesses of the German soldiers retreating before the invasion force, especially their fear and cowardice.42
She also believes she has observed stupidity in the German occupiers, repeatedly outwitted by the resistance fighters. She perceives the Germans as basically weak beings, whose very weakness leads them to oppress other peoples.
The painful experiences during the German occupation of France related in
Wars I Have Seen no doubt also shaped the intriguing article she published in Life
magazine two months after the capitulation of Germany (“Off We All Went to
See Germany,” Life magazine, 6 August 1945, 54, 56–58). Here, it seems the
author deliberately refuses to become emotionally involved with the defeated
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whose ruined cities she inspects, first from the air in the military planes that
took her from Paris to various German cities, of which Frankfurt, Cologne, and
Nuremberg were the most devastated. Thus her style, with its paratactic syntax
and recurrent phrases, excises feelings of sympathy or even empathy when the
author faces Cologne, a city “spread out . . . without a roof,” or Nuremberg,
which is reduced to rubble, and is “more nonexistent, nothing really left except
a piece of the old wall” (p. 58).
At the same time the text conveys Stein’s enjoyment of the various stages of
the trip; during one of them the pilot apparently allowed her to steer the airplane “like a ship.” Accompanied by her lifelong companion Alice Toklas she
seems to take genuine pleasure in communicating with the soldiers, but she
thinks fit to warn them against fraternizing with the Germans, who are ready
to flatter the victors. And the advice she has for the future reeducation of the
Germans is to “teach them disobedience” because that was their chief fault:
“obedient peoples go to war, disobedient peoples like peace” (p. 56). While
noticing the hostile glances of the defeated German civilians observing women
among the occupying forces, she shows understanding for the triumph of the
troops and passes a lenient judgment on their “liberation” of objects they collect, since she has the same temptation when she and her friend visit Berchtesgaden, and contemplate removing a “radiator” and other relics of the Nazi
bigwigs as trophies.
In Wars I Have Seen Stein provides generalizations in concise, recurring
phrases inserted in this book, and their form recalls the early avant-garde
achievement of The Making of Americans, though this later text not only aims at
experimenting with language but also contains pragmatic statements. In the
context of her memoirs Stein also refers to her stay of several years in Vienna
(1874–1878) and dwells on that phase of her life, to which biographical
research has paid attention because of the notes taken by her brother Leo and
the letters of her eldest brother Michael.43 This experience in her infancy, the
result of her father’s wish to promote the language competence of his children
by immersing them in another language environment, had little effect on her
image of the German-speaking part of Central Europe. Similarly, Gertrude
Stein’s impressions at Harvard as a student of the great cultural mediator Münsterberg and of Santayana did not provide a counterweight to her identification
with France, which developed over several decades. Thus it was completely natural that Stein borrowed from the French autostereotype in Paris, France and
that she took the negative French heterostereotypes of the Germans as her
point of orientation during World War II.
Retrospectively we may claim, however, a certain connection between
Stein’s contemptuous attitude to the intelligence of the Germans in Wars I Have
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Seen, viewed primarily on the pragmatic level of the political and military conflict, and those stereotype traits that are ascribed in the shortest of the Three
Lives44 to “Gentle Lena,” who emigrated from Germany. That patient and passive housemaid45 who allowed herself to be first guided and regimented by her
aunt Mathilda Haydon and then also by Herman Kreder, who only reluctantly
agreed to marry her, is from the opening sentence onward stereotypically presented as a German woman. (“Lena was patient, gentle, sweet and german
[sic].”) The stylistic device of repetition already employed by Stein underlines
the salient feature of this humble woman, whose nature contrasts strikingly
with that of her friend Mary. Of the latter it is explicitly stated: “Mary was goodnatured, quick, intelligent and Irish,” while Lena conforms to the cliché of the
patience and submission of the German housewife: “beneath [her thick, black
eyebrows] were her hazel eyes, simple and human, with the earth patience of
the working, gentle, german woman” (p. 241). This simple creature, whom
Mrs. Haydon repeatedly accuses of being stupid, was sent for in Germany from
Bridgepoint (that is, Baltimore) and patiently spent four years in her first job.
“Lena’s german patience held no suffering. . . . She stood in the hallway every
morning a long time in her unexpectant and unsuffering german patience calling to the young ones to get up” (p. 239).
Later Lena endures Herman Kreder’s lack of interest as well as several pregnancies before she dies, unnoticed and unlamented, as the consequence of her
fourth pregnancy. Lena’s mild, patient behavior and dullness are apparently
presented in conformity with the stable stereotype of the dull-witted German
housewife. Decades later, in an era when a destructive dynamic was triggered
by Lena’s fanatical fellow countrymen, Gertrude Stein in her settling of
accounts with the occupiers of her second home was again, and this time without any redeeming features, to refer to the mental slowness and the dullness of
the Germans.
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CHAPTER 8
THE
BURDEN
OF THE PAST
POST-WAR
GERMANY
The reports and above all the photographs of the liberation of emaciated prisoners from the concentration camps disclosed to the American public the
extent of the bestial crimes of Nazi Germany, and justified for many observers
the summary attribution of guilt to the Germans. Not surprisingly the writers
accompanying the Allied troops were particularly shocked at the extent to
which inhibitions had been dismantled. Next to eloquent condemnation and
accusation, silence appeared as an adequate reaction. In this context it is striking that there was a delay in the United States in the literary representation of
the horrors of the “Final Solution.” It was only from the late 1960s onward that
the theme of the Holocaust and of German responsibility for it was dealt with.1
But once it was breached, a veritable flood of publications and contributions
appeared in the various media. Yet it would be erroneous to assume that postwar Germany was rendered only in the reports of prominent correspondents
like John Dos Passos, who was an observer at the Nuremberg Trials.2
The experience of millions of American soldiers and the presence of hundreds of thousands of them as members of the occupying forces or as civilian
officials of the military government was given literary form in a wide range of
texts in the first decade after the war.3 The conviction that many, if not most
Germans had been Nazis and had been involved in crimes was an extremely
heavy burden for Germans encountering the Western world. The initially
strict regulations in force for the soldiers of the occupying forces on the distance to be observed in their dealings with the defeated enemy, who was everywhere suspect of being inclined to slide back into Nazism, fostered the use of
clichés. Favorable impulses resulted from the project of reeducation, which
supplemented the program of de-Nazification in the cultural sphere and
which was intended to rebuild the basis for democracy destroyed by the propaganda of the Nazis.4 GIs were also confronted with the destitution of the
population amid the rubble of the German cities and their reports contained
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distressing assessments, which led to concrete economic programs and many
philanthropic initiatives.
The rapidly escalating East-West conflict soon brought about a dramatic shift
in the priorities of the Western Allies, who now began to contemplate the energetic rebuilding of the industry and economy of Germany. The breach with the
Soviets not only led to the inclusion of West Germany in Western defense strategy toward the Soviet Bloc, but also ushered in a new evaluation of the Germans,
who were rapidly becoming important partners on account of the closer economic and political cooperation. The change in perspective was foreshadowed
as early as 1947 in the influential annotated anthology published by Philip Rahv
under the title Discovery of Europe.5 The subsequent “economic miracle” in West
Germany filled writers with respect. It also fostered, however, the resurrection of
some latent clichés concerning German expansionism. At the same time the
increasing modernization of society, which was often interpreted in Germany
itself as “Americanization,” led to the reduction of many heterostereotypes, for
instance, that of the very restricted role of plump German women as housewives.
American observers were thus surprised in the 1960s by the elegant lifestyle and
the modern appearance of young German women.
With the growing success of the intensely competitive German industry,
whose products were deemed reliable and efficient (for instance, Volkswagen
and Mercedes), and with the popularity of a lifestyle among German youth
widely regarded as Americanized, quite a few commentators no longer saw the
formerly obvious differences between the United States and Germany. Yet,
while this development held little attraction for those American writers who, as
the analysis of travel books and of their fictional offshoots has shown, were
looking in foreign settings for material far removed from the everyday, it also
led to a rapid reduction in the number of stereotypes and crude negative clichés
in travel sketches and nonfiction books. Academic exchange programs like the
generous program named after Senator James William Fulbright contributed
to the removal of latent heterostereotypes, thus enabling large-scale transatlantic encounters among young graduates and future opinion leaders.6 The
positive image of West Germans held by the American public was parallel to
the establishment of new negative heterostereotypes, which culminated in the
cluster of clichés coined later by Ronald Reagan, when he spoke of the Communist power of the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire.”7
American writers, however, showed a more pronounced inclination to persist in their opinions than leading politicians, who quickly adapted to the new
political climate in the world. For decades after World War II more than a few
authors permitted prejudices and stereotypes mediated by literature to appear
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not only in their fiction but also in functional text types. They vehemently
opposed initiatives prompted by political expediency and consequences of the
alliance between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States.8
Irrespective of the close economic and cultural ties, and the growth in
mutual understanding, a negative variant of the image of Germany gained
ground and, from the 1960s onward, again dominated in the media. This has
been shown in empirical investigations of the cinema and television and will
be demonstrated in connection with literary texts. In contrast to the situation
in the 1930s and seemingly detached from the image of a stable democratic
society in West Germany mediated in nonfiction books and travelogues, American fiction and the cinema seemed to concentrate on the dark German past
and its relics in the present. On the one hand, many American authors and
filmmakers suspected a continuity of ideological rubble and racist tendencies
lying dormant under the surface of the country of the “economic miracle,” and
they began to use the era of Nazism with its aberrations and horrors as an
almost inexhaustible source of material. On the other hand, recourse to the
Nazi era offered itself for reasons that were implicit in American reality, for
instance, when the aim was to expose embarrassing parallels in America
itself.9 In this case their claims of focusing on aspects of the real Germany in
the present faded into the background.
Initially a number of authors like John Hawkes, Kay Boyle, and Thomas
Berger drew on what they had gone through in the war and the period immediately following it. Other writers, like Kurt Vonnegut, dwelt on their own experience of the horror years after the event. On the basis of thorough research and
systematic reading members of the younger generation of authors evoked an
image of Germany centered on the Nazi era (Thomas Pynchon). Similarly, many
responded creatively to the discussion of the atrocities of the Holocaust initiated,
and not silenced, since the filming of Anne Frank’s diary in 1959 and intensified
by Jewish American intellectuals after the Six Days’ War. What was presented in a
good deal of fiction was a fundamental anachronistic panorama. This image was
shaped by the inherent dynamics of processes of literary reception and individual
psychological needs on the part of modernist and postmodernist authors.
The unrest caused by the dramatic changes in Central and Eastern Europe in
1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany, creating a very populous
country with the at the time strongest economy in Europe but also one in which
nationalistic forces gained ground, fostered the resurrection of latent stereotypes.10 These stereotypes have continued to be available in a number of fictions in which Germans were again the center of interest as carriers of
totalitarian ideas lusting after power.
p o s t- war germ an y
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the nightmare scenery of john hawkes’
the cannibal
Very few first novels have had a comparably lasting effect on their readership as
the postmodern novel The Cannibal (1949) by John Hawkes (1925–1998). The
young author wrote the book while still a student at Harvard attending the creative writing course held by Albert Guerard. In it he achieved surrealistic
effects, exploiting the impressions he had gained at the end of World War II
during his stint as the driver of an ambulance in northern Germany. Although
he largely renounced the traditional elements of fiction, turning the book into
an avant-garde tour de force, Hawkes presents the country occupied by the
Allied forces as a macabre nightmare landscape. The novel, which makes special demands on the reader through its segmented plot structure and frequent
shifts between two time levels, hints that incorrigible supporters of the ousted
regime are working toward the violent reestablishment of the old system.
Like John Irving, who gave free rein to his inclination to draw a picture of a
decadent society in Central Europe,11 Hawkes underlined in several interviews
that he had not been concerned with representing the real Germany. Despite
this denial by the author and his embracing of an antirealistic stance,12 the
reader, through numerous allusions and the details of the setting, is not left in
the dark about the location of chaotic events portrayed in the novel. Martin
Meyer has justly pointed out that the macabre incidents recorded in The Cannibal as taking place in Spitzen on the Dein, where finally Zizendorf ’s coup foreshadows the establishment of a new dystopia, cannot be understood without
taking into account the historical Germany.13 The author, incidentally, maintained in the interview mentioned above that the ghoulish episode near the
end of the novel (the murder committed by the mad Duke, who kills Jutta’s
young son in the hunger-stricken town of Spitzen on the Dein and invites the
latter’s aunt Stella to the gruesome feast) was inspired by his reading about a
case of cannibalism in Bremen.14 The surreal game the author plays with horrific situations offers sufficient hints that the scenario is to be regarded as the
depiction of an alienated post-war Germany reduced to the dimensions of a
microcosm. The degenerate society provides constant reminders of German
customs and habits, an impression that is equally supported by typical garments (shorts and suspenders), forms of entertainment (brass bands and
beer houses), and typical dishes, as well as the insignia of the military past
and of German student life. These details are partly introduced through the
narrative voice, and partly evoked in the memories of people now hungry and
freezing in unheated rooms.15 Even more conspicuous are the frequent references to Teutonism as well as the allusions to German mythology. They
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underscore specific features of several important figures, but also convey
deeper anxieties and suggest the overwhelming powers of the subconscious.
The grotesque action, whose oppressive effect is heightened by the presence
of the former inmates of a lunatic asylum, similarly appeals, no doubt, to
those deeper levels of the reader’s psyche.
A connection between the horrible present in which the landscape is contaminated by the stench of putrefaction and the gamut of German history and
prehistory is established primarily by Stella Snow. Her parental home, where
earlier she filled a superior social role, and her strange union with the sickly
son of the owner of a brewery, take center stage in the middle of the novel. As
the daughter of a general who was already senile when she was a child, Stella
functions as a witness of the unspeakable events of 1914, among which the
assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip is, as it were, resurrected
in a strange role-play spectacle. Through her father, a veteran of the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–1871, Stella becomes involved in the fateful implication
of her nation in several European catastrophes. Irrespective of whether the
reader takes the central part of the narrative and its frame as a sensitive
description of the events by a first-person narrator, namely the self-appointed
new political leader Zizendorf, the organization of the book suggests that
destructive acts and a perverse cult of death are integral features of the German
character. Thus the author provides a link with the arsenal of stereotypes from
the time of World War I. The masochism in Ernst Snow’s behavior and the
appearance of Stella Snow (who appears as a personified Germania or a kind
of Teutonic Proserpina), her genealogy, and her former place of residence
(“Grab,” which means “grave”) allude to the death wish.16 The power of
Thanatos in a society that has in the meantime become amorphous and homeless in a ruined landscape cannot be overlooked.
Despite the complicated differentiation between concrete action and hallucination, the behavior of the characters and their statements create the impression that the reestablishment of a totalitarian regime under the aegis of
Madame Stella Snow is imminent.17 The main actors of the novel live on the
various floors of her home, which now serves as a boardinghouse: Zizendorf,
the first-person narrator and editor of the local newspaper, who is seemingly
omniscient; and Stella’s sister Jutta, who, while her husband is listed missing
in action in Russia, is involved with various men and her children. The house is
also the abode of the Duke, a former tank commander, and the census taker,
who is constantly drunk and yields to his perverse sexual drives. A significant
marginal figure is Balamir, one of the former inmates of the madhouse now in
ruins on the outskirts of the town. There refugees and deportees occasionally
crowd into the shell of this building, while Balamir himself has taken shelter
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in the basement of Madame Snow’s home, where he clings to his fancy of having been a son of Emperor Wilhelm.
The attempts of the Allied occupying forces to root out once and for all
totalitarianism by severely punishing followers of the former regime, like Pastor Miller, have been of no avail. The outlawed ideology continues to be propagated at secret nocturnal meetings and the project prepared in Mme. Snow’s
house is finally carried out by Zizendorf and his accomplices. The assassination of a representative of the Allied forces in the figure of Leevey, the solitary
motorcycle rider who has been assigned the task of patroling part of a zone of
Germany, represents the chief test case for the reactionary forces.18 However,
the circumstances under which the solemn proclamation of a return to a totalitarian regime is printed in a chicken coop only superficially cleaned, and the
way in which it is circulated, give a parodistic turn to the rebellion. In the context of many gruesome acts of violence through which various opponents and
eyewitnesses of the plot are eliminated, and which include the murder of
Jutta’s son, who has been pursued by the Duke from the outset, these episodes
appear as additional absurd elements in a black comedy. Hawkes is obviously
expressing his own fears in a grotesquely deformed shape. Following his
encounter with chaotic postwar Germany, he formulated a pessimistic diagnosis not only for Central Europe but also for world history. As in a distorting mirror the author employed phenomena usually associated with Germany and the
Germans to construct a nightmare world.
Hawkes’ decision to abandon the originally chosen authorial narrative situation in the course of his final revisions and to assign to Zizendorf an unexplained omniscience may suggest that a merely hallucinatory quality is being
ascribed to the events presented.19 However, the concreteness of the impressions works against this interpretation. The text can also be read on a more
general level and interpreted as a sign of concern about the revival of totalitarian tendencies amid the poverty and ruins. Nevertheless, it reflects a basic
skepticism concerning post-war Germany20 though without attributing to
Germany and the Germans a priori and explicitly, as had Louis Bromfield, an
exceptional inclination to evil.
By employing a closely woven net of clichés borrowed from the arsenal of
stereotypes applicable to Germany The Cannibal invited its readership to read
the text pragmatically as a statement on the current situation of post-war Germany. This is shown in the introductory comment by Guerard, Hawkes’ mentor, who explains directly the possibility of regarding Stella Snow as “both
Germany herself and the Teutonic female and fertility principles, the traditional earth-mother of German beer and metaphysics” (The Cannibal, xi). As an
aside he also offers a critical comment on the beginnings of the American pol144 ]
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icy of integrating with Germany into the Western Alliance.21 In contrast,
Patrick O’Donnell has pleaded for not expecting an exploration of some “‘real’
history” but for regarding the novel as an investigation of the “psychic history
of the contemporary imagination.”22 By repeating clichés almost to the point
of redundancy, the author has, however, risked encouraging his less sophisticated readers to read it as a confirmation of stereotypes. A similar problem
arose several decades later in connection with Walter Abish’s How German Is It,
which owed much to Hawkes’ novel.
thomas berger’s gis in crazy in berlin
Greater uncertainty about the image of Germany was prompted by the appearance of Thomas Berger’s first novel Crazy in Berlin (1958), which takes the
reader to the devastated landscape of the German capital immediately after the
end of the war. This book opened the Reinhart cycle, which was to grow into a
tetralogy.23 It collected as if in a storehouse the various clichés and aspects of
the American heterostereotype of the Germans. Through various flashbacks
and narratives by individual characters, it offered, in the manner of a chronicle,
the vicissitudes and phases in the development of the German image in America in the twentieth century.
Through the choice of Carlo Reinhart, a somewhat ungainly fellow, as the
protagonist, the memory of the difficult situation of this ethnic group in the
American Midwest in and after World War I is evoked; parallels with the life of
the author are apparent. A simple autobiographical interpretation of the protagonist is, however, impossible, even though he is linked by a similar mentality and a number of specific experiences to the author.24 In his outward
gigantic appearance, Reinhart turns out to be a comic figure, who is extremely
prone to making mistakes and is immature (though he celebrates his twentyfirst birthday in Berlin at the beginning of the novel). While he searches for his
own identity and tries to consolidate it, his thoughts keep circling around the
question of how to interpret the conduct of the Germans during the Nazi dictatorship, how the survivors are coping with their past, and whether through his
paternal grandfather and his German heritage he himself has to carry his share
of the indisputable guilt. Therefore his desire to find his unknown German relatives increases; this, however, proves impossible.
In addition other figures take center stage and, in a probable concession to
the taste of the general reader, the novel benefits by borrowing from popular
literary genres such as the spy novel. In the context of this genre the fate of the
Jewish American Lieutenant Nathan Schild, the grandson of a Berliner, takes
its course: a secret service man who is also a double agent of the Soviet Union.
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Schild becomes an informer and the temporary victim25 of the villainous
Schatzi, a chameleonlike figure. Ironically, Schatzi insists on going to America
because he also fears his Soviet employers. He had been forced to serve them as
a former member of the SA, as a survivor of the suppression of the so-called
Röhm plot and as a political prisoner at Auschwitz.
Schatzi represents in extreme form the misguided quest of the German
psyche. So do other German men and women who have lived through the terror regime and have been either reduced to a state of confusion by the war or
have lost all sense of restraint in the struggle for survival. In long conversations
with these figures, which take place between heaps of rubble and the remains
of bunkers in the devastated landscape of Berlin, the past is sounded out and
explored. Physically and emotionally crippled individuals, veterans of the war,
and former inmates of concentration camps provide sometimes misleading
answers to Reinhart’s insistent questions. Their confessional narratives,
sometimes embellished and sometimes even freely invented, together with
their deliberate tactical maneuvers and attempts at obfuscation26 do not, however, offer any solution to Reinhart’s quest for the deeper causes of the atavistic
drives in Nazi ideology.
In addition to discussing Nazism in theory and practice Reinhart’s debates
also examine the other contemporary form of totalitarian ideology, namely
Stalinism.27 A lack of information fosters the illusions of the United States
held by the Russian officer Lichenko and those of the American double agent
Schild about the Soviet Union. Eventually Reinhart almost completely loses
track of things, and his assessment of the people of Central Europe remains
ambivalent until the end. But his understanding for the experience of others
has increased. Reinhart does not, however, come to any satisfactory conclusion in his main quest. The reader only registers phases in his search for a stable identity and a development in Reinhart’s attitude toward the Germans.
They correspond to the chronological sequence of the dominant facets and
clichés of Germany in American literature.
In Reinhart’s childhood in the Midwest among an initially self-confident
ethnic minority, the term “German” was originally positively connoted, suggesting a certain solidity: “From birth he had been a good, sturdy German type,
lived in a solid German house, on a diet of G. [sic] potato salad (with vinegar)”
(p. 15). The adjective “German,” it is true, implied a certain lack of intelligence
and a frugal lifestyle, as well as the inclination to be moderate and represent
the average in every respect.28 In his childhood memories, the Germans were
not only thought to be philistines, but also stigmatized so that nobody wanted
to play the role of a German in children’s games: “When one was ten, nobody,
least of all the boys of German stem, served willingly on the Kaiser’s side in
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war games” (p. 31).29 Even the children were familiar with the negative images
disseminated by the war propaganda of the Entente: “the pigface Hun, bayoneter of Belgian babies, violator of maidens; cabbage for a head, sausagelimbed, cheeks of ass like dirigibles kissing, he waddled in cruel insolence
before the helpless or groveled in fright before his master” (p. 32). Reinhart’s
performance in a German language course in college remained very modest.
His reading, however, convinced him that the horror stories circulating about
the Germans were merely products of the propaganda of the Entente.30 This
conviction was a major reason for Reinhart, just as it was for a wider American
readership, to be skeptical about warnings concerning the Hitler regime:
“[O]pposed to the little, venomous, weak French and the British, thin and
effeminate, they [the Nazis] could hardly be assigned the exclusive evil in an
intestine European quarrel over markets and territories” (p. 39).
In the course of a painful learning process Reinhart, however, finally perceives that reality now corresponded to the reports, and even surpassed them.
The liberation of the concentration camps revealed the extent of inhumanity
practiced there and prompted far-reaching conclusions: “[A]wakening from
his long sleep, he [Reinhart] had begun to see the terrible landscape of actuality. It was false to think that the Nazis were an accidental, noxious but temporary weed upon a permanently rich German ground of the essence, which
might one day be cleared” (p. 47).
Below the surface of the achievements in the “country of poets and
thinkers” inhuman and destructive qualities had come to light in an apparently
logical and consistent manner. Reinhart cannot temporarily avoid the syllogism that “tyranny, militarism, suicide, irresponsibility, and madness” (p. 47)
belong to the permanent traits of German “collectivity.”31 He therefore
becomes increasingly uneasy over the question whether he, as a result of his
heritage, has a share in the alleged destructive urge, whether he himself is
infected with this virus: “If Nazism was a German disease of the bone, his own
marrow, even at two generations’ remove, could hardly be spotless” (p. 66).
This fear motivates his search for his relatives in Berlin, which suddenly
becomes very important to him, as he would like to examine their attitudes and
conduct to assess his own identity. His encounters with a number of characters
in Berlin serve to steer him away from hasty reactions and summary condemnations toward more cautious and considered statements. His self-confidence
is eventually totally undermined, thus keeping him from simple conclusions,
and even making him avoid any use of the word “Nazi.”32 The tension between
the German American Reinhart and German and American Jews, and his attitude to their history of suffering reflect the degree of his own involvement.33
The effect of his encounters with people like the strangely attractive Lori Bach
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and the loving and plump nurse Veronica Leary, as well as his growing insight
into the situation of his “inimical friend” Nathan Schild, finally prompt his
conviction that “someone must care.” Thus an “ethic of decency” is evoked, a
minimalist ethic, which Reinhart as a character can observe and practice.34 It
consists of a homely “particularized idealism” that also is mandatory for the
guilt-ridden people of his host country, where the young German American
serves in the army of occupation.
Until the end the use of the dialogic form of the novel, despite the predominant omniscient mode, permits a trace of ambiguity in Reinhart’s evaluation of
the Germans. The author leaves a great deal of latitude for the reader’s interpretation, though apparently the author himself, through his protagonist, rejects
the notion of a collective guilt. In the context of this investigation it comes as no
surprise that in this important “ethnic novel” Berger allows the analysis of Germany and its history to have important implications for the American sense of
identity. A critical analysis of the heterostereotype of the Germans once again
serves the purpose of critically assessing the author’s “homeland,” as well as
chastising human meanness on both sides of the Atlantic.
kay boyle’s image of germany
after world war ii
The image of Germany fulfilled a similar function in Kay Boyle’s stories,
vignettes, and her novel Generation without Farewell (1960). The revulsion the
author felt at the atrocities of the Nazi dictatorship colored her relationship
with German culture in the years after the war. For that reason it took a long
time before she decided to follow her husband Joseph Franckenstein,35 an aristocratic exiled Austrian employed by the American occupation forces, to Marburg an der Lahn.
Her collection The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany (1951) contained a detailed report on the trial in Frankfurt of a war criminal, a certain
Heinrich Baab, which she had covered as a journalist.36 Here she exposed in
concrete terms the guilt and complicity of this particular member of the SS,
who, as part of the destructive machinery of the Nazi system, had been responsible for deportations and many deaths. At the same time she took the opportunity to deal with the full range of reactions of ordinary Germans during the
Nazi dictatorship and to demonstrate their various roles as victims, henchmen, sympathizers, or apathetic contemporaries. That Boyle was able to
observe the strict separation between the victors and the defeated during the
six months she spent in Marburg in 1948 and the following three years in
Frankfurt, where she volunteered to act as a teacher in a women’s prison,
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sharpened her perception of the problems of the German population with the
past and their sad present. Her friendship with Siegfried Maruhn, as well as her
response to the work of the writer and dramatist Wolfgang Borchert after his
untimely death, contributed significantly to correcting the clichés concerning
Germany that she was always tempted to use. Thus her stories and her novel
composed in the course of the 1950s reflect her increasing familiarity with her
“host country,” and show stereotyped assessments recede in favor of the depiction of individuals.
While several stories in The Smoking Mountain expose the inclination of contemporary Germans to suppress the memory of the preceding era, problematical phenomena emanating from America were also included in the panorama.
Thus Boyle took advantage of an opportunity that texts focusing critically on
foreign customs frequently offer. The destitution in Germany provides the
backdrop for a description of everyday experience, with a touch of local color
derived from the experiences of the author in the state of Hesse. Repeatedly she
notices the reluctance of the Germans to probe their consciences. At the same
time, the international theme gains importance as Boyle sounds out the contrast between the locals and the occupiers, and risks exposing the superficiality,
inconsiderateness, or unscrupulousness of several of her fellow countrymen.
While she illustrates unenlightened and in some cases incorrigible Germans, several of her stories also unmask the questionable nature of conditions
in her own country. This is especially the case with the racial segregation practiced in the American South, which drastically limits the freedom of colored
soldiers. In the story “The Lost,” the black Sergeant Charlie Madden is unable
to adopt a German orphan because of his color, exposing the contradictions in
the attitudes prevalent in his own country to the fundamental values of democracy. Boyle pointed out that racial clichés and prejudices prevalent in her own
country undermined the moral position of those judging Germans for their
racist attitudes in the past. Boyle’s growing inclination to capture both the
good and bad points of the contrasted cultures on both sides of the Atlantic
manifests itself clearly in her novel Generation without Farewell. The title of the
book, taken from a text by Wolfgang Borchert, a German writer, alludes to the
individual fate of the young German named Jaeger, whose fate is also representative of a whole generation. He spent several years as a prisoner of war in Colorado and has been so alienated from his own country and its people that he
now prefers American customs and forms of expression.
The location of the novel, a town called Fahrbach, is a fictionalized representation of Marburg an der Lahn. While the fortunes of Siegfried Maruhn
provided the main material for the character of the protagonist,37 many German phrases and a dense network of historical allusions and borrowings
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from social reality are used to create a plausible atmosphere. Institutions of
the occupying forces, such as the Amerikahaus, which was essential for the
realization of the programs of reeducation, form part of the graphically
depicted milieu.
In this context encounters occur between very different characters. For
instance, Jaeger admires the beautiful and sensitive Catherine Roberts, whose
militaristic and authoritarian husband has no time for her emotional needs.
