Literature (German),the United States in

The reports of the discovery of America were flanked by the emergence of literary phantasmagoria that created lasting con­structs of image and, depending on the au­thor’s view, manifested themselves in ever new themes, myths, and symbols reflecting the social, political, and cultural changes in Germany and Europe, always oscillating between admiration and fear, yearning and contempt.

In 17th-century German literary portrayals of America, Christian behavior was projected onto such characters as Pocahontas (here, depicted saving the life of Capt. John Smith). (Library of Congress)

flective medium of cultural processes that sheds light on the history of the sketches and descriptions of America and the self­observations and classifications of foreign culture expressed in them.

In the literature of the early modern age and the seventeenth century, the south­ern hemisphere was considered synony­mous with America. The travel and re­search reports appearing chiefly after the German translation of the so-called Columbus Letter in 1697 were dominated by curiosity about the menacing and a fas­cination for the unknown, with nature and primitivism either being celebrated as nat­ural and paradisiacal by those with a criti­cal stance toward civilization or feared, scorned, and dismissed as barbarism with religious and progress-oriented fervor. The land of gold and naked people, wealth, and the innocence of nature were the literary themes of the early modern age, appearing chiefly as satirical curiosities and images of paradise and Eldorado, such as in Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools, 1694). On the whole, America did not play a significant role in fictional literature, fea­turing only in allusions (Cleopatra und So- phonisbe, 1661, by Daniel Casper von Lo- henstein).

In the eighteenth century this dis­course continued and was modified. Al­brecht von Haller took a more anthropo­logical and scientific approach in his reviews of travel reports in the Gottingi- schen Gelehrten Anzeiger (Gottingen Scholar’s Gazette), as well as in the Samm- lung neuer und merkwurdiger Reisen (Col­lection of New and Strange Travels, 1750). In his educational poems Uber den Ur- sprung des Bosen (On the Origins of Evil) and Uber die Falschheit der menschlichen Tugend (On the Falsity of Human Virtue, 1730), he presents philosophical and so­cially critical ideas in which he saw Indians and Europeans as equals, allowing both to share morality through enlightenment.

As a result of literary primitivism (the belief that primitive peoples were more noble and less flawed because they had not been subjected to the tainting influence of civilized society), the ideal character of the wild man was increasingly used to present the ideas of the Enlightenment and criti­cism of social, religious, and moral institu­tions in Germany, as well as to discuss is­sues of humanity (Joachim Heinrich Campe, Entdeckung von Amerika [Discov­ery of America], 1781—1782; Andreas Georg Rebmann, Hans Kiekindiewelt [Hans Look-at-the-World], 1794).

In the eighteenth century, the modern image of the United States emerged. Fol­lowing the creation of the United States in 1776, the German states displayed an acute interest in the country of the revolution and constitution. The philosophers of the Enlightenment projected the principles of equality, freedom, and brotherhood and demands for a republic and human rights on the United States. Thus, the central mouthpiece of the Enlightenment, the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly Journal), celebrated the victory of the American Republic over the European aris­tocracy. This dichotomy consequently be­came a theme in the discourse on the United States, in which the differences be­tween the Old World and New World were chiefly discussed from a political and philo­sophical viewpoint and were transformed into the new contrasts of reason and des­potism. The human rights statement was linked with demands for personal and po­litical freedom embedded in positive law (such as in Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Deutsche Chronik [German Chronicle, 1774—1778]). This depiction of the United States was then personified by Benjamin Franklin (in works by Schubart; Johann Gottfried Herder; Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe; Georg Forster, who met Benjamin Franklin in person in 1777; and Johann Jakob Meyen’s poem in five songs, Franklin der Philosoph und Staatsmann [Franklin, Philosopher and Statesman], 1787).

At the turn of the century, as a result of the debates of the Enlightenment, German literary works increasingly stylized the United States as a haven where fleeing Eu­ropeans became familiar with the concept of community (Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger, Der Wirrwarr, oder Sturm und Drang [Muddle, or Storm and Stress], 1776; Sophie Merau-Brentano, Das Bluthenalter der Empfindung [The Blos­soming Age of Sentimentalism], 1794; Dorothea Schlegel, Florentin, 1801), and where they could live in a free society (Heinrich Stilling, Die Geschichte Florentin von Fahlendorf [The Story of Florentin von Fahlendorf], 1781; Heinrich Zschokke, Prinzessin von Wolfenbuttel [The Princess of Wolfenbuttel], 1804).

