It is a pleasure to have been asked to write a brief introduction to this Jubilee edition of the Journal of American Studies, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the British Association for American Studies, whose first Chairman and prime mover was the seminal scholar and teacher, Frank Thistlethwaite, my present Vice-Chancellor and old friend. The edition takes the interesting form of seven academic autobiographies written by distinguished European Americanist scholars, telling us in effect how they became involved in American Studies.

The fairly restricted number of first-generation European Americanists in the post World War II era (which is in fact almost to say simply the first generation) is shown by die circumstance that, with the exception of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, I know them all and most of diem very well. I am perhaps favourably, because centrally, placed to introduce them since three are my seniors and four my juniors. Of my seniors all three had set out on the path that was to lead them to the study of the United States before the war began, but all three, I think it fair to say, even including much the most senior of us, Dietrich Gerhard, only decisively became Americanists as a result of die war itself.

This corresponds with my own experience, though I suspect that I might have become one in any case: I was perhaps die only member of the pre-war generation among die contributors to have made a serious undergraduate study of die United States (in that splendid special subject at Oxford, The American Revolution and, I think it is accurate to add, the Maying of the Constitution, which Herbert Nicholas describes) under the magic yet far from invisible hand of Denis Brogan, the father or grandfather of us all in Britain and elsewhere.

The America of my infancy was, perhaps to a great degree than would now apply, the America of classic juvenile fiction – the West of R. M. Ballantyne and Fenimore Cooper, the South of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom's Cabin and, a little later, the Gothic of Edgar Allen Poe and the Mississippi Valley of Mark Twain — a country that had about as close a relationship to one's direct experience as the Spanish Main or the African jungle or the Scotland of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The real America of Coolidge and Hoover offered little to attract and hold attention – apart from gangsters and G-Men (about which I recall writing and acting in a school play Dull Days in Chicago). As appetites grew a little more discriminating the realism of Sinclair Lewis and the satire of John P. Marquand took over from the Hollywood America of thrills and comedy. Even so, America was, in every sense, a far-away country, full of portent and significance of course, but not exciting and relevant, still less attractive.

The coming of Roosevelt and the New Deal should have changed all that, of course. Honesty obliges me to admit that for a third year undergraduate at Oxford, absorbed in Greats, the American re-birth was infinitely less real and challenging than the Nazi eruption in Europe. There is a memory of a dapper, bouncy little figure lecturing to avid audiences in the North School in 1934. But to me Felix Frankfurter, then the visiting George Eastman Professor, was just another American whose lectures on the New Deal and the Constitution held one up en route to Henry Price's expositions of the Theory of Knowledge.

To become an historian was already my aim in the last forms of the gymnasium, prior to 1914, though I hardly knew anything about the profession. My father, an attorney, had been thinking of me as of his successor, yet tolerance was one of his outstanding traits. He was willing to wait until the full development of my capacities, the more so since history had always been one of his major interests. My gymnasium — perhaps even more than other Berlin gymnasia — stressed German and especially Prussian history. Even teachers with a wider horizon, such as Wilhelm Pfeifer who had been one of the last amanuenses of Ranke, were obliged to emphasise Prussian history. I remember that one whole semester was given over to the campaigns of Frederick the Great. Pfeifer was a thoughtful and independent teacher, well above the level of his colleagues. I stayed in contact with him until I left Germany in 1935. Later my American students thought that, by way of Pfeifer, Ranke's blessing had been bestowed on me — a kind of successio apostolorum.

In the year prior to my graduation from the gymnasium I learnt that recently a book of a new type of history had appeared in the form of Friedrich Meinecke's Weltbuergertum und Nationalstaat. I read it, and it was this book which led to my decision to study history. By showing the influence of cosmopolitan concepts on the emergence of the German national idea Meinecke's book opened up a new historical dimension, the history of ideas — not without objection from other historians that he neglected “real” history.

“A pedigree bloodhound for scenting out Negroana” was what I was called twenty years ago by Cedric Dover, a Eurasian writer unduly neglected today. I am content to accept his verdict on my pursuit of Afro-American and African studies, aldiough there is, perhaps, a little too much of Harriet Beecher Stowe's running dogs in the imagery for my liking and his statement seems to imply that I have spent all of my academic life tracking down disappearing black men and women in the dismal swamp of the past. It is true that I am never happier than when I have brought to light a forgotten figure with African ancestry. But my interests in Africa and America have ramified into other areas, especially into Scotland, at home and abroad; and I have spent some of my researches following Scottish themes. Yet, even here, continental and inter-cultural connections multiply, as the letter from Cedric Dover which I have quoted indicates. We were in correspondence about Robert Duncanson (1817–1872), a pioneer of Afro-American art: “a Scots Canadian mulatto born in New York State,” most of whose later life was spent in Europe, “where classical tradition took him to Italy and paternal tradition to Scotland,” whose “feeling of superiority … caused him to reject the Negro people and identify himself” with his father's country.