Colonel Roberts, who finds fulfillment in hunting and in military life, is worlds
apart from his wife, who, through her reading of classic German writers and
familiarity with German myths, carries an idiosyncratic image of the occupied
country in her mind.38 The elective affinity between Catherine and Jaeger, who
is commissioned to act as her language teacher, is already indicated in the
opening scene of the novel. But Jaeger, who ironically carries a name that
would much better suit Colonel Roberts with his preference for hunting, distances himself from the myths of his country, as he does from its cultural practices and educational methods.39 This extends even to his native tongue, which
he is expected to help Catherine acquire. That Jaeger, though young, is a veteran of the Africa Corps commanded by Rommel who like his troops was
much respected by Allied commanders as effective and honorable soldiers,
appears as an almost redundant element in the control of the focus of sympathy in this novel.
Jaeger’s reservations concerning the German language, which he partly
blames for the authoritarian past, are clearly adapted to the attitude of the
American readership. When he desires the simplicity and novelty of American
English instead of his own language with its negative associations,40 his
thoughts betray not only the acute crisis of identity of an individual but also
Kate Boyle’s own perspective. Jaeger’s admission expresses a newfound affinity with the culture of the United States, which he had labeled as inferior during
his school years.
Jaeger’s admiration for Catherine, who yearns for tenderness, seems to
pave the way for a love relationship, which she, however, forgoes as Jaeger is
going through a deep personal crisis. He can, however, overcome the temporary loss of his identity through her help and, after the departure of Catherine
and her daughter,41 he realizes that his place is in his home country.42 The
dichotomy between the characters, Catherine and her husband, continues in
the juxtaposition between the idealistic director of the Amerikahaus in
Fahrbach, Honerkamp (who is devoted to the arts), and Overstreet, an authoritarian officer in the Secret Service, who acts rigidly as a censor. Like their characters, their attitudes toward the Germans are also contrasted. Honerkamp
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exhibits sympathy for the German people, desiring for them musicians and
composers as role models instead of a long sequence of military figures.43
Honerkamp is concerned with making cultural diversity, which has long
been blocked by censorship, accessible to Jaeger’s fellow countrymen and, in
full conviction of the validity of American ideals, also revealing the whole truth
about the United States. On this issue a conflict arises with Overstreet, who is
not prepared to admit critical comments on his own country, and who bars
anything that might call into question its role as a model. An elective affinity
exists between Jaeger and Catherine on the one hand, and Honerkamp on the
other, though his enlightened cultural work in the occupied country probably
also results from his wish to expiate the latent sense of guilt that has haunted
him since his missions as a bomber pilot over the cities of Hesse (p. 184).
Through the authorial control of sympathy in depicting the development of
Jaeger and those figures who show respect for the Germans, Boyle’s image of
the country finally achieves the balance and proportion that the nightmare
scenery in the fiction of Hawkes and Pynchon lacks.
kurt vonnegut’s exploration of absurdity
and his german american heritage
A differentiated presentation of Germany and the Germans is provided in the
fiction of the pioneer of postmodernism, Kurt Vonnegut (born 1922). While
the inspiration to deal with Germany derived, as it did in the cases of Hawkes
and Berger, from his wartime service as a GI, it was not his impressions as a
member of the occupying forces but a traumatic experience that served as the
major source of his fiction. As a prisoner of war in Germany from December
1944, he witnessed the firebomb inferno in Dresden in February 1945. This
horror overshadowed his literary work, playing a major part in his rejection of
national and chauvinistic voices, and his ambivalent relationship to the American sense of identity.44 Two dozen years later he shaped that material and event
in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), employing what were for the time avant-garde
techniques of postmodernism.
We may see a connection between Vonnegut’s ancestry and his exposure of
one of the darkest chapters in the war of the Allies on Nazi Germany. Born in
Indiana, Vonnegut was descended on both sides from Germans who had
migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century and had become successful as entrepreneurs in the Midwest. His autobiographical collage Palm
Sunday (1981) makes it clear, however, that his parents had not passed on anything of their ethnic heritage. Unlike Berger’s Carlo Reinhart, Vonnegut had
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been deprived of this heritage due to the hostility to Germany prevalent in
World War I.
This denial of the family’s roots seems all the more striking as both his parents had spent several years in Germany. His father had continued his study of
architecture after attending a high school in Strasbourg and after studying at
the M.I.T. in Berlin, while his mother Edith stayed several years in Düsseldorf
with her grandfather, who had retired there as the American consul general.
She had also been engaged for a time to a German cavalry captain. In Palm Sunday, Vonnegut very much regretted his “deprivation” in a chronicle, attributed
to an uncle, which in the table of contents is termed “‘An Account of the
Ancestry of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., by an Ancient Friend of His Family’—formal
essay by the late John G. Rauch of Indianapolis.”45 In this historical survey he
also castigated the materialism of his parents and his mother’s nostalgic memories of former affluence, and retrospectively found fault with her fatalism and
weltschmerz. Despite a certain respect for his ancestors, who had acquired
considerable wealth, the author regarded their unconditional integration into
the American mainstream as a considerable disadvantage. It is from here that
he traces his own marginalization.
The withdrawal of his ethnic cultural heritage long preoccupied Vonnegut
and prompted his choice of this phenomenon as subject matter for Dead-Eye
Dick (1982) and Bluebeard (1987). In the former novel the fortunes of Rudy Waltz
reveal many parallels to the life of the author and his relationship with his parents, who, out of expediency, severed their ties with German culture and left
their son merely their agnosticism.46 In an even more alienated version this
theme recurs in Bluebeard in the fate of Rabo Karabekian: in his career several
stages of Vonnegut’s life reappear, from the enforced assimilation to his experience as a prisoner of war. The author’s statements concerning his family history here and in Palm Sunday at the same time mirror several stages in the
bilateral relations and shifts in the dominant facets of the image of Germany
documented in this investigation.
In Mother Night (1961), ten years after his first novel Player Piano and twenty
years before the literary exploration of his lost heritage in Palm Sunday, Vonnegut for the first time allocated important parts to historical and invented
German characters. In doing so, he was responding to the imprisonment of
Adolf Eichmann, a topical event abruptly recalling the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. In this novel Vonnegut enters the world of state terrorism in the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, an American dramatist who, together with his
attractive German wife, the actress Helga Noth, has made his home in Nazi
Germany. Campbell had delivered on the radio hate speeches against the Jews
which, in the obsessively anti-Semitic climate of the day, were taken literally. In
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his “Confession” in Jerusalem, where he is awaiting his trial and where he has
gone of his own accord, he wants the reader to believe that he had in reality
been recruited by the CIA as early as 1938, and that his broadcasts from Berlin
were used to send coded messages to the Allies.47 Campbell’s dilemma and the
curious conduct of his Nazi superiors (Eichmann, Goebbels, and Höss), and
later his fellow believers and his antagonists in New York, where he had lived
unrecognized for many years, become the sources of grotesque scenes that
confirm Vonnegut’s strength is black humor. This strategy seems well suited to
making the far-too-painful omnipresence of injustice, guilt, and criminal
action in the novel more bearable.48 The author allows Campbell in his reminiscences as a successful agent to borrow from a battery of clichés, for instance
when he describes the home of his mother-in-law and her husband, the efficient bureaucrat and commissioner of the Berlin police upon whom the foreign workers he had maltreated take revenge after the war.
While the connection between the trial of Eichmann and Campbell’s fate is
fairly obvious, the historical model is evoked in the text itself in Campbell’s
eager attempt to highlight the difference between his own conduct and Eichmann’s horrible crimes.49 Campbell’s alleged double dealing also had
grotesque parallels in the survival strategies of several of his Jewish guards
who managed to live through the reign of terror. In Campbell’s conduct, in
which destructive impulses from a deeper level of consciousness found an outlet in his hate speeches, his love for his wife Helga provided the necessary support until she was reported missing during the German retreat from the
Crimean peninsula.
In the claims of the first-person narrator50 the specific memories from Nazi
Germany are supplemented by vivid impressions of his New York underground
existence of fifteen years, a kind of purgatory from which there was no exit.
These scenes in American society also confirm the latent destructive features in
the human psyche. Here two protagonists profess a totalitarian ideology:51 Dr.
Lionel J. D. Jones, in a previous life a Nazi agent who now leads a racist antiSemitic organization, and his bodyguard August Krapptauer, a former deputy
federal leader of the Fascist German-American Bund and at the same time liaison to the Ku Klux Klan and to the “Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution.”52 On the other hand, the fanaticism of Bernard B. O’Hare,
a member of the American Legion, who regards the hunt for Campbell as the
great goal in his life, manifests the same destructive drive among the author’s
fellow countrymen.
In line with the intertextual allusions that are characteristic of his fictional
work, Vonnegut allows Campbell to appear again in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
There he gives a speech to Billy Pilgrim and the other American prisoners of
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war in Dresden, in which he tries to recruit them for the Free American Corps,
which is to be employed by the Axis powers against the Russians. Campbell,
here characterized without qualification as an American Nazi, represents the
hierarchy of the Nazi dictatorship.
As Slaughterhouse-Five, which the author finished after revisiting Germany in
1967, is shaped by postmodernist principles and as it contains, in the form of a
collage, various episodes on several time levels and in various modes linked to
the core inspirational experience, the nocturnal inferno of the firebombs on
Dresden, the narrator’s statements (particularly those on Germany and the
Germans) are highly ambiguous. The narrative strategy chosen supports the
assumption that it is not the behavior of the Germans or of the Allies that is in
the foreground but the precarious nature of the human condition, founded as
it is on the opposition between the freedom of will and determinism.53 The
voice of the narrator describing the fate of Billy Pilgrim, who moves between
the various levels of time while analyzing the fate of his unfortunate fellow
beings in the maelstrom of the war machinery, is supplemented by that of
a person very similar to the author. This latter voice can be heard both in the
first and the last chapters, relating its owner’s experiences and commenting
directly on the awful climax of the events, the night of horrors in Dresden and
its aftermath. This persona also denounces the violence of American society
manifest in the Vietnam War and in the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and
Martin Luther King. In view of the shock at the terrible suffering a counterimage is evoked which revises the usual interpretation of the conduct of Lot’s wife
in the biblical episode of the destruction of Sodom (Slaughterhouse-Five [rpt.
1970], 19). Her turning back to look at the ravaged city is read to signify a feeling of solidarity and not as an act of rebellion against a vengeful God. Such a
statement is consistent with the refusal of the narrator (pp. 161–62) to accept
the official statement by the military and to offset the terrible cost of that night
in February 1945 against previous German crimes.54
But Vonnegut does not focus on the rulers of Nazi Germany, where Billy Pilgrim spent half a year as a prisoner of war. Instead, a cross-section of German
society is provided. There is no doubt that the American prisoners suffered
grievously at the hands of German soldiers, who had been brutalized by the
war machine, and whose inflexibility and rigid adherence to the rules resulted
in several deaths.55 Nevertheless, the appalling treatment of prisoners during
transportation and “de-lousing” in no way justified the behavior of the Allied
Supreme Command in ordering the horrific firebombing.
Pilgrim encounters many Germans who act humanely and who thus do not
correspond at all to the familiar negative heterostereotype. The captured
British officers who look down upon the chaotic group of American prisoners
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of war and are themselves excellently provided for with the necessities of life
strike the reader as very strange indeed. They greatly impress the Germans
through their self-discipline and sense of order,56 as they correspond perfectly
to the positive image of the English. Yet their behavior is not in keeping with
the terrible reality of the moloch of war. In them the dubiousness of heterostereotypes also becomes apparent, which the narrator juxtaposes with
what is universally human. The inhabitants of Dresden who, full of curiosity,
observe the arrival of the American prisoners of war and are then called upon
to keep watch over them in the slaughterhouse,57 which provides the title of the
novel, obviously share the common humanity of the American internees. After
the apocalyptic night of the firestorm when the prisoners have to act as
gravediggers for the countless victims, a blind innkeeper offers them help and
hospitality (pp. 155–56).
Despite the many disguises donned by the author, as well as his postmodernist narrative technique, in which irony plays a central role and in which
metafictional commentaries cause confusion, Vonnegut clearly distances himself from the negative heterostereotypes of Germany dominant after World
War II. His cosmopolitan attitude resulted from his estrangement from his
own ethnic heritage, which he regarded retrospectively as a deprivation, and
the traumatic experience of the war. Without questioning the guilt of those in
power he focused in his fiction on those values common to mankind. His
severe criticism of his own country, and of the domination of injustice and violence that also threatened elsewhere, provided an additional counterweight to
any summary condemnation of the Germans.
thomas pynchon’s nightmare orgy
Hardly any other author has devoted as much space in his fiction to Germany
and the Germans as has Thomas Pynchon (born 1937), an elusive and enigmatic figure who has shunned all forms of publicity. It is uncertain whether
this graduate of Cornell University has ever even visited Germany. His first four
novels and a volume of short stories demonstrate, however, his thorough reading of travel guides and other source material on German history and culture,
and convey to the reader a dense network of allusions to their manifestations in
language, music, painting, and film.58
This is particularly true of the quasi-encyclopedic novel Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973), in which events from the last six months of World War II provide the
springboard for Pynchon’s fabulation involving historical and fictitious figures. A considerable proportion of the episodes in the novel have their setting
in the “Zone,” i.e., named localities in the north of Germany, and in the
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“region” that includes Thuringia with the Harz Mountains and Nordhausen,
Berlin, the lower reaches of the River Oder, Peenemünde, Hamburg, and Cuxhaven. On the basis of Karl Baedeker’s guidebooks and a detailed knowledge
of recent German history, Pynchon graphically presents the “interregnum” in a
space of radical indeterminacy in which the order of the Nazi dictatorship has
been dissolved and in which anarchy reigns supreme.
In V. (1963), a novel combining two strands of action as in a fugue, Pynchon
had ten years earlier traced totalitarian tendencies in Germany back in history
in the figure of a mysterious and mythical female figure, which some interpreters see as an embodiment of the fascist spirit of the times. In Lieutenant
Weissmann, who embodies merciless colonial repression in German Southwest Africa,59 and the engineer Kurt Mondaugen key figures of the later novel
were introduced in V., thus establishing a bridge between the two novels.
Allusions to the darkest chapter of German history also pervaded Pynchon’s short anti-detective novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). In this work it is
not only the discovery of Tristero, a secret organization with its far-reaching
ramifications, allegedly founded to counteract the monopoly of the German
Italian house of Thurn and Taxis, that reminds the reader of Central Europe.
Apart from the roaring trade in Nazi memorabilia Dr. Hilarius’ attacks of
paranoia evoke the dark past of this German immigrant. His personal history
catches up with Oedipa Maas’ psychiatrist, who confesses his nightmares,
which go back to his unscrupulous experiments on the inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp.60
Pynchon’s most ambitious book, Gravity’s Rainbow, is dominated by the image
of the trajectory of the V-2, the vengeance weapon, a fatal product of German
engineering. While northern Germany serves as the chief arena for the political
and human chaos of the period immediately after the war, we realize on close
inspection that apart from a whole range of diverse German characters, many
representatives of other nations, especially Britons, Americans, and Russians,
are involved in the nightmarish excesses of a dissolving culture. About two dozen
major characters appear as agents throughout the novel in a plot determined by
espionage and counterespionage in behalf of the war machine and powerful
industrial cartels.61 They include some who are unmasked as unscrupulous,
power-hungry brutes, who are partly drawn from stereotypes. They are agents in
this cosmic conflict, which ushers in the age of an international trust. This development has been instigated by I. G. Farben and, despite the opposition of the
Counterforce, threatens to lead to the absolute domination of “IG Raketen”
(Gravity’s Rainbow, Bantam Books ed. [1974], 660).
None of these figures, however, achieves the obsessive inhumanity of SSHauptmann Weissmann, alias Blicero, whose action as a manifestation of the
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universal death instinct Thanatos leaves a trail of blood. It extends from his
role in the repressive colonial administration of German Southwest Africa in
the early twentieth century, when the insurgent Hereros were decimated, to the
launching of the V-2 rockets at London ordered by Blicero from the occupied
Netherlands, and finally to the sacrifice of his homosexual lover Gottfried
when the prototype of rocket 00000 is launched.
Yet, in addition to this representative of a totalitarian ideology obsessed with
death there are some German characters as well who not only attract the attention of the reader but also can evoke sympathetic feelings. This is, for instance,
true of the chemical engineer Franz Pökler, who after his failed marriage to Leni
hopes to realize his lifelong dream of space travel. He lacks critical acumen, as
his passive acceptance of films produced in the atelier of Fritz Lang and his
dreamlike identification with unscrupulous supermen demonstrate; moreover,
he is easily exploited by those in power. They can manipulate him by depriving
him of his daughter Ilse, who is forced to live in camps together with her
mother, a Communist internee. Pökler’s individual weaknesses are rendered in
a strand of action that is more extensive than that involving other characters in
the novel. The slowing down of the pace of the narrative, which is otherwise
accelerated in the book through many “cuts” and abrupt leaps, allows the reader
to participate more intensively in Pökler’s fate than is the case with other figures, who remain fairly schematic and subject to radical transformations.62
However, many members of the Allied forces active in the ruined landscape of
defeated Germany are portrayed as barely less unscrupulous than the Nazi figures. They lack any fastidiousness in their choice of means and in their double
goal of obtaining both the human guinea pig Tyrone Slothrop and the mysterious piece of equipment, the “Schwarzgerät.” Slothrop’s insight into the ruthlessness of the chase changes his quest into a precipitous flight from his
pursuers, whose inhuman philosophy is reflected in the extreme behaviorism
embraced by Dr. Pointsman in London.
The action set in Germany is not limited to historical and fictitious events
between May 1945 and the fall of that year. The text, which is interspersed
with innumerable German phrases and with strange, telling proper names,
graphically depicts the devastated towns of northern Germany. Numerous
flashbacks recall the beginnings of the German petrochemical industry and
of the rocket research program established by I. G. Farben between the wars.
These analepses, which draw on a wide range of historical sources,63 make possible, partly in direct reminiscences, partly in hallucinations, encounters with
many historical personalities who shaped Germany’s development into the leading industrial power. In this context the achievements of the I. G. Farben trust
and their importance for the war effort are emphasized.
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In the book’s first part entitled “Beyond Zero” several scenes shed light on
the way in which German applied research was entwined with politics. Leni
Pökler, the frustrated wife of the chemical engineer, remembers a time full of
privations in Berlin. But while her husband indulged in idealistic dreams, she
found orientation in the goals of the Communist Party. In these and similar
episodes the novel attains something of the tone of the chronicles of European events produced by American journalists in the thirties. These quasidocumentary studies of the milieu with a strong element of local color64
alternate kaleidoscopically with passages of a hallucinatory nature and eventually merge with them in a seemingly chaotic potpourri. Here the collective
yearning for extinction and the principle of entropy manifest themselves. On
the fringes of the “Zone” the dominant destructive mood culminates in
Slothrop’s journey down the river Oder on the Anubis, a boat named after the
Egyptian god who led the dead to judgment. It is commanded by Margherita
Erdmann’s companion Thanatz, and provides the setting in which people of
various nationalities gratify their decadent desires in an orgy. On the other
hand, an overwhelming industrial and economic supertrust, which tries to
subjugate everything, spreads its tentacles.
Slothrop’s numerous disguises and his protean transformations on his
adventurous flight are not devoid of comedy, resulting from the strange coincidence that finally saves him from the intended mutilation. This happens instead
to his brutal pursuer, the American officer Major Duane Marvey, whose conduct,
like that of the unscrupulous British behaviorist Pointsman, suggests that Pynchon was not at all interested in ascribing a monopoly in Evil Incarnate to Germany. Irrespective of the fact that Germany has sunk into chaos and has become
an arena for downright villains, the numerous facets presented combine to create not a monochrome image but an iridescent overall view. Amid the rubble
teams of men are busy recovering corpses while ruthless black marketeers and
drug racketeers go about their shady business even under the noses of the Allied
Supreme Command, and Hereros transplanted to Germany under the leadership of Oberst Enzian secretly work on completing a copy of the rocket prototype. In this picture, in contrast to the literature of the Holocaust, there does not
seem to be an exclusive concern here with the persecution of the Jews and the
ideology of the Final Solution. Neither do the Germans have any monopoly on
racism. Its wide diffusion is evident in the derogatory remarks made by the
repulsive Major Marvey on the Southwest African Hereros in Germany, and the
anger the Russian agent Tchitcherine feels toward his black stepbrother, Oberst
Enzian. The genocide the German colonial administration inflicted on the
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namese, and thus once again confirms the relation between heterostereotypes
and one’s own sense of collective identity. The presentation of the obsessive
search for the rocket has also led some critics to read Pynchon’s postmodern fiction as a mordant satire not only on the “industrial-military cartel” but also on
the priority given to manned space flight in America.
Long flashbacks document the pioneering role of German chemical engineers in the rapid development of the pharmaceutical industry and the destructive technology of war. In connection with the career of Kekulé von Stradonitz,
who discovered the benzene ring (later the basis for polymerization), and in the
activities of the fictitious Dr. Laszlo Jamf, the fateful application of these discoveries is described at length. Still, the blame for this lies not only with German
researchers. That rather a coalition of scientists from various countries share
the responsibility is illustrated by the way in which they initiate behavioristic
experiments on Slothrop when he is an infant, and then monitor them.65 The
secret surrounding his peculiar physical anticipation of the trajectory of rockets
and where they will land is only gradually divulged and its cause is discovered in
an unscrupulous experiment by radical behaviorists from Europe and the
United States. This detail and the international connections of I. G. Farben
expose the reality that in a global perspective Germany and its scientists represent primarily modern society, which is drifting toward its extinction.
Other problematical products of the German mind, for instance in the new
medium of the cinema,66 in which Fritz Lang created films both popularizing
national myths and objective critical analyses,67 have a counterpart in modern
German poetry, which, as the narrating voice implies, promotes dangerous
tendencies in the dominant ideology.68
That various strands of the action in this compendium of postmodern stylistic devices are linked with the aid of German myths and elements from fairy
tales supports the awareness that Germany is more than merely the setting for
this nightmare between the end of the Second World War and the beginnings
of the cold war. The type of the Faustian figure is obviously represented in the
characters and in the various subplots of the novel.69 Equally apparent are the
allusions to the fairy tale of Hänsel and Gretel, under which several figures can
be subsumed, especially Captain Blicero/Weissmann, Katje Borgesius, and
Blicero’s lover Gottfried. The fairy tale also provides the pattern for the fate of
human beings who are sacrificed to the Moloch, and, as in the case of Gottfried, put in the furnace of the rocket prototype.
Despite the localization of the forces of destruction and the paths they take
in that indeterminate “Zone” in the heart of Europe,70 the pessimistic assessment of the collective chances of humanity stands in the foreground. The historical reality of this nadir of German history certainly functions as a source of
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imagery, and the author borrows extensively from the storehouse of stereotypes. But his novel refers rather to the “Decline of the West” and the overall
responsibility of the international military and industrial cartel for the apocalypse and does not present the Germans categorically as the incarnation of evil.
germans in the holocaust:
william styron’s sophie’s choice
While Pynchon’s apocalyptic epic had not borrowed directly from the Holocaust, this topic came to engage the attention of American writers and film
directors after the stage and film versions of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).71
With the increased awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust and the initiatives to build museums and memorials to its victims, the hitherto neglected
topic began to receive full media attention. Apart from books by Sinclair and
Freeman, who during World War II had shed light on both the perpetrators and
the victims of the Nazi regime, Frank Borzage’s film Mortal Storm (1940) dealt
with that theme. Later, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Berger provided insights
into the reality of concentration camps from the perspective of former
inmates. The traumatic experience of survivors was made accessible to readers
by Edward Lewis Wallant (1926–1962) in his novel The Pawnbroker (1961), where
his protagonist Sol Nazerman is made to relive his sufferings in a concentration camp (at the hands of barbarous henchmen). He is also made to recapture
the memory of the execution of a fellow inmate and the terrible humiliation of
his own wife Ruth. Films like Franklin Schaffner’s Boys from Brazil (1978), about
Dr. Mengele, who lived under a false identity in South America, confronted
moviegoers with the perpetuation of an inhuman ideology. The case of Adolf
Eichmann and the activities of uncompromising avengers for the sufferings of
the murdered Jews were also vividly portrayed on the screen.
Among the tormentors depicted in novels and films on the Holocaust two
types of characters, both the merciless executors of a criminal ideology in German concentration camps, stand out: the sober and thorough bureaucrat in
whom one encounters features of the efficient German administrator in a perverted form, and the unscrupulous physician who (justified by his racist ideology) uses the camp for his detestable experiments and who assumes the role of
God in determining life and death. The basis for dealing with this phenomenon in literary texts and in films was provided by a mass of documentary material in, for instance, the diaries of commandants of concentration camps and
in the “scientific” reports produced by physicians. The portrait of the latter
relates to a staple in the inventory of stereotypes supplied in American stories
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tury. It also carried on the ideas of radical advocates of eugenics and euthanasia, which had become popular in Europe even before the victory of Fascism
and National Socialism.
Both types of characters appear in the novel Sophie’s Choice (1979) by William
Styron (born 1925). Its film version in 1982, directed by Allan Pacula and starring Meryl Streep, triggered an intense controversy. The author was accused of
generalizing through his plot the suffering of mankind and of suggesting that
not only the European Jews were the victims of the Holocaust.72 In addition,
critics took offense at the combination of detailed memories of unspeakable
pain and suffering and boundless evil with erotic drives.
Inspired by a deeply disturbing visit to Auschwitz in 1947, Styron chose an
unusual perspective for his novel. It was also based on his extensive reading of
documents and historical analyses of the experiences of victims and their murderers.73 The thinly veiled autobiographical account of a writer from the American South provides the framework for the confessions of a Catholic Polish
woman marked for life by her experiences in Auschwitz. That the experiences
of a non-Jew internee there, who had had to endure unspeakable suffering,
were used to exemplify the horrors of the extermination camp was in itself
likely to provoke reproach and even rejection.74 That the daughter of a Polish
professor in Cracow becomes after her arrival in America involved in a painful
love relationship with a Jewish intellectual, who is emotionally unstable and a
drug addict, made polemical discussion inevitable. Sophie is tormented by
deep feelings of guilt, creating the preconditions for Nathan’s paranoiac abuse
of her until they end their lives through a double suicide.
Styron captures in lively vignettes the realities of the extermination camp and
the mentality of the German overlords. The reader gains an indelible impression of the terrible episode on the railroad ramp at Auschwitz. There the beautiful young woman, who has been deported to the concentration camp for a trivial
offense, is given on her arrival a brutal “compliment” by a north German physician, who undisguisedly expresses his erotic interest in her before he inflicts on
her the unbearable task of choosing between her two children. One may live and
the other one is to be immediately sent to the camp in Birkenau to be exterminated. This handsome man, whom Stingo calls Dr. Jemand von Niemand and
who reminds Sophie of a Prussian Junker acquaintance of her father (“a
‘Nordic’-looking [man], attractive in a thin-lipped, austere, unbending way,”
p. 481), has been brought to this abominable experiment by Sophie’s desperate
confession that both she and her children know German, and that she is a
believer and a Christian. That Sophie tells Stingo (who has fallen passionately in
love with her) about this episode, in which she lost her belief and almost her
mind, only at the very end, indicates that this experience had undermined the
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very foundations of Sophie’s character.75 Thus the scene is only mediated to the
reader through the prism of Stingo’s narrative. Yet this inhuman and blasphemous act prompts Styron’s first-person narrator to attempt an analysis, in
which this crime is explained rather through the individual psychology of the
perpetrator than through the collective consciousness of the Germans.
The other figure overshadowing Sophie’s time as an inmate of the concentration camp is Rudolf Höss, the commandant, whose notorious character is
first approached through quotations from his published diaries. These unique
documents provide in Stingo’s eyes an insight into “the true nature of evil”
(p. 148). The trivial data from Höss’ life up to the time he became an efficient
bureaucratic monster showing no emotions toward his victims, are presented
as well as the enigma of how he could simultaneously lead a normal family life
while robotically organizing an inferno. Styron’s first-person narrator considers the perfection of Höss’ destructive machinery a “consummate travesty” of
the achievements of great German scientists of the late nineteenth century
(p. 151). The north German provenance of Höss is mentioned, but it is never
explicitly shown to be a (regional) factor determining his behavior. The absurd
contrast between the atmosphere in the house of the commandant and the vale
of death surrounding it is enhanced by the impression, thereby confirming the
stereotype of the German love of music, that classical and religious music fill
the house and even reach the ears of Sophie and of the other internees working
as servants in its basement.
The music can also be heard in the commandant’s office on the top floor.
Here Sophie yields to the temptation, ultimately disastrous to her selfconfidence, to try to save her own life and that of her ten-year-old son through
a closer relationship with Höss as, due to her proficiency in the language and
her competence as a translator, she is able to act temporarily as his secretary.
Encouraged by small signs of human weakness in Höss and aware of the fact
that he is not unimpressed by her “Aryan” beauty, she risks everything when
she hears of her imminent transfer. Her deep self-abasement in front of the
master over life and death, who believes in an unbridgeable gap between
nations and races, has no positive consequences for her. In humbling herself
she refers to an anti-Semitic pamphlet dictated by her authoritarian father,
which she had smuggled into the camp. But she fails to impress the sober
administrator and bureaucrat through this denial of her own beliefs, which
run counter to the racist and misogynist prejudices of her father, who was fixed
on a final solution of the Jewish question in Poland.76 In her desperate
endeavor to make Höss listen to her, she even claims coauthorship of this “radical solution.”77 The prominence given to the propagation of the final solution
by members of the Polish élite suggests that such deadly tendencies are not the
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sole property of the Germans. The text thus somewhat qualifies their general
stigmatization as cogs in a death machine or as all too willing executioners of a
monstrous project.78
The international ramifications of such inhuman projects can also be
observed in other episodes of the novel. The narrator relates a visit paid to
Sophie’s father by a certain Dr. Walter Dürrfeld. Later the same person, like his
historical model, became the director of the I. G. Farben factory in Auschwitz,
which exploited the labor of the internees. Sophie’s conversation with the German scientist, who hardly two years before the beginning of the war had chatted
with her about German musical culture, stands in sharp contrast to the sober
discussion of the high levels of production in Auschwitz achieved by Dürrfeld,
Höss, and other figures. In Dürrfeld a paradox becomes apparent that had
meanwhile been fossilized into a stereotype, namely that highly sensitive Germans were ready to use fellow humans brutally and unscrupulously. Here Styron takes note of a phenomenon discussed by Wertham, which Walker Percy
was later to describe as a great puzzle in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome (1987).
