Book contents
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- 1 American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
- 2 The Third Pillar of Foreign Policy: West German Cultural Policy in the United States
- 3 The Study of Germany in the United States
- 4 American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1990
- 5 In the Shadow of the Federal Republic: Cultural Relations Between the GDR and the United States
- 6 American Literature in Germany
- 7 The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
- 8 The Americanization of the German Language
- 9 Between Blight and Blessing: The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Federal Republic
- 10 Popular Music in Germany: Experimentation and Emancipation from Anglo-American Models
- 11 Hollywood in Germany
- 12 New German Cinema as National Cinema
- 13 Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television
- 14 Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama
- 15 Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-American Exchange in the Visual Arts
- 16 The Rediscovery of the City and Postmodern Architecture
- 17 Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
- 18 Confrontations with the Holocaust in the Era of the Cold War: German and American Perspectives
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
1 - American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- 1 American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
- 2 The Third Pillar of Foreign Policy: West German Cultural Policy in the United States
- 3 The Study of Germany in the United States
- 4 American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1990
- 5 In the Shadow of the Federal Republic: Cultural Relations Between the GDR and the United States
- 6 American Literature in Germany
- 7 The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
- 8 The Americanization of the German Language
- 9 Between Blight and Blessing: The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Federal Republic
- 10 Popular Music in Germany: Experimentation and Emancipation from Anglo-American Models
- 11 Hollywood in Germany
- 12 New German Cinema as National Cinema
- 13 Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television
- 14 Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama
- 15 Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-American Exchange in the Visual Arts
- 16 The Rediscovery of the City and Postmodern Architecture
- 17 Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
- 18 Confrontations with the Holocaust in the Era of the Cold War: German and American Perspectives
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
Summary
By the late 1960s, German-American cultural relations reached the nadir of their post-World War II renaissance. To some of those who had been involved in the construction of this relationship, the precipitous fall had come abruptly - too abruptly. But by then the rosetinted view of America as the “Camelot” of the Western world, a view held by many in the postwar generation of young Germans in the 1950s and 1960s, had also become outdated. The German-American bond of the late 1940s and 1950s had to a large degree been created by the network of human relationships linking the two countries after World War II. The network had included many of the émigrés of the 1930s, half a million German prisoners of war who had spent years in the United States, tens of thousands of American and German officials who cooperated in rebuilding Germany, and the many German participants in the large educational exchange programs in the early postwar years.
The generation of the mid-1960s had no similar formative experiences and, consequently, no comparable commitment to the German-American relationship. The younger they were the less they remembered or even knew about the Marshall Plan, the origins of the Cold War and the NATO alliance, the Berlin Airlift, or the rebuilding of West Germany as a democratic, economically and socially stable society. Other factors contributing to disillusionment with America among young Germans were the opposition to America's war in Vietnam; the violence in America typified by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy; and the upheavals in the United States caused by the civil rights revolution.
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- Information
- The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990A Handbook, pp. 274 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004