It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the increasing po­litical and economic loosening of ties be­tween the United States and Europe, that the United States was portrayed more negatively in German-language fictional and journalistic texts. When, during the era of the Restoration under Baron Met­ternich, aiming to restore the Bourbon and emperors regime and suppressing the liberal movements, political progress ground to a halt and the pace of eco­nomic progress fell behind that of the United States and Britain, a European identity was construed that was defined by cultural values stigmatizing the United States as a country without original arts, without culture, the “country without a nightingale” (“Land ohne Nachtigall,” Nikolaus Lenau). Authors such as Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Heine (Uber Ludwig Borne [The Book of Borne], 1840), Ferdinand von Freiligrath (Die neue Welt [The New World], 1843), and Moritz Saphir (Der Auswanderer [The Emigrant], 1863) propagated the theme of American materialism, which was subsequently used into the twenty-first century whenever crit­icism was voiced over the modernization process dubbed Americanization.

At the same time, German literature celebrated the United States just as fre­quently as the country of the future, which was used as a contrast to the political and social conditions prevailing in Germany but was derived neither from personal ex­perience nor from travels through the United States. The authors of the Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) movement (Ernst Willkomm, Die Europamuden [Those Who Have Tired of Europe], 1833; Heinrich Laube, Die Burger [The Citi­zens], 1837) projected their demands for freedom and equality onto the idealistic construct known as the United States. The same can be said of the authors of the pre­revolution Vormdrz period (1815—1848) (Anastasius Grun, Schutt [Ruins] 1833). Whereas the romantics dismissed the United States as a dystopia by mythologiz­ing the Middle Ages, the political authors, including Goethe in his Wilhelm-Meister novels, discovered the values of liberalism in the New World.

Inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy, the Re­publican supporters of the 1848 revolution (Friedrich Hecker, Gottfried Kinkel, Wil­helm Weitling) saw the United States, the only major power to recognize the St. Paul’s Church Assembly (Paulskirchenparlament) as a representative body of the people, as a flame of hope for change. The exodus start­ing around 1850 bears witness to the ex­pectations of freedom, wealth, and social mobility associated with the United States. Set in the context of the mass exodus, in­numerable authentic travel reports, fabri­cated ones written as propaganda (Gott­fried Duden), guidebooks for emigrants, and novels and narrative texts on America (Gerstacker, Mollhausen, Strubberg) molded the images of the New World, complementing the private letters of emi­grants to those who stayed at home: these images include a yearning for an economic paradise providing work for all, commercial and religious freedom, the self-help myth, a policeless state, and so forth.

United States as a melting pot. The litera­ture of the poetic realists, such as Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, Berthold Auerbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, and Theodor Fontane, frequently featured the motif of characters returning from the United States. In this context the United States was por­trayed as a school for proving one’s worth and perfecting the individual.

By the turn of the century, literary in­terest in the Wild West had dwindled, and the industrial East Coast edged into view. Fantasy and exoticism were eclipsed by the technically oriented modern age. This change was fueled by the social misery of Wilhelm Il’s reign, caused by an unprece­dented level of mass unemployment that rekindled the dream of the United States. The American modern age became associ­ated with technological progress, as is man­ifest in capitalism, industrialization, urban­ization, and the mass media. Above all, in the genre of science fiction literature, nov­els of the United States as a utopia ap­peared, such as Bernhard Kellermann’s Der Tunnel (The Tunnel, 1913) and Peter Rosegger’s Der Golfstrom (The Gulf Stream, 1913), in which the focus fell on the process of modernization and the desire for global brotherhood.

The novels of Franz Kafka (Der Ver- schollene [The Missing Man], 1927) and Gerhart Hauptmann (Atlantis [1912] and the drama Dorothea Angermann, 1926) were very different. They portrayed the iso­lation of the individual in a rationalized working world and the struggle for life. The utopia of social integration with the fulfillment of the American dream was stripped of its illusory character in the bi­ographies of their protagonists, who fled American reality, seeking refuge in places of cultural interest. Painting a largely vague and unreal picture of the United States, both authors created models that were more in line with the thesis of the Viennese expressionist Robert Muller, who claimed that the United States only existed as a presentation of its own image.