Despite the close association between these individuals rooted in the Germany of National Socialism and evil as such,79 Styron’s novel, in which human
beings appear as victims of an inscrutable fate, does not focus exclusively on
the specific guilt of the Germans. Through the ruminations of his narrator a
connection is explicitly established with the exploitation of black slaves in
America. The inhumanities in the extermination camps in Central Europe are
thus put in a context of universal guilt, and may be understood rather as a
reflection of Styron’s sense of the omnipresence of evil than as evidence of a
unique role of Germans in the Empire of Evil.
the new germany of walter abish’s
how german is it
The novel How German Is It (1980) by Walter Abish, who was born in Vienna in
1931 but grew up in China and resided in Israel before settling in the United
States, differs from most of the other texts examined in this study in that its
author had had no firsthand experience of Germany when he wrote it. Nevertheless, his book sketches a very detailed but completely fictitious panorama
that includes Würtenburg, a university town on the banks of the Neckar;
Brumholdstein, a new town; and the village of Dämling. The East Frisian holiday island with the village of Gänzlich, which furnishes the setting in the concluding part of the novel, is equally imaginary. The stereotype features of the
Germans offered in condensed form at the beginning of the novel derive from
the author’s reading.
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Before composing the novel he wrote the story “The English Garden” as a
kind of preparatory study. In this text various facets of the (positive) autostereotype of modern Germany obtrude when an anonymous American writer visits
the country. But he questions them, as he has apparently obtained information
that suggests a disquieting reality below the harmonious social surface.80 The
details of the country of the economic miracle mediated to the children in a coloring book, which functions like a promotional pamphlet, include both the
idyll of an intact world and the perfect products of industry, a fact that is immediately confirmed by the man meeting the visitor in a dark brown Mercedes (“a
German vehicle, superb, reliable, safe”) at the airport. In addition to their penchant for “meditative thinking” (“The English Garden,” 4), the Germans are
said to have a “deep and abiding belief in perfection,” a feature linking them to
the Americans. The illusion of a harmonious world is, however, quickly shattered in “The English Garden,” as the visitor is confronted with manifestations
of terrible inhumanity. As in the later novel several characters vanish. Ingeborg
Platt, who is employed as the librarian in Brumholdstein, seems overwhelmed
by the memory of the nearby Durst concentration camp, in which her father had
apparently served as the commandant. After a quarrel with the American visitor, Platt is suddenly reported missing from her apartment. A photograph in
one of the drawers of her desk reminds the reader of the horrors of the past,
which had been suppressed despite the existence of the gas ovens in the camp
and of the barbed wire of its fences. An abyss has opened up beneath the surface, and its threatening presence is called to mind by Ms. Platt’s inexplicable
absence.
How German Is It, like the short story, is composed of a large number of textual segments in which the experience of various figures is explored. In contrast to more radical postmodernist texts, the novel does not completely
dispense with a logical plot, even if it is repeatedly disrupted and often remains
mysterious. The voice of the authorial narrator keeps a balance between the
recital of stereotypes of Germany and the Germans, employed like set pieces,
and recurrent, insistent questions.81 As in the short story, the first pages of the
novel list the positive German qualities that have apparently made the economic miracle possible. The virtues include “cleanliness,” “thoroughness,”
“dependability,” technological competence, and progressiveness. The development of the plot reveals, however, the dubiousness of the postulated qualities. Sinister elements can be perceived beneath the seemingly perfect surface,
undermining the foundations of the economic miracle.
On the level of the characters representativeness is claimed for Egon and
Gisela, who embody the new German of the success generation. Tall, fairhaired and blue-eyed, they are the ideal subject for illustrated features in glossy
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magazines like the journal Treue.82 Their extreme conformity is reflected in their
perfect outward appearance captured in a photo documentary. Egon’s affair
with the photographer Rita Tropf-Ulmwehrt and his derogatory comments on
Gisela, however, scratch at the superficial harmony and expose as hollow the
image of the model couple. In this exposure several critical readers have seen a
key to an understanding of the reality concealed behind the questionable clichés
of modern Germany, and reflected in the German autostereotype.83
For Schirato the novel destroys the illusion of the innocence of the Germans in whose virtues traces of their Nazi heritage, latent in a barbaric id of
their collective identity, can be found.84 The narrator is said to convey to the
reader the insight that their national character includes exaggerated selfconfidence, racial intolerance, and a tendency toward authoritarian relationships, qualities manifest in the conduct of the main characters, who treat their
fellow human beings as objects and use them as tools. This attitude is seemingly shaped by Brumhold’s worldview, which is explicitly assessed in the
novel as the representative fruit of German culture in which a sense of order,
persistence, and philosophical idealism are highly regarded.85
On the level of the plot the new town of Brumholdstein, named after the
philosopher, perfectly designed, and ethnically pure, gains central importance
as a setting. However, the horrors of the recent past emerge from under the
surface of the streets in this quintessential German city, which provides homes
for the wealthy members of the middle class. The unpleasant truth of the suppressed history of this location is brought to light when a mass grave is found
under the surface of a street, shocking the inhabitants and reminding them of
the former concentration camp of Durst on the same site. That German thoroughness showed itself not only in the planning of Brumholdstein but also in
the construction of the concentration camp is an unpleasant parallel which,
according to Schirato, underlines the evil of “Germanness” suggested by the
authorial voice.
Ulrich von Hargenau’s search for both his own individual and the collective
national identity provides the center of interest in the novel. The cogitations of
this writer, who is inclined to offer autobiographical narratives of his own past,
his acquaintance with the terrorists of the Einzieh Group, and his reflection on
his true descent correspond to the examination of all current notions of contemporary Germany, which the novel regards as inevitable. Several unexplained
attempts on Ulrich’s life, together with various amorous relationships,86 which
usually end abruptly, and the puzzling disappearance of individual figures suggest to him the need for an inquiry into reality. These incidents, together with
the damage and loss of life wrought by bombs, produce a tense, uncanny
atmosphere that gradually permeates all locations.
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Symbols of German society that had appeared stable, among them post
offices, police stations, and bridges for which Hellmuth Hargenau was the
architect, are either damaged or destroyed. A sense of insecurity is created, to
which the uncertainty about the identity of several figures in the novel contributes. This uncertainty continues until the very end of the novel, when
Ulrich consults a psychiatrist after his journey to Gänzlich, which almost ends
in his death when sympathizers of the Einzieh Group blow up a drawbridge.
There he forces himself to admit that he cannot be the son of a hero of the
resistance movement who was executed after the assassination attempt on
Hitler in July 1944, but rather is the illegitimate offspring of a mother keen on
enjoying life thoroughly and always interested in social glamor.
Ulrich’s discovery of his own suppressed individual past forms, however,
only part of the exposure of deceit and lies that happens on several levels in this
novel. While the photo documentary compiled by Tropf-Ulmwehrt reveals
many embarrassing aspects of private relationships, which prompts Hellmuth
Hargenau’s angry intervention and his destruction of her photo sequence from
Germany, she has also preserved on film the scandalous discovery of the mass
grave, thereby documenting something of the denied collective past. That dark
chapter of German history is also evoked and made a topical issue through the
exact reconstruction of the concentration camp in a model built by Franz Metz,
the former servant of the Hargenau family (part 3, chap. 18, 25 and 33). His
traumatic experiences are mirrored in recurrent pathological attacks, underlining the horror of the reality that the city mayor, Albert Kahnsitz-Lese, and
the other inhabitants of Brumholdstein would like to exclude from their consciousness.
The hierarchical structure of society prevalent in their town is also responsible for its ethnic homogeneity, which forces many immigrant workers
employed in service industries to commute from Dämling every day. The perfection noticeable in the plan of the new town, a perfection that is also underlined in an earlier digression by the narrator in which he referred significantly
to “standards of perfection for marriage and driving, for love affairs and garden furniture, for table tennis and for gas ovens” (p. 19), does not, however,
apply to human relationships. How superficial and unstable these are is borne
out by the behavior of Egon, Hellmuth, and even Ulrich toward their changing
partners.87 To argue as Schirato does that these moral shortcomings can be
accounted for by ethnic factors, as is suggested by the authorial narrator’s
voice, would, however, mean explaining a common modern syndrome by reference to a national culture.
In spite of its analysis of these phenomena How German Is It is less concerned
with the dichotomy of appearance and reality in the people of West Germany:
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allusions make it clear that there is also another Germany.88 In the middle
of the novel Anna Heller, for instance, seeks as a teacher to explain this
dichotomy (part 3, chap. 14, 119ff.). She tries to demonstrate to her pupils
through incisive questions how they respond to everyday phenomena and
where their wish for a shift in perspective and the experience of the “other”
comes from. She implies that familiar phenomena are necessary for the wellbeing of the individual and for their feeling at ease. But she also endeavors to
make her pupils aware of the problems of schematic thinking, and to trigger in
them a productive uncertainty as a result of this insight.89
To achieve such an effect through constantly questioning statements and
through the exposure of discrepancies in individual and collective experience
was apparently a major concern of the author of How German Is It. To attain this
goal he omitted complex facts and made extensive use of stereotype traits,
thereby risking the accusation of provocative simplification and schematization.
looking backward from the future:
walker percy’s the thanatos syndrome
The close connection between the literary projection of Germany as a phenomenon of “otherness” and the reality of the United States has been repeatedly
noted in this investigation. Reference back to his own country also shapes the
use of several facets of the image of Germany in the work of Walker Percy
(1916–1990).
In the last of the six novels published during his lifetime, the dystopia The
Thanatos Syndrome (1987), the allusions to Central Europe, which had repeatedly
appeared in his earlier work,90 gain in frequency to become a significant analogue. Provocatively, Nazi Germany supplies a model for a highly problematical
state of society in the United States in the near future, a situation extrapolated
from current trends and tendencies. At the same time the author calls himself to
account for the deep impression a visit of several weeks to Hitler’s Germany had
made on him in 1934, a fact admitted in various interviews. In that year Percy
traveled to Germany together with fellow students from Chapel Hill in a group
led by their German teacher, Dr. E. C. Metzenthin, spending ten days in the Pension of the Langnickels at Schuman[n]straße 56 in Bonn.91 Apart from a hiking
tour in the Black Forest, which he undertook by himself and which he alluded to
in several later novels, Percy vividly remembered in particular encounters with
convinced National Socialists, among them the son (or possibly the nephew) of
Langnickel, a young man who was at that time an enthusiastic member of
Hitler’s youth group and who planned to join the SS. Apparently the young
Southerner was deeply impressed by the absolute surrender of Willy Langnickel
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to the dubious ideals of that movement. It seems that Percy regarded the situation as such a serious temptation that more than half a century later a kind of
exorcism of that threatened infection appeared necessary to him. In “Father
Smith’s Confession” in The Thanatos Syndrome he thus dealt with this autobiographical experience, but he placed it in the larger context of American society
in the late twentieth century.
From the outset the author, who did not publish his first novel The Moviegoer until 1961 when he was forty-five years old, was inclined to use stereotypes
with national and regional clichés included. Percy, who abandoned many
favorite traditions of the American South, discovered in the existentialism of
Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, and in the Catholic faith a source of orientation
after his illness (he had infected himself with tuberculosis) had forced him to
abandon his career as a doctor. In the following decades he judged a whole
series of naive or incorrigible characters in his fiction and his philosophical
essays from a very sharp critical perspective. The author or his satirical mouthpiece employed a comprehensive array of stereotypes, which helps him to offer
pointed summaries of the physiognomy and the psyche of various characters.
For this purpose several of Percy’s first-person narrators rely literally on their
medical experience. In Percy’s two dystopias, Love in the Ruins (1971) and The
Thanatos Syndrome, Dr. Tom More takes on the role of the narrator, whose habitual and swift diagnosis of his patients has an effect on the portraits of the other
characters. In the depiction not only of subsidiary figures, who are drawn in
rough outline with a few strokes of the brush, Percy targets both regional types
and representatives of philosophical and denominational groups.92 A preferred butt of his satire is the typical homo Americanus whom Percy arbitrarily
locates in Ohio and who represents for him the complacent individual totally
unaware of his problematical existential condition and, therefore, the more to
be pitied.93
Percy’s inclination to offer caricatures and play satirical and ironic games
with his characters, German types included, becomes apparent in the portrait
of Dr. Helga Heine, who works in the love clinic, “a West German interpersonal gynecologist.” As the assistant of the formidable Dr. Kenneth Stryker
she is not unaffected by the sexological experiments conducted with couples
and is herself stimulated to engage in such activity. Tom catches her in an
unambiguous situation with Dr. Stryker. More important for the theme of this
investigation, however, is the fact that More explicitly establishes a link
between Dr. Heine and a type of German woman prevalent in literature. She is
referred to as “a jolly, matronly Bavarian gynecologist . . . , a ‘regular hausfrau,’
hair done up in a bun” (Love in the Ruins, 123) and sketched as a sentimentalist.
Dr. Heine, whose German origin is betrayed by her accent, likes to play “Zwei
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Herzen on her little Bavarian guitar” (p. 125) and occasionally takes homebaked cakes to the love clinic. Whether the author intended in his sketch of a
sexologist to allude satirically to Beate Uhse’s sex shop chain may be considered an open question.
While in Love in the Ruins Percy draws a dystopian panorama involving racial
unrest in “Feliciana,” which serves as the Southern setting of his fiction, the
serious political crisis provides the background for the efforts of social engineers to use technical means to defuse conflict and to resolve existential problems by means of medical devices and drugs. In Love in the Ruins Tom himself,
who has invented the “lapsometer,” has high hopes that that goal can be
reached with this instrument, which can apply a “massage of the brain.” However, he realizes to his dismay that Immelmann, a Mephistophelian figure, has
taken possession of this device, conjuring up the threat of complete anarchy.
In the sequel to this dystopia such optimistic expectations concerning the
use of technology to control behavior are held only by other characters, who
cling to a gnostic concept that promises the creation of an immanent paradise.
Several physicians and leading scientists strive for the realization of this dream
and, without the permission or even the knowledge of the people involved,
unscrupulously carry out experiments to reach this goal. In this context the
author draws on the arsenal of stereotypes concerning Germany and draws a
character portrait of the main culprit, Dr. Van Dorn, based on the type of the
German scientist devoid of any moral principles. From his very first appearance this villain, who has adopted the aura of a Renaissance man, is linked to
another social type of German origin. It is no coincidence that Van Dorn
reminds More of “a German officer standing in the open hatch of a tank and
looking down at the Maginot line” (Thanatos Syndrome, 44) and that briefly
afterward he is compared to a Prussian general. Van Dorn, the head of the computer division of a nuclear power plant, is also associated through further
details with the rigid military tradition of Prussia. Even his physiognomy, his
cold steel-blue eyes and a saber scar on his face, brand him in this sense as a
descendant of the type of character that was suspect in American fiction as
early as the late nineteenth century.
This intellectual without scruples is linked in yet another respect to a facet
of the prevalent heterostereotype of the German. He is also the founder and
manager of a boarding school for the élite, Belle Ame School, which, in his
own words, he manages in the tradition of the “tough old European Gymnasium-Hochschule” (Thanatos Syndrome, 219). By adding heavy sodium produced in the nuclear power plant to the drinking water that the inhabitants of
the whole county of Feliciana unknowingly consume and that determines their
behavior (Percy’s science is, of course, totally imaginary), Van Dorn has gained
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considerable scope for his perverse desires. With the help of this chemical substance, which dampens all conflicts between individuals but significantly
increases the libido and enables him to manipulate both children and adults,
he has managed together with accomplices to sexually abuse many pupils in
the boarding school. However, More and his allies put a stop to his villainous
acts and Van Dorn meets his well-deserved fate by being forced to drink an
undiluted potion of heavy sodium in atonement of his criminal offenses, relegating him to an ape-like level of behavior.94
Nevertheless, Percy is not content to use these facets of the negative heterostereotype of the Germans. Through Father Rinaldo Smith, who functions
as a Cassandra and lambastes the moral shortcomings of American society, he
establishes a connection with the darkest chapters of German history. The
ideas of the American behaviorists are branded and every form of euthanasia
advocated by social engineers (geroeuthanasia, i.e., the killing of useless elderly persons, or pedoeuthanasia, i.e., the killing of handicapped children)
and the unrestricted legalization of abortions are linked with the conduct of
unscrupulous Nazi doctors. For Smith the behaviorists in Feliciana belong to
the same camp as the originally sensitive and cultivated but eventually totally
corrupt German physicians, psychiatrists, and neurologists of the Weimar
Republic, who were prepared to be integrated into the death machine of the
Nazis and who took upon themselves an important function in the elimination
of life “devoid of value.”
In his conversation with More, Father Smith remembers his own problematical visit to Germany in the 1930s when a “romantic German feeling” overwhelmed him and when he admired the culture of the élite in an academic
community like Tübingen without noticing any ominous signs. He recalls a
distant cousin, Dr. Jäger, who combined exquisite taste, superb scientific competence, and scrupulous exactitude, but who later became an unscrupulous
tool in the hands of criminal politicians. This Smith later realized himself, as
he relates in his “Footnote,” when visiting Eglfing-Haar close to Munich where
handicapped children had been gassed. In this “Confession” (in two parts) by
Father Smith, who was at that time open to the influence of fascist tendencies,
the connection between an image of Germany in which general human weaknesses are drastically exposed and threatening tendencies in the American
present becomes obvious.95 The dystopian features of Feliciana are extrapolated from these trends: they include the beginnings of a society in which
euthanasia has become acceptable and in which the use of other dubious
methods of social engineering is similarly feasible.
Percy’s mouthpiece explicitly relates his distant cousin, a leading psychiatrist, to the outward appearance of the type of the idealistic and sensitive Ger170 ]
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man as portrayed in Hollywood by Paul Lucas in Watch on the Rhine, based on
Lillian Hellman’s play.96 Thus Percy alludes to a medium which, together with
various literary forms, decisively shaped the imagological formation of types in
the twentieth century. While the author notes in the (fictitious) acquaintances
made by Rinaldo Smith at that time aesthetic sensitivities, especially in the field
of music, the novel also includes other facets of the storehouse of types associated with German-speaking countries. Vienna and its aesthetic output in particular share the aura of high culture. Yet the figures who are associated with it
through their predilection for the music of Richard Strauss and Mozart and
their surrender to intoxicating waltzes, which are almost used as a kind of leitmotif, appear in a dubious light. The exquisite taste cultivated by some characters in The Thanatos Syndrome seems perfectly compatible with the unscrupulous
projects of the neobehaviorists. That this had been a historical phenomenon is
substantiated in the jeremiad intoned by Rinaldo Smith through verbatim quotations from Wertham’s alarming documentation in A Sign for Cain,97 where the
transformation of the “charming Austrian” Dr. Max de Crinis into an instrument of a pitiless policy (“the golden Viennese heart notwithstanding”) is
stressed.
Despite this serious accusation, which, with its implied parallels to tendencies in modern democratic society, appeared as a provocation to many readers,
Father Smith responds to More’s explicit question “Are you saying that there is
a fatal flaw peculiar to the Germans, something demonic?” with a counter
question, “Do you think we’re different from the Germans?” (Thanatos Syndrome, 256). Thus Percy implies a general human predisposition to incur serious guilt, and the inherent tendency to live out destructive impulses. In short,
he alludes to the power of Thanatos in man, irrespective of his ethnic or
national provenance. In doing so Percy’s character qualifies, more clearly than
many other authors had done, the validity of those negative stereotypes frequently associated in American fiction of the 1970s and 1980s with the Germans and resulting from the heavy burden left on them by the Nazi regime.
facets of the image of germany
in american films and television since 1945
For only very few American fiction writers have films gained as much importance as they did for Walker Percy. In his first novel The Moviegoer his protagonist
searches for a sense of authenticity in the cinema,98 while his last novel serves as
an ideal reminder of the extent to which authors and readers alike were exposed
to the influence of this medium. Thus the uninterrupted sequence of films on
the Holocaust has developed its own momentum and has contributed decisively
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to the domination of related facets of the image of Germany. Irrespective of the
diversity of information available on West Germany, the country of the economic miracle with its brilliantly marketed products like those of Volkswagen,
Mercedes, or Bayer, the media of fiction, film, and television have continued to
rely on such negative material. As Paul Monaco stated as early as 1986 in
“Stereotypes of Germans in American Culture,” subject matter from the
Weimar Republic and the Nazi era has dominated the programs of the film studios since the late 1960s. Despite the friendly bilateral relations between the
United States and West Germany, a thorough empirical study on Deutschlandbilder im amerikanischen Fernsehen (Images of Germany in American Television) (1994) by
Lothar Bredella and his colleagues, which treated the very substantial corpus of
films shown by American television stations between 1 March 1988 and 28 February 1989, reveals that negative variants of the image of Germany predominated on television screens. Four-fifths of the broadcasts analyzed in this
representative sample drew on the storehouse of disagreeable types when
choosing German characters. Thus a highly selective image was mediated that
differed significantly from the reality of West Germany as a democratic country
and a reliable partner in NATO.
It is admittedly not easy to answer the question how strong the long-term
impact of those numerous documentaries, television feature films, and movies
presenting the Holocaust and the military campaigns of the Nazi dictatorship
has been. It is equally difficult to assess to what extent those films consolidated
and confirmed negative features in the German heterostereotype among American moviegoers and television audiences. These products of the film studios
have had their own momentum, have stimulated the production of similar
films, and have confirmed the well-established allocation of roles. The investigation by Wolfgang Gast based on an analysis of Bredella’s sample can thus
justly underline the stock role of the intelligent, evil member of the SS and of
the related type of the German scientist, ingenious but totally unscrupulous
and cynical (such as the figure of the chief engineer in The Right Stuff, who is
reminiscent of the paradigmatically inhumane Doctor Strangelove in Stanley
Kubrick’s film of that title).99 These figures are supplemented by the character
of the officer borrowed from a storehouse of types, who is rigid in his concern
with discipline, with the German corporal, a popular type, humane, gemütlich,
but also somewhat stupid, only filling a subsidiary role (as in the television
series Hogan’s Heroes).
It would, however, be wrong to assume that filmmakers have repeatedly
furnished Germans with negative qualities since Frank Borzage’s The Mortal
Storm (1940) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Life Boat (1943)100 and made them exclusively or even primarily to correspond to the pattern of the “ugly” German,
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“Today, East Germany! Tomorrow, Germany’s 1943 borders”
from the Los Angeles Times, 2 March 1990. © Knight-Ridder/Tribune Media
Information Services. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
had no ulterior motives. As Bredella has shown in his comprehensive analysis
of his large sample, the obvious preference of American scriptwriters and film
directors for the Nazi era and the Holocaust as subject matter has multiple
functions. Even more clearly than in the corpus of fiction investigated in this
study, Germans and Germany in the cinema remain closely linked to the
American sense of identity. On the one hand, society in Nazi Germany represents on American television the totally “other,” the counterimage to democracy, and thus helps confirm the values of American culture in the conflict of
average Americans with the representatives of that inhuman dictatorship.101
The selective depiction of the darkest phases of German history may also
serve to distract attention from urgent problems in American culture. On the
other hand, the corpus of documentaries and feature films analyzed may also
permit an interpretation of them as a form of self-criticism practiced by filmmakers to whom the focus on the period of National Socialism, its crimes and
massive injustices, can also provide an approach to conflicts within their own
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“Out of the Ashes” from the Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1992.
© Knight-Ridder/Tribune Media Information Services.
All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
national culture and to general human problems.102 The cinematic depiction
of incidents from World War II is thus also a way of exposing the collective
susceptibility to corruption and acts of blatant injustice, as well as to discover
and locate such traits not only in German antagonists but also in American
officials and politicians, who are on occasion not unwilling to ally themselves
with corrupt regimes.103 The analyses of feature films and of film series on the
Nazi era reveal the complexity of the situation and provide evidence that, in
spite of the apparent continuity of the negative heterostereotype, the retrospective examination of this aspect of Germany’s history is more balanced
than the image projected by films produced during World War I, which were
dominated by propaganda.104
The political cartoon, whose history in the American press can be traced
back well over a century, is more clearly aligned with reductive procedures and
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offers a distortion of reality in the interest of maximum effect, with the arsenal
of stereotypes being of considerable use.105 Events like the end of the Berlin
Wall apparently prompt only the temporary replacement of inherited clichés by
other stereotypes that have fewer negative associations. German reunification,
for instance, which aroused anxieties in many quarters, especially among Germany’s European partners,106 spawned the use of thoroughly negative notions
drawn from critically evaluated historical patterns.107
Thus we encounter again and again symbols of National Socialism (SS cap,
swastika, Hitler-style moustache, and military symbols) when figures of prominent Germans are drawn, and two-thirds of the visual code linked to individuals
is borrowed from this historical sphere. Thus it is not only in “literature,” where
such practices are fostered by generic conventions, but also in the illustrations
provided in nonfiction texts that a severely schematized image of Germany is
mediated, an image that distorts the realities of political links and the recent
collective experience. That this image in American culture continues to be
shaped by the burden of the past is demonstrated by Sabine Sielke and Elisabeth
Schäfer-Wünsche in their recent survey of the projection of Germany in American culture in novels and, especially, in American films from the 1980s and
1990s.108
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CHAPTER 9
CONCLUSION
A LOOK
TOWARD THE
FUTURE
The analysis of the image of Germany in American literature since the latter
half of the nineteenth century has confirmed the results of imagological
research based on the examination of other texts from other cultures. The
research has substantiated the view that the importance of individual experience is often limited in comparison with collective views expressed in statements in written form. This fact is underlined by the repeatedly observed
revision of earlier personal experiences under the pressure of the opinion of
the majority. This in turn prompted certain expectations in future visitors to
Germany and led to the selection of certain allegedly typical phenomena both
in nonfiction and in fiction.
As a large number of immigrants of German origin had settled in the
United States, interest was strong in their home country, their traditional customs and characteristics. The contacts with Germany were thus more intense
and had wider implications for America than was the case in the national states
of Western Europe, where Germany only came to be recognized as a culturally
unexpectedly fertile region around 1800. Of course, the depiction of German
figures in literature and expository texts in the United States continued to use
stereotype elements borrowed from the storehouse of older ethnographic
descriptions such as the image of German drunkenness originally mediated by
the Germania of Tacitus. The personal experiences of a large number of American graduates, who became familiar with the colorful forms of student conviviality and customs in German universities (such as dueling, and German habits
in eating and drinking) confirmed such stereotypes. However, these visitors to
Germany in the course of the nineteenth century corrected the image of the
German professor, who compiles bulky tomes, both under the influence of
Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, and in light of the high standards German university teachers set themselves, as well as the remarkably creative potential of
the country’s universities. German literature, philosophy, and science became
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important catalysts for American intellectual life, and Germany came to serve
as a corrective, even an alternative model on the path toward a separate
national identity distinct from that of the British mother country. This development went hand in hand with the establishment of “poets and thinkers” as
essential elements in the American heterostereotype of Germany.
The great expectations raised early in the nineteenth century by the pioneers
from among the young academic élite concerning the professional competence
of German academic institutions were largely fulfilled until the late nineteenth
century. The transformed hetereostereotype of the Germans was based on the
impressions gained by a total of more than nine thousand American graduates
up to World War I, who studied primarily at reformed universities in northern
and central Germany, where a combination of research and teaching was practiced. The emergence of a romantically colored image of Germany with its old
half-timbered houses, Gothic cathedrals, and impressive art galleries resulted
from the inclusion of the Rhine valley and central Germany in the expanded
route of the grand tour. The romanticization of German reality by intellectuals
and journalists from New England and the South, linked to one another
through a network of friendships, cannot be isolated from the American reception of German classical and romantic authors, whose texts were increasingly
translated. Together with the philosophy of idealism and German theology
these translations played a major role in the birth of the first “autochthonous”
philosophical movement of Transcendentalism. While German musicians
made their contribution to the positive counterimage, which highlighted various cultural deficiencies in the young American republic, the educational system remained for a long time the central element in the contacts with and
opinions on Germany.
The rapid modernization in Bismarck’s Prussia and the obvious transformation of the political map of Europe from the 1860s onward through the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership removed the basis for the
cherished cliché of the cozy and warmhearted sociability of the Germans (as in
the works of Bayard Taylor) and of the lack of practical wisdom shown by German idealists. The Franco-Prussian War and the circumstances of the foundation of the German Empire had long-term effects on the awareness of the
American public and the functions of the image of Germany in American texts.
While distinctions had occasionally been made between very different social
types (such as Motley’s differentiation between average German citizens and
students), and Catholic southern Germans and Protestant northern Germans
(the latter considered to be closely related to the Americans) had been contrasted, a number of American writers now stressed the uniform character of
contemporary German society. Accordingly, Crawford’s romance Greifenstein
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attempted to interpret the military, economic, and intellectual achievements of
the whole nation as the product of their lifestyle and the code of honor of students. Whereas the reticence shown by Samuel Clemens in his treatment of
phenomena inviting caricature in A Tramp Abroad reveals that some American
authors continued to be well-disposed toward German culture, the fact
remains that Germany under William II fell increasingly into popular disrepute
in America. This was not only mirrored in the irritation felt by a growing number of observers with the triumphalist monuments of the new empire, but also
prompted fiction writers to turn again to Italy and France as strongholds of
cultural riches and a more sophisticated national character (as did Henry James
and Edith Wharton). Additionally, anxieties over tendencies in America itself,
which were projected outside, shaped various traits of the image of Germany,
for instance, the profile of the German natural scientist and physician. He was
to function repeatedly in imaginative literature as an unscrupulous experimentalist and a researcher hungry for knowledge and power. The traditional German myth of the Faustian figure in league with the Devil furnished the nucleus
for this stereotype, which permitted the expression of fears of irreligious tendencies in American society and culture.
