IN THE LATE 1980S a provocative book appeared that upset many professors of German literature in the United States, especially experts on exile literature. In his book The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom discussed what he termed the negative impact of the “German connection” on American culture of the twentieth century. The emigrants who fled Hitler's Germany in the 1930s appeared to Bloom to constitute an unwelcome intellectual invasion. With their psychoanalytical theories and their ideas on the relativity of values, the exiled authors had, according to Bloom, destroyed the traditional educational canon of American colleges and universities — that is, they had cast doubt on the American ideals of common sense, religion, and justice. The cultural-political unease of the last decades, the questioning of the dominant American identity concept by the student movement, by feminist studies, and by the multicultural discourses was traced back to the influence of the European emigrants of the 1930s and 1940s, and especially the German emigrants. Bloom's analysis is as one-sided as it is undialectical. First of all: although the impact of the Hitler refugees should not be underestimated, it is obvious that the more recent emancipation movements in the United States are deeply rooted in the traditions and founding documents of American democracy. And secondly, the refugees from Germany and Austria not only left their mark on the American educational arena, but they themselves in turn were influenced by the experience of the American way of life.