In Bertolt Brecht’s works as well, the United States consisted only of scattered images. He associated archaic myths with visions of progress, shaping ideas such as the urban jungle (Im Dickicht der Stadte [Jungle of Cities], 1923). The abattoirs of Chicago became the literary setting of Americanization and the political debate on capitalism and the reflection of the condi­tions prevailing in Germany (Brecht, Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui [The Re­sistible Rise of Arturo Ui], 1941; Alfons Pa­quet, Fahnen [Flags], 1924). This new func­tionalist literature (Neue Sachlichkeit) was also shaped by the encounter with Ameri­can literature, particularly with the muck­raking movement a la Upton Sinclair. After World War I, the intellectuals and pacifist poets of the Weimar Republic made open professions of support to the United States, with which they associated optimism, tech­nological progress, sportsmanship, and vi­tality. This rapid change was illustrated most clearly by the diplomat Harry Graf Kessler, who rejected Woodrow Wilson’s peace ideas in September 1918, only to be­come an admirer of the League of Nations and the U.S. president just three weeks later. A short-lived pro-American euphoria broke out in the “Golden Twenties,” when cultural imports from the United States, fa­cilitated by the Dawes Plan, left their mark on fashions in art, film, and music. Particu­larly music (jazz, swing), architecture, and dance (Josephine Baker, the foxtrot, one- step, Boston, shimmy) developed into icons of freedom. The fascination with silent movies from Hollywood opened up new distribution channels for the literature of Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. These cultural imports were widely discussed in literary texts (Alfred Doblin, Georg Kaiser, Iwan Goll, Fritz von Unruh). They often constituted conscious reactions against in­tellectual anti-Americanism arising from the economic war between the German Empire and the United States, as well as World War I.

This anti-Americanism grew from the idea of an America devoid of history and culture in the Gτundeτzeit (the years of rapid industrial expansion in Germany from 1871), through conservative and na­tional liberal beliefs regarding the weak U.S. civil service, its mechanization of human beings, and the dominance of economism and unilateralism (Hugo Mun- sterberg, Die Ameτikaneτ [The Americans], 1910), to propagandist hate (Adolf Halfeld, Ameτika und die Ameτikaneτ [America and the Americans], 1927), which was adopted by the National Social­ists. In the Third Reich the Nazis gave anti­Americanism a racial foundation. The United States was considered the “Jew state” and the center of Jewish imperialism as portrayed by Giselher Wirsing in his journalistic piece Deτ maβlose Kontinent (The Excessive Continent, 1943). How­ever, this view, which was borne out by a ban on all American cultural forms, such as jazz and swing, rapidly disappeared after the war, bowing to a more, though not ex­clusively, pro-American image.

Mainly on the basis of reports of Ger­mans living in exile, many authors, includ­ing left-wing intellectuals, considered the Americans not only guarantors of freedom and wealth but also an occupying power (Hans Werner Richter, Die Geschlagenen [The Beaten]; Ernst von Salomon, Deτ Fτagebogen [The Questionnaire]; Hans Hellmut Kirst, Sagten Sie Geτechtigkeit, Capitain [Did You Say Justice, Captain?]). Even so, transatlantic solidarity continued almost without interruption into the 1960s and the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Several anthologies appeared in which lit­erature was recognized as having a political mediatory function between both states (Max Rohrer, Ameτika im deutschen Gedicht [America in German Poetry], 1948; Ernst Fraenkel, Ameτika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens [America as Reflected in German Political Think­ing], 1959; Alfred Gong, Inteτview mit Ameτika [Interview with America], 1962; Wolf Stratowas, Spektτum Ameτika [Spec­trum America], 1964). Above all, the con­cept of the “American Dream” and a “country of unlimited opportunity” fueled the social optimism of progress. However, these dreams were also considered critically, particularly under the influence of the Frankfurt School (Arno Schmidt, Die Gelehτtenτepublik [The Egghead Republic]; Stefan Anders, Deτ Mann auf deτ Bτucke [The Man on the Bridge]; Hans Henny Jahn, Tτummeτ des Gewissens [The Ruins of Conscience]) and in the 1970s were por­trayed as private debates about one’s own subjectivity (Peter Handke, Deτ kuτze Bτief zum langen Abschied [Short Letter, Long Farewell], 1972).

Along with the protests against the Vietnam War during the student revolu­tion and in left-wing intellectual circles, criticism of the United States became more radical. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse supported the anti-American stance of the student move­ment by announcing their solidarity with Vietnam, while Erich Fried expressed his support in his political poems (und Viet­nam und [and Vietnam and], 1966) and Peter Weiss in his documentary theater Viet Nam Diskurs (Viet Nam Discourse, 1968). Symbolically, this criticism of the United States led to the image of the crying Statue of Liberty, an expression of the dis­appointment over the abuse of freedom and human rights as portrayed in Rolf Hochhuth’s dramas (Guerrillas, 1970; Ju­dith, 1984).