The reform of American universities from the 1870s was based on the pattern of German university seminars, and residence in Germany continued to be
a must for most academic careers. Nonetheless, further contacts with professors, who two generations earlier had had a decisive share in the reevaluation
of Germany into a cultural model, contributed to the sense of estrangement
between the nations despite the persistence of very positive views in some
quarters (as William James demonstrates). The ideological support given by
academics like von Treitschke to the empire of William II and a sequence of
diplomatic and political confrontations led to the swift dissipation of the capital of sympathy accumulated since 1815. The deterioration in bilateral relations
had undeniable consequences for the image of Germany in American nonfiction and in the portrayal of characters in fiction. Despite the tendency familiar
to the imagologist for stereotypes to persist, several autobiographical texts
show a complete revision of earlier statements concerning the German character (for instance, those of Poultney Bigelow and Henry Adams).
Before Allied propaganda in World War I denied that any positive influences
had emanated from German universities and blamed philosophical idealism
and the German professor for the “Prussianization” of Germany, a minority of
American authors continued to orient themselves toward those very tendencies
that more conservative writers regarded as offensive. With reference to the
more liberal social criticism and the battle against taboos on the stages of
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tic attitudes by Nietzsche, Germany came to serve as a corrective, this time
against puritanically inspired reforms in the United States and against the
moralistic restrictions of the “genteel era.” Despite the dedicated efforts of
cultural mediators such as Hugo Münsterberg, modern Germany was at the
very least somewhat ambivalently judged by the majority of writers before the
propaganda war caused its unexpectedly swift degeneration into the home of
barbaric hordes, the Huns. Authors from different ideological camps paid tribute to this stereotype and shared responsibility for the elimination of German
press associations and schools in the United States.
While German American culture was never to recover from this catastrophe
in public opinion, the endeavor in the period between the wars to show fairness to the former enemy prompted recourse to traditional facets of the image
of Germany. The defense of German professors offered by H. L. Mencken and
the resumption of a dialogue involving considered comparison (Sinclair Lewis’
Dodsworth) illustrate this change of direction. Individual texts rescuscitated
older idylls of the Rhine valley or the Black Forest (for example, in the works of
Louis Untermeyer), or observed the healthy vitality of the young people not
only in the countryside but also in Germany’s towns and cities (as did Joseph
Hergesheimer). Yet the testimony of many expatriates in the period of hyperinflation illustrated the loss of traditional values in German society, which had
fallen into a deep crisis. The consequences of the end of the Weimar Republic
were only very slowly grasped by many writers (such as Kay Boyle, Katherine A.
Porter, and notably Thomas Wolfe), certainly much later than by American foreign correspondents, most of whom had come from the Midwest. The memory
of the manipulation of public opinion in World War I, however, delayed any
clear description of the reality resulting from the accession to power of the
National Socialists in written texts and in other media. While the awareneness
of the crude polemics against Germans in World War I counteracted the tendency toward similar generalizations, the total condemnation of the Germans
by those who had at first hardly or only reluctantly expressed criticism turned
out to be even more extreme. The critical judgment is intensified into a summary condemnation in narrative prose (for instance, by Louis Bromfield),
while fictional chronicles (those of Upton Sinclair and Joseph Freeman) illustrate the increasing brutality of the henchmen of Hitler’s regime in a broad
panorama. The disgust these critics felt for Nazi ideology also affected the
depiction of characters in episodes set before Hitler’s seizure of power.
Katherine A. Porter’s Ship of Fools, for instance, projects familiar negative elements of the hetero-stereotype of the Germans (their exaggerated sense of
order, arrogance and racism, drunkenness and gluttony) onto figures from a
slightly earlier period.
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The dark shadows that the discovery of the extent of the Holocaust threw
over Germany after World War II have continued to taint the German-speaking
countries and their people. Against the background of a bombed landscape the
persistence with which, allegedly, the Germans, with their death wish, clung to
the totalitarian ideology, gained a central function in the avant-garde evocation
of a nightmarish world (for example, that of John Hawkes). The ambivalent
depiction of German characters in Thomas Berger’s Crazy in Berlin, in Kay
Boyle’s late fiction, and in Kurt Vonnegut’s postmodern narratives reveal the
problematical nature of generalizations, which in the cases of Berger and Vonnegut meant confronting their own ethnic heritage. The continuing application of the analysis of postwar Germany offered in these texts to the condition
of American society fostered the self-critical interrogation of forms of injustice
(for instance in civil rights) persisting in the United States.
The “look backward” to Nazi Germany prevalent in American literature
leads to the nightmarish scenery of Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic postmodernist novel Gravity’s Rainbow, where the force of the destructive urge in the
many individuals is revealed against the graphically depicted backdrop of a
“zone” in which the fateful products of the German mind were created. While
Pynchon takes full advantage of the range of negative stereotypes associated
with Germany, he does not shy away from unmasking members of other
nations who similarly appear as racists or unscrupulously carry out behavioristic experiments. They have their share of the moral burden in his radically pessimistic assessment of the individual and collective opportunities of humanity,
whose merciless exposure is a function of the historical material with its
stereotypical elements. To confront the horrors of the past is also William Styron’s goal in his fictional account of the Holocaust in Sophie’s Choice. There the
author relies on types of characters of German provenance based both on
clichés and on historical reality. In his depiction of the inhuman medical doctor, the efficient bureaucrat in the infernal war machine, and the cultivated
Prussian scientist who unscrupulously exploits the inmates of Auschwitz, Styron falls back on explicit perversions of stereotypes of the German character.
But by referring back to the heavy burden of guilt weighing on Southerners as a
result of slavery, he places the events in a context of universal inhumanity.
Unlike these panoramas based on plots set in the past, Walter Abish’s How
German Is It presents Germany as the country of the economic miracle (in his
case without any autoptic experience) and in so doing effectively plays with
clichés. Beneath the glossy surface of a society with typical German virtues
(such as reliability, punctuality, and efficiency) he discloses evidence of a grim
past and hints at the danger of a relapse into authoritarian structures. Finally,
the intercultural function of various facets of the American image of Germany
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repeatedly revealed in the present study motivates the act of remembering in
Walker Percy’s last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. In this dystopia memory is
used to expose global parallels and to point to the danger posed by trends in the
United States themselves.
The intensive treatment of the Holocaust has led to the SS-man, the brute in
the concentration camp, and the militarist becoming the dominant German
character types in fiction, in film, and on television. Considering that imagological research focusing on other material has revealed that frequently a selective
perception determines the “profile” of a foreign country and its people in literature, it can come as no surprise that present-day democratic Germany has in
recent decades lost its importance as a source in American literature. When Germany is used as a setting, writers tend to depart from contemporary reality and
primarily immerse themselves in that period in which the country was home to
state terrorism and militaristic tendencies. The legitimate and necessary memory of the “topography of terror,” for instance in the capital Berlin since the demolition of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of repression in the “other Germany,” has
led foreign observers to focus their gaze on the horrors of the past.1
Despite the caution shown by politicians, the concern about a possible
recurrence of a nationalistic upsurge was revived in the wake of reunification.
In the meantime, fears of a reunited Germany articulated in many places,
including Germany’s West European partner countries, have largely disappeared, even though the media have paid particular attention to the activities of
extreme right-wing hooligans in German cities. That the Germans will long
continue to be associated with the unspeakable guilt of the Holocaust seems,
however, likely when one considers the significance given to this topic in publications such as William H. Gass’ novel The Tunnel (1995).
The hope that the postwar record of the Germans as committed democrats
would help put an end to their close association with the horrors of the Nazi
era has so far not been fulfilled. On the contrary, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s
massive accusation of the Germans being “congenitally genocidal racists”2
triggered a vehement debate. Goldhagen posited a fundamental flaw in German culture, which, in the perspectives of his critical reviewers, such as Norman G. Finkelstein, is presented as being “radically different” from other
societies and cultures, and as a homogeneously sick society.3 The emphasis
both on an anti-Semitic strain in German culture and on the “inevitable” development of an “exterminationist mindset” from the eliminationist mindset of
earlier times made ordinary Germans appear not only as having been in collusion with the perpetrators of the Holocaust but as “willing executioners,” as
pathologically sick, sadistic psychopaths, who bore full responsibility for the
horrors of the extermination campaign.
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Historians on both sides of the Atlantic were divided in their views on the
specific arguments and evidence presented by Goldhagen, but his sweeping
generalizations and rhetoric provoked criticism and led to much skepticism
about the inferences drawn from the evidence. Critics felt that by relating the
obsessive nature of the anti-Semitism practiced by Hitler and his associates to
the passionate acts of a monomaniac like Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick,
Goldhagen’s approach abandoned the sphere of a sober historical analysis in
favor of a passionate yet sweepingly general indictment of the Germans.4
It may still take a generation before the fundamental changes in the map of
Europe and the eastward enlargement of NATO and the European Union generate new variants of German character types, and before the repertoire that
has been dominant since the period of National Socialism gradually fades
away.5 Meanwhile, the former Communist states of Eastern Europe may provide inspiring sources of material for American writers, and inside this transformed view of Europe the many journalistic reports from a reunited Germany
may hopefully furnish new impulses and inspire fictional representations of a
world from which the burden of the past has been removed.
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NOTES
introduction
1. See Peter Firchow’s review of Blaicher’s monograph in GRM 44.2 (1994): 244–47.
2. A systematic and programmatic summary of its goals is offered by Joseph Theodor
Leerssen in “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey” in Poetics
Today 21, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 267–92. Currently, a handbook on this growing
academic field is in preparation. Imagology has drawn on the insights of sociopsychology and cultural anthropology and is a well-established subdiscipline in
Continental Europe, especially in francophone and German-speaking countries,
while it has not yet been widely adopted in the United States.
3. “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” (1959), rpt. in Concepts of Criticism (1963),
282–95.
4. See James Buzard, “A Continent of Pictures” (1993), and The Beaten Track (1991).
5. The cultural studies approach has in the last few years been very productive in the
debate about postcolonial phenomena and the construction of collective identities.
The interconnection between this approach and feminist literary theory is apparent,
e.g., in Mary Louise Pratt’s study Imperial Eyes (1992).
6. See Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, “National Stereotypes in Literature in the English
Language: A Review of Research,” REAL 1 (1982): 75–120.
7. Wittke, We Who Built America (1939).
8. Pochmann, German Culture in America (1957). Stanley Vogel devotes himself in German
Literary Influences on the American Transcendentalists (1955) to the same cluster of questions, and carefully discusses the popularity of German literature as well as of the
philosophy of idealism.
9. The dramatic gap between this attitude and the temporary rehabilitation of Germany in the preceding period can be inferred e.g., from Wittke, German-Language
Press in America (1957).
10. See Germany in American Eyes: A Study of Public Opinion (1959), and Das Deutschlandbild
der Amerikaner (1960).
11. See Deutschlands literarisches Amerikabild, ed. Ritter (1977) and Amerika in der Deutschen
Literatur: Neue Welt—Nordamerika—USA, ed. Bauschinger et al. (1975).
12. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh have collected evidence in the two volumes of
America and the Germans (1985). In the same year the most comprehensive bibliography of German American relations appeared: Arthur R. Schultz, German-American
Relations: German Culture in America, a Subject Bibliography, 1941–1980 (1984).
13. See H. Dyserinck, “Zum Problem der ‘images’ und ‘mirages’ und ihrer Untersuchung im Rahmen der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft,” Arcadia 1.2 (1966):
107–20. See also various publications by Joseph Th. Leerssen, who has examined
diverse aspects of the representation of national identity. Peter Firchow has also
contributed important insights to the analysis of this theme: “National Stereotypes
in Literature: A Critical Overview” [1994] in Il Confronto Letterario (see note 13),
85–99. See also Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary
Practice, ed. C. C. Barfoot (1997).
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14. Il Confronto Letterario: Supplemento al numero XII, 24 (1996).
15. See Leerssen, “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey,” Poetics
Today 21.2 (Summer 2000): 267–69.
16. Numerous bibliographical references are furnished by U. J. Hebel, “Amerika ist
keine Wüste, kein Paradies,” Amerikastudien 38.2 (1993): 203–21.
17. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).
18. Perceptions and Misperceptions: The United States and Germany, Studies in Intercultural Understanding. Gießener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik, ed. Bredella and Haack (1988).
19. Amerikanisches Deutschlandbild und deutsches Amerikabild in Medien und Erziehung, ed.
Krampikowski (1990). The thorough analysis of popular heterostereotypes in U.S. television offered in Deutschlandbilder im amerikanischen Fernsehen, ed. L. Bredella, W. Gast,
and S. Quandt (1994) is based on a project sponsored by Stiftung Volkswagenwerk.
20. “Picturesque in the highest degree . . .”: Americans on the Rhine, ed. Karl Ortseifen, W. Herget and H. Lamm (1993).
21. See Herget, “Overcoming the ‘Mortifying Distance’: American Impressions of German Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Transatlantische
Partnerschaft, ed. D. Gutzen, W. Herget, and H. A. Jacobsen (1992), 195–208.
22. Transatlantic Encounters: Studies in European-American Relations, ed. U. J. Hebel and
K. Ortseifen (1995).
23. Kersten, Von Hannibal nach Heidelberg: Mark Twain und die Deutschen (1993).
24. Alte und Neue Welt in wechselseitiger Sicht: Studien zu den transatlantischen Beziehungen im
19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1995).
25. See the historical survey of the development and state of German Studies in the
United States and its dependence on the relationship between Germany and the
United States in David P. Benseler, Craig W. Nikisch, and Cora Lee Nollendorfs,
eds., Teaching German in Twentieth-Century America (2001).
26. See “‘Germans Make Cows Work’: American Perceptions of Germans as Reported
in American Travel Books, 1800–1840,” Transatlantic Images, 41–63.
27. See “Representations of Germans and What Germans Represent: American Film
Images and Public Perceptions in the Post-War Era,” Transatlantic Images, 285–308.
28. The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000
(2001).
29. Detlef Junker et al., eds., Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges:
1945–1990, 2 vols. (2001).
30. See Werner Sollors and Marc Shell, eds., The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000).
31. In Schlüsselmotive der amerikanischen Literatur (1979), 43–94.
32. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (1987).
33. See inter alia Amerikaner über Deutschland und die Deutschen: Urteile und Vorurteile, ed.
Kurt H. Stapf, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Klaus Jonas (1986).
34. See E. Allen McCormick, ed., Germans in America: Aspects of German-American Relations
in the Nineteenth Century (1983), Randall M. Miller, ed., Germans in America: Retrospect
and Prospect (1984), James F. Harris, ed., German-American Interrelations: Heritage and
Challenge (1985), Willi Paul Adams and Knud Krakau, eds., Deutschland und Amerika:
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Perzeption und Historische Realität (1985), and Klaus Weigelt, ed., Das Deutschland- und
Amerikabild: Beiträge zum gegenseitigen Verständnis beider Völker (1986).
35. See “Germans,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom et al. (1981), 405–25, and “Patterns of German-American History,” in Germans in America: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Randall M. Miller (1984), 14–36.
36. See Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration, ed. F. C. Luebke
(1990).
37. The Death of the German Cousin: Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890–1920 (1986).
38. See “When William Came; If Adolf Had Come. English Speculative Novels on the
German Conquest of Britain,” anglistik & englischunterricht 29/30 (1986–1987):
57–83, as well as As Others See Us: Anglo-German Perceptions, ed. H. Husemann (1994).
39. See Blaicher, Deutschlandbild, 13–43, and Peter Freese, “Exercises in BoundaryMaking: The German as the ‘Other’ in American Literature,” in Germany and German
Thought, 93–132.
40. See Blaicher, Deutschlandbild, 40.
41. See the fifth edition (1731), 11.
42. While an exaggerated cleanliness is regarded as a salient feature of German housewives, this characteristic is, as Freese points out, also associated with a pronounced
sense of order of the Germans.
2. discovering germany
1. See The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4 (1961), 234.
2. See his various tributes to these settlers: “The Germans live frugally in their homes
with respect to diet, furniture and dress,” or “Pennsylvania is indebted to the Germans for the principal part of her knowledge in horticulture,” or “A German farm
may be distinguished from the farms of the other citizens of the state by the superior size of their barns.” Quoted from Faust, vol. 1, 131–38.
3. See Letters from an American Farmer, Letter III, “What is an American,” 84.
4. See, for instance, Charles Ingersoll, Inchiquin: The Jesuit’s Letters (1810).
5. “The first intimation I ever had on the subject was from Mme. de Staël’s work on
Germany, then just published.” See Ticknor, Life, Letters and Journals (1876), vol. 1, 11.
6. On his career cf. Faust, vol. 2, 163–69. See also below.
7. See Ursula Brumm, “Charles Follen: Kultureller Mittler bei den amerikanischen
Transzendentalisten,” in Transatlantic Encounters, 146–56. While Follen was the first
to act as an instructor in German at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania had
already offered instruction in German from 1780 and Columbia University temporarily from 1784.
8. See Blaicher, Deutschlandbild, 110–23.
9. Ticknor pays tribute in his correspondence to the “unique” literature of Germany
created within a period of forty years. For the admiration of the literary pioneers for
Germany, see Long, esp. 10–31.
10. Ticknor is convinced that in the small principalities of Germany the isolation of
scholars from the power structures has led to the development of a culture dominated by thought and ideas and a “Republic of Letters.”
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11. See Long, 77–107, esp. 103–7 for this statement and for Cogswell’s impressions in
Germany and their consequences. In his essay on “National Education” published
in the New York Review in July 1838 Cogswell praised Germany as the only country
where the “science of education” was understood.
12. After having contributed several translations to George Ripley’s influential multivolume publication Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature (1838), Hedge edited previously produced translations of essays by more than twenty German authors and
provided some introductions: The Prose Writers of Germany (1847). Having been
appointed professor of German at the age of sixty-seven, Hedge published his lecture notes as Hours with German Classics (1886).
13. On the basis of his own experience—he was forced to learn German after his arrival
in the country—Dwight pleads for the timely acquisition of German.
14. “The German students, however, are not Germans” (Dwight, Travels, 43–44). J. L.
Motley was to use this phrase a decade later in similar form in his romance Morton’s
Hope (1839).
15. In a footnote on p. 56 he explicitly states that his extensive description of a duel was
written down six months before he had seen John Russell’s Tour in Germany with a relevant report, thus exonerating him in every way from the charge of plagiarism.
16. That Dwight’s criticism of the limitations of American libraries caused annoyance
is indicated by a commentary in the Christian Spectator 1 (December 1829): 638ff.,
from which Vogel quotes (44–45).
17. In view of his comprehensive documentation it seems surprising that Pochmann
provides no commentary on Dwight’s book in his masterly study. There is no doubt
that Dwight’s book on Northern Germany was an important factor in the process of
establishing a romantic image of Germany.
18. For the comments of this scion of plantation owners in the Carolinas, cf. below.
19. See Daniel B. Shumway, “The American Students at the University of Göttingen,”
German-American Annals 8 (1910): 171–254 as well as Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars
in Goethe’s Germany (1965). See also O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual
History (1988), esp. 49–51. A comprehensive account of transatlantic cultural relations of Southerners is offered in his recently published study Conjectures of Order:
Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (2004).
20. See Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars in Goethe’s Germany, 23–45.
21. See Motley, Morton’s Hope, vol. 2, 166: “The German students are no more Germans
than they are Sandwich Islanders. They have, in fact, less similarity with Germans,
than with any other nation. . . . The German is phlegmatic,—the student fiery. The
German is orderly and obedient to the authorities,—the student ferocious and
intractable.”
22. See his remark in a letter (Correspondence, vol. 1, 224): “[Austria] contains eight millions of civilised Germans and nearly thirty millions of Asiatics in sheep-skins and
in tight pantaloons inside their boots.”
23. See Walter A. Reichart, Washington Irving and Germany, 42, and the author’s entries in
Washington Irving’s Journals and Notebooks, vol. 3, which reflect his reading and his
impressions on the journey.
24. The function of this strategy has been seen differently by scholars, see Stowe, “The
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Heidenmauer and Hyperion: Uses of Central Europe in Cooper and Longfellow,” in
Images of Central Europe, ed. Zacharasiewicz, esp. 54–55, and Pochmann, 362–63,
where the parallels between the centuries are seen in the affirmation of an ideology
of progress.
25. Furnished with recommendations from Dr. Francis Lieber, Sumner had visited
experts on International Law in Heidelberg in the late 1830s, and also met prominent historians in Berlin. During his convalescence following the physical attack on
him in the American Senate in 1856, Sumner sought his health in various European
spas, again visiting learned friends in Germany. His sympathy for Germany was
later a factor when he intervened in the Senate during the Franco-Prussian War
together with the most prominent American politician of German origin, Carl
Schurz (1829–1906). See Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, ed. Edward L. Pierce, 4
vols., esp. vol. 1, 120–39 and vol. 3, 529–49.
26. Among those who studied in Göttingen and Berlin were Thomas C. Reynolds,
Samuel Lord, and David Ramsay, the grandson of the signer of the Declaration of
Independence. One major figure who surprisingly escaped the notice of Krumpelmann, was James Pettigrew, whose extensive diary and correspondence with his
friends and other members of the important family of planters of lawyers in North
and South Carolina to which he belonged has meanwhile attracted some attention.
27. On the distinguished career of Gildersleeve, who had studied at Berlin, Göttingen,
and Bonn 1850–53 see Krumpelmann, Southern Scholars, 104–33, and the edition of
Gildersleeve’s letters. Another influential Southern scholar of the next generation
who benefited from his studies in Germany was James H. Kirkland, who later
reformed Vanderbilt University as its chancellor. See also Zacharasiewicz, “A Separate Identity Asserted: Agrarian Affinities with European Culture,” in Hölbling,
Walter, and Klaus Rieser, eds., What Is American? New Identities in U.S. Culture (2004),
191–211, esp. 192–94.
28. On Taylor’s key role see Krumpelmann, Bayard Taylor and German Letters (1959).
29. In “A Home in the Thueringian Forest,” in At Home and Abroad, second series (1862),
Taylor combines a detailed account of his vacation in this area with a report on the
celebration of 4 July, an expression of the implied affinity between the two nations
(210–18, “How We Spent the Fourth of July”).
30. In Views A-foot (211–13) Prague is presented as evoking attractive associations of
“wild and wonderful legends of the rude barbaric ages,” but also appears as a “halfbarbaric, half-Asiatic city” and as the place of residence of “Sclavonic tribes” originating in the wide steppes of Central Asia.
31. This eulogy, composed on the occasion of the German victory over the French with
the capitulation of MacMahon’s army on 4 September 1870, was published in the
New York Tribune on 6 September and quickly reprinted by the German press in America. Krumpelmann, Bayard Taylor and German Letters, 152–53.
32. A detailed account of the intricate relationship between the Transcendentalists and
German culture was provided by Sigrid Bauschinger in her monograph Die Posaune
der Reform: Deutsche Literatur im Neuengland des 19. Jahrhunderts (1989) [rev. ed. The
Trumpet of Reform: German Literature in Nineteenth-Century New England (1998)], where
she updates the research published in the 1950s studies by Vogel and Pochmann.
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33. Dial 1, quoted from Krumpelmann, Bayard Taylor and German Letters, 11.
34. Quoted from Krumpelmann, 12.
35. In addition to her translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe and her edition of the selection from Bettina Brentano’s Günderode, Fuller helped to shape the
image of Germany held by her associates and the larger reading public by her essays
bearing witness to her devoted reading of Novalis, Jean Paul, and others.
36. See Pochmann, 153–207. Here Emerson’s debt to various individual philosophers
and writers is documented in detail. See also the account of this complex relationship in Bauschinger, Die Posaune, 17–75.
37. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11, ed. A. W. Plumstead (1975), 30–31.
38. “A German eats as long and as leisurely as he pleases at one thing, sure that all will
be offered to him in turn; and they are the most indefatigable of eaters; not a meat,
not a vegetable comes on table which they do not partake” (Letters from Abroad, 169).
39. Continuing her continental journey without her husband, who knew Germany
from a previous visit, Beecher Stowe, responding to outward impressions, drew an
amusing caricature of a typical German, stressing the contrast between coarseness
and the inclination to unexpected flights of the fancy: “These Germans seem an odd
race, a mixture of clay and spirit—what with their beer drinking and smoking, and
their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but an ethereal fire is
all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of
poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus” (Sunny Memories, vol. 2, 370–71).
40. That Beecher Stowe in her aesthetic response was indebted to a reading of the central chapter “On the Nature of Gothic” in John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, which had
appeared only two years before and helped her to appreciate this cathedral, deserves
closer consideration.
3. differing responses
1. Humorous illustrations in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, where the bulk of the text first
appeared (June–November 1863, 160–79 and 306–20), with a circulation of 110,000
copies, ensured that a wide readership was able to enjoy the depiction of German
festivities in a family context, presumably in accordance with the frequent celebrations of feasts by German settlers in America.
2. Browne offers sketches which illustrate an inversion of the principle of authority,
allowing pupils to apply the birch to their schoolmasters (see “Schoolmaster’s PayDay,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 27 [July 1863]: 175).
3. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1866, 771, following the publication of
the book version.
4. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson et al. (1989), 142–43.
5. Alcott’s biographers have attempted to discover the model for Professor Bhaer
among her various acquaintances of German extraction. Bhaer represents not the
type of the extravagant Romantic, but the complementary type of the fatherly German.
6. See essay in Images of Central Europe, ed. Zacharasiewicz, pp. 60–67.
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7. See A Kate Chopin Miscellany, ed. Per Seyersted (1979), 70–87, and Emily Toth, Kate
Chopin (1990), 100–120.
8. See Kersten, Von Hannibal nach Heidelberg, 303–4.
9. See Saunterings in The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner, vol. 2 (1904). Warner
brought out his experiences first in the Hartford Courant from 1868 onward. In the
winter of 1875–1876 he visited Germany again and reported on this experience in
the Hartford Courant (December 1875 and January 1876). On the striking similarities
between Clemens’ and Warner’s observations concerning Heidelberg, the comforts
of German bedrooms and living rooms cf. Kersten, Von Hannibal nach Heidelberg,
221–28.
10. Besides Taylor only William Howitt in The Rural and Domestic Life of Germany (1842)
can contest Warner’s right to a pioneer role in this respect.
11. Warner, Saunterings, 209: “It was no easy matter, at last, to pull up from the dear old
city in which we had become so firmly planted, and to leave the German friends who
made the place like home to us. One gets to love Germany and the Germans as he
does [sic] no other country and people in Europe. There has been something so simple, honest, genuine, in our Munich life.”
12. Before undertaking his commissioned visit to Germany, Clemens was advised by his
friend Warner, who offered suggestions for Clemens’ itinerary. Clemens’ attitude
toward the German Empire was also influenced by the highly esteemed Bayard Taylor, who crossed the Atlantic on the same ship as the Clemens family in order to take
up his post as ambassador in Berlin. In addition Clemens had many contacts with
settlers from Germany during his career in various parts of the United States, from
Missouri to the Far West and in the Northeast. See Holger Kersten, Von Hannibal nach
Heidelberg, passim.
13. The technique of irony at the narrator’s expense can be found, for example, in the
lengthy description of the nocturnal search for the lost sock. The comical exaggeration of the risks of rafting on the Neckar, where Clemens and his friend escape the
fury of the elements just as they do the dangers of dynamiting, also belong to this category. Clemens, however, offers a satirical story of the origin of German spectacles.
14. The satirist is in his element when he demonstrates how, all solemn preparations
notwithstanding, the distance observed between the political antagonists Leon
Gambetta (the leader of the Left) and Marie-François Fourtou (the leader of the
Bonapartists) in their notorious duel, which actually happened after the public confrontation on 18 November 1878, excluded even the risk of their being wounded. It
was only the narrator who was temporarily harmed while acting as a witness in this
ridiculous combat!
15. A Tramp Abroad, 42: “They are warm-hearted, emotional, impulsive, enthusiastic,
their tears come at the mildest touch, and it is not hard to move them to laughter.
They are the very children of impulse. We are cold and self-contained, compared
with the Germans.”
16. A Tramp Abroad, 41: “I said she was discovering to me a kindly trait in the Germans
which was worth emulating. I said that over the water we were not quite so generous; that with us, when a singer had lost his voice and a jumper had lost his legs,
these parties ceased to draw.”
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17. “There are plenty of things in Berlin worth importing to America” (Complete Essays,
91).
18. “When we got to the German frontier, where I could use the honest, good sprache,
then I was at home” (Howells, Selected Letters, vol. 1, 98).
19. Letter of 7 December 1861, Selected Letters, vol. 1, 98.
20. See “A Little German Capital,” Nation, 4 January 1866, 11–13.
21. “I’m getting disgusted with this stupid Europe, and am growing to hate it. What I
have told you of society here in Italy, is true of society throughout the continent.
Germany is socially rotten—and the Germans have a filthy frankness in their vice,
which is unspeakably hideous and abominable to me. The less we know of Europe,
the better for our civilization; and the fewer German customs that take root among
us, the better for our decency” (Selected Letters, vol. 1, 114).
22. Though many of Crawford’s peers dismissed the appeal of his fiction (no fewer
than forty-four novels and romances) to a broad readership, his success, manifest
in three collected editions that appeared in his lifetime, ensured a wide reception.
See Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 10.
23. His brother-in-law, in fact, disapproved of Crawford’s participation in a number of
duels. See Maude Howe Elliott, My Cousin F. Marion Crawford, 39–40.
24. Quoted in the following from The Complete Works of F. Marion Crawford, vol. 2 (1883).
25. Claudius appears as “a sort of typical Goth, prototype of the Teutonic races” (6).
Later the authorial narrator takes the opportunity to emphasize that a delay in the
budding of affection in Claudius is part of his inheritance: “the heart of the cold,
northern-born man, is a strange puzzle” (26).
26. The protagonist of the novel, Greif von Greifenstein, in a speech traces “Germany’s
victories directly to their origin in the daily life of German students, so different
from that in other countries” (Complete Works, vol. 15, Greifenstein, 65).
27. Harper’s Monthly Magazine (1886), 495–518, and Atlantic Monthly 27 (1871): 433–46
respectively.
28. William James, Correspondence, vol. 2: William and Henry, 1885–1896, 219–20.
29. Such a comparison has been facilitated by the fact that William’s correspondence
has recently been made accessible to a wider reading public in a new twelve-volume
edition.
30. Apart from comments in the standard biographies of the author, the pertinent
monograph by Evelyn A. Hovanec Henry James and Germany (1979) contributes to an
understanding of James’ problematical relationship with Germany.
31. See Sergio Perosa’s brilliant essay “Henry James and Northern Italy,” in Images of
Central Europe, 119–27. See also Stowe, Going Abroad, 161–94. The exigencies of space
compel us to treat this central theme in James’ career and work more cursorily here
than would be possible on the basis of documentation and would seem appropriate
in view of the sensitive way in which he deals with this topic.
32. See Letters, ed. L. Edel, 4 vols., vol. 1, 126–29, letter of 31 August 1869.
33. See Perosa in Images of Central Europe, 119.
34. See Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1992), 41–45.
35. They form part of Henry James: Autobiography, ed. F. W. Dupee (1956), which com-
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prises the volumes A Small Boy, and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and
The Middle Years (1917).
36. See the amusing comment on this trip in Letters, vol. 1, 30–31, and the quotations
plus drawings contained in “Picturesque in the highest degree . . . ,” ed. Ortseifen,
178–79.
37. This impression is not removed by one of the letters of the sixteen-year-old Henry
to his mother in which he praises the culinary art of Frau Humpert (whose name he
repeatedly gives as “Humbard”) and in which he presents her cuisine without any
apparent irony as exemplary and announces that he would return with her recipes.
Letters, vol. 1, 34.
38. Kaplan, Henry James, esp. 90–92, underlines the contrast between the rather passive
Henry and his elder brother William, who, in spite of his health problems, was
always more active.
39. See “Paris Under Fire,” New York Daily Tribune, 23 January 1871, 2. The New York
papers had previously been largely Germanophile, but they now even compared
the mercilessness of the conquerors with the conduct of the Huns under Attila.
Thus, Wilhelm I was called Attila in the New York World (see Gazley, 374), decades
before Emperor Wilhelm II’s infamous speech provided political polemicists
with a suitable key-term and what was to become the most popular cliché for the
Germans.
40. “What colossal tastelessness,” he exclaimed when faced with the man-sized sculptures surrounding the monument of Maximilian I. See also Hovanec, 19. See, however, Warner’s praise for the same sculptures.
41. He calls “Heidelberg a disappointment (in spite of its charming castle), and even
Nürnberg not a joy for ever.” See Hovanec, 20, and James’ dismissive reference to
German cities in his travelogue on Venice in Collected Travel Writings: The Continent,
345–48.
42. “A lovely little place which is insidiously reconciling me to Germany, which I have
been hating ever since I came abroad, on the evidence of traveling Germans”
(William James, Correspondence, ed. Skrupskelis and Berkeley [1992], vol. 1, letter of
5 August 1873, 217).
43. The essay first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869 and was reprinted in Taylor’s
collection Byways of Europe (1872).
44. In addition to the monument to Arminius that for Friedrich Barbarossa on the
Kyffhäuser mountain was also in the planning stage.
45. On the factors that shaped this vignette, see K. P. S. Jochum, “Henry James’ Strong
American Light on Darmstadt” in Transatlantic Encounters, 207–17.
46. Complete Tales, vol. 4, 427–65.
47. Kruse surveys that tradition in Schlüsselmotive der amerikanischen Literatur (43–94) in
nineteenth-century American fictional prose, which employs the type of the German scientist as a problematical figure.
48. See Letters, vol. 1, 367. It is striking that Ralph Touchett passes a similar judgment on
Henrietta Stackpole and that many a trait in his fellow countrymen Henry James dislikes has a counterpart in Germany.
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49. See the hypothetical formulation in the essay “Occasional Paris” (Portraits of Places,
1877), where Henry posits in a comparison with the British and the French that the
Germans are a detestable people. Even if Henry adds in parentheses that the negative attribute could easily be placed differently, the very selection of the Germans
reflects a deep-rooted dislike.
50. His review appeared in the Nation 22 (30 March 1876).
51. While Henry notes in his review that Julian had spent six years in Dresden, the Dictionary of American Biography gives only three years as a maximum.
52. See “A Golden Wedding in the Best Society,” Appleton’s Journal, 4 January 1873,
49–52, and “Why Jack Went to Europe,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 56 (1877–
1878): 924–27.
53. That Willis, Browne and William James also noted that Saxon women were subjected to exhausting physical labor probably suggests there is a kernel of truth in
this observation. Only Julian Hawthorne, however, reports the provocative scene
with a farmer’s wife and his dog pulling a cart from the market, while the husband
is sitting smoking on the cart.
54. Apparently James shared Hawthorne’s attitude of rejecting the Germanophile tendency current in America, “to make Germans of all people in the world, and Saxons
with them, objects of sentimental hero worship” (preface in Saxon Studies).
55. Complete Tales, vol. 3, 299–350. Mme. Blumenthal drops her infatuated admirer in
favor of a Prussian Major, while Blumenthal’s turbulent career is summarized by
Herr Niedermeyer, an Austrian of the “school of Metternich,” whose “knowledge
on social matters had the flavor of all German science; it was copious, minute,
exhaustive” (Complete Tales, vol. 3, 326).
56. See Complete Tales, vol. 5, 357–412.
57. See “Collaboration,” Complete Tales, vol. 8, 407–31. See on the story Hovanec, 85–86.
58. Ludy T. Benjamin et al. have shown that William Wundt was the teacher of many
American psychologists. He evaluated sixteen doctoral theses and was the coexaminer of further seventeen. See American Psychologist 47.2 (February 1992):
123–31.
4. transatlantic encounters
1. See Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar: The Beginnings of Columbia University
(1934), esp. 322–41. On the efforts to intensify cultural exchange, the foundation of
a German museum in Harvard, of an America Institute in Berlin, and on the German
American exchange of professors, see also Reiner Pommerin, Der Kaiser und Amerika
(1986).
2. On the whole issue see Charles Franklin Thwing, The American and the German University, and Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School. The long-term effect of educational experiences is also documented in the Old Letters of a Student in Germany
1856–57 of Edward Southey Joynes, who taught for decades at Columbia, South
Carolina, and whose letters were significantly reissued during World War I, briefly
before his death, thus demonstrating the Germanophile attitude of its author, one
of the first professors of foreign languages in the South.
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3. See his Autobiography (1931), 129–52, and his long letters from Germany to his sisters, parents, and friends, from August 1889 onward.
4. George Santayana, for instance, was later to trace German militarism and the supposed lack of internal protective mechanisms back to the patterns of thought and
argumentative practices of German idealists. The authoritarian and nationalistic
attitude of professors like von Treitschke, reported by many visitors and then taken
to be typical of German professors, was to facilitate the summary condemnation of
the German intellectual élite at the beginning of World War I.
5. His fiancée married him in 1881. See his lively letters to her from 1879–1880 in the
Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dabney Papers, MS. 1412, series 2.1, folders 176–77.
6. He earlier commented that there they would have “no picture galleries and no great
opera,” but would return “to a land the most fertile and a people the most honest
that God governs” (letter of 30 November 1879).
7. He was the director of the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station and state
chemist, and temporarily professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina.
His European experience probably helped him later to attain the presidency at the
University of Tennessee, which he held until 1904, before he served for sixteen years
in this capacity at the University of Cincinnati.
8. See The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney by Thomas Cary Johnson (1903), 422.
9. See Lavern J. Rippley, “German Assimilation: The Effect of the 1871 Victory on
Americana-Germanica,” in Germany and America, ed. Trefousse (1980), 122–36.
10. Cf., however, Brent O. Peterson, Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity: Literature and
Community in Die Abendschule (1991), on the assimilation of immigrants from Germany, which had set in earlier, and the decline of their distinctive cultural identity.
11. Friedrich Paulsen, a professor of philosophy in Berlin, composed a highly regarded
description of the historical development of German universities which was to
function as a major source of information at the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago in 1893. A translation (The German Universities and University Study) appeared
in New York in 1895 and an expanded version in 1906.
12. The future professor of history at Cornell and author of a comprehensive history of
Prussia had written this book in Berlin while a foreign correspondent.
13. Apart from an obituary by Kuno Francke, “Bismarck as a National Type,” Atlantic
Monthly 82 (1898): 560–68, the American readership encountered a favorable picture of the Iron Chancellor in James W. Headlam, Bismarck and the Foundation of the
German Empire (1899).
14. This autobiography appeared between 1944 and 1953 under the title Persons and
Places. References in the following are to the critical edition of 1986.
15. This essay appeared in Harvard Monthly (May 1892) and is reprinted in George Santayana’s America: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. James Ballowe (1967), 131–41. In a
sweeping generalization, Santayana called teachers and students in modern Germany “excellent examples of that unquestioning subordination of mind to matter
and of ends to means which is the essence of Philistinism” (134–35).
16. “For me it is a source of eternal regret to have missed the enrichment and the lesson
that fusion with German life, in my youth, might have given me. . . . I see now that I
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ought to have made a fresh plunge, a bold decision, gone to Marburg or Jena or Heidelberg or Bonn, seen only Germans, compelled myself to master the language, and
lived, as during my first semester, an austere poor student’s life” (Persons and Places,
259–60).
17. Like Fred Lewis Pattee, who was to reinterpret his experience in the light of the
growing threat of Nazism, both publisher and readers of Santayana’s polemical
work of 1916 were conscious of the current state of Central Europe when Egotism in
German Philosophy was reissued at the beginning of World War II.
18. Rather like the case of Henry James, whose long-deferred arrival at Dresden may
explain his inability to appreciate the achievements of German culture, the absence
of a genuine rapport between Santayana and German culture may be traced back to
the fact that after the idyllic days spent in Dresden he lost touch with the Baroque
aspects of German-speaking countries. In his autobiography he also noted that he
had originally intended to visit Vienna “and see the Catholic, gay, and courtly
aspects of Germany, so utterly ignored in the view of Germany obtainable from
America” (467). Here there is a hint of a regret that he had not really come to know
the side of German culture closer to the Mediterranean spirit congenial to himself.
19. Santayana boldly asserts: “The marvel was that with all these morbid preoccupations filling his days and nights Westenholz retained to the last his speculative freedom. . . . If this cohabitation of profound moral troubles with speculative
earnestness was characteristically German, so was the cohabitation of both with
childish simplicity” (263–64).
20. The most exhaustive treatment of Du Bois’ experiences in Europe is contained in
The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1968), 156–76. For the significance of his stay in
Germany see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919,
vol. 1 (1993), 118–27.
21. See his reference to Treitschke, “the fire-eating Pan-German,” in Writings (1986),
588, and 626. There is a more detailed report in The Autobiography, 165.
22. Except for an incident with nosy people in Lübeck (see Lewis, Du Bois, vol. 1,
138–39), the Germans gave hardly any cause for annoyance. In general, Du Bois’s
skin color certainly created fewer problems for him in Europe than in his own country, just as it did half a century later for James Baldwin. The experience of marginalization was apparently not the reason for his estrangement from Germany two
decades later.
23. See his admission in The Autobiography, 169: “The saluting of magnificent uniforms,
the martial music and rhythm of movement stirred my senses. Then there was that
new, young Emperor . . . Ever and again he came riding ahead of his white and
golden troops on prancing chargers through the great Brandenburg Gate, up the
Linden . . . I even trimmed my beard and mustache to a fashion like his and still follow it.”
24. See Lewis, Du Bois, vol. 1, 515.
25. On this later visit see chapter 6.
26. Mary Church Terrell also refers to an American woman who told the proprietor of
another pension that, as a black woman, she would be ostracized in the United
States, thus cherishing and exporting prejudices.
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27. Terrell’s moderate stance in the field of politics may have been influenced by her
concern for her husband’s career as a senior judge repeatedly up for reelection. The
tribute she pays in her autobiography to both Booker T. Washington and Du Bois,
however, suggests her inclination to avoid extreme positions and function rather as
a mediator.
28. J. W. Johnson, in Three Negro Classics, ed. John Hope Franklin (1965), chap. 9, 470–71.
29. “I do not pretend to understand German, yet it seemed to me that there was something familiar and friendly about that language as compared with Czech” (The Man
Farthest Down, 58). See the similar preference which Taylor admitted two generations earlier for German over Czech and other Slavonic languages.
30. Bigelow later reported on this experience, though “coloring” the facts in The Prussian Memories (1915–1916).
31. This adventure was described in a series of travel reports which first appeared in
installments in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine under the title “From the Black Forest
to the Black Sea” (February to July 1892) and then as a separate publication entitled
Paddles and Politics down the Danube (1892).
32. Contemporary accounts alleged that this was the reason the author was declared
persona non grata in Russia. His report continues a practice which one century before
globetrotting John Ledyard had employed in his travel journal when he set out for
Siberia. The crossing of the frontier between Prussia and czarist Poland marked for
him the point of transition from the culture of the Occident to the barbaric East, the
“great barrier of Asiatic and European manners.” (See Larry Wolff, “ ‘Between the
Eastern and Western World’: John Ledyard in Central Europe,” in Images of Central
Europe, ed. Zacharasiewicz, 10–26.)
33. Quoted from Raimund Lammersdorf, “Amerika und der Kaiser: Zur Perzeption
Wilhelms II. in den Vereinigten Staaten, 1888–1909,” American Studies 31.3 (1986):
295–302.
34. See also Bigelow, History of the German Struggle for Liberty (1896–1905).
35. Georg von Bunsen had published a number of essays in the United States, for
instance his portrait of Frederick William, the father and short-lived predecessor of
William II (“The German Crown Prince,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 67
[1883]: 354–79), in which he presented Frederick William as very humane. Bismarck made Bunsen pay very dearly for his political opposition so that Bigelow
remarked in his Prussian Memories that Bunsen’s grave might bear the inscription
“Done to death by Bismarck” (63).
36. It is one of the oddities of history that there are close parallels between the fate of
the eight-year-old schoolboy Poultney Bigelow in 1864 and the irritation felt by
Henry James, who could not stand the plain fare provided in the household of his
teacher in Bonn. It is intriguing to note that such youthful experiences should have
had considerable imagological consequences for the works of these authors.
37. In this respect it is precisely Bunsen’s article cited above that provides a totally different perspective (369–70), as he saw Dr. Hinzpeter as the embodiment of high
educational ideals far removed from a merely authoritarian way of thinking.
38. “Germans you have ever been, and Germans shall you always remain, so help me
God and my good sword!” (Prussian Memories, 29).
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39. See Henry Cord Meyer on the relatively balanced studies by S. Whitman, Imperial Germany (1891), or by W. von Schierbrand, Germany: The Welding of a World Power (1902),
and a number of well-informed books by William H. Dawson.
40. See Meyer on Austin Harrison’s Pan-Germanic Doctrine (1904), a volume that provided
key concepts for André Geradamé’s alarming and alarmist claims concerning the
ruthless desire of the Germans for world power (see The Pan-German Plot Unmasked,
1917).
41. See the publications by General von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (1912; trans.
London 1914), and Franz Freiherr von Edelsheim, Operationen über See (Berlin, 1901),
which awakened suspicions later confirmed by the German invasion of neutral Belgium. Cf. Reinhard R. Doerries, “The Politics of Irresponsibility: Imperial Germany’s Defiance of United States’ Neutrality During World War I,” in Germany and
America, 3–20. See also Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “Die USA und Europa vor dem
Ersten Weltkrieg,” Amerikastudien 39 (1994): 7–41.
42. Flynt’s full name was Josiah Flint Willard (1869–1907). In his essay “The Germans
and the German-American,” Atlantic Monthly 78 (November 1896): 655–64 he
hinted that his assessment was based on many years of intimate acquaintance. In
his adventurous life Flynt/Willard had, indeed, spent some time with his mother,
who ran a private school for girls in Berlin.
43. “Bismarck as a National Type,” Atlantic Monthly 82 (1898): 560–68.
44. After the beginning of the war Francke tried hard to express the perspective of a
German immigrant to the United States in the media (see his collection of essays A
German-American’s Confession of Faith, 1915). After the catastrophe of the Great War
and the wholesale destruction of German cultural institutions in the United States
Francke attempted a vindication of his own ethnic group in Atlantic Monthly 137
(April 1926): 494–502.
45. Howells, Their Silver Wedding Journey, illustrated, 2 vols. (1899).
46. On the continuing attraction of Berlin in general medicine see Thomas NevilleBonner, American Doctors and German Universities: A Chapter in International Intellectual
Relations, 1870–1914 (1963), esp. chap. 3. Pathology as practiced in Berlin under
Professor Virchow had as good a reputation as general medicine, so that from the
1880s onward Berlin surpassed Vienna, which had earlier been regarded as the
“Mecca of medicine.” At the peak of the interest there were probably about one
hundred medical graduates from the United States simultaneously in Berlin, with
special summer courses provided for them.
47. For an explication of this important motif see Kruse, “Dr. Materialismus,” esp.
86–94.
48. As Dr. Heidenhoff is not mentioned in the sketch of the history of the motif by
Kruse, he is here chosen as an example. The novel also reached a German reading
public in an adaptation by A. Zacher entitled Dr Heidenhoffs Wunderkur.
49. The text, which originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in November of 1890, was
included in In the Three Zones (1893). It is reprinted in Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century, ed. H. Bruce Franklin (1966), 168–86.
50. The summary characterization of Dr. Materialismus is concluded with the significant phrase: “His soul was a damned one, and he cared not for the loss of it.”
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51. See Ware’s encounter with the German scientist who can say of himself: “I am a
doctor three or four times over” (Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware, esp. 69).
52. Münsterberg fulfilled his tasks as an academic teacher with great energy, but in the
interest of good bilateral relations he organized a big international conference,
which caused some friction with William James who had expected a stronger
involvement on the part of Münsterberg in the development of experimental psychological research.
53. Münsterberg does not specify if he was thinking of any particular cartoons. Cf. the
sucessful series by Rudolph Dirk published in Hearst’s New York Journal begun in
1897 about the “Katzenjammer Kids” (children of immigrants reminiscent of Max
and Moritz, the well-known figures of Wilhelm Busch).
54. “The habits of this Prussian sauerkraut-eater are well-known. He goes shabbily
dressed, never takes a bath, drinks beer at his breakfast, plays skat, smokes a long
pipe, wears spectacles, reads books from dirty loan libraries, is rude to the lower
classes and slavishly servile to the higher, is innocent of the slightest attempt at
good form in society, considering as his object in life to obey a policeman, to fill
blanks with bureaucratic red tape, and to get a title in front of his name. Most of this
genus fill their time with training parade step in the barrack courts; the others either
make bad lyrical poems or live immoral lives, or sit in prison on account of daring to
say a free word in politics. But their chief characteristic comes out in their relations
to women and to the government. With calculating cruelty, they force women to
remain uneducated and without rights; in marriage they treat them like silly playthings or servant-girls. . . . And lastly, their government: it is hard to understand
why, but it is a fact that they insist on living without any constitution, under an
absolute autocrat, and it is their chief pride that their monarch is an irresponsible
busybody, whose chief aim is to bother his patient subjects. This is the ‘Dutchman’
in American eyes” (7).
55. Münsterberg regrets that many immigrants devote themselves completely to their
new home and abandon all links with the “fatherland.” He is no advocate of a cultural pluralism as propagated from 1916 onward by Horace Kallen, but is apparently
inclined to accept the notion that “a new English-speaking people in which the
most various elements are fused into something new and original” would be
formed of the members of various ethnic and national groups. Münsterberg’s concept anticipates by a few years that of the “melting pot” memorably formulated by
Israel Zangwill.
56. The book first appeared in German (Berlin, 1904) and was translated as The Americans by one of Münsterberg’s assistants.
57. See Keller, German-America and the First World War (1969), 207–97.
58. This was a major factor in Münsterberg’s repeated refusal to accept a call back to
Germany, though he served briefly as exchange professor in Berlin in 1910.
59. In the countries of the Entente there was indignation at the fact that ninety-three
German professors had signed an “Appeal to the Civilized World” supporting German war objectives. The reaction was even more furious when 1341 academic teachers, diplomats and civil servants signed another manifesto in June 1915. See Keller,
German-America and the First World War, 173–74.
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60. See Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al., vol. 5, 353. As early as the 1890s
Adams had regarded Germany as a major agent disturbing the status quo: “until its
expansive force is decidedly exhausted, I see neither political nor economical equilibrium possible” (Letters, vol. 4, 476–77).
61. On his meeting Sumner in Berlin see The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Leon
Wieseltier (1990), 76.
62. This report, which was finished in Dresden, appeared only after World War II in
American Historical Review 53.1 (October 1947).
63. “A few days at Dresden in the spring weather satisfied them [Adams and his American companions] that Dresden was a better spot for general education than Berlin,
and equally good for reading Civil Law. . . . the Theatre and Opera were sometimes
excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the Spree” (Education, 81).
64. K. A. Mayer has substantiated the claim made by Pochmann that Adams followed
the model of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and of his novel
Wilhelm Meister: “Some German Chapters of Henry Adams’s Education: ‘Berlin
(1858–9),’ Heine and Goethe,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19 (1994): 3–25.
On Adams’ debt to German philosophy and scholarship, see the contributions by
David C. Partenheimer “The Education of Henry Adams in German Philosophy,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 339–45, and “Henry Adams’ Scientific History
and German Scientists,” ELH 27.3 (1990): 44–52.
65. During the war Santayana had also revised earlier experiences in a similar fashion.
As early as 1915, using impressions gained in Berlin during his studies, he blamed
the catastrophic development in Germany and the current situation in the war on
the intellectual excesses of German idealism, his targets ranging from Kant, Fichte,
and Hegel to Nietzsche.
66. See Morton G. White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (1949),
147–54, on John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics (1915). Thorstein Veblen in
Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915) used his knowledge to offer a
more sober analysis of the links between the idealism in the ethical sphere of German philosophy and the economic and industrial efficiency of the Empire.
67. See The Political Thought of Heinrich von Treitschke, ed. Henry William Carless Davis
(London: Constable, 1914).
5. cultural conflicts
1. See his translation of a volume of essays on Oscar Wilde (from the German and the
French) as well as his short stories, novels, and plays.
2. “The legend of a Germany ruled by uniforms, military or bureaucratic, became hard
to discern under a play of wit and criticism in print that no other land in the world
surpassed” (Masks and Minstrels, 15).
3. Pollard underlines the modernity and the cleanliness of German cities, regarding the
fate of the lower classes in English cities as incomparably worse than in Germany, but
subsequently pays tribute to the situation in the fine arts and in the theater.
4. Masks, 265: “[I]t is essential that we dwell a moment upon certain most illuminat-
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ing conclusions to be reached by studying the map of central Europe. That map is
full of revelation in what it tells us of the effect of climate on temperament.”
5. On the role of propaganda in World War I see Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of
Words (1987).
6. In several editorials in the Baltimore Sun Mencken severely criticized Germany as
early as 1910, at a time when his sympathies for England still predominated.
7. On his attitude toward Germany and the approaching conflict see Fred Hobson,
Mencken: A Life (1994), 132–36.
8. With the opening of the archives after the prescribed period the letters as well as the
private memoirs of the quarrelsome author have become accessible, thus furnishing a solid base for a definitive biography, since provided by Hobson. The following
remarks are based on this comprehensive work and on some autobiographical texts
edited in the 1990s.
9. See Manfred Stassen, “Nietzsky vs. the Booboisie: H. L. Mencken’s Uses and
Abuses of Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche in American Literature and Thought, ed. Manfred Pütz
(1995), 97–114. There the reader is reminded of an anecdote which Mencken related
later: Emissaries on behalf of the Department of Justice visited Mencken in World
War I in order to interview him about his alleged role as “an intimate associate and
agent of the ‘German monster Nietzsky’” (108).
10. Smart Set 34 (August 1911): 151–55.
11. Mencken himself noted that his interest in Germany was awakened by his reading of
Samuel Clemens’ A Tramp Abroad. On Mencken’s relatively modest earlier knowledge cf. Hobson, Mencken, 45. In his social milieu only some servant girls had used
German, and it appeared to him at first as an “awful language.”
12. See Atlantic Monthly 114 (November 1914): 598–607. Ellery Sedgwick, the Anglophile
editor of this journal, seems to have deliberately provoked Mencken, whose column
had since 1913 been unequivocally pro-German.
13. See Hobson, Mencken, 135–40.
14. It appeared in the Smart Set (April 1913). See The Young Mencken: The Best of His Work,
ed. Carl Bode (1973), 251ff.
15. See David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel (1994), 64–70.
16. See Mencken: My Life as Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (1993), esp. 41–43 and
172–75, and Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir by H. L. Mencken, ed. Fred
Hobson, et al., esp. 52–59.
17. See My Life as Author and Editor, 173.
18. The author speaks repeatedly of “my German year.” In her later autobiography she
refers to an eight-year long sojourn in Germany, a fact also reflected in her book
Eight Years in Germany (1914).
19. Peter Firchow in The Death of the German Cousin (1986), 81–84, contrasts Dividing
Waters with less complex narratives which shed light on the crises in mixed marriages and partnerships (e.g., Elizabeth Beauchamp von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her
German Garden, 1898, and Sybil Spottiswoode, Her Husband’s Country, 1911).
20. It is ironical that later a “revocatio” of this enlightening tendency occurred. Wylie
subsequently distanced herself from this portrait of “Germans” and dismissed her
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positive image as a sign of total confusion. After the beginning of World War II she
renounced, in My Life with George (1940), her earlier statements in fiction and nonfiction, claiming that they were merely the result of her long stay in the southwest of
Germany and her problematical love for the music of Richard Wagner. She accused
herself of having been (even before World War I!) a typical young National Socialist.
21. See Gustavus Ohlinger, Their True Faith and Allegiance, with a foreword by Owen Wister (1916). Wister distinguishes clearly between those loyal American citizens who
had come from southern Germany and the “Prussians and the prussianized” (ix).
See also Price Collier, Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View (1914),
and William Roscoe Thayer, Germany vs. Civilization: Notes on the Atrocious War (1916),
esp. chap. 8: “Prussianizing Germany,” 106.
23. Mencken felt that Dreiser’s novels, which according to genteel critics advocated the
ethics of the jungle, furnished a truthful picture. Mencken similarly assessed the satirical castigation of the weaknesses of American society by his friend Sinclair Lewis.
24. Lewis was to warn in the 1920s of the threat of a collapse of efforts for a lasting
European peace and refer to the dangers resulting from the suppression of a
defeated Germany.
25. “The National Letters,” rpt. from Prejudices (1920) in The American Scene, ed. Huntington Cairns (1977), 55–110, esp. 100.
26. In this context the pugnacious journalist takes aim at the extraordinary increase of
the number of professors in the United States: “One cannot turn in the United
States without encountering a professor . . . A professor was until lately sovereign of
the country, and pope of the state church” (98). He refers explicitly to the machinations of “Mr. Creel’s amazing corps of ‘twenty-five hundred American historians’ ”
(100). Creel had earlier in the same year in How We Advertised America (1920), proudly
called his own achievement “a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest
adventure in advertising.”
27. Mencken described the Oktoberfest in a letter to an English friend as “the grandest
festival ever arranged on this earth by mortal man” (Hobson, Mencken, 223).
29. In the thirties Mencken was apparently inclined to make light of Hitler’s rise as a
purely temporary phenomenon. The impression given is that he tried to isolate
himself from oppressive reality.
30. See the correspondence between Dreiser and Mencken and its assessment in Hobson, Mencken, 106–10.
31. See also Renate von Bardeleben, “Personal, Ethnic, and National Identity: Theodore
Dreiser’s Difficult Heritage,” in Interdisziplinarität, ed. M. Forstner and K. v. Schilling
(1991), 319–40.
32. See “The Art of Theodore Dreiser” (1916), rpt. in The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, ed.
A. Kazin and C. Shapiro (1955), 92–96.
33. See his essay “Theodore Dreiser: Hidden Ethnic,” MELUS 11 (Spring 1984): 53–63.
34. See Casciato’s essay in Dreiser’s “Jennie Gerhardt”: New Essays on the Restored Text, ed.
James L. W. West III (1995), 167–82.
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35. Jennie Gerhardt, ed. James L. W. West III (1992), 32: “From this on, Gerhardt heard
continually of the fine senator at the hotel . . . He was inclined, with the simplicity of
a German working-man, to believe that only superior qualities could exist in one so
distinguished.”
36. Jennie Gerhardt, 25: “The Germans love to make a great display at Christmas. It is the
one season of the year when the fulness of their large family affection manifests
itself.”
37. Meanwhile the restored complete text has been edited by R. von Bardeleben.
38. The following observations on the image of Germany in Dreiser’s travelogue are
indebted to von Bardeleben’s analysis of the manuscript: see her essay “Central
Europe in Travelogues by Theodore Dreiser: Images of Berlin and Vienna,” in
Images of Central Europe, ed. Zacharasiewicz, 144–58.
