America's Germany: National Self and Cultural Other After World War II

"America's Germany" explores post-World War II American depictions of Germany and the Germans in literature, film, the media, and policy formulation, showing how representations of Germany have been involved in the self-definition of America.Literary accounts by William Gardner Smith and Kay Boyle illustrate how African-American GIs conceived of occupied Germany as a Utopian alternative to America, articulating in the contact with the foreign culture a domestic civil rights agenda. Thomas Pynchon mounts a radical cultural self-critique by depicting disintegrating Nazi Germany as a dystopian anticipation of postwar America. John Hawkes, Walter Abish and Joyce Carol Oates and others turn to Germany for less historically specific commentaries on American culture.In film, as well as photo-features in weeklies like "Life" or "The Saturday Evening Post", relations between the U.S. and Germany are framed in terms of sexual relations between GIs and fr uleins. The fear of "fraternization" in Billy Wilders' "A Foreign Affair", Georg Seaton's "The Big Lift" and Henry Koster's "Fr ulein" draws on a traditional American self-conception as innocence threatened from abroad, while it also inscribes a contemporary debate about America's global role.Political rhetoric in print from Henry Morgenthau and James S. Martin intended to provide blueprints for the reconstruction of Germany. As New Deal industrial reformers, they saw the reconstruction of Germany as the last chance to fulfill American trustbusting efforts and to salvage an agrarian idea of America safe from industrial corruption. Their argument owes more to a long standing American tradition of protest against industrial capitalism rather than a specific analysis of the German political post-war challenge. Georg Schmundt-Thomas received his Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University and pursued an international career outside of academia. In his spare time, he is a student of the American space program and of innovation history. He lives in Erlangen, Germany.