Amerika Institut
The Amerika Institut was founded in 1910 in Berlin and took responsibility for maintaining and furthering academic relations and cooperation in the intellectual sphere between Germany and the United States.
Its creation is to be seen in the context of the societal discourse in the United States on what constitutes an American identity. Figuring prominently in the discourse was the perceived antagonism between German and Anglo-Saxon culture. The debate thus reflected not only the numerical predominance of British and German immigrants, or rather their descendants, among the population of the United States but also political and ideological developments in Europe.The Amerika Institut concerned itself with matters that were considered traditionally and generally to be German success stories: scientific thoroughness and higher education. The institute thus aimed at those sections of American society that could be expected to be German-friendly; that is, academics and the educated elites. Almost 10,000 U.S. citizens had received an education at German universities in the nineteenth century, and the German system of higher education was recognized by many among the U.S. academic elite to be exemplary.
There was, however, an increasing chorus of voices pointing to the authoritarian, grandiose, elitist, and inflexible character of German scholarship and its incompatibility with the American ideal of a democratic educational system. The Amerika Institut therefore may have served to counter those tendencies that threatened to undermine German exemplariness in the one field where it had hitherto gone virtually unchallenged. The importance of the founding of the institute among German Americans was shown by the fact that financial contributions were sent to Berlin even before the institute was set up. The Prussian Education Department received a check for 100,000 Reichsmark from the New York banker Jakob Henry Schiff, co-owner of the banking house Loeb and Co.
The New York German American James von Speyer sent $200,000 to Germany as a contribution toward the institute’s library.The institute’s founder-president was Hugo Munsterberg; he was succeeded by Karl O. Bertling, who headed the institute until his death in 1945. During World War I, the Amerika Institut and its connections in the United States became part of the propaganda efforts of the German government; the institute continued to serve as a covert propaganda tool during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, establishing a working relationship with the German intelligence community. The Allies closed the Amerika Institut after World War II.
Joachim Lerchenmuller
See also American Students at German Universities; Johns Hopkins University; Munsterberg, Hugo; U.S.-German Intellectual Exchange
References and Further Reading
Lerchenmuller, Joachim. Keltischer Sprengstoff: Eine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studie uber die deutsche Keltologie von 1900 bis 1945. Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1997.