39. See Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser, vol. 2: An American Journey, 1908–1945 (1990), 57–60.
40. See Riggio, “Europe Without Baedeker: The Omitted Hanscha Jower Story—from A
Traveler at Forty,” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (1977): 423–40. Von Bardeleben has corrected the name on the basis of her study of the author’s diary to “Jauer.”
41. Like authors of travel books since the seventeenth century, Dreiser notices the
abrupt change in the physiognomy and patterns of behavior when crossing borders,
first when entering Switzerland, and then when he reaches German soil.
42. See A Traveler at Forty (1913), 438: “[An] impressive equestrian statue of Emperor
William I, armed in the most flamboyant and aggressive military manner and looking sternly down on the fast-traveling and uniting waters of the two rivers.”
43. Dreiser is generally dismissive of what he considers the tasteless architecture of the
Wilhelminian period and proposes: “The present Imperial Opera House should be
torn down and cast into the scrap heap and a truly individual structure reared in its
place . . . There should be a new imperial palace, set off entirely by itself . . . Berlin
needs a great Pantheon, an avenue such as Unter den Linden lined with official
palaces (not shops), and unquestionably a magificent museum of art. Its present public and imperial structures are a joke” (A Traveler at Forty, new critical ed., 656–57).
44. The fact that, in contrast to the Americans, in whose country the means of transportation are provided by profit-seeking businessmen, passengers in Berlin have an
excellent public service at their disposal provokes the sarcastic remark that the subjects of an imperial monarchy are apparently better served than the inhabitants of a
free republic.
45. In contrast to Dreiser’s relatively short description of nightlife in Berlin in the 1913
version of the travel book (474–78) that theme was dealt with extensively by American travelers ten years later.
46. It was only briefly before his arrival in New York on the Kronland that Dreiser
received the news of the sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage.
47. J. Walton in Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation (1970), calls A Motor-Flight through
France “a fine, old-fashioned travel book.”
48. The diary of her cruise in the Mediterranean, undertaken in 1888 with her similarly
adventurous husband Edward, The Cruise of the Vanadis, appeared only in 1992. In
addition to three travelogues dealing with France there is In Morocco (1920), which
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captures the exotic appeal of the former French colony. See Edith Wharton Abroad:
Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920, ed. Sarah Bird Wright (1995).
49. A Backward Glance: A Memoir (1934) and the formerly unpublished text “Life and I” are
contained in Novellas and Other Writings, ed. Cynthia G. Wolff (1990).
50. See the authorial characterization of Shepson: “the squat figure of a middle-aged
man in an expensive fur coat, who looked as if his face secreted the oil which he
used on his hair” (The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis, 2 vols.
[1987], vol. 1, esp. 664).
51. See “Life and I,” 1079.
52. See Lewis’ summary of her impressions in Berlin and Dresden in Edith Wharton: A
Biography (1975), 351–55.
53. In this collection of impressions from the front, Wharton illustrates the destruction
of art treasures by the war machine of the aggressor from the east.
54. This collection focuses on the demonstration of the characteristic values of the
French, which are unchanged by the war and in indirect contrast to those of their
eastern neighbors.
55. Here the readiness for sacrifice and the wisdom of the French, who do not abandon their national ideal, is presented. See Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her
Fiction (1953), 165–68. The point at issue is the renunciation of a natural egoism
in order to save Western civilization, which Wharton identifies with France. She
demanded its support by the United States in 1915, urging American entry into
the Great War.
56. See the concluding essay “The Tone of France,” in Fighting France (1915), 217–38.
Through this contrast it is made clear that the enemy belongs to the category of the
bloodthirsty, “more brutal races” (234).
57. See Lewis, Edith Wharton, 393. On the artistic imperfections of drawing in black and
white see Nevius, Edith Wharton, 162–68.
58. Within the Rim and Other Essays, 1914–1915 (rpt. 1968).
59. See Within the Rim, 29: “the awful proposition of a world squeezed together in the
huge Prussian fist.”
60. On the inclusion of Henry James and other literary figures in the propaganda activities of the Allies, see Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words, 59–64.
61. In this text Wister remembers positive impressions in Germany in the years 1870
and 1882–1883 and discusses the transformation of this nation and its culture under
Prussian influence.
62. See Buitenhuis, 27–28 on the extremely dubious “Report of the Committee on
Alleged German Outrages,” compiled under the chairmanship of Lord Bryce in
1915.
63. A variant of this schematic differentiation (on the one hand: Prussian bullies, on the
other: sensitive and warmhearted southern Germans) is also found in Henry
Adams’ letters after the turn of the century and in his Education (382–85, 392–94,
403, and 405–7), where southern Germany and the Rhineland are, as part of an
Atlantic cultural space, contrasted with the heart of Prussia, a territory influenced
by Eastern despotism.
64. It is explicitly mentioned that it is not Prussian cities but rather Weimar, Jena, Göt202 ]
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tingen, Heidelberg, and Bonn which have had the greatest international reputation
“for intellectual leadership” (Thayer, 21).
65. “They have given the world lyric poetry, music, mythology, philosophy, and these
are still their souls’ darlings. . . . The American seeks wealth, the Englishman
power, the Frenchman notoriety, the German is satisfied with peaceful enjoyment
of music, poetry, art, and friendly and very simple intercourse with his fellows.”
Collier (Germany and the Germans, 134–35) stresses the prominent role of Jews in the
German public sphere and already mentions tensions between this frequently cosmopolitan segment of society and nationalist tendencies in Germany (130–33).
66. The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers by Randolph Bourne (1920, rpt. 1956),
esp. 97–101. Bourne, who like Horace Kallen developed “an un-American dream of
a ‘transnational America’” in an essay in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916, had spent
a year of study and investigation in Europe in 1913. His impressions are based on his
thirteen months in the Old World, where he carefully observed the resistance to the
growth of militarism in various countries. Spending the last two weeks of July 1914
in Germany enabled him to witness the excitement in Berlin on the eve of the Great
War before he left the country. Still, his analysis of the promising trends in German
architecture and the sober building style leading to the Bauhaus architecture
prompts the acknowledgment of “some profound and subtle sympathy, a harmony
of spirit and ends” fundamentally different from the summary denunciation of
Germans and German culture in the ensuing years.
67. The illustration of this bespectacled, pot-bellied academic with his large moustache, long beard, and straggling hair reiterates through a caption the cliché of
heavy-handed soporific German scholarship and through his name seems to suggest the bruality of trench warfare with poison gas attacks, a perverse manifestation
of German “Kultur.”
68. See the documentation offered by Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty (1974), esp. 3–26. The
wave of anti-German hysteria also undermined and basically ended the German
ethnic theater, for instance, in New York, where self-parody of the ethnic group had
found an expression in the plays staged by Adolph Philipp. See Peter ConollySmith, “Ersatz-Drama and Ethnic (Self-)Parody: Adolph Philipp and the Decline of
New York’s German-Language Stage, 1893–1918,” in Multilingual America, ed.
Werner Sollors (1998), 215–39.
69. See Luebke, 225–66 (“Superpatriotism in Action”) and 267–308 (“Ethnic Reaction”).
70. See the research by Keller. In her thesis she concentrates on the fate of intellectuals
of German extraction, especially Hugo Münsterberg, Georg Sylvester Viereck, the
militant German American, and Hermann Hagedorn, who emphatically stressed
his American loyalties.
71. See Luebke, 264–71.
72. See the fate of Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955), the Jewish American who had been
born in Berlin and had grown up in South Carolina. Following philistine attacks on
him Lewisohn, who had meanwhile dedicated himself to the study of German literature, abandoned his academic position in Ohio. See Up Stream (1922), the first volume of his autobiography in which he settles his scores with the pettiness of
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American society. That even scholars whose loyalty was never in doubt because of
their provenance felt the pressures of conformity in the propaganda crusade of the
Entente is illustrated by the case of the prominent coeditor of the Cambridge History
of American Literature, William Peterfield Trent, who was subjected to vicious attacks.
While about one-fourth of the pupils at American high schools had attended
instruction in German in 1915 (324,000), the proportion dropped below 1 percent
in the year 1922. See Wolfgang Hierl, Zum Deutschlandbild in den anglo-amerikanischen
Deutschlesebüchern, doctoral dissertation, University of Aachen 1972, 33. On the targets of the anti-German propaganda and on the attacks on the German language,
which were also fueled by the presidential ambitions of individual political figures
like Ohio Governor James Middleton Cox see Clifford Albrecht Bernd, “World War I
as a Shaping Force in American Germanics,” in Teaching German in Twentieth-Century
America, ed. David Benseler et al. (2001), 58–68.
73. On the change of opinion of the young John Dos Passos see Melvin Landsberg, John
Dos Passos’ Path to “USA”: A Political Biography, 1912–1934 (1972), 41ff. Concerning this
relic of anti-German propaganda in his first important novel cf. Manhattan Transfer
(1925, rpt. 1953), 7–10, where Ed Thatcher is invited to have a Kulmbacher beer by
Mr. Zucher, a printer from Frankfurt, who takes pride in the birth of a son. But later
Ed has to foot the bill, as the complacent Mr. Zucher, who is going to name his firstborn after the emperor (“Ach, his name shall be Vilhelm after the mighty Kaiser”
(10)) has left without paying.
74. See Buitenhuis, 74–75. On Sinclair’s role in World War I, on his close contacts with
President Wilson and his conflict with the pacifists cf. Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair,
American Rebel (1975), chap. 13, 157–65. In his Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962)
Sinclair mentions the fact that his contacts with German socialists and the arrogance of the German military during his visit on the eve of the war prompted his
later support of the Entente.
75. On Sinclair’s later political chronicle in eleven volumes, which take a significant
place among the roughly one hundred works he produced, see below.
76. See James Woodress, Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana (1955), esp. 198–203.
77. See Buitenhuis, 76–77.
78. In The American Colleges and Universities in the Great War, 1914–1919: A History (1920).
79. See James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee of Public Information, 1917–1919 (1939), and George G. Bruntz, Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918 (1938).
80. For instance America Unprepared (1916). See also Michael T. Isenberg, War on Film: The
American Cinema and World War I, 1914–1941 (1981), 68–69, and Craig W. Campbell,
Reel America and World War I (1985), esp. chaps. 2 and 3.
81. See Isenberg, War on Film, esp. 145–60. See also Richard A. Oehling, “The GermanAmericans, Germany, and the American Media,” in Ethnic Images in American Film and
Television, ed. Randall M. Miller (1978), 51–62.
82. Similar effects were achieved in films like Adele, When Men Desire, For Liberty and The
Unpardonable Sin. See also the films The Unbeliever and The Heart of Humanity, in which
barbarous acts perpetrated by the Germans in Belgium are depicted. See also Till I
Come Back to You, Lest We Forget, a film that describes, among other things, the execu204 ]
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tion of a woman by a Prussian firing squad, and The Hun Within, The Woman the Germans Shot.
83. See also Mary Pickford’s successful part in The Little American (1917), where a similar
fate threatens her because she is suspected of espionage.
84. See Isenberg, War on Film, 150.
85. His method was so crude that President Wilson and other political figures distanced themselves from this wretched piece of work and regarded such a technique
as counterproductive (Isenberg, 152). In a letter to Henry Morgenthau, a former
ambassador to Turkey, President Wilson regretted that Gerard had allowed his
“narrative” to be presented in such a fashion.
86. See the filming of Pershing’s Crusaders (1918) (Isenberg, War on Film, 152).
87. See the film Beware! and the filming of Why America Will Win, Why Germany Must Pay
(originally entitled The Great Victory), a film in which President Wilson appears in the
guise of an Old Testament prophet.
88. See the representation of the democratic German opposition in The Zeppelin’s Last
Raid (1917) (see Isenberg, War on Film, 153).
89. As early as the filming of Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918) von Stroheim had been
publicized as “the man you love to hate.” Apart from those films which evoked an
aversion to Prussian militarists and despots, there were also film comedies which
parodied melodramatic exposures of the Germans, for instance The Geezer of Berlin, a
farce which took its cue from The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, or Charlie Chaplin’s comedy Shoulder Arms (1918).
6. interlude
1. See E. E. Cummings’ exposure of the brutal consequences for young Americans
who did not succumb to these polemics in The Enormous Room (1922), ed. G. J. Firmage (1978). Cummings was detained in the foul prison of La Ferté only because he
had avoided giving a straightforward answer to the question “Est-ce que vous
détestez les boches?,” answering evasively: “J’aime beaucoup les Français” (14).
2. See Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World-War (1928). See also H. C. Meyer on the contribution of American revisionist historians to this topic, 14–16. The careful analysis by Clara Eve Schieber, The Transformation of American Sentiment toward Germany,
1870–1914 (1923), and Gazley, American Opinion of German Unification (1926), indirectly reflect the efforts of academic historiographers to provide a fair assessment
of Germany.
3. On the occasion of the award of honorary doctorates to Gustav Stresemann, who
had meanwhile received the Nobel Prize for Peace, and the American ambassador to
Germany, Jacob Gould Schurman, in Heidelberg on 5 May 1928, the political rapprochement between the United States and Germany was so noticeable that France
sought diplomatically to oppose it.
4. A turning point was the Dawes Plan of 1924, when the preconditions for the Treaty
of Locarno and Germany’s joining the League of Nations were created.
5. According to Lewis’ biographer Mark Schorer, who himself draws upon a cliché,
the company of the “heavy-drinking, high-living . . . Philip Goodman in the
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bibulous atmosphere of a dissolute German city” was problematic for Lewis, (Sinclair Lewis. An American Life (1963), 413). But Lewis was, no doubt, personally endangered by the conviviality in the beer garden because excessive festivities undermined
his self-control, which was to have disastrous consequences in the future.
6. Reprinted in the anthology The War Guilt (see also Schorer, Lewis, 424).
7. The visit to Vienna described in this essay (which does not differentiate between
groups within the German-speaking countries) takes “Lewis” to a Heurigen (wine
tavern), and to the ballroom in the Imperial Palace, makes it impossible for the
satirical “persona” further to cultivate the obligatory “respectable hatred for the
Hun”: “Then we met a typical Hun. He was not only a Hun but a Baron. . . . The
Baron was of an old Viennese family . . . And it was he who accompanied us to
Vienna, carrying out the propaganda.” The impressions in Vienna destroy the negative stereotype culled from the war propaganda: “By this time it was only with the
greatest difficulty that a True American could keep up the hatred of the Middle
European which befits any True American” (20).
8. As an advocate of the quantitative method Gottlieb appears like earlier literary figures of German origin as a kind of priest of science whose pioneers include “Father
Koch” and “Father Pasteur.” Yet that “the quest for scientific knowledge” in Gottlieb’s life takes precedence over other “human considerations” is not counted
among his human deficiencies.
9. That the blame for the end of his relationship is placed on Fran, who hungers for
life and who has her first affair in Paris, is, no doubt, a revision of Lewis’ own life.
See Hegger’s version of her experiences as the wife of a notoriously unfaithful
author in Half a Loaf (1931), and With Love from Gracie: Sinclair Lewis: 1912–1925 (1955).
10. Dodsworth (1929), quoted from the Signet Classic Edition (1995), 234.
11. Europe appears to Professor Braut as “[t]he last refuge, in this Fordized world, of
personal dignity” (251).
12. See Sheldon Norman Grebstein, Sinclair Lewis (1962), 110–17.
13. See the remarks below on McAlmon’s stories, in which the night life in Berlin
involving individuals sniffing cocaine and engaging in drunken sprees and sex
orgies is presented.
14. “Though they sang with the tongues of angels, they appeared in the bodies of behemoths” (107).
15. A comparison with the relatively meager cultural offerings in the author’s home
country is provided in the description of the lively and demanding theater and opera
productions in Freiburg/Breisgau: “The mischievous brain that lives on comparisons could not help wondering what was being offered that week in Peoria, or any
American city six times the size of Freiburg” (185).
16. See his reports dated 2 September and 5 September 1922, in Dateline, Toronto: Hemingway’s Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–1924 (1985), 194–204.
17. An incident in a railroad carriage in which a pater familias egoistically dines in the
restaurant car while his wife has to make do with cheese sandwiches prompts Hemingway’s skeptical observation on the traditional image of the idyllic German family. At the same time Hemingway refers to the cliché of the exploitation of women in
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German patriarchal society, see Dateline, 212–13, and Robert O. Stephens, Hemingway’s Non-Fiction: The Public Voice (1968), 81.
18. James H. Justus analyzes this “forgotten book by a well-nigh forgotten writer” in
“Joseph Hergesheimer’s Germany: A Radical Art of Surfaces,” Journal of American
Studies 7 (Spring 1973): 47–66.
19. See Berlin, 16, where Hergesheimer gives as the reason for his stay his wish to
describe the lifestyle(s) in four big cities in Central Europe—Berlin, Munich,
Vienna, and Budapest. The short title of the book is thus misleading.
20. “She gazed at me with a momentary cold scrutiny; her glance was hard and intolerant like black steel. . . . She, too, was modern Germany, in especial Berlin; a land, at
last, without sentimentality; an obdurate and cold and disenchanted spirit” (22).
21. In this context Justus refers to a later, unpublished essay preserved in Austin,
“Berlin Remembered,” in which the author, on the one hand, claims to have
grasped the situation more clearly than the testimony of his book suggests, and, on
the other, notes that during his visit in the summer of 1931 he was unable to register
any signs of anti-Semitism.
22. The world of the expatriates is primarily reflected in the novels and stories by
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and in A Moveable Feast and in
the fiction by Gertrude Stein.
23. See Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel
(1995), esp. chaps. 7 and 8.
24. On the appeal of the city of Berlin to American musicians and to artists like Marsden Hartley, see James L. Colwell, “The American Experience in Berlin During the
Weimar Republic,” doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1961, esp. 88–103.
25. Joseph Freeman and Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, but also Lillian Hellman
(see “Julia” in her fictionalized autobiography Pentimento, 1973) stopped in Berlin
on their journey to the Soviet Union.
26. Matthew Josephson (1899–1978), an ally of the Dadaists, described Berlin as “a
stone-grey corpse” (Life among the Surrealists [1962], 192) and vividly depicted poverty
in a metropolis severely affected by inflation. Paul Bowles (1910–1999) made a
devastating criticism of the Berlin landscape when he visited the city in 1931. Without Stopping: An Autobiography by Paul Bowles (1972): “Architecturally Berlin was
hideous. . . . The city was a gigantic slum, a monstrous agglomeration of uninhabitable buildings” (109), and he called the city itself “strange, ugly, vaguely sinister”
(116).
27. They were told that their own country on the periphery lacked that aura of the special: “that glamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna and that glory was confined to
the dim past” (Exile’s Return [rpt. 1976], 28).
28. See Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (1985), 91ff., and Hemingway, Dateline,
201–4.
29. See Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages, 312, on the advantages McAlmon derived from
the wealth of the Ellerman dynasty department store owners.
30. See Hemingway, Dateline, “European Nightlife: A Disease,” esp. 406–7: “Berlin is a
vulgar, ugly, sullenly dissipated city. After the war it plunged into an orgy that the
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Germans called the death dance. There is nothing attractive nor gay about the
nightlife of Berlin. It is altogether revolting.”
31. A similar assessment of the depressing situation in Berlin’s nightlife is provided by
McAlmon in his autobiography Being Geniuses Together (1938) (a book which Kay
Boyle later [1968] expanded), 110. Robert E. Knoll put together some autobiographical fragments to form McAlmon’s self-portrait McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A
Self-Portrait (1962), “A Note on the Berlin Stories,” 221–25. The narrator, a “deracinated American,” is said to have taken an old friend, Rudge Kepler, “on a tour of the
nochtlokalen [sic!].” The narrative presented as a study of the milieu describes
encounters with “dope addicts” and “down-at-the-heels aristocrats” (223).
32. See the biography by Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (1984).
33. Agitators of German origin were for some while part and parcel of the gallery of figures in the “radical novel.” See Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States,
1900–1945 (1956), 88–89, where the arrival of the “German radical” Johan Most in
1882 is discussed. The founder of the International Working People’s Association furnished the model for the cliché of the typical anarchist of German extraction.
34. The circumstances of Stafford’s experience of academic life in Heidelberg, where she
was temporarily a favorite disciple of Professor Hoops, and her encounter with the
Nazi movement are described by Ann Hulbert in The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean
Stafford (1992; see esp. 45–49). It was only in 1971–1972 that Stafford admitted the
“one time” effect of Nazi propaganda on her. Her unpublished novel Autumn Festival
and her novella “A Winter’s Tale” (1954) deal with this autobiographical experience.
35. See her interview with Robert Van Gelder, New York Times Book Review, 3 August 1941,
2 and 19.
36. The anti-Semitic element is equally prominent in Death of a Man in the ideology of
Dr. Prochaska. Among the figures of the novel the local organizer of a National
Socialist group, Praxlmann, along with Dr. Prochaska, appeals to the interest of the
reader.
37. See the Southern Illinois University Special Collection in Carbondale.
38. Joan Mellen also arrives at this conclusion in Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994). See
especially chap. 11 “Nazis as Heroes,” 177–94.
39. In a letter to Sandra Spanier, the author of Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986), the
writer with reference to her return to Europe in 1946, underlines that it seemed
impossible to her at first to live in Germany: “I did not wish to live in Germany . . .
for my feelings about the German people were still too strong” (174). This attitude
is also reflected in her stories in The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany
(1951). See below.
40. The Web and the Rock (1939), ed. 1940, 622.
41. See below remarks on his impressions in “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” esp. in “The
Dark Messiah,” which the executor of his estate, Edward Aswell, later included in
the posthumously published novels.
42. The anger and irritation of the traveler at the language barrier in France and various
frustrations apparently color the portrayal of his figures. In this connection one
must concede either a lack of fairness on the part of the author or an inclination to
caricature the creatures of his imagination.
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43. See the short cliché-ridden characterizations of the English, who, from the beginning of the Oxford chapter, are devalued, with references to their “neighing voices”
and the “grimly weathered faces” of the other English women, against whom Edith
Coulson stands out favorably. See esp. Of Time and the River, 601–4, but also The Web
and the Rock, 670, where there is again a summary reference to the “neighing voices
and long teeth” of the English women.
44. In December 1926 Wolfe reports to Aline Bernstein about his excitement when
crossing the Rhine near Strasbourg by train, and in a letter from Munich he contrasts the Germans with the French: “the people, I believe are simple, more honest,
and a great deal more friendly than the French. And I do not think their kindness
and honesty is the result of a malevolent conspiracy to dominate the world through
trickery” (My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein, ed. S. Stutman
[1983], 136).
45. Though Aline herself was in Europe at that time, the two did not meet.
46. The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, ed. R. S. Kennedy and P. Reeves (1970), vol. 1, 165–66.
47. On the composition of this fragment cf. David Herbert Donald, Look Homeward: A
Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987), 184–86.
48. Compare with Dietmar Haack, “Thomas Wolfes ‘Dark Helen found and lost’: Der
Wandel des Deutschlandbilds in den späten Romanen,” in Images of Germany,
143–55, esp. 144.
49. The testimony of the Notebooks shows that at first Wolfe ascribed the incident which
necessitated the medical attentions of Dr. Lexer to Oliver Weston. It was only later
that these experiences associated with the semiautobiographical figure in the torso
of the short novel “The River People” were linked to George Webber.
50. See The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Elizabeth Nowell [1946] 1956, 127–29, in a letter
to Professor Homer A. Watt of New York University.
51. See Donald, Look Homeward, 240–42. See his letter to Aline of 24 May 1930 from
Paris, My Other Loneliness, 306–7, and his report on problematical encounters with
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
52. See Lanzinger, Jason’s Voyage (1989), 190–92.
53. This inclination to transform the reality perceived is apparent in his letter to Henry
T. Volkening (September 1930): “I am at length in the Black Forest. I arrived here a
few days ago by a kind of intuition—the inside of me was like a Black Forest and I
think the name kept having its unconscious effect on me. It is a very beautiful
place—a landscape of rich, dark melancholy, a place with a Gothic soul, and I am
glad that I have come here” (Letters, ed. Nowell, 261–62).
54. In 1926 Wolfe witnessed such a farewell in the railroad station in Munich. See Notebooks, vol. 1, 93, on his impressions concerning the “consumptive who rode with
me in the carriage—His rather young and handsome wife at Munich.”
55. Wolfe, From Death to Morning (1935, rpt. 1970), 105.
56. It has been reprinted and analyzed by Hans Helmcke in his monograph Die Familie
im Romanwerk von Thomas Wolfe (1967), text 304–15, analysis 58–59 and 262–75.
57. “The other was in certain sections of Germany and the Austrian Tyrol—places like the
Black Forest and the Forest of Thuringia, and towns like Weimar, Eisenach, old
Frankfort, Kufstein on the Austrian border, and Innsbruck” (The Web and the Rock, 12).
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58. “Two men in a ‘Workers Beerhall’ next here stabbed and shot each other” (Notebooks, vol. 2, 516). In line with the stereotype of the Hun, Wolfe occasionally on the
spur of the moment expressed his dislike of German arrogance.
59. On Wolfe’s significant attempt cf. Bettina Thurner, “ ‘My Dear Jew’: The Literary
Construction of Cultural Otherness in Thomas Wolfe’s ‘The Good Child’s River,’ ”
master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 1996; meanwhile her doctoral thesis on “ ‘The
Ties that Bind’—Identity and Alterity in Three Autobiographical Novels of Thomas
Wolfe. Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again read
through the lens of Cultural Studies and Charles Taylor’s Politics of Recognition” has
been completed.
60. See the prepublication of the first chapter, “Morning,” in The Notebooks, vol. 2,
600–605.
61. They first appeared in three installments in the New Republic in March 1937.
62. See his later “Letters to Germans,” in Values for Survival (1946), especially his first letter to a woman from Lübeck, 243–54.
63. Heinz Tschachler in Lewis Mumford’s Reception in German Translation and Criticism
(1994) identifies the fictionalized addressees of Mumford’s letters and discusses
the assessment of his ideas from contrary ideological positions on both sides of the
Atlantic.
64. Ms. Harvard College Library, *46 AM-7 (66) Box 1. Quoted from Paschal Reeves,
Thomas Wolfe’s Albatross: Race and Nationality in America (1968), 100.
65. See William W. Pusey III, “The German Vogue of Thomas Wolfe,” Germanic Review
23 (April 1948): 131–48. Lawrence D. Stokes has recently reassessed Wolfe’s reception in Germany in those years and examined the anxiety of his publisher about the
inclusion of problematical passages concerning Jews in Hans Schiebelhuth’s translation as well as the debate pro and con in the German press. See Look Homeward and
Forward (2003), ed. A. Lombardo et al., 153–72.
66. For a contemporaneous account of Wolfe’s orgiastic celebrations during his visit
in 1935 cf. Martha Dodd, Through Embassy Eyes (1939), 89–95. See also H. M.
Ledig-Rowohlt, “Thomas Wolfe in Berlin,” American Scholar 22.2 (Spring 1953):
185–201.
67. Letter dated 23 May 1935 from the Wartburg Hotel, Letters, ed. Nowell, 460.
68. See also Donald, Look Homeward, 322.
69. See Donald, 385–89, and You Can’t Go Home Again (ed. 1973), 483.
70. The publisher appears as Franz Hartmann in the New Republic and under the name of
Franz Heilig in the novel.
71. Martha Dodd tried retrospectively to exonerate him and to excuse his belated realization of a reality of the secret police and the discrimination against opponents of
the regime and Jews.
72. With her critical sketch of Hitler (“He is a little man, his countenance is a caricature
of a drummer boy risen too high”), whom she called “the very prototype of the Little
Man,” Thompson triggered off the anger of those in power. Her book and the
increasingly loud warnings by other American foreign correspondents had a substantial counterpart in the vivid report in book form by the American journalist
Edgar Ansel Mowrer with the title Germany Puts the Clock Back (1933).
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73. Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (rpt. 1970) 141, and the ominous words spoken earlier,
26–29.
74. In this dystopia German Americans serve as a link with Germany, which had meanwhile been transformed into a repressive tyranny.
75. Staubmeyer, originally functioning as “Superintendent of Schools,” refers to
Hitler’s successful battle with the Marxists: “Didn’t Hitler save Germany from the
Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I know!” (It Can’t Happen Here, 29).
76. See It Can’t Happen Here, 154–57 on Willy Schmidt.
77. See Not Peace, But the Sword (1939) and Between the Thunder and the Sun (1943).
78. See Eisele, Das Deutschlandbild in der amerikanischen Literatur des Zweiten Weltkriegs, doctoral dissertation, University of Erlangen, 1961, 47–51, on Sheean’s later representation of National Socialism as a relapse into barbarism of a nation of otherwise
great achievements, which does not support as a whole the crimes of the regime.
79. See Hemingway’s reports on the Ruhr, occupied by the French as a kind of security,
and his apparent sympathy for those harmed, especially the German middle classes
(Dateline, 277–91, dated May 1923). Hemingway’s warnings resemble the more
explicit ones of Sinclair Lewis not to lose peace through a myopic policy of revenge.
80. Mowrer described the return of Prussianism, the renaissance of militarism, the
changes in the judicial system, and the development of anti-Semitism in all its variants down to the Nazi seizure of power. On the practice of American journalists in
Europe, see Morrell Heald, Transatlantic Vistas: American Journalists in Europe, 1900–
1940 (1988).
81. Shirer continued his journal in End of a Berlin Diary (1947), and Mid-Century Journey:
The Western World through Its Years of Conflict (1952). He also shaped the image of Germany’s transformation for following generations of readers with The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1959, 1960), and the two more directly autobiographical volumes Twentieth-Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times—The
Start, 1904–1930 (1976), and The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940 (1984). In 1988 Shirer’s
Berlin Diary was filmed in two parts under the title The Nightmare Years. In it the fundamental importance of manipulation by the Ministry of Propaganda and Hitler’s
rhetoric are demonstrated.
