Americanization
Americanization refers to a process by which ideas, practices, and patterns of behavior that were developed and widely spread in the United States first aroused the interest of some Germans.
They studied them and introduced them into public discussion in their country, raising the question of transferability and applicability. Those who were convinced that what they saw and scrutinized was transferable began to import these ideas and practices. Not the United States as a whole, but selected aspects of American society, became to them a model to be emulated. They were helped in this transaction by Americans who not only believed that their model was superior to existing alternatives (e.g., the British one) but who also had a vested interest in exporting the American model. These two groups are Americaniz- ers. Americanization, seen as a process in which elements and practices first developed in the United States were introduced into Germany, invariably met with resistance from those who rejected these elements as alien and unsuitable to German society and its economic, political, and cultural traditions.What emerged from the Americanization process was not a simple replica of conditions in the United States but a blending of both those imports that came to be accepted and indigenous traditions. They formed a peculiar mixture, the specific American content of which varied from issue to issue, from social group to social group, and from region to region. This is illustrated by the large, impersonal, profit-driven multinational corporation, McDonald’s, which imposes its alien, uniform, and low standards on a helpless world. Though McDonald’s has a standardized menu, featuring hamburgers, Big Macs, shakes, and fries, the chain does not impose a worldwide model. If you have ever had a cup of coffee in a French McDonald’s, you know you are not in the United States.
In India, McDonald’s serves lamb burgers; in southern France, they substitute aubergine for pickles; in Germany, there is beer. Instead of insisting on doing things its own way, it adapts to local tastes.The process that Americanizers, both foreign and indigenous, set in motion resulted in a stance that became known as Americanism, which had a flip side: it extolled the need to uphold German traditions that the American imports were thought to undermine. Over the past fifty years, anti-Americanism has evolved in fits and starts and experienced both ups and downs. In the 1950s and 1970s, for example, anti-Americanism was at a low point; more recently, it has been on the rise.
The progression of Americanization depends not just on the relative balances of power between Americanizers and their indigenous critics but is also related to the hegemonic pressure that the United States is willing and able to exert upon a foreign society. This pressure can take a variety of forms: political, economic, and cultural. It could be quite direct or it could be indirect, subtle, and covert.
U.S. hegemonic pressure may be said to have been very weak before 1914. It became stronger during and immediately after World War I, before it weakened again as a consequence of U.S. isolationism. It partially revived in the mid-1920s, when American industry became a model for Germany and American investments propelled a rise in commercial mass culture. German entrepreneurs and trade unionists went to the industrial centers of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to study the transferability, to their country, of what they saw.
During the 1920s, Germany imported jazz, Hollywood, and the Tilly sisters. There was both acceptance and integration of these imports and resistance to them.
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the United States retreated into isolationism. However, American cultural offerings continued to intrigue the Germans. Joseph Goebbels was mesmerized by American film and thought of a “counter-Hollywood”; Albert Speer built scale models of assembly halls, railroad stations, and bridges for Adolf Hitler’s proposed urban reconstruction program, and time and again American architecture provided the models; and Ferdinand Porsche inspected Henry Ford’s factories before he began to construct what came to be called the Volkswagen Works at Wolfsburg.
Of course, Hitler’s societal utopia, driven as it was by racism, military conquest, and mass murder, was fundamentally different from the “American dream.” Yet even for Hitler, who began to establish an exclusive Germanic folk community, the United States never completely disappeared from his ideological radar screen. However fierce the regime’s anti-Americanism may have been, even then the penetration of ideas, prac-tices, and patterns of behavior from the United States did not stop completely.
In 1945, U.S. hegemonic pressure on Germany was greater than ever before because of the occupying forces in the American zone. The mistakes of the interwar period had made the U.S. political, economic, military, and cultural elites absolutely determined, from 1941—1942 onward, to shape the structures and mentalities of the Europeans and of the Germans in particular in their own image.
The process of Americanization affected West Germany’s political, economic, and cultural system after 1945 in several ways. Although the reshaping of the political system began in 1949, first at the local and regional levels and later at the interzonal level, West Germany did not import the U.S. Constitution en bloc. What the Basic Law therefore reflects is a mix of American and indigenous traditions and principles. General Lucius D. Clay exerted direct pressure, but he left it to the Germans to design a constitution that broadly fitted the principles of parliamentary- representative government, a division of powers, democratic elections, and basic rights. In a very broad sense it might be said that the German political system was westernized in that it was wrenched away from its authoritarian traditions and practices that had spelled the end of Weimar democracy. But the specific forms that this transformation took were British or French at best in a marginal sense. The blending occurred between what the American hegemon and the West German constitutional experts envisioned.