Although the majority of authors un­derlined the differences between the United States and Germany with a polem­ical or political intention, Max Frisch em­phasized the similarities through the men­tal representations of the self and the other in his novels (Stiller, 1954; Homo Faber, 1957) and his diaries, discussing also “our arrogance toward America” (Unsere Arro- ganz gegenuber Amerika [Our Arrogance toward America], 1952). At the same time, he deconstructed American self-images such as the “American way of life.”

In the 1960s German authors started criticizing capitalism, a phenomenon al­most entirely associated with the United States (Herbert Heckmann, Der groβe Knockout in sieben Runden [The Big Knockout in Seven Rounds], 1972). The fear of an economic dictatorship led Rein­hard Lettau in his work Taglicher Faschis- mus (Daily Fascism, 1970) to draw paral­lels between National Socialism and American politics. These views were similar to the German Democratic Republic’s por­trayal of America. The American ideals of freedom, freedom of the press, and democ­racy were exposed in Socialist fiction as chimera, racism, anticommunism, and ex­ploitation. Particularly in the Ulbricht era of the cold war, the American is portrayed as an anti-Communist agitator and imperi­alist (Gustav von Wangenheim, Auch in Amerika [Also in America], 1950; Maxi­milian Scheer, Die Rosenbergs [The Rosen­bergs], 1953). An analysis of the McCarthy era is found in the Goldsborough novels (1954) and The Cannibals, which the U.S. Army officer Stefan Heym wrote both in English and German. The Vietnam War fueled criticism of the U.S. government, which was expressed particularly in lyrical texts (Volker Braun, Wolf Biermann).

An aesthetic deconstruction of Ameri­can myths from the world of film and his­tory was presented by Hans Christoph Buch (Aus der Neuen Welt [From the New World], 1975), Dieter Kuhn (Festspiele fur Rothaute [Festivals for Redskins], 1974), Gerlind Reinshagen (Leben und Tod der Marilyn Monroe [The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe], 1971), and Alfred An- dersch (Der Tod des James Dean [The Death of James Dean], 1973). At the end of the 1960s, a new, decidedly literary image of the United States found its way into German literature. The authors of pop literature such as Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Peter O. Chotjewitz, and Jorg Fauser focused their view of the United States on beat literature and the postmod­ern reception of individual myths (comics, Westerns) and entertainment media (pornography, film). The United States of America is no longer perceived as a politi­cal symbol, but as a fatherland of new cul­tural forms. This pattern was also evident in the East German literature of the 1970s. In the Honecker era and the initial liberal­ization phase, American symbols such as jeans and rock music were discussed in works such as Ulrich Plenzdorf ’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (The New Sor­rows of Young W., 1973). In spite of re­proaches over pornography and aesthetic and political discrimination, the reception of American literature has far-reaching consequences, with the authors of the “Prenzlauer Berg” (Adolf Endler, Gert Papenfuβ-Gorek) being greatly influenced by beat literature (Jack Kerouac). In the 1980s, the image of the United States de­veloped many more facets. The United States was no longer seen only in a nega­tive light.

As a result of the post-colonial transi­tion, left-wing authors of the Federal Re­public of Germany started in the 1970s to extend their perspective to America, with the countries of Southern and Central America also edging into view. Particularly Hubert Fichte (Geschichte der Empfind- lichkeit [The Story of Sensitivity], 1974ff.) and Hans Christoph Buch (Rede des toten Kolumbus am Tag des Jungsten Gerichts [Speech of the Deceased Columbus at the Last Judgment], 1992) have portrayed the other America through ethnological and socially critical approaches.

The Watergate affair and the NATO rearmament debate of the 1980s strength­ened the stereotypes of military predomi­nance and a world police force in German literature. This critical view and the im­ages of imperialism, materialism, and the double standards of the American super­power became entrenched during the 1990s and the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq. Thus, authors during the 1990s in­creasingly reacted in their writings to the global and political upheavals, in which the United States was either criticized as a world police force (Durs Grunbein, PAX Americana, 2000) and financial center (Botho Strauβ), or seen as a contrast to the perceived European inability to act as a military and political leading power (Wolf Biermann). After September 11, 2001, German authors expressed their sympathy for the United States by portraying the ter­rorist attacks as traumatic experiences and interpreting their own sadness as signs of their amiable political and cultural rela­tionship with the United States. Above all, through the medium of the diary, which was resurgent in the 1990s, apocalyptic fears were expressed and bear witness to the loss of language in describing the inde­scribable (Durs Grunbein, Peter Ruhmkorf, Else Buschheuer). Authors were quick to react with texts (Rene Pollesch, Smarthouse I + II, 2001) in which the terrorist attack was perceived as an aesthetic initiation or recovery of real­ism (Kathrin Roggla, Really Ground Zero, 2001). Above all, September 11 was seen as a global turning point (Dagmar Le- upold, Kerstin Hensel, and Marica Bo- drouic, 11.9.—911 Bilder des neuen Jahrhunderts/ Images of the New Millen­nium, 2002).