If, according to Henry James, “it's a complex fate, being an American,” it is a no less complex fate being an Americanist, especially when you were born in Europe, in a non-English speaking country. Unlike poets (as well as kings and dalai-lamas and humorists too probably), Americanists are not born, but made. For my part, at least, I was made one by very slow stages, and my education, like that of Henry Adams, began quite early. For, though I didn't go to America until I was nearly thirty, America came to me when I was still a very small child. This occurred during World War I, the Great War, as it was called then. I was living at my great-grand-parents' in a village in Berry, while my father was at the front and my mother worked in the post-office at Orléans (my birth-place). Suddenly — it must have been in 1917 or 1918, I was about three at the time-our village was invaded by a troop of Sammies. I was thrilled. I can still see diem very vividly. They looked so smart and martial in their khaki uniforms and broad-brimmed hats or saucy helmets. They were so different from the jaded French soldiers in faded grey-blue uniforms I saw from time to time, and, above all they spoke a language which no one understood. I gaped at them for hours, while they drilled on the village square or played football, occasionally breaking window-panes, but always paying for the damages right away. They broke one at my great-grand-parents, while we were having lunch, and my great-grand-mother was very angry, but they soon pacified her. They were very generous indeed, especially with children. I loved them. They carried me in their arms, took me on walks, gave me large slices of bread and salt butter, a rare delicacy, and even small coins, nickels and pennies with buffaloes and Indian heads, which I still have.

My first steady job, if one leaves out four years of wartime soldiering, began at Manchester University in 1949. It was a lectureship in American Studies and followed a two-year Commonwealth (Harkness) fellowship at Yale, also in American Studies, under the benevolent guidance of Ralph Gabriel. I have been in the same line ever since. The invitation to review what has happened to me and other Americanists in Britain during that long span carries the risk of self-regarding anecdotage. To reach the point of looking forward mainly to looking backward would be dismal. Yet Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was an exercise not in nostalgia but in prophecy; and while much of this essay takes the form of reminiscence I hope it may seem relevant to colleagues younger than myself.

One rainy day in the autumn of 1978, when I returned to Moscow from my leave, the Institute's executive secretary for international ties called me to her office and handed me a letter with the invitation for me to write an autobiographical article for the silver jubilee issue of the Journal of American Studies and to tell how I came to be a historian and a specialist on the United States.

At first the invitation puzzled me. To be honest, I have never written anything personal and, certainly, nothing autobiographical (except for the formal “autobiography” required in the USSR for official documents). Secondly, my official status and my place in the academic hierarchy could hardly justify my taking up the genre of autobiography. True, addressing their letters to the Institute, foreign correspondents often called me “professor” and even “academician,” but I naturally saw diis just as a polite form of address or as ignorance of our scientific hierarchy. The fact of the matter is that I have never been a professor (there is no such official post at the research institutes in the Soviet Union). As far as the title of “academician” is concerned, the difference between a senior research member of an academic institute and an actual member of the USSr Academy of Sciences (Academician) is the same as between the English “Dear Sir” and the French “Sire.”

There exists a handy term, “Americanist,” that serves to describe what it is I am, and what it is I do. I teach in, indeed I started, a busy American Studies programme; I specialize in American literature. The term is handy, and yet it doesn't entirely satisfy me, explaining a good deal about the object of my academic attention, but nothing about why the attention grew up, or what part it plays in my life. I have many basic preoccupations, and many roles deriving from them: I am a university teacher, a literary critic, a writer. But if, as I think, they link fruitfully with each other, this is because they are tied by a presiding and demanding preoccupation with literature — with its stylistic nature and its social and cultural origins and existence, with its historical pastness and its insistent presentness. In such matters I spend most of my life and invest most of my imagination. And in such matters there is no doubt that the United States plays a central and a fascinating part. Yet I was interested in literature before I was interested in America, I was interested in America before I became an Americanist, and my Americanist interest is itself part of something else, an obsessive concern with the inter-nationality of writing, with the influences that shape and command it, with the world in which it works, or does not, as the case may be. So I want to go behind my Americanist function – and what better opportunity could I have than in response to the present invitation, which calls for reminiscence, and even a little confession?

In many ways, of course, my American interests are inevitable enough and obvious enough: anyone drawing the map of contemporary intellectual geography would need to put the United States in some radiating and central position, and anyone considering the nature of writing today would need to agree that in its conduct and its stylistic advancement the United States plays a role of enormous power.