The Americanization of West Germany is perhaps even more striking when Germany’s economic system is considered.
The economy that had emerged in Germany by the late 1930s was fundamentally different from the liberal, multilateral, competitive, open-door world system that the Americans wanted to reestablish after the war. The Nazi economy was still capitalist, at least for the time being, in the sense that in general it upheld the principle of private ownership. It was also industrial and, within limits, wedded to constant technological innovation. But beyond this there was little left to compare. It was totally cartelized. The market and competition had been virtually abolished. Collective bargaining, workers’ rights, and trade unions had been proscribed. It had been largely decoupled from the world economy and aimed at the creation of an autocratic system within which the economies of Germany’s neighbors would be blatantly exploited and geared exclusively to the needs of the German economy and financial system. It was a system of trade based on barter and bilateralism. The Nazis spoke of the creation of a consumer society, but it was one based on the idea of ethnic exclusion and the murder of “undesirables.”American planners were determined to decartelize the Nazi economy and to establish, at the earliest opportunity, competitive market conditions. They also wanted to deconcentrate some of the virtual monopolies, such as IG Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, but did not envisage a total breakup. Rather they envisaged the creation of units of production that were large enough to act as engines of growth in the European reconstruction effort and to be able to compete in the open-door world trading system. In using their hegemonic clout, the Americans could rely on a number of German businesspeople and politicians as their Americanizing allies.
There was considerable opposition to the introduction of American-style antitrust law and decartelization, mainly from heavy industry in the Ruhr. This legislation, which was finally ratified in 1957, was not a mirror of the American antitrust laws preventing businesses from engaging in practices, such as forming anticompetitive agreements, that would allow them to dominate the market.
Instead, German antitrust legislation blended German and American tradition. It pushed German business away from their ancient cartels and syndicates in the direction of a competitive oligopolistic capitalism very similar to the American version.U.S. hegemonic pressures also brought social and cultural changes in West Germany during the postwar period. German Americanizers, it seems, were very much young people who responded positively, indeed enthusiastically, to what arrived from the United States. The resistance to these imports came from an older generation who rejected rock and jazz, James Dean and Coca-Cola as products of an Unkultur. For a while they thought that West Germany’s youth was immune to American youth culture, and they were shocked when riots broke out at the end of rock concerts. The arguments that could be heard were the familiar ones dating back to the 1920s. But the attractiveness of this culture to the young was something that intellectuals, academics, parents, clergy, and politicians could not contain. There was something inexorable about the way American mass culture began to blend into West German society.
This wave of acculturation was inseparably connected with something that West German business had embraced as part of the recasting of the country’s industrial system: Fordism. In the 1920s, German industry had begun to experiment with rationalized production. It sought to gain the economic benefits of modern technology and factory organization without any of the leveling effects of Americanism. They wanted higher productivity without mass production, greater exports without mass consumption, and higher profits without higher wages. In other words, German business refused to accept the other side of Ford’s equation; that is, that the transition to mass production would be incomplete if it did not result in a lowering of prices, thus making products that were hitherto reserved for the few within the budget of the many. It was with this principle that Ford had initiated the motorization of the United States in the 1920s.
The German car industry refused to adopt Fordism in this sense, with the exception of Opel Cars, acquired in 1927 by General Motors, which began to produce the Laubfrosch, the first popular German motorized vehicle manufactured on an assembly line.After World War II, confronted with the need to adapt to an American-dominated, competitively organized, multilateral economy, the German economy made the transition to mass production and embraced the idea of mass consumption. The marketing of mass-produced consumer goods may not immediately have led to levels of consumption comparable to the United States in the 1950s. Many Germans could not yet afford a car, a refrigerator, or a washing machine and invested their rising wages in the replacement of essential household items. However, all this does not mean that the introduction of Fordism—defined here not just as mass
production but also as the initiation of mass consumption—did not arouse consumerist desires and dreams of a better life.
Michael McGregor
See also American Occupation Zone; CocaCola; Ford, Henry; Fordism; Hollywood; McDonald’s Restaurant; Volkswagen Company and Its VW Beetle
References and Further Reading
Berghahn, Volker. The Americanization of West German Industry. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986.
Diner, Dan. America in the Eyes of the Germans: An Essay on Anti-Americanism. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1996.
Kroes, Rob. If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Nolan, Mary. Visions of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Willett, Ralph. The Americanization of Germany, 1945—1949. New York: Routledge, 1989.