However, this revaluation of the U.S. image in German literature is accompanied and often eclipsed by a critical reserve to­ward the United States, which in the 1990s became the symbol of globalization and of economic liberalism as well as the per­ceived enemy of the environment. Critical tones and even extreme anti-American views were voiced after the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in which fears of imperial unilateralism are expressed (Stefan Heym, Franz Xaver Kroetz). German authors wrote open letters to George W. Bush (Matthias Altenburg, Maxim Biller, Moritz Rinke, Sibylle Berg, Feridun Zaimoglu). In Bambiland (2004), Elfriede Jelinek de­structed a Walt Diseny view of the world molded by mass media. This fundamental criticism of the media and its manipulative mass influence in the United States is a re­

peated complaint (Kathrin Roggla, Thomas Hurlimann), recurring since Wolfgang Koeppen.

New York enjoys a special place in German literature. Above all in the twenti­eth century, the metropolis evokes a lasting literary fascination (Rose Auslander, Amerika-Herold-Kalender, 1922; Klaus Mann, Der Wendepunkt [The Turning Point], 1949; Max Frisch, Hilde Spiel, The Darkened Room, 1961; Uwe Johnson, Jahrestage [Anniversaries] 1970—1983, Ger­hard Roth, Der groβe Horizont [ The Wide Horizon], 1974; Gert Hofmann, Die Dununziation [The Denunciation], 1979; Alban Nikolai Herbst, In New York, 2000). Whereas Jurgen Federspiel criticizes the morbidity and social neglect in his satire Museum des Hasses: Tage in Manhattan [Museum of Hate: Days in Manhattan] (1969), the majority of authors perceive New York’s architecture, its transportation and roads, the clashes with a foreign cul­ture, and the social and cultural diversity as a literary challenge and a biographical ex­perience that is noted in chronicles, diaries, and memoirs. New York can be said to be the goal of numerous GDR authors, who, in the wake of the velvet revolution, use their renewed freedom to travel to visit the America.

Claude D. Conter

See also Americanization; Brecht, Bertolt; Duden, Gottfried; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and the United States; Griesinger, Karl Theodor; Hecker, Friedrich; Heym, Stefan; Marcuse, Herbert; May, Karl Friedrich; Mollhausen, Heinrich Balduin; Munsterberg, Hugo; Ruppius, Otto; Strubberg, Friedrich August; Weitling, Wilhelm

References and Further Reading

Bauschinger, Sigrid, ed. Amerika in der deutschen Literatur: Neue Welt—Nordamerika—USA. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975.

Brenner, Peter J. Reisen in die neue Welt: Die Erfahrung Nordamerikas in deutschen: Reise- und Auswandererberichten des 19. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1991.

Cobbs, Alfred L. The Image of America in Postwar German Literature. Bern: Peter Lang, 1982.

Dobert, Eitel Wolf. Dt. Demokraten in Amerika: Die Achtundvierziger u. ihre Schrften. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1958.

Durzak, Manfred. Das Amerika-Bild in der dt.

Gegenwartsliteratur. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1979.

Galinsky, Hans. Amerikanisch-deutsche Sprach- u. Literaturbeziehungen: Systematische Ubersicht u. Forschungsbericht, 1945—70. Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum-Verlag, 1972.

Jantz, Harold: “Amerika im dt. Dichten u. Denken.” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriβ. Ed. Wolfgang Stammler. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1962, 3:309-372.

Mikoletzky, Juliane. Die dt. Amerika- Auswanderung des 19. Jh. in der zeitgen∂ssischen fιktionalen Literatur. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1988.

Osterle, Heinz D., ed. Amerika! New Images in German Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

Ritter, Alexander, ed. Deutschlands literarisches Amerikabild. Hildesheim, NY: Olms, 1977.