82. Sigrid Schultz, head of the Chicago Tribune’s bureau in Berlin who had lived in Germany since her childhood, felt compelled in 1939 to warn against the dangers lurking in the German nation.
83. That Gunther had tried his hand as novelist as early as the 1920s is mentioned by
Shirer in the opening volume of Twentieth-Century Journey, where he refers to Gunther’s novel The Red Pavilion. The Lost City appeared only in 1964.
84. In A Fragment of Autobiography: The Fun of Writing the Inside Books (1962), Gunther
reported on the commission he had received in 1934 to write such a guide, some
sections of which were to be published in Harper’s Magazine.
85. See, for instance, Inside Asia (1939), Inside Latin America (1941), Inside USA (1947),
Inside Africa (1955), Inside Russia Today (1957).
86. Quoted from the inscription in the war edition of 1940.
87. See the preface and the bibliographical note in the war edition. The potentates are
introduced according to countries and fields of action. See “Hitler” to “The Other
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Little Hitlers” (chaps. 1 to 6 in the War Edition). That Gunther attributes special
importance to the fate of Austria (chaps. 24 to 27 among forty chapters) comes as
no surprise considering his stay of many years and his imaginative confrontation
with the “lost city.”
88. See Dietmar Haack, “‘Sweetheart, what watch?’: Hollywoods späte Reaktionen auf
den Faschismus in Europa,” anglistik & englischunterricht 25 (1985): 149–67, esp.
155–56.
89. See the reprint in the Massachusetts Review 27.2 (1986): 334–62.
90. In Tolman’s analysis of the situation the capitalists are accused of having had a
share in Hitler’s rise to power.
91. On the Olympics cf. his contribution to the Pittsburgh Courier, 19 September 1936 and
24 October 1936, rpt. in The Complete Published Works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Newspaper
Columns Vol. I, 1883–1944, ed. Herbert Aptheker (1986), 114–15, 127. On the reflection of this journey cf. also Werner Sollors, “W. E. B. Du Bois in Nazi Germany,
1936,” American Studies 44.2 (1999): 207–22.
92. See especially “Industrial Education and Siemens City,” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 November, Newspaper Columns I, 132–34.
93. See Pittsburgh Courier, 17 October and 31 October, Newspaper Columns I, 124–26,
129–31.
94. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality in the American Century 1919–1963 (2000),
398.
95. Pittsburgh Courier, 5 December, Newspaper Columns I, 143.
96. Du Bois was particularly shocked at Julius Streicher’s racist periodical Stürmer,
which he calls “the most shameless, lying advocate of race hate in the world” (150).
97. See Pittsburgh Courier, 2 January 1937, Newspaper Columns I, 154.
98. “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” in You Can’t Go Home Again, 490.
99. See chap. 41 “Five Passengers for Paris,” in You Can’t Go Home Again, 514–25. Similarly Lillian Hellman is full of anxiety and fear when traveling in the opposite direction on a train to Germany as a messenger and courier on behalf of her friend Julia,
for whom she smuggles money to Berlin to ransom opponents of the regime, cf.
Pentimento.
7. the return of clichés
1. A discussion of the image of Germany sketched by these émigrés would exceed the
scope of this investigation.
2. It is obvious that Bromfield’s summary condemnation of the Germans is rooted in
the anti-German propaganda of the Great War. The familiar contrast between
North and South Germans is confirmed by various narrators who set the humane
softness of female characters from the Swabian Southwest against the rigid nature
of women from Northern Germany.
3. See Anderson, Louis Bromfield (1964), esp. 127–29 and 137–38, who underlines the
artistic shortcomings of this black-and-white technique.
4. In this text this couple and an amiable young woman are surrounded by many Germans conscious of their power. Among them there are the influential Baron Hagen
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and the vulgar, repulsive Heintzlemann (probably a caricature of Röhm) who
impose their will on other vacationers in the Swiss winter resort Saint-Firmin (The
World We Live In, 273–339).
5. As early as The Asiatics, the young American protagonist encounters not only oriental
women drawn on the basis of clichés and types representing classes and professions, but also European national characters, for instance, a French rake (Antoine
Samazeuilh) and an angelic young woman from Britain (Miss Bariton).
6. The narrator summarizes Hugo von Wildenbruch’s “German ideals”: “a primeval,
vehement, northern desire for some sort of ‘heroic ideal’ ” (The Seven Who Fled
[1984], 251). “[M]ore than anything . . . he wanted to be a strong, proud boy; and,
some day, a strong man, a stern and truly strong man, with muscles and heart and
will of iron” (253). Also: “Yes, he too wanted to obey, and blindly. What he longed
for was the simplicity of ignorance, the animal, the child” (260). This desire is
shown to go beyond any rational bounds: “For him, pain, privation, death! How he
longed for them, to prove his true nobility and ardor!” (261).
7. He was repeatedly surrounded there by an uncanny atmosphere, for instance at the
country seat of a Great Aunt.
8. Prokosch draws an even more depressing image of Germany as a country of ghosts
in The Conspirators (1943), a novel set in Spain in 1940.
9. See Sally E. Parry, “Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd: The Allies’ Secret Weapon against
the Third Reich,” in Germany and German Thought, ed. Freese, 190–204, on the
numerous letters from the years 1938 and 1939, in which Sinclair reports on the
progress of his work in his long narrative “on the rise of Fascism.”
10. Between Two Worlds (rpt. 1947), 259: “The band struck up, and Charlie Chaplin came
upon the stage. At least Lanny and Rick thought it was an imitation of that little
comedian, whose pictures were the rage all over America and Europe at that time.”
11. Between Two Worlds documents this situation (chap. 17, 293–94) and the crisis developing in Berlin. There Lanny Budd is later the guest of Johannes Robin, a Jewish
business partner of his father.
12. See his debates with an uncle on his mother’s side, Jesse Blackless, but also with
sons and daughters of plutocrats who, in reaction to the capitalist lifestyles of their
families, had embraced a leftist ideology.
13. See Mann’s appreciation of Sinclair, quoted from Parry, in Germany and German
Thought, 190: “Whoever knows Nazi-Germany will admit that not a word in your
book is exaggerated. While I read it, my principal feeling was one of the satisfaction
that all this has been written down and preserved for the future.” This letter underlines the fact that, apart from attentive journalists in Europe, also those intellectuals
banished from Germany who had meanwhile found a foothold in the United States
made an important contribution to the image of Germany held by the American
public. On the later influence of German refugees on American conceptions of Germany see Guy Stern, “The Function of Distinguished German-Speaking Refugee
Characters in Postwar American Literature,” in German Politics and Society 13.3 (Fall
1995): 31–42.
14. Sinclair requested in many letters to his acquaintainces that they should examine
his novels with regard to the authenticity of the situation and settings presented.
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15. A distinction between good and evil Germans is also made by Lillian Hellman in her
play Watch on the Rhine (1941), in which an upright German opposed to the regime
(Kurt Müller) is compelled to kill the representative of the Nazi regime (Teck de
Brancovis) in the United States.
16. On Freeman generally see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary
Communism (1961), and Oliver Scheiding, J. Freeman: Literatur und Politik in den USA
zwischen 1920 und 1960 (1994).
17. Freeman returned to Europe with the Allied forces in 1945 and visited the devastated
areas of Germany.
18. On the pattern in the constellation of figures cf. Zacharasiewicz “Waltzing in the
German Paris,” 189.
19. In the thoughts and dreams of the tortured camp inmate Paul Schuman a classical
text on Eusebius, an early Christian heretic, plays an important role. This figure had
attracted Paul’s interest in his historical research and triggers in him dramatic
visions in which the political conflict with Communism is skillfully depicted in
veiled form. Scheiding demonstrates (235–37) how Eusebius gains, as it were, the
status of a patron saint of the homeless Left through the Eusebius subtext, which
presents the accusation, excommunication and finally the execution of the heretic.
20. See the parallels between Never Call Retreat and other novels reflecting the disillusionment of former Communists, like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), or
Manes Sperber’s philosophic-political trilogy Wie eine Träne im Ozean (1961).
21. Massing’s report first appeared under the pseudonym Karl Billinger in New York in
1935, also with Freeman’s support. Sinclair Lewis had earlier referred to Billinger’s
Fatherland in It Can’t Happen Here, 261.
22. This story was first published in the Southern Review in the fall of 1941 and provided
the title for the collection which appeared in 1944: The Leaning Tower and Other Stories.
23. The Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, ed. Isabel Bayley (1990). Unfortunately the letters to
Herbst, which are relevant for the development of Porter’s image of Germany, for
instance those referring to her observations in Berlin and her contacts with powerful men like Hermann Göring, whom she apparently met several times, are not
included; missing is, for example, the letter of 16 October 1933, which is preserved
in Beinecke Library. But Joan Givner has extracted the facts in several essays, e.g., in
“‘Her Great Art, Her Sober Craft’: Katherine Anne Porter’s Creative Process,” Southwest Review 62 (1977): 217–30, and in her biography—Katherine Anne Porter: A Life
(1982). She has also, on the one hand, contrasted these facts with their fictionalized
version in “The Leaning Tower,” and, on the other hand, reconstructed Porter’s
social and political contacts in Berlin, e.g., with American journalists like Herbert
Klein and Sigrid Schultz, the leading foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune.
As a selection from the author’s correspondence and the biography by Givner are
accessible, the contemporary critic has more material at his disposal than HansJoachim Lang did for his analysis of the novel: “Katherine Anne Porter’s Einladung
auf Das Narrenschiff,” in Die amerikanische Literatur in der Weltliteratur, ed. Claus Uhlig
and Volker Bischoff (1982), 458–75.
24. That the author explicitly mentions Upton’s limited insight and competence to judge
in a country that is foreign to him, may reduce the credibility of his impressions.
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25. Porter, The Collected Stories (1985), “The Leaning Tower,” 481. That both protagonist
and reflector have no insight into the symbolic character of the marzipan pigs,
which are for sale as good-luck mascots in the shopwindows before the turn of the
year, does not escape the critical reader of today.
26. After the beastlike landladies, the hate-filled gaze of the couple who own the hotel
and who laugh like hyenas after his departure is impressed upon his memory.
27. See Givner, “Her Great Art, Her Sober Craft,” 223.
28. See her letter to R. P. Warren of 20 June 1940 (ed. Bayley, 181).
29. As Givner demonstrates, Porter has similarly avoided including in her panorama of
Berlin the infamous nightclubs, which she had visited at least once in the company
of Robert McAlmon, and the decadent demimonde of drug addicts and prostitutes.
30. See the amicable relations with Herbert Klein mentioned by Givner in her biography and Porter’s anti-Semitic remark in connection with the end of this friendship
(258–65).
31. On Porter’s anti-German sentiment see a passage in “Letters to a Nephew,”
included in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of K. A. Porter (1970), 113, note 6.
Porter expresses understanding for the hatred of the French for the “sales Boches.”
In April of 1945 she still gave vent to her anger at the wars regularly started by the
“god-damned Boches” and confessed: “The Germans have marched first in every
instance for the past three European wars. If they tried to tell me they are duped into
making war by other powers I say then let them be punished for their stupidity. I
resent from the bottom of my soul that twice in one generation we have sent our
men to Europe on account of those god-damned Boches. When I heard that Berlin
was being reduced to rubble, I rejoiced.” Letters written long afterwards mirror her
extreme skepticism about the attempt to integrate West Germany into the Western
Alliance. See her letter of 1 April 1954 (ed. Bayley, 458), in which she criticizes the
“insanity” of Western politicians and stresses the damage done by the quickly
recovering German economy: “And here it is, the great bloodsucking, bloodshedding monster, already grabbing world trade from Great Britain and France.”
On 19 August 1956 she still refers to “the Hitler mentality which was of course a natural state of mind in Germany, he was only what other gangsters used to call, the popular German ‘mouthpiece’” (ed. Bayley, 514).
32. On the themes in the story (The Collected Stories, 443–73) see esp. Diana Hinze,
“Texas and Berlin: Images of Germany in Katherine Anne Porter’s Prose,” Southern
Literary Journal 24 (1991): 77–87.
33. References to the novel in the following are to the pb. ed. Signet New American
Library (1963).
34. See Letters, ed. Bayley, 46–60.
35. Both the composition of the group of passengers, primarily expatriate Germans
returning home, several Swiss, Americans, many Spaniards, Cubans, and Mexicans, and even the number of passengers in third class (876) corresponds to the
reality of Porter’s experience.
36. The constant quarrels between Jenny Brown and her friend David mirror Porter’s
own tense relationship with Pressley. Aspects of her character are also included in
the more mature Mary Treadwell, who likes to flirt with younger men and to drink.
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Some facets of Porter’s own character even seem to have been captured in the
authoritarian Frau Rittersdorf, who, like the author, keeps a log.
37. Rieber surpasses most of the other passengers in his blunt, racist mode of expression. His ideas are, however, congruent with those of several compatriots, not least
Frau Rittersdorf, who keeps her distance from representatives of lower nations,
and advocates ostracizing non-Aryans.
38. The captain’s anger is provoked by the boldness of those anarchists who dared to
call themselves Spanish monarchists and to include him in their alliance, “He had
never ceased to mourn the Kaiser; he loathed with all his soul the debased pseudorepublicanism of defeated Germany, and was shocked to discover that this ragtag
bobtailed lot were claiming as it were relationship with him, calling themselves
Royalists” (411).
39. In earlier drafts for the novel and in the extract published in the Partisan Review Dr.
Schumann’s name was still Dr. Sacher. See Sister M. Joselyn, “On the Making of
Ship of Fools,” South Dakota Review 1 (1964): 46–52.
40. The connection both with popular “hotel novels” and with Thomas Mann’s Magic
Mountain has not been overlooked by the critics.
41. In his detailed analysis of Stein’s pioneer role Malcolm Bradbury in Dangerous Pilgrimages, esp. 247–73, calls the publication “an act of gratitude and a gesture of solidarity” (273).
42. “The Germans seem to be afraid, so completely afraid of the population although
the population is unarmed and peaceful” (Wars I Have Seen, 182).
43. See Wars I Have Seen, 4–5, and Journey into the Self: Being the Letters, Papers and Journals of
Leo Stein, ed. Edmund Fuller (1950), “Fragments of Autobiography,” 185–89.
44. Three Lives was composed in 1904 and appeared in 1909. Quoted from Vintage
Books, New York, 1936.
45. There are also numerous references to character traits of Germans in the opening
portrait of “The Good Anna,” both in herself and in the people with whom she
associates, hardworking, dutiful German wives, and their enjoyment of the pleasures of the table and the bottle.
8. the burden of the past
1. On the “phase displacement” in the mediation of such images see Paul Monaco,
“Stereotypes of Germans in American Culture: Observations from an Interdisciplinary Perspective,” Amerikastudien 31.4 (1987): 403–11.
2. See Tour of Duty (1946).
3. For the size of this tradition see Martin Meyer, Nachkriegsdeutschland im Spiegel
amerikanischer Romane der Besatzungszeit (1945–1955) (1994). It refutes Louis F. Helbig’s assumption that the number of American writers who deal with German
themes is “extremely small” (Transatlantische Partnerschaft, ed. D. Gutzen, 227–44).
4. See Hansjörg Gehring, Amerikanische Literaturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1953: Ein
Aspekt des Re-Education-Programms (1976).
5. See esp. Rahv’s selection of relevant passages from Edmund Wilson’s Travels in Two
Democracies (1936), where the Stalinist personality cult is condemned.
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6. It fulfilled an important role over several decades and acted as a counterweight to
the temporary estrangement later on, for instance during the Vietnam crisis, the
later debate on the stationing of Pershing rockets.
7. In connection with the rearmament of East Germany in the Soviet sphere of influence the image of the ugly German was transferred to the Soviet zone and the later
German Democratic Republic. The self-image of the latter as the guardians of the
traditions of Prussia and Prussianism created ideal preconditions for such a projection, which was fed by the erection of the Berlin Wall.
8. Katherine Anne Porter, for instance, took offense in the 1950s at the reintegration
of Germany, and as late as 1990 Arthur Miller did not conceal his great skepticism
concerning the reunification of Germany: “Uneasy About the Germans,” New York
Times Magazine, 6 May 1990, 46–47, 77, 84–85.
9. See the results of the thoroughgoing research by Lothar Bredella, esp. in “Funktionen der Nazizeit in amerikanischen Diskursen,” in Deutschlandbilder im amerikanischen Fernsehen (1994), 57–252. See also below, chap. 8.
10. See their reflection in cartoons both in European and American newspapers, for
instance, in the Los Angeles Times (March 1992), the Atlanta Journal (1989).
11. See John Irving’s multiple anachronistic games with “Vienna” in The World According
to Garp (1978), and other novels.
12. See Hawkes in his interview with John Enck, Wisconsin Studies in Comparative Literature
6 (Summer 1965), 141–55, esp. 150: “I want to try to create a world, not represent it.”
13. See Meyer, Nachkriegsdeutschland, 161–75, esp. 163.
14. Meyer (164, note 115) quotes the case of Bodo Fries, who murdered two children in
Bremen and, like the mad Duke, divided up their bodies after their murder like a
hunter’s booty.
15. See John Hawkes, The Cannibal (1949, pb. rpt. 1962; introduction by Albert J. Guerard), esp. “Part 2,” 41–43.
16. Hawkes, The Cannibal, 43: “Her ancestors had run berserk, . . . had jumped from a
rock in Norway to their death in the sea.”
17. She also takes over the leadership in the punitive expedition of the women from
Spitzen on the Dein against the neglected, suffering and finally rebellious lunatics,
an activity which ends, however, in absurd cruelties against the monkeys and rats
housed in the same building and used in experiments.
18. Zizendorf draws his energy for a return to power from the extreme situation of postwar destitution in Spitzen on the Dein, a town which is increasingly destroyed by
fire and frost and in which all values are abandoned as everything has become a
question of mere survival.
19. This structural revision is reported by Hawkes himself in Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition (1982), 172.
20. Hawkes admitted in a written interview: “I thought of the totalitarianism as a
uniquely, amazingly, horrifyingly German creation . . . I thought of it as inseparable
from Germany” (Meyer, Nachkriegsdeutschland, 165).
21. Guerard suggests that the novel discloses hidden levels of the real Germany when
he alludes to the absurd effort to reconstruct German pride and nationalism (xv).
22. O’Donnell, John Hawkes (1982), 39.
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23. See also Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), Reinhart’s Women (1981). Dictionary
of Literary Biography, Yearbook 1980, s.v. “Berger” (12–17), and Brooks Landon,
Thomas Berger (1989).
24. Berger and his protagonist are coevals, both joined the army because of lack of success at college in the Midwest and served in ambulance units in England, France,
and Germany.
25. That Schild is unable to get rid of the Russian officer Lichenko, who, after his desertion, stays with him for weeks, betrays weakness, which, however, makes his preceding career as a secret service man less plausible (Crazy in Berlin [1958, rpt. 1982],
107–236).
26. Cf. the sexual advances of sixteen-year-old Trudchen Tischmacher, with whom Reinhart becomes involved in spite of the ban on fraternizing, or the self-accusations of
the grotesque Otto Bach, Lori Bach’s intellectual husband, and the remarks of her
blind twin brother, the psychically disturbed physician Dr. Otto Knebel.
27. The inhuman practices of the KGB become evident not only in the treatment Schatzi
receives but also Major Sergeyev, who is himself subjected to the most brutal methods of interrogation after the “unfortunate mistakes” which lead to the deaths of
the double agent “Fritz” Nathan Schild and a German accomplice.
28. In this image the romantic aspect, “the lofty vision, the old and exquisite manners
of prince and peasant” (42), was missing, which Reinhart had come to know
through his reading of literature.
29. A figure like the fighter pilot (Manfred von) Richthofen, whose life was embellished
with legends, however, commanded everybody’s respect, including that of American youth.
30. “[T]he German ‘atrocities’ of World War I were fabrications of the British and
French” (39). See also 359: “Like the murder of the Belgian babies in World War I
. . . which was a propaganda lie.”
31. That such notions were mediated to the soldiers of the occupation forces in specially produced films, is shown in the synopsis of the film Here Is Germany (1945); see
Meyer, Nachkriegsdeutschland, 125.
32. “Reinhart could no longer use ‘Nazi’; with the passing of each German day the term
became more like the name of a soap powder, some slick and vulgar “Rinso”
invented by Americans, who eventually reduce everything to that level: ‘Nazi,’ the
cute name for a pack of buffoons, played always by the same actors, regularly
thwarted by some clean-shaven Beverly Hills Boy Scout whom a ruptured eardrum
disqualified from the real war” (179–80). Reinhart thus distances himself from the
way the Nazis are played down in Hollywood films.
33. There is a similar ambivalence in Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Master Race” in the relationship between Philip Schoen, who is descended from German immigrants, and
the Nazi ideology. This ideology, with which this expert in European history deals
intensively and apparently in a rational way, appeals to deeper levels of his psyche,
so that his personal conduct is adversely shaped by it.
34. See Myron Simon, “Crazy in Berlin as Ethnic Comedy” (1983), rpt. in David W. Madden, ed., Critical Essays on Thomas Berger (1995), 100–110.
35. See Joan Mellen, Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994), esp. 300–313. Her husband
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worked as a news editor for the Neue Zeitung, a newspaper published by the American occupying forces.
36. See Elizabeth S. Bell, Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992), 56–57.
37. Boyle was inspired by her intensive discussions with Maruhn and could rely on his
personal notes. Maruhn’s reading of her manuscript concerning the precise presentation of the setting and of German postwar society in general ensured sufficient concreteness and plausibility in the depiction of the milieu.
38. “Oh, the deep, dark mire of German myths! . . . I’ve been studying lithographs of
heaven and hell, and reading the poems in translation, in the hope that the secrets
of the dark forests of Germany will be revealed to me” (Generation without Farewell,
11).
39. Jaeger confesses that his father, a noncommissioned officer, beat him regularly. He
repeatedly talks of his rejection of his whole heritage, the “old, accursed heritage of
class,” and maintains in his thoughts: “[He] was done forever with the vainglory
and the black possession of the Nibelungs of his youth” (4).
40. See his sentiments “he wanted speech to be as simple as that. He wanted to say ‘hi’
to whatever grim, defeated faces leaned over spade or hoe in the German gardens
that he passed” (4). “For everything that was fresh and bright and new in Germany
now was American—even the language” (54).
41. Colonel Roberts, with his dictatorial behavior and scorn for feminine tenderness,
intervenes in the love affair between his daughter Milly and the young groom
Christoph Horn by sending wife and daughter back to America.
42. Catherine urges him to accept his heritage: “This is your language. You belong here
with these men,” and eventually Jaeger accepts her advice after her departure. “I am
left with my countrymen” (255 and 293–94).
43. See Honerkamp’s statement (190): “Military strategy must be rejected for the
polyphony, say, of Mozart, . . . and the figures who stood massive and immobile in
German history must no longer be Frederick the Great, or Bluecher, or Moltke, or
Bismarck, no longer Ludendorff, or Hindenburg, or whatever others there were
who stamped out the measure of the booted, belted, homicidal dance.” German
national culture should be manifest in “Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert,
right up to Orff.”
44. See the analysis of Vonnegut’s processing of his experiences in Robert Merrill,
“Kurt Vonnegut as a German-American,” in Germany and German Thought, ed.
Freese, 230–43.
45. Palm Sunday (1981, rpt. 1982), 33–70.
46. Vonnegut’s great-grandfather Clemens thought of himself as a freethinker. While
Vonnegut’s father found consolation in German literature and music after the death
of his wife and the economic decline, he earlier excluded his son from these spheres
of life. Only his artistically inclined grandfather Bernard had distanced himself
from the materialism and the philistinism of the extended family.
47. See Mother Night (rpt. 1968), 26ff. Campbell maintains that he had been recruited by
a Major Wirtanen who cannot later be identified.
48. In the new introduction to the reprint of Mother Night in 1966, the playfully ironic
tone of the “Editor’s Note” is replaced by the grotesque description of the mass
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deaths in the fire storm over Dresden. The black humor (“135 000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men”) in the description of this “largest massacre in European history” leads to a sober insight and the admission: “If I’d been
born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and
Poles around” (xi).
49. An additional analogy exists with the career of Ezra Pound, whom the Fascist Italian
regime temporarily suspected of sending information to the Allied forces encoded
in his anti-Semitic diatribes.
50. Campbell’s explanations are certainly not completely consistent and thus not fully
plausible. When the text ends, he is about to hang himself in his cell.
51. See Mother Night, 48–68, 131ff.
52. When the security forces surround the men of this “Iron Guard,” some of them
become hysterical: “The paranoia their parents had been inculcating for years had
suddenly paid off. Here was persecution! One youth clutched a staff on an American
flag” (Mother Night, 171).
53. As elsewhere in Vonnegut’s fiction, a fatalistic worldview is expressed, to which the
extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians, who abduct Billy Pilgrim from the earth and put
him in the company of the sex star Montana Wildhack, contribute various key
phrases and commentaries.
54. Explicit reference is here made to David Irving’s documentation The Destruction of
Dresden (with a foreword by General Ira C. Eaker), in which the number of casualties
is justified in terms of the war against the Nazi dictatorship.
55. See, for example, the death of Colonel “Wild Bob” and of Roland Weary, and later
the execution of the upright American teacher Edgar Derby for a minor offense.
56. Slaughterhouse-Five, 81: “They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were
exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable,
and fun.”
57. Young Werner Gluck, who guards the internees, is explicitly described as follows:
“He was tall and weak like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his. They
were, in fact, distant cousins, something they never found out” (Slaughterhouse-Five,
136).
58. There are several substantial investigations of this topic, especially David Cowart,
“Germany and German Culture in the Works of Thomas Pynchon,” in Germany and
German Thought, ed. Freese, 305–18.
59. The outward appearance of Weissmann, who caries out his destructive task as commander of the V-2 firing batteries under the code name Captain Blicero, as a bald
scientist with thick glasses, corresponds to the national type.
60. That Dr. Hilarius distances himself from Sigmund Freud gives a peculiar twist to
the situation. Dr. Hilarius explicitly ridicules Freud’s (unfounded) optimism concerning the elimination of evil through psychoanalysis: “Freud’s vision of the world
had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let
in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and
solfeggio in the strangling rooms” (The Crying of Lot 49, quoted from pb. edition
[1986], 137–38).
61. See Approaches to “Gravity’s Rainbow,” ed. Charles Clerc (1983), especially the editor’s
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introduction, 13ff., and Khachig Tololyan, “War as Background in Gravity’s Rainbow,” 31–67.
62. This applies not least to Tyrone Slothrop, but also to many of his female partners,
such as the “apprentice witch,” Geli Tripping, the aging film actress Margherita Erdmann and her daughter Bianca, similarly to the black market racketeer and later drug
dealer Emil “Säure” Bummer and the film director Gerhardt von Göll, and even more
to Captain Geoffrey Prentice and the double or triple agent Katje Borgesius.
63. Pynchon drew on Richard Sasuly’s I. G. Farben (New York, 1947) and on General
Walter Dornberger’s reports on the pioneering research in rocket technology. For
the most detailed documentation of Pynchon’s debt to nonfiction books, on the
development of organic and pharmaceutical chemistry, which made the production
of artificial polymers and rocket technology possible, see esp. Steven Weisenburger, A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (1988).
64. The portrait of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s contrasts strikingly with Joseph
Hergesheimer’s book on Berlin. Pynchon’s lively description of the effect of the
UFA-films on Franz and Leni Pökler is indebted to Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari
to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947).
65. Dr. Jamf plays a major role in rocket research and in the conditioning of Slothrop.
The latter’s reflexes are observed by the English behaviorist Dr. Pointsman and by
other secret services. See David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon
(1988), 168–79.
66. On the use of cinematic techniques in this novel see David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon:
The Art of Allusion (1980), esp. 31–62. The settings include the meanwhile deserted
film studios in Berlin-Neubabelsberg, where Slothrop encounters the demonic film
actress Margherita Erdmann. Her role in scenes involving horror effects and rape, it
is suggested, has shaped the fates and careers of many moviegoers.
67. Films produced by director Fritz Lang are meanwhile ambivalently assessed. Professor Jamf is explicitly linked to figures from German films of the interwar years,
such as the inventor Rothwang in the film Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse.
68. Several passages from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien and the Sonette an Orpheus are cited,
suggesting a kind of mystic death wish.
69. A connection to the Faust myth is established through Slothrop’s ascent of the
Brocken mountain in the company of Geli, his temporary mistress in Nordhausen.
70. See Hannjo Berressem, Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (1993).
71. Bruno Bettelheim in “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” in Surviving, and Other
Essays (1979), 246–57, initiated a lively debate in which many Jewish critics became
involved. They took offense at the seemingly harmonious ending of the play in the
face of incomprehensible suffering, but they also rejected the attempt to use it for
moral instruction. See Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the
Unimaginable (1988), and Sidra Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature
(1980). On the controversy see also Lothar Bredella, “Funktionen der Nazizeit in
amerikanischen Diskursen,” in: Bredella, ed., Deutschlandbilder, esp. 94–112.
72. See Frederick Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence (1966).
73. See Styron’s discussion of philosophical analyses of those phenomena in Sophie’s
Choice, 215–16.
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74. See Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (1980), esp.
159ff., and Barbara Foley, “Fact—Fiction—Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in
Holocaust Narratives,” Comparative Literature 34.4 (1982), esp. 356ff. Styron was
accused of secret anti-Semitism. This accusation was based on the alleged negation
of the historical claim of the Jewish people to have their Holocaust acknowledged,
but also fueled by Nathan’s role as a psychotic sadist (see below).
75. According to an interview, the encounter with a Catholic Polish woman who had
lost her faith in a concentration camp provided a source of inspiration for the
author. See Conversations with William Styron, ed. James L. W. West III (1985), esp.
243–64.
76. The irony that the advocate of a radical solution is himself sent to a concentration
camp (Sachsenhausen) and is executed together with the Polish élite from Cracow
is stressed in the novel. This is poetic license on the part of the author, for in reality
the professors were only interned for a while and then released.
77. This key scene is placed approximately in the center of the book (266–87).
78. That the connection between these crimes and the Germans continued to be very
close in American literature fifty years after the war is confirmed by William H.
Gass’ massive postmodern novel The Tunnel (1995). In this book the professional
achievement of the narrator William Frederick Kohler, a respected professor of history, consists in an analysis of “Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany.” Between
the pages of his magnum opus Kohler inserts, however, fragments from his memory, as he works obsessively through his personal past with its frustrations and
hatreds, while he digs a subterraneous escape route from civilian life, which he dislikes. The critics are divided on the issue whether the attibution of guilt to the German people as a whole is primarily an expression of the provocative narrative stance
of Kohler, who is driven to a kind of exorcism, or whether it is also supported by the
satirical author. Cf. the author’s essay on the genesis and gestation of this novel in
“How German Are We?” in German Politics and Society 13.3 (Fall 1995): 165–72.
79. Cynthia Ozick’s complex short story “The Suitcase” illustrates the fact that characters with a German background who were not at all involved in the Holocaust are
also burdened with its guilt: The successful architect Gottfried Hencke, who has
worked in America since the period between the wars, is accused by the Jewish girlfriend of his son and suffers from nightmares.
80. The fictitious setting in the southwest of Germany in the vicinity of a former concentration camp and important figures like the philosopher Brumhold (a slightly
alienated sketch of Heidegger) link “The English Garden” and the later novel.
81. Originally Ulrich himself served as the narrator of the narrative. See Richard Martin,
“Walter Abish’s Fiction: Perfect Unfamiliarity, Familiar Imperfection,” Journal of
American Studies 17.2 (August 1983): 229–41. In the lively debate on the novel
Anthony Schirato claims that the narrative voice expresses the problematical thesis
that National Socialism was not an extreme historical aberration on the part of the
Germans but corresponded to the essence of Germanness. (“The Politics of Writing
and Being Written: A Study of Walter Abish’s How German Is It,” Novel 24.1 [Fall
1990]), 69–85).
82. The thematic relevance of this and other documentaries is discussed by Joseph C.
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Schöpp, “Das Bilderbuch-Deutschland des Walter Abish: oder, Vom Beunruhigungswert literarischer Stereotypen,” American Studies 31.4 (1986): 441–52. Schöpp
even calls the book a kind of photo-novel.
83. This impression shaped the opinion articulated in the New Yorker that the novel
offered “the most remarkable description of post-War Germany” (26 November
1984, 136). That the syntax in the novel is determined by a series of questions gives
the reader exceptional freedom in the evaluation of the statements offered. This is
confirmed by the incompatible assessments of the image of Germany conveyed in
the book. Depending on which characters are regarded as key figures, critical readings range from a very differentiated image of Germany to the opinion that the narrator provides an image of a protofascist Germany.
84. See Schirato, 71–72. The “cleanliness” of the Germans was presented in Erica
Jong’s novel Fear of Flying (1973), which deals with unrestrained female sexuality, as
a revealing compensatory activity of the Germans (and Austrians). In addition German gemütlichkeit and efficiency are sarcastically and cynically called adequate
preconditions for their part in the Holocaust.
85. See the commemorative speech given by Hellmuth Hargenau in honor of
Brumhold, which is presented as being synonymous with “explaining or attempting to explain Germany” (169). It is significant that in this eulogy the German forest
is presented as a source and root of Brumhold’s philosophical profundity.
86. Ulrich develops an amorous relationship with a young American woman, who is
allegedly interested in Brumhold the philosopher; later he becomes involved in a
relationship with Anna Heller, a former mistress of his brother Hellmuth.
87. See Hellmuth’s love affairs with the wife of the mayor of the town, with Anna Heller
and with Rita. It is disquieting that there is some cause for suspicion against Hellmuth, who after the breach with his wife gains a circle of new friends who are
apparently ready to act violently and who may be responsible for shots fired at
Ulrich. In addition there is the suggestive question why Germans still have such a
predilection for black leather, the material used by the SS.
88. A cross-reference to the wall (“the wall from East Germany,” part 3, chap. 7, 88)
reminds the reader of this phenomenon.
89. This aspect is also focused upon in Ulrich Hargenau’s manuscript on The Idea of
Switzerland, in which imagological phenomena and the differences between essence
and appearance, reality and the ideal are considered.
90. For a detailed analysis of this topic see an essay by the author of this book, “Stereotypes in Walker Percy’s Fiction,” REAL 8 (1991/1992): 125–40.
91. The details of this grand tour have been verified after diverse statements in interviews by the author. See Jay Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (1992),
116. The students traveled through Europe from 26 June 1934 onward. After four
weeks in Germany they reached Zürich from where Percy wanted to continue his
journey to Vienna. See also some corrections in Patrick Samway, Walker Percy: A Life
(1997), esp. 75–78.
92. Tom More’s inclination to arrive at shorthand assessments also applies to three
attractive young women in Love in the Ruins whom he courts simultaneously. Thus
the cliché phrase coined for Ellen Oglethorpe, who finally becomes his wife,
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obtrudes several times, and he refers repeatedly to her as the “stern but voluptuous
presbyterian nurse” (14).
93. Percy often caricatures this type and analyzes his dilemma using the “commuter” in
his essay “The Man on the Train,” as an example. See The Message in the Bottle (1975),
83–100.
94. The overdose of undiluted natrium reduces him temporarily to the level of a
pongid, which makes him a suitable playmate for the morose gorilla Eve before he
begins his long-term sentence in a high-security prison.
95. Such a critical reference back to one’s own country also occurs in Joyce Carol Oates’
story “Ich bin ein Berliner” (included in Last Days [1984]), where the first-person
narrator, amid the nocturnal cityscape of Berlin, which is shaped by materialism
and hedonism, is unsure whether he is being confronted with America or Berlin.
96. See above chap. 7, note 15. Rinaldo Smith, himself the descendant of immigrants
from Alsace, had great respect for his German relatives, while he looked down upon
his sentimental father, who was enthusiastic about Bayreuth and sensed the aura of
the popular play “The Student Prince” (by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster) in Tübingen and
Heidelberg.
97. See “The Geranium in the Window: The ‘Euthanasia’ Murders,” in Wertham,
153–91, esp. 184.
98. See Lewis A. Lawson, “Moviegoing in The Moviegoer,” in Lawson, Another Generation:
Southern Fiction since World War II (1984), 90–108.
99. See W. Gast, “‘Typische Deutsche’ im amerikanischen Fernsehen” and “Das
Deutschlandbild im amerikanischen Fernsehen: Zahlen, Strukturen, Methoden,”
Deutschlandbilder, 11–39 and 253–75. See also Michael E. Geisler, “Germans as Nazis
on U.S. Television,” in German Politics and Society 13.3 (Fall 1995): 173–89.
100. An analysis of the former film is furnished by Dietmar Haack in “The Mortal Storm:
Stereotypical Frames,” a discussion of the latter by Bredella in “Demonic Germans
and Naive Americans: The Dialectics between Hetero- and Auto-Stereotypes,” in
Mediating a Foreign Culture, ed. Bredella (1991), 93–107 and 108–31.
101. See the plot of Hitchcock’s Life Boat (1943) and Frank Capra’s War Comes to America
(1945).
102. See the implied critical perspective on the conduct of General Patton in the film of
that title (1970) and the comparable problems in The Fifth Day of Peace (1986) by
Franklin Schaffner.
103. The conventional image of the courage of the Allied soldiers is undermined in The
Dirty Dozen: Next Mission (1985), whereas in The Longest Day (1962) the exemplary
ethics of Allied officers is not questioned, in contrast to that of their German
antagonists. See also Marathon Man (1976) and the film series based on Shirer’s
Berlin Diary under the title The Nightmare Years (1988). Critical light is shed on the
cooperation between Americans and Nazis in The Great Escape II (1988).
104. This does not mean, of course, that the journalistic treatment of events that appeal
to the media (cf. the polemics concerning Reagan’s visit to the war cemetery at Bitburg) cannot lead to a dramatic heightening of facts by drawing on a reservoir of
stereotypes.
105. See the digression on “Das Deutschlandbild in den Cartoons amerikanischer
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Tageszeitungen,” in W. Gast, “Das Deutschlandbild im amerikanischen Fernsehen,” esp. 263–64.
106. See Lachlan R. Moyle, “Once a German—Always a German! Germans and Germany in Contemporary British Press Cartoons,” Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. C. C. Barfoot (1997), 423–43.
107. See a cartoon in the Los Angeles Times of 2 March 1990, in which Chancellor Kohl
was depicted raising his arm in the Hitler salute. See also: Karin Böhme-Dürr,
“Deutschland im amerikanischen Cartoon,” in Medienlust und Mediennutz, ed. Louis
Bosshart and Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem (1994), 435–46. Chancellor Kohl
appeared as a heavyweight champion among the leaders of major powers (Katalog
Deutschlandbilder: Das vereinigte Deutschland in der Karikatur des Auslands [1994], 32),
while reunification was discredited as the return of the Phoenix, accompanied by
the symbols of the Third Reich (Katalog, 68, from Los Angeles Times, 1992, “Out of
the Ashes”).
108. See Sielke and Schäfer-Wünsche, “Vereinigte Staaten,” in Klaus Stierstorfer, ed.,
Deutschlandbilder im Spiegel anderer Nationen (2003), 155–89.
9. conclusion
1. See the analysis by Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History and the
Urban Landscape (1997). The curious results produced by the marketing of notorious
institutions in the Third Reich, like the high security prison for prisoners of war
suspected of planning their escape in Colditz, has been documented by Husemann
in “The Colditz Industry,” in Anglo-German Attitudes, ed. Cedric Cullingford and
H. Husemann (1995), 141–63.
2. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).
3. Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen-Thesis
and Historical Truth (1998).
4. See Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mördern? Die Dokumentation zur GoldhagenKontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (1996). Not surprisingly, German
historians responded critically to this blanket accusation, but other American and
British historians also advocated circumspection and underlined the risks of
decontextualized accusations. See also Volker Ulrich, ed., Die Goldhagen-Kontroverse
(1996).
5. It remains to be seen whether Central Europe after the sea changes of 1989–1990
will inspire a timely new version of Clemens’ The Innocents Abroad in the fashion of
P. J. O. Rourke’s Holidays in Hell (1988). Time will only tell whether the boom in the
genre of historical metafiction in North America will increase the readiness of readers to yield to the self-perpetuating process of stereotyping and to accept fictional
accounts as factual, and whether the image of Germany will remain burdened by
the problematical tendency to accept fictional accounts as factual.
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INDEX
Abish, Walter, 6, 145, 163–67, 180, 222
Adams, Henry, 29, 63–67, 178, 198, 202
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 27, 30
Alcott, Louisa May, 30–31, 41, 188
Atherton, Gertrude, 86
Auschwitz, 146, 161, 163, 180
Austria, 21, 29, 54, 104–5, 118, 120, 125,
186, 209, 212. See also Vienna
Austrians, 93–94, 105, 109, 117, 124–25,
148, 171, 192, 223. See also Viennese
Bancroft, George, 18–19, 29, 47, 65
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 70, 219
Bellamy, Edward, 59
Berenson, Bernard, 78
Berger, Thomas, 141, 145–48, 151, 160,
180, 218
Berlin: 20–21, 24–25, 35, 39–41, 44, 47,
49–54, 56, 59–60, 64–65, 69, 72,
75–77, 79, 88, 92–95, 98–99, 101–3,
112–13, 116, 120, 127, 130–31, 145–47,
152–53, 156, 158, 181, 187, 189–90,
192–93, 196–98, 201–3, 206–8,
211–15, 221, 224; University of Berlin,
3, 19, 21, 46, 60, 64, 93; Wall, 8, 175,
181, 217
Bigelow, Poultney, 54–57, 131, 178, 195
Bismarck, Otto von, 22, 39–40, 51,
55–56, 58, 72, 76, 177, 195, 219
Black Forest, 37, 79, 95–98, 109–10, 124,
167, 179, 209
Boyle, Kay, 13, 104–5, 131, 141, 148–51,
179–80, 208, 219
Brace, Charles Loring, 28, 65, 68
Bromfield, Louis, 122–24, 128, 144, 179,
212
Browne, John Ross, 30–33, 65, 68, 188,
192
Bryant, William Cullen, 23, 25
Burgess, John W., 46, 192
Calvert, George Henry, 21, 23, 29
Chopin, Kate, 31
Clarke, James Freeman, 26–27
Clemens, Samuel L., 7, 33–35, 76, 96,
101, 178, 189, 199, 225
Cogswell, Joseph Green, 19, 186
Collier, Price, 81–82, 203
Communism, 103, 126, 128–30, 140,
157–58, 182, 214
Conway, Moncure, 37
Cooper, James Fenimore, 22
Cowley, Malcolm, 101
Crawford, Francis Marion, 36–38, 78,
177, 190
Creel Committee, 3, 86, 92, 98, 120
Creel, George, 81, 86–87, 200
Crèvecoeur, Jean de, 16
Curtis, George William, 75
Dewey, John, 63, 66–67, 198
Dickens, Charles, 30, 94
Dodd, Martha, 112–13, 210
Dos Passos, John, 85, 139, 204
Dreiser, Theodore, 72, 74–77, 101,
200–1, 207
Dresden, 22, 28, 40, 42–44, 48–49,
64–65, 151, 154–55, 192, 194, 198,
202, 220
Du Bois, W. E. B., 46, 50–54, 120–21,
194–95, 212
Dwight, Henry E., 19–22, 26, 186
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27, 188
Everett, Edward, 19
expatriates, 12–13, 94–95, 100–4, 109,
119, 122, 136, 179, 207, 215
Fascism, 113–15, 119, 126, 153, 156, 161,
170, 213, 220, 223
Fay, Theodore S., 24–25
110 index (249-254)
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Felton, Cornelius, 23
Flynt, Josiah, 57–58, 196
Follen, Charles, 18, 185
Francke, Kuno, 58, 68, 193, 196
Franco-Prussian War, 12, 26, 29, 31, 43,
45, 47, 79, 143, 177, 187
Frankfurt, 76, 137, 148, 204
Freeman, Joseph, 126, 128–30, 160, 179,
207, 214
Fuller, Margaret, 27, 188
Gass, William H., 181, 222
German characteristics: aggressiveness
(including brutality), 35, 55–56, 66,
76–77, 87–90, 92, 110–12, 123, 128,
133, 161, 163, 179, 197, 202–3;
arrogance, 40–41, 43, 47, 49, 57–59,
72, 76, 86, 94, 133–35, 179, 204, 210;
authoritarianism (including
obedience), 49, 58, 61, 66–67, 69,
125, 134, 137, 147, 150, 162, 165,
180, 186, 193, 195, 197, 213, 216;
cleanliness, 15, 35, 42, 76, 93, 107,
111–12, 164, 185, 198, 223;
corpulence, 14, 28, 33, 40, 72–76, 96,
100, 123, 130, 132, 135, 203, 225;
death wish, 123, 125, 143, 147,
157–58, 171, 180, 213, 221; decadence,
75, 94, 102–3, 142, 206, 208, 215,
224; dichotomy in, 49–50, 88–89,
109–10, 163, 166–67, 212; discipline,
24, 38–39, 48, 66, 98, 101, 111, 124,
134–35, 155, 172; dullness, 17, 21, 75,
77, 138; efficiency, 35, 76, 85, 140,
153, 160, 162, 180, 223; emotionality,
30, 49, 112, 123, 163, 168, 170–71, 189,
224; frugality, 16–17, 132, 135, 146,
185; “Gemütlichkeit,” 31, 48, 68, 91,
172, 223; gluttony, 14, 96–97, 106,
123, 130–31, 135, 179, 188, 216;
honesty, 16, 34, 38, 75, 133, 189,
209; industriousness, 16, 44, 57, 132,
138; irreligiosity, 26, 59–60, 132, 152,
178; kindliness, 28, 34, 38, 48, 58,
92–93, 110, 112, 155, 189, 209; loyalty,
250 ]
57, 81–82; pedantry, 50, 71;
perseverance, 57, 76, 124, 165;
phlegm, 22, 34, 36, 38, 54, 75, 186,
188, 203; religiosity, 19–20, 66, 135;
sense of order, 22, 76, 93, 112, 125,
134, 165, 179, 185; simplicity, 30, 34,
50, 65, 74–75, 83, 97–98, 110, 117,
134, 138, 189, 194, 201, 213;
thoroughness, 40, 76, 80, 164–65,
192; title mania, 34, 61, 123, 197;
ugliness, 41, 123, 130, 172, 217;
vitality, 18, 76, 99–100, 107, 179
German food, 39, 61, 64, 83, 99, 123,
132, 142, 191, 195, 197; sauerkraut, 61,
64, 83, 115, 197
German habits: bad manners, 40, 58, 61,
64, 123, 191, 197; bureaucracy, 61, 153,
160, 162, 180, 197–98; dipsomania, 14,
20, 22, 37, 40, 61, 71, 88, 107–8, 133,
188, 197, 205–6, 216; smoking
(including pipes), 20, 61, 64, 107, 188,
192, 197; urge to perfection, 43, 71,
164–66; wearing spectacles, 61, 123,
189, 197, 203, 220
German language: 9–10, 16, 44, 150, 157,
161, 185, 190, 199; learning of, 9, 17,
39, 64, 185–86, 204; proficiency in,
21–22, 28, 35, 48, 51, 53–54, 64, 70,
78, 97, 130, 137, 147, 194–95;
restriction of, 4, 83–84, 86–87, 179,
204
German music: 15, 22, 47–48, 54,
64–66, 70–71, 95, 97–99, 108, 120,
155, 162–63, 171, 177, 198, 200, 206,
219; military music, 24, 34, 194
German types and professions: farmers,
14–17, 132, 192; Faustian figures, 57,
59–60, 107, 159, 178, 196; housewives,
14–15, 38, 133–34, 138, 140, 168, 185,
197, 206, 216; musicians, 15, 42–43,
49, 53, 98, 151, 177; officers, 14,
57–58, 66, 82, 88, 124, 135, 169, 172,
224; philistines, 22, 49, 70, 146, 193,
219; philosophers, 17, 27, 48;
physicians (“cloudy metaphysicians”),
index
110 index (249-254)
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14, 59, 104, 160–61, 169–70, 178;
professors, 14, 20, 30–31, 34, 41, 44,
48–49, 58–59, 73, 81–82, 85, 87,
93–94, 134, 176, 178–79, 193, 197;
Prussian Junkers, 42, 51, 72, 89, 161;
revolutionaries (social), 15, 22;
scientists (natural), 41, 44, 57, 59–60,
62, 124, 159, 162–63, 169, 172, 178,
180, 191, 197, 206, 220; soldiers, 24,
88, 136, 150, 154; students, 14, 19–22,
34, 36–38, 59, 64, 66, 96, 135, 142,
176–78, 186, 190, 193; theologians,
50, 59–60; women, 14–16, 33, 42, 51,
53, 58, 75, 81, 88, 94, 99, 107, 125,
133–34, 138, 140, 146, 168, 192, 197,
206–7, 212
Germany: chauvinism, 87; country of
poets and thinkers, 7, 12, 17, 24, 81,
98, 147, 177, 185; education, 3–4, 7,
12, 18–22, 27, 29–30, 44, 46–48, 52,
54, 56–57, 62–64, 120, 134, 150, 169,
177, 186, 192, 195, 198; forests, 40–41,
97, 108–9, 124, 219, 223; idealism, 29,
36, 62, 66, 104, 121, 148, 165, 170,
177–78, 183, 193, 198; imperialism,
36, 41, 47, 52, 57, 63, 80, 101, 196,
198; militarism, 45, 55, 57–58, 66–67,
72, 76, 80, 92, 122, 147, 150, 181, 193,
198, 203, 205, 211; nationalism, 14,
29, 51, 53, 59, 116, 127, 141, 181, 193,
203, 217; philosophy, 19, 27, 49, 52,
59, 67, 70–71, 165, 176–78, 183, 198;
spas, 22, 28, 40, 96; ugliness of
architecture, 39–41, 49, 64, 76, 79,
101, 201, 207; war guilt, 4, 81, 86,
89, 90
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 21, 26,
63, 65–66, 78–79, 112, 198
Göttingen, 18–21, 41, 47, 66, 187
Gunther, John, 117–18, 126, 129, 211–12
Hedge, Frederick Henry, 19, 27, 186
Heidelberg: 23, 25, 30, 34–37, 47, 96,
135, 187, 189, 191, 194, 203, 205, 208,
224; University of Heidelberg, 21,
36–37, 46
Heine, Heinrich, 35, 198
Hellman, Lillian, 171, 207, 212, 214
Hemingway, Ernest, 97, 101–2, 116,
206–7, 211
Herbst, Josephine, 103, 119, 130–31, 214
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 91, 95, 98–100,
107, 179, 207, 221
Hitler, Adolf, 115, 118, 120–21, 126, 128,
147, 166–67, 175, 179, 182, 200,
210–12, 215, 225
Hitlerism, 121, 215
Hohenzollern (House of ), 54, 56, 88–89,
93
Hollywood, 87–89, 119, 171, 218
Holocaust: 4, 9, 13, 98, 127, 139, 141,
152, 158, 160–61, 171–73, 180–81,
222–23; collective guilt for, 104, 131,
139, 145, 148, 163, 171, 181, 222
Hood, Thomas, 18
Hosmer, James Kendall, 37
Howells, William Dean, 35, 58, 76
Hughes, Langston, 102
Huns, 12, 14, 88, 91–92, 147, 179, 191,
206, 210
Hall, Stanley, 44, 46
Hawkes, John, 141–45, 151, 180, 217
Hawthorne, Julian, 42, 192
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 42
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 32–33
James, Henry, 8, 13, 34–35, 37–45, 54,
65, 77–81, 92, 100, 178, 190–92,
194–95, 202
i nd ex
imagology, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 55, 80,
171, 176, 178, 181, 183, 195, 223
immigrants and refugees: from
Germany, 10, 17–18, 30, 47, 54, 103,
119, 122, 124, 143, 193, 196–97,
212–13, 218, 224; of German origin, 3,
10, 12, 16–18, 27, 47, 57–58, 62, 81,
84, 105, 127, 185, 188–89
Irving, John, 142, 217
Irving, Washington, 22, 34, 78
[ 251
110 index (249-254)
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James, William, 8, 37–46, 48, 51, 54, 60,
76, 178, 190–92, 197
Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 63
Koblen(t)z, 30, 76, 106, 111
Leipzig, 44, 46
Lewis, Sinclair, 8, 73, 91–95, 113–16, 179,
200, 205–6, 211, 214
Lieber, Francis, 17, 187
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 23, 25,
31, 96
Luther, Martin, 7
Lutheranism, 74, 85, 124
Mann, Horace, 27
Mannheim, 22, 35
Marx, Karl, 132
Marxism, 103, 128, 211
McAlmon, Robert, 94, 102, 206–8, 215
Mencken, Henry L., 8, 13, 49, 59, 67–74,
77, 98–99, 179, 199–200
Motley, John L., 21–22, 29, 177, 186
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, 116, 210–11
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 118, 171,
219
Mumford, Lewis, 111, 210
Munich, 34, 40, 69, 71–73, 91–92, 99,
106–9, 125–26, 170, 189, 207, 209
Münsterberg, Hugo, 45, 60–63, 68, 81,
137, 179, 197, 203
Murray, John, 18
Mussolini, Benito, 98, 126
national socialism: anti-Semitism,
52–53, 90, 104–5, 111–15, 120–21, 125,
127, 131, 133, 152–53, 158, 162,
181–82, 203, 207–8, 210–12, 215, 220,
222; concentration camps, 13, 90,
114–15, 127–29, 139, 146–47, 156,
160–62, 164–66, 181, 222; ideology of,
98, 104, 113–14, 119, 125, 146, 161, 163,
173, 175, 182, 200, 211, 218, 222;
Nazism, 4, 9, 53, 66, 103, 111, 113–14,
252 ]
116–17, 119, 122, 124, 126–31, 134, 137,
139, 141, 145–48, 151–54, 156–58, 160,
165, 167, 170–74, 179–81, 194, 208,
211, 213–14, 218, 220, 224
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 67, 70–71, 82,
179, 198–99
Nuremberg, 90, 107, 137, 139
Ohlinger, Gustavus, 81, 200
Parker, Theodore, 26–27
Pattee, Fred Louis, 63, 65–67, 194
Percy, Walker, 104, 163, 167–71, 181,
223–24
Pettigrew, James Johnston, 21, 187
Pollard, Joseph Percival, 8, 68–70, 99, 198
Porter, Katherine Anne, 104, 122,
130–36, 179, 214–17
Prokosch, Frederick, 122, 124–26, 213
Prussia: 4, 24, 29, 41, 43–44, 55–58, 64,
82, 101–2, 117, 169, 177, 193, 195, 202,
217; Prussianism, 72, 211, 217;
Prussianization, 81, 87, 178, 200;
Prussians, 14, 22, 36, 40–42, 48,
53–54, 56, 61, 64, 72, 80–81, 88–89,
94, 134, 161, 169, 180, 192, 197, 200,
202, 205
Pynchon, Thomas, 6, 141, 151, 155–60,
180, 221
Rhine valley, 12, 21, 23, 25, 30, 39, 76,
106, 177, 179
Ruhr, 90, 101, 116, 211
Rush, Benjamin, 16
Russell, John, 18, 186
Santayana, George, 48–50, 137, 193–94,
198
Schiller, Friedrich, 65, 112
Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 28
Sheean, Vincent, 116, 211
Shirer, William L., 116–17, 211, 224
Sinclair, Upton, 86, 126–28, 160, 179,
204, 213
index
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Spender, Steven, 101
Stael, A. L. G. de, 14, 17, 20, 176, 185
Stalin, Joseph, 118, 128
Stalinism, 128, 146, 216
Steffens, Lincoln, 46, 207
Stein, Gertrude, 136–38, 207
stereotyping: autostereotypes, 5, 14–15,
28, 137, 164–65; contrast between
Germans and British, 17, 37–38, 44,
48, 51–52, 60, 66–67, 69, 72–73, 93,
106, 147, 155, 198, 203; contrast
between Germans and French, 19, 26,
31–32, 34–35, 37, 39–40, 54, 69, 77,
79–80, 82, 137, 178, 202–3, 209;
contrast between Germans and
Italians, 34, 37–39, 41, 49, 65, 69,
77–78, 82, 93, 114, 178; contrast
between Germans and Slavonic
peoples, 26, 54–55, 195; contrast
between Protestant North and
Catholic South, 19–21, 49–50, 135–36;
contrast between Prussians and South
Germans (Bavarians), 12, 72, 81,
98–99, 123–24, 200, 202–3;
heterostereotypes, 2, 5–10, 12–14, 19,
23, 26, 29, 34, 80, 86, 90–91, 96, 113,
115, 122, 124, 137, 140, 145, 148,
154–55, 159, 169–70, 172, 174, 177,
184; national, 4–6, 11–12, 15–17, 29,
37–38, 50, 85–86, 92–94, 118–19, 134
Stimson, Frederic Jessup, 59
Stowe, Calvin, 27
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 28, 188
Styron, William, 160–63, 180, 222
Sumner, Charles, 23, 64, 187, 198
Tacitus, Cornelius, 17, 176
Tarkington, Booth, 86
Taylor, Bayard, 25–27, 29, 41, 47, 177,
187–89
Teutonic heritage, 13–14, 17, 66, 82, 107,
113, 142–44, 190
Thayer, William Roscoe, 81, 200
i nd ex
Thompson, Dorothy, 95, 113, 114, 116,
210
Ticknor, George, 17–18, 185
Treaty of Versailles, 90, 94, 116, 120, 126
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 51–52, 58, 67,
82, 125, 178, 193–94
Tucker, George, 17
Tuttle, Herbert, 48, 95–98, 109, 179
Tyrol, 104–5, 110, 113, 209
Untermeyer, Louis, 91
Vienna, 22, 39, 69, 91–92, 95, 98, 101–2,
104, 109, 117, 121, 123, 128–29, 131,
137, 163, 171, 194, 196, 206–7, 223
Viennese, 91, 121, 128, 171, 206
Virchow, Rudolf, 60, 196
Vonnegut, Kurt, 141, 151–55, 160, 180,
210, 220
Wagner, Richard, 35, 66, 120, 200
Wallant, Edward Lewis, 160
Ward, Sam, 23
Warner, Charles D., 33–34, 38, 40, 189,
191
Weimar Republic, 12–13, 75, 90, 98,
100–1, 103, 116, 126, 170, 172, 179
Wharton, Edith, 77–80, 178, 201–2
Wilhelm (William) II., 39, 50, 52, 55–57,
63, 71, 81, 88, 144, 178, 191, 195
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 24–25, 192
Wister, Owen, 80–81, 200, 202
Wolfe, Thomas, 6, 8, 99, 104–13, 121,
125, 179, 209–10
World War I, 5, 10, 12, 39, 47–48, 50, 58,
60, 62, 67, 77–89, 93–94, 97, 98, 101,
115–17, 120, 122, 131, 143, 152, 174,
178, 179
World War II, 4, 8, 13, 50, 74, 87, 90–91,
118, 122, 124, 136–37, 140, 142, 148,
155, 160, 174, 180, 194, 198–99
Wylie, Ida Alexa, 72, 199
[ 253

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